Archetypes

Governance roles and the characters that play them

We encountered many types of characters in our Season 2 readings, often embodying recurring tropes. Regular attendees used a lightweight group process to sort these character types into a handful of archetypes. The archetypes — benevolent dictator, backstopper, shapeshifter, and anarch — can be found in two modes, Mature (–), an underdeveloped or corrupt version of the archetype, and Mature (+), a thriving, purposefully actualizing version.

Our archetypes

Benevolent Dictator

In the Yak Collective’s ongoing explorations of web3 collectives and DAOs, we find ourselves doubting that token-based governance is ready for the masses. web3 governance has obvious theoretical appeal: democratic, everyone-has-a-say, we-all-win-together. Yet, for one example, Wired reported on MakerDAO founder Rune Christensen “always planned to step aside once the DAO had become self-sufficient, but when he tried, it was always rudderless in his absence.” He realized that “without someone to guide the ship, a power vacuum forms and the community begins to fracture.”

It’s hard to motivate all members of a group to care about every single decision. And even if they do care, do they have the right expertise to weigh in? If they don’t, are they willing to rapidly develop that expertise? These are some obvious concerns about token-based governance. Vitalik Buterin points out a few lesser-obvious concerns like how smallholders have much less incentive to care or self-educate about a topic and vote and that coin voting only gives power to one group (coin-holders) at the expense of other groups.

Ironically, Buterin is often referred to as a benevolent dictator of Ethereum. After The DAO got hacked, Buterin had to decide whether to let the community vote on how to handle things or to intervene directly himself. He decided on the latter, which much of the community has come to retrospectively recognize as the correct choice. Even today, and even among the Ethereum Foundation and core Ethereum developers, Buterin is often seen as the person with the most coherent understanding of the protocol and its roadmap.

We’ve observed that many organizations default to having some sort of Benevolent Dictator, whether it’s For-Life (BDFL) or otherwise (BDFx: for season; for x). And it's the model that we’ve adapted for ourselves in our study tracks, tasking a BDFx with the duties of picking our weekly readings, taking notes, delegating the work to others, and kicking off synthesis work such as this series of writings. Yak Collective particularly favors the idea of having a benevolent dictator for a limited time period versus for life. Ascension is opt-in; descension is dictated by a duration of time.

Mature (–): Dictatorial fascist. The steward has become enamored with power and starts steering protocols and directives to their benefit. 

Ex: Elon Musk; WeWork founder Adam Neumann; maniacal figures from homeowners associations

Mature (+): Esteemed steward. Provides sufficient structure and kindling to keep a group focused and supplied with ideas. Promote a balance of staying aligned and pushing boundaries. Sparingly intervenes to help the project KTLO when necessary. Due to the public nature of their post as BD, their efforts here are more legible than that of the backstopper (see next).

Ex: Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum Foundation); Stewart Brand (The Long Now Foundation)

Backstopper

The backstopper is the more introverted, less-legible correlate to the benevolent dictator. While the benevolent dictator stewards the project legibly and enacts a certain level of charisma in directing people, the backstopper may lack the creative or social courage to put themselves out there in the same way. Nevertheless, they play an important role in the functioning of the organization. 

The backstopper often cares deeply about the group and derives great benefit from participation. But to express their value to the group, they do the behind-the-scenes, KTLO (keep the lights on) work.

Stewart Brand writes about the crucial role of maintenance in the endurance of an entity in a race or prolonged competition, whether a sailboat or organization. The Yak Collective has a growing appreciation for KTLO. In our reading tracks, which have been taking place for a few years, the current benevolent dictator for the track can often have a roadblock: illness or a particularly demanding work week. With little fuss, another Yak will step in and backstop by BDFxing for the day.

Those who best embody the archetype, however, often do the work with no obvious reward: creating event cards on our calendar, providing editorial guidance on writing, and supporting new BDFxes as they step into their roles and are unsure of protocols or their ideas.

Mature (–): A stunted IC. They have a degree of internalized learned helplessness in their role in an organization. They show up but self-limit their participation, perhaps juicing the numbers of attendance/participation to any given group event but staying on listen-mode only — taking up a seat at the table without adding further value. 

Ex: Milton Waddams (stapler guy from office space); the useful idiot

Mature (+): An executive assistant or chief of staff. They’re not the face of an organization but are, behind the curtain, helping the face of the organization look good and making sure events continue. They do the chores and have a holy-martyr-like drive to show up to keep the lights on as they identify closely with the organization’s livelihood. “Behind great leadership is a great team of backstoppers.” 

Ex: Glue people (“people who pull teams together to make them greater than the sum of their parts); Carolynn Levy, inventor of the SAFE who worked closely with Y Combinator for many years but is lesser known and dealt with the minute, legal work required to craft such a document.

Shapeshifter

The shapeshifter either buys into or enjoys the game that the broader collective is participating in, yet plays it not for the benefit of the group but for their amusement and in a highly individualistic style. 

The shapeshifter has certain strengths. Since they drift from the otherwise centralized, high-alignment core of a collective, they can exploit a cutting-edge schism and exploit it for their advancement — and sometimes this equals a win for the collective as well. They’re the perfect example of a player who has embodied a certain level of being slightly evil. They’re less concerned with immediate praise (such as from playing teacher’s pet) or the legibility of their behaviors and motives.

Mature (–): Distracted schizoposter. Their openness to chaos is not masterfully honed and their contributions may challenge the alignment of the group. Or, they have good ideas but have not mastered how to articulate them within the language and frame that the rest of the group occupies. Their ideas come across as vagrant tweets on the collective timeline. Perhaps there is a there there, but it’s not fully articulated or useful to others.

Ex: Bertram Gilfoyle from Silicon Valley

Mature (+): Master OODA looper. They may not always be running alongside the group and may occupy a default, low-inertia state where they conserve energy and direct their attention mainly to the observation of the larger game, they are at the same time gathering sufficient context and positioning themselves in time and space. They run a high-tempo OODA loop and are able to pounce quickly into action to secure a win for not only their group but also for themselves.

Ex: Lionel Messi

Anarch

The anarch is skeptical of authority and doesn’t agree with either pole of an existing schism in a system. They exist in the system due to some sort of dependency or need that can only be fulfilled by the system or collective, despite their frustrations with it. 

Rojava, a de facto autonomous region in northeastern Syria, exemplifies this. While Syria may not recognize it as autonomous, the region practices democratic ideals — a strong departure from the governance of its neighboring countries.

Anarchs often occupy or exploit edge cases, i.e., points of failure or weakness, in the system. Here they find less friction against their inner values.

Unlike the shapeshifter, they’re less concerned with immediate rewards that can be earned with high-tempo moves. They’re more concerned about the mid-term future and thus operate on a medium tempo.

Mature (–): A doomer. This anarch dwells in whatever edge case(s) they’ve identified and can’t seem to see possibilities or futures outside of, or even within, it. Their frustrations often get expressed in self-destructive ways, either to themselves, the systems they occupy, or both. There’s an immature sense of agency that they possess and a sense of learned helplessness.

Ex: Ted Kaczynski; agenda-sabotagers in the workplace; eco-terrorists (climate activists who damage famous artwork)

Mature (+): Protocol author. This anarch realizes that edge cases are often expressions of broken or insufficient civilizational protocols that lead to systemic dysfunction. However, instead of trying to change the game from inside the game, they take to authoring separate protocols entirely and creating a productive landscape for other anarchs to build things together. The protocol author has weaponized agency.

Ex: cryptographers

The Sovereign

The sovereign has achieved some sort of self-sustaining, fully independent existence through wealth or power/status and where the systems they inhabit don’t constrain them. They’re not malevolent enough to warrant countermovement against them but have creative flexibility and can often get rules bent to their desires.

This is the warrior who has attained enough money or status through exerting agency and playing the game well and has now carved out a longer-term state of honor, status, and peace for themselves. Unlike the BDFx, they no longer seek to fully identify with a collective or organization. The sovereign has enough status or wealth that they can choose to have leverage over entire organizations themselves. The sovereign self-elects into playing games according to their values and has the privilege of thinking about society on a longer time horizon. Thus, they play a lower-tempo game. Actions taken today may not yield results or feedback until much later. 

Mature (-): Crackpot leader. The sovereign who is self-obsessed and lacks epistemic humility to realize that system-wide, collective impact merits a diversity of ideas and collaboration. They want to only see their theses enacted in the world.

Ex: Aubrey de Grey, prominent longevity researcher charged with sexual harassment against female researchers; Stephen Wolfram

Mature (+): Frontier opener. The sovereign who has seen and studied enough of the world to have a more accurate model of how long-term technological progress and change are enacted and wants to enable the mass proliferation of ideas. They can fund tech and people who may not have an opportunity to raise funding through conventional means (bootstrapping, VC) since frontier tech is inherently high-risk and frontier tech is potentially very high reward. Their warrior status conveys that their worldviews are sufficiently correct that they were able to excel in a challenging game themselves.

Ex: Marc Andreessen, who often invests in experimental writing and projects