Recipes for Companies, Art and the Role of Government
Your weekly 5 things from the mind of Miles Lasater
Happy Saturday! Here are your 5 things from the mind of Miles for this week.
DAO of Corporate Law. What’s the most successful decentralized autonomous organization? Have you participated? I was looking at Flamingo recently and learned that it is structured with full US normal corporate legal procedures and crypto procedures. You have the obscurity and newness of crypto combined with the restrictions and compliance costs of the corporate legal system. As of July, Wyoming recognizes DAOs directly as legal entities. But they require that you file an operating agreement above and beyond the smart contract. So, is it really code as law? And they require that “underlying smart contracts are able to be updated, modified or otherwise upgraded.” But then you can’t truly create autonomous organizations. Is there a jurisdiction that fully recognizes DAOs or will the pure DAOs always be extra-legal by design?
Who is the Artist? When someone draws lines on a wall according to a recipe created by Sol LeWitt, there is little question who is the artist. LeWitt is fully accepted in the artistic canon. Museums or collectors can even own his conceptual pieces and re-render them on different walls (and maybe without them being rendered into physical art?) With computer-based algorithmic art, we are probably comfortable that the creator of the code is the artist. But who is the artist when AI gets involved? For example, if GPT-2 writes the libretto for an opera about Turing, who is the artist? And is there a widely and pseudo-anonymously owned DAO that creates art? In that case, we might be uncertain about both the creator and the owner.
Government as Value Driver for Business. We talked before about the Chinese tech crackdown. Prof Aswath Damodaran attempts to put a valuation on the big Chinese tech companies given the government’s actions. What’s more interesting to me is that he also made a handy-dandy chart of the role of government in any business. He catalogs the ways that governments can create or destroy value. I recommend reviewing it and thinking about business strategy and government policy.
Police Use of Force. On the role of government, I would take the position that government should avoid killing people. If there are proven methods to reduce deaths caused by police, why not do it? One research-backed recipe for less police violence is 8 Can’t Wait. Is there research showing that police are at more risk with these policies? Or is the trade-off thought to be police effectiveness? It is such a politicized topic, I’m not sure I have seen reasoned policy arguments without all the rhetoric. Check out where your city or state stands on use of force policies. Share your thoughts.
Podcasts. What’s your favorite podcast that I haven’t heard of?
Until next week,
Miles