Breaking Group Heart: Material Interests and the Collapse of Digital Gemeinschaft in CityDAO

• In Event: Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 12: Community and Connection

Abstract

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) represent a significant attempt to reinstitute Gemeinschaft-style solidarity through digital infrastructure, disrupting the Gesellschaft logic of modern institutions. Yet, despite their explicitly anti-hierarchical values, many DAOs have failed to sustain the solidarity necessary for long-term governance. This paper proposes “group heart” as a theoretically synthesized concept for understanding how solidarity emerges and collapses in distributed digital communities, examined through a three-level sociological framework. At the macro level, DAOs emerge from creative disappointment with financialized institutions, creating the structural preconditions for group heart. At the meso level, Bamyeh’s (2006) four vectors of fluid solidarity must be simultaneously active within the community. At the micro level, Deci and Ryan’s (1985) Self-Determination Theory (SDT) explains how extrinsic rewards can undermine the intrinsic motivation that sustains solidarity. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of CityDAO (2021-2024), including participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and a word embedding analysis of textual data, this paper argues that CityDAO achieved a group heart state during its early period but that the introduction of monetary compensation undermined micro level psychological conditions, which led to material interests colonizing the meso level vectors, resulting in the breaking of group heart and the eventual collapse of the DAO. These findings suggest that solidaristic communities require structural protections against material vector dominance if Gemeinschaft is to survive contact with Gesellschaft incentives.

Author

• David Scott Warner, University of Pittsburgh