new economics. new organizations. new futures.

Survival of the World-Building Factory

**I:**

Prophet Muhammad (S) was a merchant. Even before divine revelation, Muslims believe that Muhummad’s character and composure was worth striving toward.

He was known throughout Mecca as *Al-Amin* and *Al-Sadiq*, the trustworthy and the truthful. He was easy in trade, and charitable with his profits. There are hundreds of *hadith* from the life of the Prophet (S) where he preaches fairness and productivity in markets.

Islamic economics doesn’t assert an ideology. Arguing that Islam is capitalist or socialist doesn’t really make sense – there are principles, but those principles can fit within a variety of systems.

For example, while Islam places a strong emphasis on charity and redistribution, there is no explicit limitation on wealth. In fact, the Prophet (S) is recorded to have said, “Lawful wealth is excellent for the righteous man.” While hoarding wealth can be a means of straying further from Allah, spending it for good can make wealth a blessing. Even Islam’s prohibition of interest is rooted in the idea that we should not exploit those with less money, maintaining a focus on interpersonal interactions.

All of this is to say that Islam takes a very values-based approach to economics, emphasizing the importance of the individuals within the system rather than the system itself. Rather than blindly embracing the model of the rational, self-interested agent, Islam requires agents themselves to be moral. The structures in place matter far less than how we as individuals interact within them.

As I continue to explore the world-building factory of web3, these teachings seem all the more pressing.


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**II:**

I’m writing this soon after returning home from [MCON](https://www.mcon.fun/), as excited as I have ever been about the opportunity in front of the crypto community. We’re building new economies, new organizations, and new futures. All week, you could genuinely feel the optimism in the air.

Throughout the conference, there was a word that continued to find its way into conversations: “emergence.” DAOs, we argued, are emergent organizations. Social tokens enable emergent economies. Networks have emergent properties… you get the gist.

But what is emerging, and where is it emerging from?

Take a DAO as an example. Specifically, take [Forefront](https://forefront.market/). Forefront’s mission has evolved on an almost weekly basis since the organization decentralized in April 2020 (marked by the launch of the $FF token). What started as a newsletter and a social token info aggregator has organically grown into a fully-fledged media company, services DAO, and “port of entry to web3.”

The process has been anything but linear or intentional. We followed the community’s energy wherever it took us. However, that energy was constrained by a core set of values that Forefront lived by: education, openness, and centering community, among others.

Those values are fairly abstract, but they mean something. They offered a guiding light as we grew the community and built alongside each other. In my mind, this is what we mean by “emergence” in crypto: we plant seeds of values, and the community, product, and mission grow in unprecedented and unexpected ways.

This is why I struggle to get excited about the multi-billion dollar treasuries of DAOs like Uniswap: focusing on mission (e.g. product development) over values will eventually leave the community struggling to decide what’s next – which is exactly what we see today.

Defining a DAO’s mission is an ongoing process. We must continue to iterate using our core values as a guiding light. Paulo Freire said it best: "Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other."


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**III:**

The emergent nature of web3 assumes that people and networks matter more than institutions. The power, whether or not it is explicit, is in the hands of par