I'm not quite this pessimistic yet, but close

Most people doing "governance" seem to be reinventing the wheel and ignoring history and context. I agree legacy systems are not perfect (far from), but they do contain significant embedded wisdom. https://twitter.com/tbr90/status/1297635987519086594

People interested in this stuff should delve into the history of corporate control contests. Our capital markets would be a total wreck without regulations that limited the ability of activist investors and T. Boone Pickens to engage in greenmail, coercive tender offers, etc.

The challenge for decentralized governance is to come up with cryptonative mechanisms that accomplish the same things as this very complex and nuanced regulatory regime.

So far, no one even seems to be trying. Complete ignorance of history.

The first thing you'd have to start with is some basic honesty--"oppression of shareholder minorities" is a constant threat that corporate law was invented to deal with. Conflicts of interest are real and need structural mitigations, even if everyone has good intentions.

entrenched rent-seeking mgmt vs. short-term greenmailing activist investors is a constant check/balance game that needs some type of third party like a regulator--or potentially equivalent tech mechanisms--to referree.

these things are just fundamental and the tech doesn't change them at all--potentially makes them worse. any governance discussion that doesn't make these issues the focus is just completely missing the point.

There is one DAO system that I think takes the issues seriously and offers an elegant solution to many (not all) of them-- @MolochDAO.

It has one simple feature starkly different from corporations--"ragequit".

This mitigates many issues that otherwise require legal mechanisms.

It's not perfect--I think it should have a quroum requirement, for example--but man just by that simple, cypherpunkesque option of permissionless "free exit" with your share of the guildbank, it really streamlines governance.