SiggeB
Active Pivian
Released today but written and uploaded in the beginning of this week, before I knew how things would unfold just a few days later 
Seems like perfect timing. Originally published here https://medium.com/pivx/what-a-couples-therapist-would-tell-this-dao-14191ea31f82
If the PIVX community sat down in a couples therapist’s office, the therapist would say something that sounds almost rude at first: of course it’s like this.
A community isn’t a hand-picked team. It’s whoever shows up, from a species that produces generous people and cruel ones, calm people and reactive ones, the occasional genuinely well-adjusted adult and the occasional person running on trauma they’ve never once looked at directly. A DAO doesn’t filter any of that out. It just hands all of it a voting mechanism and a shared treasury and says, good luck. Well, at least the ones that own masternodes. But everyone has a voice.
So the question was never “why does our community have conflict.” Conflict was guaranteed the moment more than a handful of real humans showed up and started caring about the outcome. The actual question is whether it knows how to fight well. Most don’t. That’s not a PIVX problem. That’s a humans problem wearing PIVX merch.
The paradox built into the model itself
A good number of people in the PIVXcommunity have read Rick Falkvinge’s Swarmwise, free online, often treated as close to scripture for how a leaderless movement is supposed to work. It’s a genuinely useful book. It’s also carrying a contradiction most of its readers never clock, because Falkvinge states it plainly, almost in passing, and then builds a model that runs directly against it.
The line is this: accountability and authority go hand in hand.
Then the rest of the book describes a structure built specifically to avoid granting anyone formal authority. Leadership in a swarm isn’t appointed, it’s earned purely by inspiring people, moment to moment, with nothing backing it up but whether others feel like following right now. No one can tell anyone else what to do. That’s the whole design, and it’s a real strength, it’s a big part of why swarm-style organizing can move fast and resist capture.
But read those two ideas side by side and the problem announces itself. If accountability requires authority, and the model deliberately has none, then holding anyone to anything was always going to be fragile by design. The person trying to enforce a line the community already agreed to has no backing, no formal process, no higher body to appeal to. Just whatever social force they can generate in the moment. When that’s not enough, and it often isn’t, they’re left standing there alone, holding a rule nobody’s required to respect.
Structurelessness doesn’t remove power. It just stops you from seeing it
This isn’t a new problem, and it isn’t a crypto problem. In 1970, Jo Freeman wrote an essay called “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” about the feminist collectives of her era, and it’s been cited by basically every leaderless movement since because it names something uncomfortable and true: refusing to build formal structure doesn’t eliminate power. It just makes the power that’s already there, confidence, charisma, tenure, social capital, informal and impossible to check. A group that insists it has no hierarchy still has one. It’s just unacknowledged, which means it can never be held accountable the way an acknowledged one could be.
A DAO with no formal authority isn’t a DAO without power dynamics. It’s a DAO where the power dynamics are real and deniable at the same time, which is worse for the person trying to hold a line, not better. They’re not just fighting the rule-breaker. They’re fighting the community’s own insistence that no one here actually has power to begin with.
When the person enforcing the rule becomes the villain of the story
There’s a specific, well-documented pattern worth naming directly, because once you see it, you’ll recognize it instantly: DARVO. Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. Psychologist Jennifer Freyd documented it originally in contexts far more serious than DAO governance, but the mechanism is identical wherever it shows up. Someone breaks an agreed-upon line. Called on it, they don’t address the violation. They deny it happened, attack whoever raised it, and recast themselves as the one under attack.
Watch for it and you’ll see the shape every time: the person holding the community to its own stated rules gets rebranded, in real time, as the aggressor. Not because the facts support that. Because it’s an extremely effective move, and because a structureless group has no mechanism to stop the reframing from taking hold once enough people are confused about who actually started it.
This isn’t abstract for PIVX specifically, and it’s worth being concrete about why. Since I joined this community in 2019, PIVX has stood out against the broader crypto space, loud by default, frequently hostile, often unmistakably hypermasculine, as something genuinely friendlier, as purple. That’s not an accident anyone just enjoyed. It got written down, deliberately, as actual guidelines on the community’s Discord, agreed to by a clear majority, aimed squarely at not scaring off newcomers before they ever got to the technology. A privacy coin for everyone has to actually include people who don’t already know how to survive crypto Discord’s default tone, or the “for everyone” part is just a slogan.
Those guidelines get challenged reliably, and the challenge almost always arrives dressed as a free speech objection. It’s worth being precise about why that doesn’t hold up, rather than just asserting it. Free speech, as a principle, protects your right to say something. It has never meant a right to say it inside someone else’s community, free of any agreed consequence, and it has certainly never included the right to insult. Asking people to be respectful isn’t restricting anyone’s speech. It’s declining to hand a platform to a specific kind of speech nobody was ever owed a platform for in the first place.
One careful distinction matters here, because it’s easy to blur. Disagreeing, in good faith, about exactly where a guideline should sit, whether a specific rule is too strict, too vague, enforced unevenly, is healthy, normal, and should be welcomed outright. That’s not DARVO. DARVO isn’t “I think this line is drawn wrong.” It’s break the agreed line, get called on it, and respond by denying, attacking, and recasting the person enforcing the community’s own stated agreement as the actual aggressor. Those are two entirely different things, and treating every objection as the second one would be its own kind of bad faith.
But here’s the part that actually matters, once that distinction is clear: DARVO shows up constantly, in politics, in families, in every kind of institution that has ever existed. Its sheer prevalence everywhere else is not an argument for tolerating it here. A community that spends real, continuous, deliberate effort trying to stay friendly, open, and welcoming doesn’t get to wave through a widespread bad pattern just because it’s widespread. If anything, the opposite is true. The fact that something is common everywhere else is exactly why a place that worked hard not to be like everywhere else shouldn’t quietly let it back in through the side door.
Reading the book isn’t the same as living it under pressure
Here’s the part that explains why some of the people most fluent in the language of healthy process still fail at it completely the moment things get tense. There’s a real difference, well documented in therapy, between declarative knowledge and embodied behavior. Being able to describe a healthy boundary calmly in a forum post is a different skill than holding that boundary when you’re actually angry, embarrassed, or scared of losing status. Plenty of people can recite the theory perfectly and then abandon every bit of it the second it costs them something personally.
This isn’t hypocrisy, exactly, or at least not only that. Intellectualizing, understanding a concept so thoroughly that the understanding itself starts to feel like the work, is a recognized defense mechanism. It lets a person feel like they’ve done something by knowing the right answer, without ever doing the much harder thing of actually behaving differently under stress.
The reality everyone builds for themselves
And underneath all of it sits the plainest, most universal mechanism of all: motivated reasoning. People don’t usually experience themselves as the one breaking the rule. They’ve already, often without noticing, reasoned their way to a version of events where they were right, a version where the rule didn’t really apply to them, a version where the other person started it. This isn’t a character flaw unique to difficult people. It’s one of the most replicated findings in psychology, and it applies to every single person in this conversation, including whoever’s reading this and nodding along about someone else.
Now, the part worth actually reading twice
None of the above is a reason to feel worse about this community. If anything, it’s close to the opposite.
Here’s what a good therapist tells a couple who shows up exhausted, convinced their fighting means something’s fundamentally broken: conflict was never the warning sign. Avoidance is. The research on this is about as clear as social science gets, relationships that last aren’t the ones with no conflict, they’re the ones that repair well after it. Gottman’s decades of research on couples found that the presence of disagreement predicts almost nothing about whether a relationship survives. What predicts it is whether the people in it can come back together afterward, honestly, without pretending nothing happened and without staying wounded forever.
A community where nobody ever fought about anything wouldn’t be healthy. It would be a community where nobody cared enough to bother. The fights happening in PIVX’s community aren’t evidence the project is failing. They’re the noise made by a genuine number of people who actually give a damn about the outcome, which is a far rarer and more valuable thing than it sounds like from inside the exhaustion of watching it happen.
And if you’re one of the people this exhausts, the one who runs a node quietly, who shows up and votes thoughtfully on proposals, who welcomes a confused newcomer patiently for the fourth time this month, who has never once wanted to be in the middle of a public fight about who said what to whom, here’s the thing worth hearing directly: you are not failing at this because you hate the conflict. You are not required to be the one who wins the argument, outlasts the aggressor, or fixes the people who came here carrying their childhood trauma this community never signed up to treat. That was never your job.
Your job, the one that’s actually been building this network for a decade, is the unglamorous, undramatic, compounding work that was never going to trend on social media. It’s the thing the conflicts are, underneath all the noise, actually fighting over the right to continue doing. The loud moments are visible precisely because conflict is loud by nature, not because they’re the majority of what’s actually happening here. Most of what sustains this project every single day is quiet, and it’s being done, right now, by people exactly like you, whether or not anyone ever tells you that directly.
So: let the people who want to fight about governance fight about governance. Keep doing the thing you were already doing. Ten years from now, nobody will remember the argument. The node you kept running, the wallet feature you tested, the person you helped get set up, that’s the part that was never going to show up in anyone’s screenshot, and it’s also the only part that was ever actually load-bearing.
Seems like perfect timing. Originally published here https://medium.com/pivx/what-a-couples-therapist-would-tell-this-dao-14191ea31f82If the PIVX community sat down in a couples therapist’s office, the therapist would say something that sounds almost rude at first: of course it’s like this.
A community isn’t a hand-picked team. It’s whoever shows up, from a species that produces generous people and cruel ones, calm people and reactive ones, the occasional genuinely well-adjusted adult and the occasional person running on trauma they’ve never once looked at directly. A DAO doesn’t filter any of that out. It just hands all of it a voting mechanism and a shared treasury and says, good luck. Well, at least the ones that own masternodes. But everyone has a voice.
So the question was never “why does our community have conflict.” Conflict was guaranteed the moment more than a handful of real humans showed up and started caring about the outcome. The actual question is whether it knows how to fight well. Most don’t. That’s not a PIVX problem. That’s a humans problem wearing PIVX merch.
The paradox built into the model itself
A good number of people in the PIVXcommunity have read Rick Falkvinge’s Swarmwise, free online, often treated as close to scripture for how a leaderless movement is supposed to work. It’s a genuinely useful book. It’s also carrying a contradiction most of its readers never clock, because Falkvinge states it plainly, almost in passing, and then builds a model that runs directly against it.
The line is this: accountability and authority go hand in hand.
Then the rest of the book describes a structure built specifically to avoid granting anyone formal authority. Leadership in a swarm isn’t appointed, it’s earned purely by inspiring people, moment to moment, with nothing backing it up but whether others feel like following right now. No one can tell anyone else what to do. That’s the whole design, and it’s a real strength, it’s a big part of why swarm-style organizing can move fast and resist capture.
But read those two ideas side by side and the problem announces itself. If accountability requires authority, and the model deliberately has none, then holding anyone to anything was always going to be fragile by design. The person trying to enforce a line the community already agreed to has no backing, no formal process, no higher body to appeal to. Just whatever social force they can generate in the moment. When that’s not enough, and it often isn’t, they’re left standing there alone, holding a rule nobody’s required to respect.
Structurelessness doesn’t remove power. It just stops you from seeing it
This isn’t a new problem, and it isn’t a crypto problem. In 1970, Jo Freeman wrote an essay called “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” about the feminist collectives of her era, and it’s been cited by basically every leaderless movement since because it names something uncomfortable and true: refusing to build formal structure doesn’t eliminate power. It just makes the power that’s already there, confidence, charisma, tenure, social capital, informal and impossible to check. A group that insists it has no hierarchy still has one. It’s just unacknowledged, which means it can never be held accountable the way an acknowledged one could be.
A DAO with no formal authority isn’t a DAO without power dynamics. It’s a DAO where the power dynamics are real and deniable at the same time, which is worse for the person trying to hold a line, not better. They’re not just fighting the rule-breaker. They’re fighting the community’s own insistence that no one here actually has power to begin with.
When the person enforcing the rule becomes the villain of the story
There’s a specific, well-documented pattern worth naming directly, because once you see it, you’ll recognize it instantly: DARVO. Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. Psychologist Jennifer Freyd documented it originally in contexts far more serious than DAO governance, but the mechanism is identical wherever it shows up. Someone breaks an agreed-upon line. Called on it, they don’t address the violation. They deny it happened, attack whoever raised it, and recast themselves as the one under attack.
Watch for it and you’ll see the shape every time: the person holding the community to its own stated rules gets rebranded, in real time, as the aggressor. Not because the facts support that. Because it’s an extremely effective move, and because a structureless group has no mechanism to stop the reframing from taking hold once enough people are confused about who actually started it.
This isn’t abstract for PIVX specifically, and it’s worth being concrete about why. Since I joined this community in 2019, PIVX has stood out against the broader crypto space, loud by default, frequently hostile, often unmistakably hypermasculine, as something genuinely friendlier, as purple. That’s not an accident anyone just enjoyed. It got written down, deliberately, as actual guidelines on the community’s Discord, agreed to by a clear majority, aimed squarely at not scaring off newcomers before they ever got to the technology. A privacy coin for everyone has to actually include people who don’t already know how to survive crypto Discord’s default tone, or the “for everyone” part is just a slogan.
Those guidelines get challenged reliably, and the challenge almost always arrives dressed as a free speech objection. It’s worth being precise about why that doesn’t hold up, rather than just asserting it. Free speech, as a principle, protects your right to say something. It has never meant a right to say it inside someone else’s community, free of any agreed consequence, and it has certainly never included the right to insult. Asking people to be respectful isn’t restricting anyone’s speech. It’s declining to hand a platform to a specific kind of speech nobody was ever owed a platform for in the first place.
One careful distinction matters here, because it’s easy to blur. Disagreeing, in good faith, about exactly where a guideline should sit, whether a specific rule is too strict, too vague, enforced unevenly, is healthy, normal, and should be welcomed outright. That’s not DARVO. DARVO isn’t “I think this line is drawn wrong.” It’s break the agreed line, get called on it, and respond by denying, attacking, and recasting the person enforcing the community’s own stated agreement as the actual aggressor. Those are two entirely different things, and treating every objection as the second one would be its own kind of bad faith.
But here’s the part that actually matters, once that distinction is clear: DARVO shows up constantly, in politics, in families, in every kind of institution that has ever existed. Its sheer prevalence everywhere else is not an argument for tolerating it here. A community that spends real, continuous, deliberate effort trying to stay friendly, open, and welcoming doesn’t get to wave through a widespread bad pattern just because it’s widespread. If anything, the opposite is true. The fact that something is common everywhere else is exactly why a place that worked hard not to be like everywhere else shouldn’t quietly let it back in through the side door.
Reading the book isn’t the same as living it under pressure
Here’s the part that explains why some of the people most fluent in the language of healthy process still fail at it completely the moment things get tense. There’s a real difference, well documented in therapy, between declarative knowledge and embodied behavior. Being able to describe a healthy boundary calmly in a forum post is a different skill than holding that boundary when you’re actually angry, embarrassed, or scared of losing status. Plenty of people can recite the theory perfectly and then abandon every bit of it the second it costs them something personally.
This isn’t hypocrisy, exactly, or at least not only that. Intellectualizing, understanding a concept so thoroughly that the understanding itself starts to feel like the work, is a recognized defense mechanism. It lets a person feel like they’ve done something by knowing the right answer, without ever doing the much harder thing of actually behaving differently under stress.
The reality everyone builds for themselves
And underneath all of it sits the plainest, most universal mechanism of all: motivated reasoning. People don’t usually experience themselves as the one breaking the rule. They’ve already, often without noticing, reasoned their way to a version of events where they were right, a version where the rule didn’t really apply to them, a version where the other person started it. This isn’t a character flaw unique to difficult people. It’s one of the most replicated findings in psychology, and it applies to every single person in this conversation, including whoever’s reading this and nodding along about someone else.
Now, the part worth actually reading twice
None of the above is a reason to feel worse about this community. If anything, it’s close to the opposite.
Here’s what a good therapist tells a couple who shows up exhausted, convinced their fighting means something’s fundamentally broken: conflict was never the warning sign. Avoidance is. The research on this is about as clear as social science gets, relationships that last aren’t the ones with no conflict, they’re the ones that repair well after it. Gottman’s decades of research on couples found that the presence of disagreement predicts almost nothing about whether a relationship survives. What predicts it is whether the people in it can come back together afterward, honestly, without pretending nothing happened and without staying wounded forever.
A community where nobody ever fought about anything wouldn’t be healthy. It would be a community where nobody cared enough to bother. The fights happening in PIVX’s community aren’t evidence the project is failing. They’re the noise made by a genuine number of people who actually give a damn about the outcome, which is a far rarer and more valuable thing than it sounds like from inside the exhaustion of watching it happen.
And if you’re one of the people this exhausts, the one who runs a node quietly, who shows up and votes thoughtfully on proposals, who welcomes a confused newcomer patiently for the fourth time this month, who has never once wanted to be in the middle of a public fight about who said what to whom, here’s the thing worth hearing directly: you are not failing at this because you hate the conflict. You are not required to be the one who wins the argument, outlasts the aggressor, or fixes the people who came here carrying their childhood trauma this community never signed up to treat. That was never your job.
Your job, the one that’s actually been building this network for a decade, is the unglamorous, undramatic, compounding work that was never going to trend on social media. It’s the thing the conflicts are, underneath all the noise, actually fighting over the right to continue doing. The loud moments are visible precisely because conflict is loud by nature, not because they’re the majority of what’s actually happening here. Most of what sustains this project every single day is quiet, and it’s being done, right now, by people exactly like you, whether or not anyone ever tells you that directly.
So: let the people who want to fight about governance fight about governance. Keep doing the thing you were already doing. Ten years from now, nobody will remember the argument. The node you kept running, the wallet feature you tested, the person you helped get set up, that’s the part that was never going to show up in anyone’s screenshot, and it’s also the only part that was ever actually load-bearing.