Hey You Guys! Get Ready for GoonieDAOs

With Aragon now on Polygon, kids can set up DAOs for a few cents. Cue: adventures.

Aragon

• Oct 8, 2021 • 3 min read

DAOs are now simple and cheap enough for kids to start fundraising and building global projects together. Web3 is growing up fast, and Web2 is gettin' a wedgie.

Goon Docks, Cryptoverse

If crypto were The Goonies, we're at the stage where we know that our house is being repossessed by a bunch of elites, we've found a treasure map, and are being chased by professional crooks through a booby-trapped underworld. In the end, we know who wins so let's sit back and enjoy the adventure.

What if we cut though, Spielberg-style, from our '80s dream-sequence back to the present day? Generation Alpha are hitting their prime Goonie years and crypto is the biggest adventure out there (if you have to be home by 6pm). There is no way they are missing out on this.

In recent weeks, the price of setting up a DAO on Aragon has dropped 5000x to well below pocket-money levels so it won't be long before tech-savvy kids start setting up GoonieDAOs with transferable tokens and stake-weighted voting to fundraise their own companies, exchange programs or skate-parks with donations flooding in from all over the world.

“It’s Our Time Down Here.”

GoonieDAOs are revolutionary on a few levels:

First, economically: 15-40% of the world’s population (varying by region) are under 18 and less likely to be economically active. Yet, the digital world is not a Victorian sweatshop even if legal systems still treat it as such. Aragon's founders were trying to set up their first company at 15; Kyle Giersdorf was 16 when he won $3m competing in the Fortnite World Cup; 9 of the top-10 self-made millionaires under 18 made their money online. Kids can be vastly more digitally competent than their parents and - given that digital is the fastest growing component of the world economy - are likely to become a significant economic force in the near future. DAOs, especially if kids are collaborating transnationally, are ideally positioned to become the native governance structure for the Goonie economy.

Second, geographically: it is a tragedy that most of the talent and enthusiasm of children in third-world countries is not given the opportunity to flourish - often the fault of dysfunctional governments and scant access to capital. The broader promise of crypto is to make capital globally liquid and accessible to anyone with an internet connection. The promise of DAOs is to provide the transparent and incorruptible governance to manage that capital, meaning it can safely flow to initiatives in any jurisdiction. DAOs are long talent and short unearned privilege.

Third, intellectually: the current norm in the western world is that children are passive recipients of knowledge for the first 20-30% of their lives, only beginning to apply it in their early 20s. Not only is this existentially frightening, it’s absurdly ignorant of Confucius’ truism: “I hear and I forget… I do, and I understand.” Jeff Booth has framed this another way: “Intelligence is error correction.” It’s not rocket science to predict that if kids are iterating transnational organizations for 12 years, then they’ll have corrected far more errors and be magnitudes better prepared for life than if they had listened to 10,000 lectures. The current social and legal framework prefers the latter, but DAOs will supercharge the former and unleash what Robert Breedlove has called ‘the pluripotentiality of youth’.

The End

One day DAOs won't be the new rock and roll, they'll just be how people organize themselves. Until that time, a supercharged youth leads to a cruise-controlled adulthood so if your kids are fizzing with ideas and bored of lectures you can help them to get ready for a DAO-based society by Setting up a Hedge Fund, Starting a Charity from their Bedroom, or any of these 15 Other Ideas for GoonieDAOs. You'll be surprised what they're capable of, as adults always are.

Set up a GoonieDAO for $0.1 with Aragon Client on Polygon

Aragon is building the future of decentralized governance for Web3 communities & organizations. Deploy a DAO on Aragon Client or Aragon Govern, manage your community on Aragon Voice, resolve disputes in Aragon Court and run enterprise-level votes on Vocdoni, all within our open-source stack. See the latest at aragon.org, subscribe to our monthly newsletter, join the conversation on Discord, or follow us on Twitter.