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

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.