I once joined a writer’s group that aimed to write a fantasy story together. The goal was to do some collaborative worldbuilding and establish canonical lore that other writers could write in. Sort of like how Star Wars created a six-episode arc establishing an intergalactic world, and then Disney bought it and set a ton of stories in that world.
But we were structured as a DAO—a decentralized autonomous organization that meant that all of us on the project had an equal say in how it would go.
It didn’t work. Because there was no hierarchy and no one in charge, we couldn’t agree on anything. We wound up fighting over the smallest details of our world to the point that we couldn’t write a single sentence without an all-out brawl. I remember a particularly excruciating call in which someone had written a dragon into the story and we had an hour-long debate on whether dragons should be “real” in our world.
After three months of meetings without a single chapter agreed upon, two members got on our group chat at 2am and came up with the whole story while everyone else was asleep. In the morning, they informed the rest of us of our new world order and told us to get on board or quit. Out of the chaos of democracy, they created their own autocracy just so we could finally get something done. And because the alternative was pure chaos, it was tempting to just get on board and move on.
But our unelected leaders weren’t the right ones to lead us. They were far from being the best writers on our team, in fact, they were the only members who weren’t writers at all. And they certainly weren’t the best leaders among us—they were mean to the point that we had a separate group chat where the rest of us could brainstorm free from their tyranny.
They were merely the ones willing to step into the power vacuum and bully the rest of us into submission. And they did.