Forking as Cultural Practice: Institutional Governance after The DAO

Description

Since the micro-computing revolution in the 1970s we live in the age of permanent technological disruptions, but institutional and educational practices remain unchanged. As noted by Flavin, “technologies come and go but the university remains, in a recognizable and largely unchanged form” (Flavin, 2017). Disruptive technologies, such as distributed consensus systems (blockchains, DLT) challenge the role of the university as gatekeeper to knowledge and question the structure and organizational architecture of institutions. The only chance for traditional institutions is to find interfaces to informal and technology-driven “production cultures” (Tarasiewicz, 2011) to be able to radically reinvent the university. If the universities don’t react to technological and societal change, they will be forked, replaced, and decentralized.