1. Shared Fictions and the Architecture of the Future

In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari argues that every civilization rests on shared fictions—stories that allow strangers to cooperate at scale. Money, laws, nations, even human rights exist because we collectively agree to act as if they are real. When technologies change, these shared stories evolve with them.

The Agricultural Revolution gave rise to slavery-based empires sustained by divine hierarchies. The Middle Ages organized around feudalism, justified by faith. The Industrial Revolution produced capitalism—the grand fiction that wage labor, markets, and growth are the natural engines of human progress.

Now, another technological wave is reshaping what we believe about work and value. The Internet, AI, blockchain and solar power are dissolving the boundaries that once defined employment, ownership, authority and energy production.

As automation performs more of society’s productive tasks, the idea that we must sell our time to survive begins to crumble. What kind of fiction could replace it? Perhaps one in which cooperation is the organizing principle.

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) offer an early glimpse: programmable agreements coordinating people and resources through transparent rules instead of centralized command. They are not just a new technology—they may be the scaffolding for the next shared story.

2. Post-Labor and Mutualism

In earlier posts—What Does Post-Labor Really Mean? and Introduction to Mutualism—we explored two parallel shifts. Post-Labor Economics asks what happens when machines outproduce humans, severing the link between income and employment. Mutualism, an older tradition, offers a framework for organizing abundance through reciprocity and shared governance rather than wage dependence.

Together they form the moral and structural foundations of a new economy. But ideas alone are not enough; they need a medium through which they can be practiced. The Internet gave us global communication; DAOs may give us global cooperation—digital infrastructures where communities, not corporations, define how value circulates. In this sense, DAOs can be seen as the technological continuation of Mutualism, turning its ethics into executable systems for a post-labor age.

3. DAOs: The Cooperative Code

A Decentralized Autonomous Organization is a digitally native organization whose rules and treasury are managed by code rather than by managers. Smart contracts on a blockchain enforce agreements transparently: who can propose, vote, spend, or receive. Members coordinate through tokens or reputation systems that track participation.

Still, code alone does not guarantee fairness. The same infrastructure can be used for speculation or solidarity. The challenge is cultural: designing DAOs that embody mutual aid, not market frenzy.

The significance of DAOs is not technical but social. They represent an attempt to replace trust in hierarchy with trust in transparency. Instead of assuming that leaders act fairly, rules are visible and verifiable. Instead of a company extracting value from users, a community can own and govern its own platform.

In this way, DAOs can be understood as a new generation of platform cooperatives—digital organizations owned and governed by their users. Like cooperatives, DAOs align incentives between participants and the system itself. A DAO for ridesharing, for instance, could ensure that drivers collectively set rates and share profits. A creative DAO might distribute revenue automatically to contributors, without intermediaries. By merging cooperative governance with blockchain transparency, DAOs offer a way to scale solidarity across the digital commons.

4. Mutualist Governance in Practice

What might a Mutualist DAO look like? Imagine a community energy DAO that owns neighborhood solar panels. Residents fund and govern the grid collectively; smart contracts distribute surplus electricity credits automatically. Or a creative DAO where artists pool royalties and decide collectively how to reinvest in shared tools. Or a data commons DAO in which citizens control how their personal information is used, balancing privacy and collective benefit.

In each example, Mutualism’s three architectural principles come alive:

1. Self-organization – Those affected by a system govern it directly.
2. Reciprocity – Contributions are recognized and rewarded transparently.
3. Shared governance – Ownership and decision-making are collective, not capital-based.

DAOs make these principles programmable. A rule once enforced by trust or bureaucracy can now be embedded in code. When designed ethically, such systems could turn participation itself into a form of livelihood—distributing value as a structural right rather than as charity or wages.

5. Building the Solarpunk Economy

The Solarpunk imagination envisions more than verdant cities and golden sunlight. It is a call for an economy that is regenerative, decentralized, and socially intelligent—a civilization that runs on abundance rather than extraction.

DAOs could provide the governance layer for that vision. Picture an ecosystem of federated DAOs managing local food networks, renewable energy, cooperative housing, and cultural production. Each acts as a self-governing cell; together they form a planetary web of mutual stewardship.

Such an economy would no longer be organized around the exchange of labor for wages but around participation in commons—a world where care, creativity, and ecological balance are coordinated through transparent, community-owned systems. It is not utopian; it is architectural. Every generation builds the institutions that match its technology. DAOs may be to the digital-solar age what corporations were to the industrial one—but oriented toward cooperation rather than labor extraction.

6. Rewriting Our Shared Fictions

Harari reminds us that humanity advances by rewriting its stories to fit new realities. The myths that fueled the industrial age—wage labor, endless growth, corporate ownership—once made sense. Today they constrain us more than they guide us.

Internet networks, artificial intelligence, blockchain and solar power infrastructures together create the conditions for a new kind of economy, but technology alone cannot supply meaning. We must decide what these tools are for. If corporations were the shared fiction that organized the industrial world, DAOs might become the shared fiction that organizes the cooperative one—a story encoded not in sacred texts or legal contracts, but in open-source code and collective imagination.

The emergence of Solarpunk governance would mark more than a technical evolution; it would signal a moral one: from ownership to stewardship, from profit to participation, from work to contribution. Whether that story becomes real depends entirely on whether enough people choose to believe in it—and build it.

Our shared fictions built our current world; which new stories — and which new DAOs — will we build together?