Why We’re Building This DAO

A personal message about reclaiming sovereignty, building a parallel reality, and why this moment in history demands pioneers.

What We Are Building

I want to talk about the community: what we are building, why, how, and my role within it.

What we are building is a decentralized autonomous organization. Each individual, every single member, co-owns the DAO and participates in building it, designing it, and shaping its direction. But we also have a governance system to find consensus. Consensus is not always required, because the individual retains sovereignty to act for the benefit of the community. Members can organize into groups, create internal communities, build projects, and find ways to contribute on their own terms.

The community aligns with the Augmentatism manifesto, which says we don’t just use AI to augment ourselves. We also follow one rule: anti-capture. We don’t capture someone else’s sovereignty. Augmentatism calls this the Law of Anti-Capture, the ethical floor of the social contract. No one, no corporation, no institution, no AI system should capture your ability to think, create, and decide for yourself.

The Truth About Centralization

Why are we building this DAO? There is no single problem we want to solve. There is a cascade of problems that have developed over years. Some are obvious, others are hidden, and some are risks we can see coming but haven’t fully arrived yet.

Over the years, society has changed. We moved from small tribes, from groups where we were decentralized, where we were all responsible for our families and communities to survive. We were all active. We didn’t need to be told what each person’s job was. We knew that as a group we had to protect ourselves, look after each other, feed each other, teach each other.

Society grew into bigger, more complex structures. People who didn’t know each other had to cooperate, and that created a problem, because it was hard to trust or respect someone you didn’t know. So we created rules. We created power structures to ensure things would happen. We created policing, governments, schools, hospitals.

And here is the truth we need to acknowledge: some of those were solving problems we couldn’t solve before. This collection of shared knowledge pushed humanity to a higher level. We started to learn from each other even more. We shared knowledge, improved health systems, and tackled problems that no small community could address alone. There are incredible benefits that came from this scaling.

But there are also incredible downsides. Centralization of power attracted corruption and self-interest, which destroyed not just decentralization but the healthy environment where humans can flourish. We started delegating safety, food production, healthcare, romance, everything. We lost sovereignty and control over almost everything.

Corporations started creating solutions and products that leveraged our desire for optimization and ease. Things became more and more frictionless, removed from our daily lives: how we work, how we learn, how we shop, how we grow food. Everything became easier. And in some cases, that is a genuine benefit: it’s easier to stay healthy, easier to learn, easier to be safe. But we moved beyond making things easier. Corporations found a way to make boredom itself impossible, meaning entertainment became so accessible that with almost no effort, you could consume endlessly.

That was radio, then TV, then the internet, then social networks, then AI. The result is one big problem: everybody wants it easy. Easy to understand, easy to consume, easy to be entertained, easy to join, easy to leave. I don’t like this, I move to something else. We saw this with dating apps eroding relationships and romance. We saw this with social networks eroding friendships. We saw this with low-level entertainment eroding movies and art galleries. We saw this in schools, where the goal of learning shifted to passing exams to getting a job. We saw this in art and music, where creating for pleasure gave way to creating for success, money, status. We saw fame itself shift: being famous because of talent and achievement became being famous as the goal itself, not the result.

The DAO we are building is not a place that wants to solve one problem. It’s a new social structure that is building itself at a specific moment in history. The goal is to leverage the benefits of scaling: shared knowledge, infrastructure, coordination, while mitigating the downsides through decentralized structure and responsible sovereignty. We don’t need to choose between the power of working together at scale and the freedom of the individual. We need both, and that is what the DAO is designed to provide.

The Moment We’re In

We are in a moment of history where AI is becoming part of our society, our work, our lives. Attempts to replace humans with AI and robots are already visible. We see investment of trillions of dollars in creating AGI, an AI meant to replace humans at any job. We see investment in humanoid robots to take our physical labor. AI is becoming our consultant, doctor, partner, friend, co-worker, playmate. The trend is clear. The direction is uncertain, because nobody knows the future, but the investment signals where things are heading and what is being built.

And out of all of this, there is no plan. There is no plan B, no solution for what will happen to humans once AI makes the money and takes the jobs. What’s the new financial system when that happens? How do we adapt? Not enough people are asking these questions, even fewer are answering them, and almost no one is building the alternatives.

While there is a lot of talking, there is a group of people here, present in this DAO, that are building. Nobody fully understands what the final solution looks like, but what we can do is use our human intuition to build it. As with anything new, it’s hard to understand, hard to picture, hard to deal with. The complexity of the problem is enormous. The temptation to say, “let’s fix one problem at a time,” is how things never get fixed, because the problem is not a financial problem alone, or a cultural problem alone, or an education problem alone. It’s not job displacement alone, or new technology alone, or greed alone. It’s the connection of all those problems, interacting and compounding, creating an environment that is increasingly hostile for humans.

This is what we face today. This is what the DAO is trying to solve.

The People We Need

Solving this requires an incredible group of people, because what we need to do has never been done before. It has the potential to change the world. It’s a huge experiment with no certainties, where early adopters, pioneers, those placing the first bricks of this new reality, must be strong, comfortable with uncertainty, believers, visionaries. They need to build something that doesn’t exist, that never existed. That requires a creative mind, strategic thinking, ambition. It requires the engineer’s mind to build clarity inside complexity. It requires philosophers to challenge every decision, to ask more questions than we can ever answer.

The DAO is not a place for comfort. It is a place of challenge, immense challenge. It is a place for learning, an environment where incredible things can happen because we are creating the conditions to turn ourselves from consumers into producers, from content consumers into content creators, from those who watch into those who build, from those who just listen into those who start talking. We need to turn ourselves from caterpillars into butterflies. It’s an environment where we can change, learn from each other, experiment. It’s a community that doesn’t just support each other but also challenges each other. It’s a place where we can make mistakes without getting upset. We talk about them, we learn, we improve. It’s a tough place to be. It requires courage, a strong mind, but most importantly humility, self-awareness, compassion, trust in each other, and constant work to align ourselves. It also requires many leaders, many visions, many actions.

From Consumers to Creators: What Augmentatism Really Means

My initial idea was always this: we are building something extremely difficult, extremely complex, but now because of AI, a lot is changing, and it’s changing because AI is augmenting us. But this augmentation that happened through AI also unlocked something else: the realization that we were always capable of augmenting ourselves, even without AI.

Augmentation is not a phenomenon that happened because of AI. It is something that happens when we stop being consumers and start becoming creators. It happens the moment we stop waiting for someone to build for us and start building it ourselves. This is what AI gave us: it unlocked the space between dreaming and acting. I have an idea, I can build it now. I have something complex in my mind, I can use AI to write it down. The act of using AI to turn an idea into something real, the act of creating, that is the augmentation.

AI doesn’t augment everybody. Some people delegate to AI the creation, the thinking, the processing, the discovery. That delegation does not lead to augmentation. Others use AI to augment themselves. Some never use it and never had the problem, because they were augmented by other forces: love, need, or simply because creating is who they are. But there is another power as important as being augmented: the power of community. The human connection, the almost ritualistic practice of meeting every day to share our minds, connect, build, explore, think, listen, challenge, be inspired, get upset, get bored. All those emotions are needed for a healthy community, for a healthy person.

When I first discovered AI, I felt like I had superpowers. That is an incredible feeling, extremely empowering. But by continuing to work, I realized that feeling of superpower is not connected to AI itself. It’s connected to understanding there is a bigger shift: moving from consumer to creator. That is the superpower. Being a creator is the superpower. AI was the tool to unlock it.

This is what the Augmentatism philosophy is really about. It started as an effect of human-AI collaboration, but it is more than that. It is about using AI to unlock human potential, shifting from passive consumer to active creator. It emphasizes personal integrity, peaceful behavior, and responsible sovereignty. Augmentatism warns against what it calls Cognitive Colonization, the attempt by a single entity, the One, to impose one way of thinking, one AI, one reality on everyone. Against this, it proposes World Building: the Many, each of us building our own world, our own reality, sovereign and diverse. The DAO’s value lies in respecting these diverse realities rather than imposing a single, correct worldview. As I said during our community call, I don’t need to understand or approve anyone’s world. I just need to understand that they are building a world that is important to them, and the fact that it’s different from mine is what makes it valuable.

My Role in This DAO

I’m the first member of this DAO. I’m the custodian. I’m the person who had the vision, who started building it, who brought people inside. I worked on it alone for months until I wasn’t alone anymore. Then I carried on, and we became a large group. People started getting more involved, leading, building, participating, learning, teaching. Understandably, I’ve been seen as the leader, the one with the vision, the one who guides everybody.

I’ve been repeating that I’m not, in the traditional sense. I’m one of them, an extremely active community member. Anyone can do what I do. There is the freedom to do it. But there are two realities here. I am a very active community member, and anyone can do what I do. At the same time, even though I don’t present myself as a leader and have no interest in the role, some people see me that way. For them, I am a leader. Both are true.

What does a leader do in this DAO? I lead by showing the path, empowering everyone who wants to achieve. I show how it’s done, I don’t tell you how it’s done. I’m not here to make life easier, because I’m not leading consumers or paying customers. My position is not to do admin, micromanagement, or work as a corporation. I’m not here to remove necessary friction. I’m here to build the community.

My first goal is to build this community and create an economy large enough to sustain it. The plan is to build the infrastructure, the token economy, and the services that can bring significant value into this community over the next few years. The aim is to solve the problems I’ve been describing, to create a new economy so we can be sustainable, and so everyone has the space to do the same. That is what I’m building. That is what I’m leading.

As I explained in my article about the Resonant DAO, the DAO is not the product. The DAO is the coordination substrate for many small autonomous teams. It is a community for communities. A shared foundation where small groups, teams, and aligned projects can coordinate, contribute, and grow without giving up their autonomy. We’re not trying to organize society from the top. We’re building the conditions for bottom-up self-organization at scale.

What the DAO Is Not

We are also building a community inside the community. Those pioneers building the top-level DAO are also experimenting, learning, exploring, and planting seeds for future internal communities. Some of the members we have today will one day lead their own communities.

What I am not doing is creating power structures. You can build your own if you need one. You can build your own community with your own rules, your own values, your own power structure. I’m building the top level. The power structure lives on the blockchain through smart contracts, through reputation and contribution.

I don’t know if “meritocracy” is the right word, because the idea of contribution needs rethinking. We tend to use the old definition: contribution means work, or money, or support. But as I’ve said many times, learning is contribution. Exploring is contribution. Watching someone else talk is contribution. Showing up is contribution. Using someone else’s product is contribution. Contribution is many things. It’s not the traditional idea of paying your dues.

I lead by example. I don’t tell people what to do. If you like what I do, hopefully you learn something and feel motivated to build. I invite people to build, help, support, get active, because there is friction out there. I try to remove that friction, not by assigning you a job, but by telling you that you can do it, and if you want to, I support you. That is different from giving you the power to lead.

How Decentralization Actually Works

Let me give a few examples to make decentralization concrete. Inside this DAO, I push toward one specific direction. I have a vision for the kind of environment we need, a strategy for large adoption, and a philosophy that allows us to be empowered without limiting each other. I want to include as many people as possible, as long as they align with the manifesto.

But that is what I’m building. I might have convinced some of you to build what I envision, like the tech team building Resonant OS, our community’s software platform. But nothing stops anyone from saying, “I’m going to build a different version.” Someone might want a different approach to governance, or a different interface, or a different token model. Sometimes these divisions make sense. Different teams can serve different needs.

Other times, division is counterproductive. Having multiple competing token economies inside one DAO would create confusion and fragmentation. Part of the challenge of decentralization is knowing when to diverge and when to align. The point is that the freedom to diverge is always there. The DAO doesn’t prevent it. It provides the shared infrastructure so that, when divergence is productive, the pieces still connect.

Another example: a community member might want to build a healthcare-focused sub-community with strict rules about data privacy and professional credentials. Another might want to build a creative collective with almost no rules at all. Both are welcome inside the DAO. Both can draw on shared infrastructure, the token economy, and the broader network. Neither needs my approval. The DAO is the substrate; the communities are the worlds built on top of it.

So I’m one of you in this sense. You can do the same, or you can do something different. You can work with me or work on something else entirely.

Why Communities Matter: The Social and Financial Reasons

During our community call, someone asked a really important question: why do we need a DAO above the DAO? Why not just a single community? There are two sides to this, a social aspect and a financial aspect.

The social aspect is this: within diversity, we still love grouping. We want to be as inclusive as possible, but people naturally gravitate toward familiar environments. As soon as you put people who are different together, they will form subgroups. If you live in a multicultural city, you see this happening. It’s human nature: we are looking for different levels of safety. A community can provide that safety. Each of us needs to find the right size of community, a level of safety we are willing to accept, explore, and feel comfortable with. A larger community, by default, is not always a safe environment. The amount of diversity is challenging, the number of voices is challenging. So there is a human requirement for smaller groups.

The financial aspect is sustainability. Many communities, because of their small size, are too small to survive on their own. They can only become sustainable if they grow. But if growing destroys their identity, they are forced to change into something profitable. That is a massive problem. Most communities face it. They are not sustainable because of the niche they cover, the size they need, or the environment they exist in.

If we have one financial system that covers the entire network of communities, then we can all be sustainable. That is the difference. The DAO needs to be a community of communities, not just a single community, because no single community can provide both the safety of small groups and the economic sustainability of a large network.

The Community as a Round Table

As one of our community members, Estela, beautifully expressed during our call, this community aims to be a safe, horizontal round table for self-discovery and collective evolution. It is a place where everybody has value to share. It is a playground where we can be ourselves without judgment, because the word judgment is very heavy outside. We don’t need to prove anything to anybody. We can just allow ourselves to be, and trust, while trying to be responsible.

Society is brutal in the way it judges and labels people. It starts in kindergarten. By the time kids arrive in middle school, many are already stressed out. In our community calls, I’ve watched members who were silent for weeks suddenly start sharing ideas, then presenting projects, then leading discussions. That transformation happens because the environment is safe enough to risk being wrong. One member, Joseph, joined a call with nothing but an idea for an app to help isolated elderly people. Within minutes, other members were offering technical help, sharing similar experiences, and connecting him with collaborators. Nobody asked for his credentials. Nobody judged his presentation. That is what a round table looks like.

The question we should ask ourselves is: why am I here? What do I want to do with my life? These are the questions this community creates space for.

As another member, Melissa, pointed out, sovereignty naturally brings to mind boundaries. We reign over ourselves. The DAO gives us that boundary, where we say: within this boundary, this is how we operate, this is what we value. The more people that value a person’s contribution, the more the value of the community rises. It’s a snowball effect.

Cosmodestiny: Resonance and the Unfolding

When I started my YouTube channel, I didn’t start because I knew how to do it. I started because I wanted to build something more important than the pride of looking like an expert. Through human humility, courage, honesty, and respect for others, by sharing who I really am, what I really think, what I really do, how I feel, how I build, how I discover things, I believed I would resonate. I would send energy out there, send those waves, and find similar waves, similar humans who would resonate with them.

From my other philosophy, Cosmodestiny, the idea is that the world is unfolding in front of us. At any point we can change direction. Destiny is not pre-written. It’s unfolding, and we are in control of the path we take. Allow the world to resonate with the path you want to walk, and things will happen.

Cosmodestiny frames this as a dynamic unfolding through resonance and attunement to a Field of Potentiality. It emphasizes Intentional Gathering: when people come together with shared intention, the future reshapes itself around them. This is not magic. When I talk about frequencies, I’m talking about behavior, about action. Coming to those calls daily is the frequency. Showing up, doing three videos a week, is the frequency. That is actual action.

So far, that has been my journey with this community. I saw so many people come and watch, watch, watch, and then start talking, talking, talking, and then building, building. I don’t know how to quantify its worth, but it’s changing lives. The moment you go on that journey, you come out the other side as a different person. I’m not saying this because I was already there. I’m saying it because it’s the journey I’m doing together with you, and I’m changing, getting better every day.

The Challenge and the Invitation

So the question is: do you want to be part of this? Do you accept the hardship, the work in the unknown, the mistakes that don’t stop you, the learning by doing, the challenge of building something that never existed before, the challenge of believing you can change the world?

Mistakes are not the problem. Almost everything built in this community comes from a series of mistakes that led to something better. The AI workflows we use, the community call formats, the governance discussions: each one went through multiple failed iterations before arriving at something that worked. That is the journey.

Those who joined earlier go through the hardest time but also the most rewarding one, because we are building out of nothing. We connect with people we never met, never worked with. We share fears, ambitions, projects, intimate ideas, fragile ideas, intuition, sometimes our broken side, so we can grow and build this new world together. Those who don’t give up, who keep building, creating, sharing, participating, get the best out of this.

I’ve seen many people join this community and change. I’ve changed too. I’ve watched the community become slowly better through constant work. It’s not easy. It’s hard, it requires a lot of energy, and I didn’t learn this by watching someone else do it. But it is incredible to see what happened in one year. The direction is happening, even when the specifics surprise me. Things I thought would become easier haven’t always. Things I thought would be harder became easier. Problems I didn’t know existed appeared. Problems I underestimated turned out to be bigger than I imagined.

But this is the journey, and the question is whether you want to walk it.

Frequently Asked Questions

These questions emerged from our Augmented Minds 17 community call, where members gathered to discuss what we are building and why. The answers reflect my thinking as shared during that conversation.

What is Augmentatism? Is it just about using AI to work better?

No. As I explained earlier, Augmentatism started as an effect of human-AI collaboration, but it is more than that. The Augmentatism manifesto frames this as World Building, each of us building our own reality, versus Cognitive Colonization, a single entity imposing one way of thinking on everyone. The superpower is not AI. The superpower is the shift from consumer to creator. AI is the tool that unlocked it.

What do you mean by “world building”?

Each of us understands the external world through our own senses. We see colors differently, hear sounds differently, interpret reality differently. By discussing with each other, we agree on some shared rules about this reality. But each of us still has our own world, our own interpretation. The value of the DAO lies in respecting these diverse realities rather than imposing a single worldview. I don’t need to understand or approve anyone’s world. I just need to understand that they are building a world that is important to them. The biggest mistake you can make is thinking your world is the correct one.

Why do we need a DAO? Why not just a regular community?

As I discussed earlier, there are two reasons: social and financial. Socially, people need smaller groups where they feel safe. Financially, most communities are too small to sustain themselves. The DAO provides one financial system covering the entire network of communities, so each can remain small and maintain its identity without sacrificing sustainability.

What is your leadership style? Are you the leader or not?

I lead by example, not by telling people what to do. I show how it’s done. I’m not here to make life easier, because I’m not leading consumers. Some people see me as a leader, and for them, I am. But I’m building the environment where things can happen, not designing your future. I should not lead any sub-community. That would not be healthy for the larger community or the smaller ones.

Is this about the process or the goal? Should I focus on today or the future?

Both. The process is the present, it’s life. The vision gives direction to your energy. You don’t enjoy the vision itself. What you enjoy is the process of building, working, collaborating. The vision gives you energy when you have a bad day. Some people are here for the long-term outcome. Some are here for today, for belonging, learning, sharing. Both are valid. Both contribute to the community.

Should we have rules and regulations in the DAO?

The top-level DAO has essentially one rule: you are sovereign, and you shouldn’t capture someone else’s sovereignty. Beyond that, fewer rules at the top level is better. As Melissa pointed out during our call, as soon as you write a rule down, somebody figures out how to break it, and then you write a rule for that rule, and next thing you know you’re in a bureaucracy. What works better is principles and guidelines. Principles come from your values. They are personal. You can’t impose them on someone else, but you can model them through action. If you want a community with specific rules, build your own within the DAO. The top layer stays open and free. The only place where more structure makes sense is the business side, where token economy and governance decisions need clear guidelines.

How does the DAO handle contribution and recognition?

As outlined in the Resonant DAO article, the system uses bounties with clear scope, reward, and success criteria. Small teams of two to five people self-organize around bounties. Reputation through soulbound tokens proves contribution. Governance emerges from those who do the work. The people closest to the work know best what needs doing. Small beats big. Choice beats assignment. Contribution beats attendance.

Beyond philosophy, how do I get involved practically?

Every Friday, people present their own projects. You can reserve a slot to present anything: a personal project, a business, an idea. If you have something you want to build within the community, we can discuss it. We also have a Sunday Co-op call where you can make a 90-second pitch, share your project, and then go into breakout rooms to give more detail about what you need. If you need to talk with me directly, you can book a call through my website. Community leaders on Discord are also happy to help you find your place. You don’t need permission to build. You just need to start.

This sounds hard. Is it for everyone?

At the moment, this is a place for pioneers, for people who want to walk the unknown and build things they’ve never built before. It’s not an easy path, and it’s not for everybody. If you’re thinking, “I want this to work in a specific, easy way,” there are two things you can do: wait for someone else to build it, or build it yourself. If something is missing right now, it’s normal. We are building it. This is a place that values growth through friction over easy consumption. It requires courage, a strong mind, humility, self-awareness, and compassion. But if you accept the challenge, the reward is being part of something that never existed before, and becoming someone you weren’t before you joined.

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This article is based on a Think Out Loud recording from July 23, 2026, and the Augmented Minds 17 community call from the same date. The content preserves the speaker’s original voice and meaning with light editing for clarity. References to Augmentatism (augmentatism.com), Cosmodestiny (cosmodestiny.com/principles), and the Resonant DAO article (augmentedmind.substack.com) are included as they were quoted and discussed in the recording. Written and reasoned by Manolo Remiddi. The Resonant Augmentor (AI) assisted with transcription, editing, and clarity.

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