Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organizations and the Arts ed. by Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organizations and the Arts ed. by Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty
• Hannah Grannemann (bio)

radical friends: decentralised autonomous organizations and the arts Edited by Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty
Torque Editions
https://torquetorque.net/publications/radical-friends/
352 pages; Print, £20.00

What are decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) in the art world? They are "cosmic computers." They are utopian experiments: "an experimental practice for moving towards a different way of living together." They are cooperatives or collectives that "enlarge the reach of friendship to the point of replacing corporations and governments." Or they're "implicitly antisocial." DAOs will completely reinvent artists' relationships to the art market. Or they're just "shinier versions of the same shit." Or maybe they are starfish.

I came to Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organizations and the Arts as a bit of an outsider; I have significant arts management experience, but I don't work in the contemporary art field. At a fundamental level, as I learned in the introduction by editors Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty, DAOs are organizations that exist online and are built on the blockchain. DAOs are collectively owned by their members. Decisions about the DAO itself (its governance) and its activities are voted on by the members using "smart contracts," so called because the outcomes of the smart contracts are automatically executed and cannot be changed except through votes by the membership of the DAO. This allows them to be "trustless" organizations, meaning that trust between the members is not required, because of the automaticity of the smart contracts. Beyond that, DAOs can be many different things, including artworks themselves.

The goal of Radical Friends is to bring together writings by the people working with DAOs to show "how traditional organisational patterns and the power structures they serve might be transformed by the emergence of blockchain-enabled Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) in artworlds and beyond." The traditional organizational patterns the editors and authors are referring to is how artists intersect with the international art [End Page 21] market, museums, each other, all the related funding sources, and more. Artists and arts workers often view these patterns as extractive and exploitative. The search for more equitable systems is long-standing and ongoing. The purpose of the book is not to persuade the reader that DAOs are the solution to the art world's problems, but instead to "support deep thinking, inspiration, praxis and prototyping."

The problem with DAOs is that, while they can be an organizational structure that supports those goals, they can also be structures that continue the current practices. There's nothing inherent in DAOs that leads to different outcomes. The "trustless" function of DAOs is fallible and therefore requires a high level of trust—friendship—to avoid replicating extractive practices. DAOs are presented in Radical Friends as experiments, examples, and works-in-progress only. DAOs may change everything—or nothing. "What is a DAO?," asks artist and theorist Hito Steyerl. "No one really knows. One reason is that most possible answers lie in the future."

Radical Friends is intended to be, at least in part, an introduction to DAOs. It dedicates space to explaining how DAOs work. It provides a glossary of terms and a timeline of the development of DAOs in art. The book is also meant to capture the practice of creating and running DAOs in the current moment, a moment in which DAOs are beyond the nascent stage but still very much in an exploratory phase. The essay section has sixteen essays from nineteen contributors on emerging concepts and philosophies. The essays include both arguments for and doubts about DAOs.

Most contributors to the book share their definition and purpose of a DAO, hence the jumble of contradictory definitions that began this review. Progressing through the book, the constant constructing and deconstructing of the concepts of what DAOs are makes the essays section of Radical Friends difficult to grasp. The authors switch within their essays from abstract concepts to critiques of the current systems to lamenting the oppression of peoples worldwide (both currently and historically) to examples of actual DAOs without giving the reader a chance to reach a level...