How I Learned to Stop Collectivizing and Love Centralization: Lessons from 9 years of DAOs and Art "Collectives"
The Death and Rebirth of Black Sky Society (II)
This is one of my final personal and reflective posts for BLAXXKY. Starting next month, we will transition into a more curated editorial mode, featuring a reoriented podcast and print magazine! We’ll be sharing more details about the BLAXXKY 2026 vision soon, so stay tuned!
To follow along with new reflections, life updates, and historic notes after this, you can subscribe to my new personal Substack publication hosted now at stellarmag.net.
Continuation of The Death and Rebirth of Black Sky Society (I):
The remaining videos from Aetheria Symposia I still need to be shared. Expect the full archive to be uploaded in the next 7-10 days. We won’t send emails about each individual video upload, but we will email a digest once the whole series is up. First, I’ll be publishing Giulio Prisco’s talk, which provides an overview and summary of his book, Irrational Mechanics.
Fortunately, life has felt much brighter since the Part I post from October. Despite pondering if I’d ever organize humans again, I actually launched a Promethean study group—Fire From the Future—just a week later! Our initial focus is on Jorjani and Prisco.
I eventually handed off the leadership baton, but we began our study of Irrational Mechanics about two weeks ago. We’ll be publishing select videos from our discussion sessions soon. If you’d like to join the live discussions (Sundays at 16:00 UTC), let me know!
Black Sky Society as a real life community is dead now, but its spirit continues here in BLAXXKY, the media network, which will include a science fiction universe where Black Sky Society is a thing. My vision is to first develop the aesthetics, metafysiks, and cultural scaffolding as fiction, so eventually, a real life community can come about. I believe that it will be much easier to sustain (and not rage quit) online communities when people are mostly on the same page about metafysiks and the future.
Where did Black Sky originally come from, as a community name, you ask?
In 2017, we were brainstorming program names for our decentralized space agency, Space Decentral.
Giulio is the person who turned me on to Rachel Armstrong’s concept of Black Sky Thinking:
Nature does not obey the linear laws of machines but operates in complex, contextualised and irreversible ways, which exist beyond the singularity in places that we cannot see clearly. We may think of these conceptual opacities as the Black Sky, for which, we need a different toolset – this is Black Sky Thinking.
Black Sky Thinking is tactical, propositional and iterative. It draws existing threads of experience together and weaves a loose reality fabric from them. It then repeats the process until we can start to see the world around us again clearly and bump confidently up against its warp and weft, under new blue skies.
As he suggested, we first started using Black Sky in 2017 as the name of our catch-all space program: “An initiative to chart our long-term future among the planets and the stars.”
This ended up being our final list of programs on the Space Decentral landing page:
But, Space Decentral essentially came to an end in 2020 after things fell apart with Aragon. My company, Autark—Space Decentral’s sister software organization—had been building the infrastructure for Space Decentral’s DAO leveraging Aragon’s DAO framework, but the Aragon Association abruptly cancelled our grant, regardless of the DAO approving us for funding.
This was back in the more “wild west” DAO days, where it was being run more as a quasi DAO, with a “signal vote” that wasn’t tied to a smart contract. Transferring funds still had to be done by human multisig signers.
Autark couldn't continue building without that grant, and frankly, after everything that happened, we no longer wanted to build in their ecosystem anyway. We essentially had to walk away and sacrifice two years of code (that they thought was low quality code, hence cancelling our grant).
This was such a painful experience, which resulted in a lot of burnout and grumpiness for many years thereafter. But in 2026, I am actually super grateful and glad that I went through this unique life experience.
You learn a lot when faced with challenges like this. Failures are tremendous growth opportunities. So I’m glad I have accumulated a complex DAO / business legal challenge in historic record. And at this point, I have personally internally forgiven the Aragon founders, but I haven’t talked to them since then.
Last year, when I “shut down” Black Sky Society, I could start to better understand the Aragon founder’s motives in basically shutting down their decentralized operations as well. Decentralization sounds like the ideal, but it is actually extremely hard, when a lot of different humans with different “north stars” are involved.
Autark was part of the Aragon ecosystem to build Space Decentral. In a sense, it cared more about Space Decentral than it did about Aragon. And Aragon was a bit too early stage and didn’t have product market fit, and needed people who were more laser focused on Aragon. And people who I guess wrote better code and had less psychological issues?
Our team had some psychological issues. A couple of our developers would often disappear and I’d have to hunt them down and scream at them for disappearing and not being communicative about the status of their pull requests.
Many of us just felt under a lot of pressure in different ways and didn’t handle it super well. I know that my teammates in Autark have grown a lot since then though.
I still think there could have been some synergetic, mutually beneficial arrangement designed, and we could have actually launched the first real Space DAO in like 2020 or so, but oh well, you know.
It didn’t happen.
Anyhow. In late 2020, after everything crumbled with Autark, I started proposing that Space Decentral rebrand to BLAXXKY. We did a little poll:
It was a little bit on the fence. Space Decentral didn’t really continue on at that point though, although there were a few people who were still trying to keep the Coral space program alive.
With some of the other contributors, we forked off and started using the name BLAXXKY for another initiative.
But the BLAXXKY name didn’t stick for this other initiative, some of the new people just preferred referring to it as “The Collective”. Our first (and only) project was organizing a virtual event, Azimuth on December 20-21, 2020, at the height of the pandemic. It was fun. It didn’t sell many tickets though.
A few of the contributors forked away to focus on building metaverse tools (that Black Sky Society would later use, in 2022) and The Collective disbanded sometime in Spring 2021.
But by Fall 2021, I start up “Black Sky”, first running it as an artist residency. I hosted just a single artist, Sun Deep (details about her stay, in my Taos, New Mexico residency), who also was a member of The Collective. It was a short lived residency, I eventually found myself being nomadic in Europe by the next Spring, moving away from Taos.
I had a lot of fun having her in Taos and she helped mindjam some things with me, like the tagline/mission of “minimize dystopia and maximize harmony with the cosmos”.
[ Note: I am no longer into a bias toward ‘harmony’ ]
We were making sigils one night, and I drew the sigil for Black Sky, incorporating the tagline:
After this, my “[fake] collective” bug sprang up again and I started paying Sun Deep and others (primarily Rachel Cross, a friend I met in New Mexico) to help make zines and organize virtual events. We all went to EthDenver together in early 2022.
I also forked over a few thousand bucks to make a few promo videos for Black Sky (this was one of them):
From 2022 to 2025, Black Sky went through a lot of ups and downs. I frustrated and pissed off a lot of people along the way. I was paying people to help and positioning the project more as decentralized, as a collective, but also at the same time being a control freak that didn’t want decentralization and wanted to have final sign off everything.
Last summer, I finally realized that I’m fooling myself when it comes to decentralization. And I hope that everyone who I have led on along the way, will eventually forgive me for being confused and wasting their time.
The thing is, if you want to start a true collective, you can’t have one person paying half the members who need to be paid to be a part of it, anyhow. It was a bit of an awkward operation, where we had some contributors who didn’t need to be paid and some that did. There wasn’t really equal “skin in the game”. I highly recommend against starting “collectives” like this.
In late 2024, Giulio decided to revive BLAXXKY as a brand for a media network. He asked me for access to the @blaxxky X.com handle and cleared its old posts, and teased about BLAXXKY coming soon.
This was happening independent of the Black Sky Society vision, but we started cross-pollinating BLAXXKY<>Black Sky Society.
I’m telling this story so you understand these death and rebirth cycles:
Space Decentral to BLAXXKY to The Collective to Black Sky to Black Sky Society, back to BLAXXKY we go. I’d like to believe this is the last trip on the roller coaster.
In the next weeks or months, we will also finally be publishing videos from Azimuth 2020 and Black Sky’s Feb 2022 virtual events.
There have been too many false starts in collective organizing the past decade. But what has been consistent throughout this entire time of space agencies and art collectives and companies and network states has been Giulio—since 2017. 9 years. He is the last one standing. It’s just me and him, and we are Keeping it Simple, Stupid, for now. As he likes to tell me.
We aren’t going to complicate operations by including other people in leadership. But we will welcome exceptional contributors. Unpaid for now, but commissioned in the future as we build up our paid subscriber base.
More details will be shared in our ANNOUNCING BLAXXKY ISSUE 1 soon.
If this resonates, subscribe. We're building something strange here: a media network first, faster-than-light travel next.
Good Girl Walking!
"When you start to walk on the way, the way appears” -- Rumi