The Things We Forgot
James Wigginton argues that Web3 and decentralized technologies can learn crucial lessons from ancestral wisdom, particularly from cooperatives and consensus-building practices. Drawing on David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything , he suggests that humans have always experimented with diverse social structures, and today’s DAOs need not reinvent governance from scratch. Wigginton highlights cooperatives—from REI to Blue Diamond Almonds—as proven models for democratic ownership that align naturally with blockchain ideals, while also pointing to Buddhist Sanghas and Quaker meetings as examples of consensus decision-making that produces more stable outcomes than majority-rule voting.
