I’m a research fellow at the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity. This is a series about where this internet is headed, and what internets might come after this one.

We all agree: the business model of the web is not working. Companies extract data, free labor, and gig-ified labor from—broadly speaking—us, people who can't afford to not use the internet. The question is, what do we do about it?

Jake Hartnell thinks he has an answer: collectively owned corporations whose software is cryptographically bound to obey the democratic wishes of workers and users. I spoke (in person) to Jake, co-founder of Stargaze, about decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) in October.

We all agree: the business model of the web is not working… The question is: what do we do about it?

I've edited our conversation down to its highlights. I hope you'll enjoy.

For my own part: I contribute to DAO DAO, Juno, and Stargaze. So I've drunk the kool-aid myself, in part because Jake makes a great case: he has a specific theory of change that spans the technical and the social. An eye toward on-the-ground organizing, labor required to make any technology meaningful in practice.

Jake Hartnell, along with co-founding Stargaze, is a core contributor of Juno Network and InterWasm DAO. Previously, he founded Common Garden, an open-source agriculture technology start-up, and was an early member of Hypothes.is, where he worked on web annotation technology and standards. He graduated from the UC Berkeley MIMS program in 2014, and was an affiliate with E.E.C.S. in 2016.

Thanks to Chuck Kapelke for recording the live talk. The music in this episode is by Nick Schofield.