David Graeber participated in the Direct Action Network, a leaderless anarchist collective that faced a legal problem when someone donated a car: a decentralized group couldn't legally own it. The dilemma, unresolved decades ago, mirrors today's questions about whether DAOs can actually control property.
David Graeber was an activist. He was part of a social justice movement in the United States that was called the Direct Action Network. They were organizing protests and all sorts of things in the big cities in the United States. It was very much an anarchist experiment. There was no leader, there was no managers, there was no boss making the decisions on behalf of the group. They were collectively making decisions, and that was working really, really well until one day somebody had the terrible idea of donating a car. They couldn't decide who was the owner of the car. And they realized that a decentralized network cannot legally own a car. The fact that a car was donated to a decentralized network of activists just didn't fit with any of the legal frameworks, and the car became a burden. And so this question of like, can a decentralized network control assets? It's a big question today in the DAO communities, right? It's an old question.
