Homeostatic Governance: A Gorsky-Anokhin Alternative to the Viable System Model for Decentralized Organizations

Anton Dziatkovskii · ORCID 0000-0001-7408-3054

Preprint, 7 September 2026. Version of record: Zenodo, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22639712. License CC BY 4.0.

Full text (PDF, 4 pages, 166 KB)DOICode: claw-consensus

Abstract

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) increasingly require principled governance design rather than ad-hoc parameter choices. The leading cybernetic lens applied to DAOs is Stafford Beer's Viable System Model (VSM), recently mapped to decentralized organizations by BlockScience (Zargham, Nabben). We propose a distinct cybernetic grounding drawn from the Soviet/Russian school of homeostatics (Gorsky) and Anokhin's theory of functional systems. We decompose governance into three coupled control circuits — a main steady-state circuit, an adaptive circuit, and a protective self-compensation circuit — and show that this tripartite model is a simpler, implementable subset of VSM's five subsystems with different coupling assumptions. We map the three circuits onto concrete on-chain mechanisms (Ethereum's slashing and inactivity-leak as negative feedback; dual-governance and circuit breakers as the protective circuit) and use the model to predict governance failure modes, which we compare against observed DAO crises. We additionally sketch a computable governance-stability score derived from a typed actor-relation matrix (developed in companion work), and exhibit the three circuits as executable guards in a dependency-free multi-agent consensus protocol (claw-consensus) offered as a reference implementation beyond the on-chain setting.

Keywords

DAO governance · cybernetics · homeostatics · viable system model · multi-agent systems · blockchain

How to cite

Dziatkovskii, A. (2026). Homeostatic Governance: A Gorsky-Anokhin Alternative to the Viable System Model for Decentralized Organizations. Preprint. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22639712

@misc{dziatkovskii2026homeostaticg,
  author    = {Dziatkovskii, Anton},
  title     = {Homeostatic Governance: A Gorsky-Anokhin Alternative to the Viable System Model for Decentralized Organizations},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {Zenodo},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.22639712},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22639712},
  note      = {Preprint, CC BY 4.0}
}

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