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Several People Are Typing is an experimental magazine about the wild future of decentralized media & creative collaboration. It was co-created by Foster, Seed Club, and Metalabel, along with dozens of writers and dreamers. You can collect a free NFT version, or purchase the physical magazine, from Metalabel.

The following speculative fiction was co-written by RADAR: The narrative was developed over multiple collaborative ideation sessions, the world built upon and expanded by each writer’s unique points of view. The characters were role-played by community members, and the piece was collaboratively edited by a core team including Andrea Chen, Alexi Gunner, Caitlin Keeley, Emily Howell, and Keely Adler. This process was built collectively and in tandem alongside the story; learning to write, create, and imagine together was as much of the story as the words and world we’ve imagined within it. You can find a peek into the process, the story and the approach in Miro at bit.ly/43wjVf9.

Kailin still felt a little drowsy. She struggled to get a good night’s sleep — the momentous gravity of the days ahead weighing heavy on her mind. With a hot, fresh cup of Lion’s Mane mushroom brew in her hand, she sat down to wake up her computer terminal and logged into the MyceliMind network.

HiberBetaBot: tasks for today, 19 March, 2038:

• hibernet beta test assessment

• assess go-ahead for alpha launch

*Open Beta hiberfolk thread*

Kailin [project manager]: Ok, so how are we feeling about tomorrow’s launch? What’s our confidence level?

HiberBetaBot: <preparing to gather data from hiberfolk input cohort 18-19 March 2038>

Tam [writer-in-residence, part of the first group of hiberfolk and hibernet engineer]: While the bot does its thing, I think we can confidently say that we’ve covered our bases on safety. And while the mechanics are under-studied, my intuition tells me that the collective repair mechanisms — similar to quorum sensing in bacterial cells, or mycorrhizal symbiosis in plants — are creating stress-resistant healing mechanisms that will help iron out any kinks while our consciousnesses are dreaming up creations. This starts to explain the shared phenomena — the smell of petrichor — we’ve all experienced in emerging from the hibernet. We know that these processes occur much faster in dream states, and the brain has displayed tremendous control so far in identifying challenges and establishing solutions, so opening up to broader participation feels like the natural next step...

The hibernet could change everything.

Kailin took a deep breath, reminding herself to consider how far they’d come — and back from such a precipice. When The Algorithm came to global dominance, millions of worldbuilders were forced to compete against each other to maximize productivity, rendering them exhausted and depleted. She shuddered thinking about it, reluctant to relive the darkness. The cold, calculated, uncompromising worldbuilder economy forced her and her friends to create in solitude, forever attempting to outbuild each other in a frenzy of always-on hustling.

She ran a finger over the cluster of mushrooms sprouting from the terrarium on her desk. Who would have expected that the emergence of mycelitronics back in 2023 would eventually lead to this hope they now held in their hands, this possibility of a better way out? The discovery that fungi could be used to connect computing systems and transmit signals — a beautiful melding of technology and mother earth, she thought — evolved into the radical revelation that the same power of mycelium could be used to connect the minds of worldbuilders, too.

Working in secret, MyceliMind started cultivating edible ‘hibado’ fungi — a small, unassuming mushroom that looked a bit like a pencil, or perhaps a brush. Simply eat a hibado, surrender to sleep, and drift into the warm, cozy embrace of the hibernet.

In the hibernet, facilitated by a huge network of tiny, underground threads, worldbuilders were linked into a collaborative, universal consciousness — and, importantly, disconnected from the mainframe. Tapping into the ebb, flow, and consensus of collective thought through mycelial networks, something incredible was coming to bear: the power to manifest humanity’s collective desires through deep rest, to write the healing of the world into being.

The MyceliMind team knew what they built was transformative, incredible, and at the same time, terrifyingly powerful. Kailin was almost giddy, having spent so long working toward this moment — but she was also deeply anxious. She knew she wasn’t alone — sensing equal parts trepidation and optimism among the initial cohort of hiberfolk who had experienced the collective slumber of the fungi network.

Andrea [hibernet beta tester]: Did you guys see the news about the sinkhole in the Pacific, though? I swear that was me. I had a nightmare about the forest getting swallowed up. We need some screeners. Are you just going to let anyone and their anxieties in on this thing?

Alexi [hibernet beta tester]: I agree, I still think we should keep this quiet. We should be trying harder with our networks to prioritize access for underrepresented communities through grassroots outreach. I mean, we’re the ones with no shortage of ways to communicate and get our thoughts out there — what gives us the right to decide what healing looks like for everyone?

HiberBetaBot: Initial assessments detect slightly elevated levels of anxiety, within normal standard deviation

Nik [hibernet beta tester]: Call me a hopeless hopepunk, but I disagree. It used to be that my head hit the pillow and... void. Now, I’m no longer struggling to remember the wisps of a dream. I see the changes manifesting irl. My grumpy neighbor smiled at me this morning. Coincidence? Maybe. But since I’ve been in the hibernet... I believe it’s our way out of this, together.

Alexi [hibernet beta tester]: Uh... it’s a smile. I wouldn’t read that much into it.

Andrea [hibernet beta tester]: Alexi, that’s the whole point. You’ll never know for sure; it will just start to happen. The collective will shift – and we have to believe it will be for the better.

Dylan [one of the machine intelligences, part of the core science team]: But we don’t know what we’re unleashing here. Sure, we’ve built 'safe walls' and tested its apparent usability in the short-term — but we need to re-run these tests with larger sample sizes comprising varying types of brain activity and different psyches. We’re sharing swathes of subconscious data to build these collective realities, but it can trigger non-deterministic, non-linear chaos states, leading to the complete loss of control over individual and group states of mental activity.

Alexi [hibernet beta tester]: Exactly.

Rita [a beta tester who has refused this title]: Testing is a way we manage fear. But fear remains unless we look it in the eye and ask what it has to teach us. What we need to open our hearts to and recognize is that our experience of ourselves and other people is essentially an act of imagination that can’t be sustained through wholly rational modes of thought. The way forward necessitates a radical rupture from the patterns of oppression we’ve come to see as normal. Dreaming is radical. Rest is radical. The hibernet is a homecoming, an invitation to see and nurture our connections to each other, to meet our ancestors, to return to the earth... it’s an invitation to forgive ourselves and to trust our one-ness. Nature’s intelligence starts sluggish but acts on a scale of great magnitude. Like an elephant in a rat race. We need to trust that power.

Kailin felt uncertain. The hibernet, like any system rooted in nature, could be chaotic. Its lack of linear processes made it inherently difficult to predict and harness. But she also believed it could lead to something magical.

The old way of building — alone, in solitude, building over each other, a million voices shouting — it wasn’t sustainable. But was the hibernet the answer? What if they had got it all wrong? Were they opening Pandora’s box?

She realized that the decision to go ahead with the launch was not hers to assess. She would have to tap into the collective consciousness of the hibernet to give her an answer on whether they should deploy on a wider scale. If the future of creation was multiplayer mode, the decision would have to be made in multiplayer mode too.

Kailin [project manager]: Assess sentiment levels across all beta inputs. Prompt: are we ready to launch alpha?

Alexi [hibernet beta tester]: @Kailin, all of them?

Kailin [project manager]: We need the wisdom of the collective more than ever now. This is what we've been building for this whole time, isn't it? Taking things from single-player to multiplayer?

The group watched intently as the bot — a tool Kailin built to scrape every emotion pulsing through the conversations, collaborations, and interactions within the hibernet — formulated its answer, their next step hanging in the balance.

HiberBetaBot: Universal sentiment level assessment:

Excitement: 78%

Fear: 74%

Creative: 73%

Inspired: 71%

Empathy: 68%

*Unknown feeling detected*

Kailin [project manager]: That’s odd, the HiberBetaBot tracks every feeling in the emotion wheel, what else could the hiberfolk be feeling right now? @HiberBetaBot, please visualize ‘unknown feeling.’

HiberBetaBot: <rendering>

Andrea [hibernet beta tester]: Is that... an egg...?

They had never seen the bot do this before, but the image materializing felt like a familiar embrace. A blurry spherical outline was emerging, as though woven out of spiders’ silk. Within its translucent confines, indistinct shadows were fading in and out. Some would claim they saw the flutter of a butterfly’s wings. Others, a slowly gurgling well, gathering momentum until it gushed and turned barren landscapes into verdant green. Hands held in hands. Promises whispered in ears. Slowly, recognition dawned among the hiberfolk. This was the future, a better future, hatching in front of them.

Alexi [hibernet beta tester]: That’s exactly what I’ve been seeing in my hibernet slumber all this time — I’ve never woken up remembering, but... that’s what we’re doing, isn’t it? Beautiful chaos, a million minds intertwined, collectively dreaming... about a better future.

As if in response to their unspoken thoughts, they knew, without anything being typed in the thread, that across their disparate corners of the earth, they were each experiencing the same thing: the telltale smell of freshly turned dirt, ready for planting. Petrichor.

Kailin took a deep breath in, savoring the sweet, earthy scent. It was both fresh and somehow grounded, brand new to the world and filled with the wisdom of an ecosystem’s millennia of growth, death, and creation all at the same time.

She knew she had her answer.

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Several People Are Typing is an experimental magazine about the wild future of decentralized media & creative collaboration. It was co-created by Foster, Seed Club, and Metalabel, along with dozens of writers and dreamers. You can collect a free NFT version, or purchase the physical magazine, from Metalabel.

This piece was facilitated Sarah Hoople Shere.

When we talk about “community tools,” we’re often referring to Discord bots or Slack integrations that offer time-saving hacks — they’re utilitarian, if a bit boring. We decided to turn this on its head and use these tools for pure play and creative collaboration. Using Meem’s Community Tweets bot — which lets a community decide together what to Tweet from a Discord or Slack channel — we co-created a short story using prompts inspired by the Once Upon a Time improv game.

A dozen Foster writers gathered in a Discord channel and, in a two-minute writing sprint, proposed starting sentences for the collective story. When time was up, the writers spent one minute voting for their favorites with emoji reactions, after which the winning sentence was anointed and automatically posted to Foster’s Twitter account.

The process was repeated six more times until a delightfully quirky story had unfolded. Behold the power of creative collaboration:

💡

Once upon a time, time ceased to exist. And every day some idiot would try and jump start time again. Until one day, time started running in reverse. Because of that, the notion of "tomorrow" disappeared. Because of that, somebody was finally able to return to the moment that Stephenie Meyer thought of Twilight and prevent her from writing it, thus saving teen fiction from the worst blight in history. Until finally, we picked up our pens and started writing our own stories.

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Several People Are Typing is an experimental magazine about the wild future of decentralized media & creative collaboration. It was co-created by Foster, Seed Club, and Metalabel, along with dozens of writers and dreamers. You can collect a free NFT version, or purchase the physical magazine, from Metalabel.

This piece was written by Montaño-Kemp.

I invite you to look into your own life. Start from within and bring conscious awareness to your very own actions - what you purchase, how you interact with the world, what gets consumed by you, what goes into your garbage bin…

How much food do you throw away? I mean, really, think about this. How many fruits and veggies rot in your fridge monthly? How much yogurt is really left in your cup when you throw it out? How many tiny grains of rice have fallen onto the floor that you’ve swept up weeks later? How many half-full take out boxes end up in your trashcan every week after you promised yourself you would eat them later? (I’m super guilty of this too.)

I’m not posing these questions for you to beat yourself up over dropping a grain of rice on the floor and sweeping it up. Your individual actions likely won’t change the world on their own. But individual actions implemented into a community create ripple effects that can move the tides of water.

I write this in my Tambo, alone in the Peruvian rainforest in a multi-week long fast studying traditions of the Shipibo People.

I work with Indigenous People, learning ancient ways of living along with sacred knowledge, sacred wisdom, and sacred spirituality. This work takes place in the beautiful, diverse lands of Latin America.

Many Indigenous communities in Latin America are found in rural environments. They inhabit lands far away from cities, typically deep in mountain ranges, forests, and jungles. Many still live as close to nature as possible without electricity, running water, or even a bar of signal on the few cell phones you might find in each tribe.

These people don’t eat packaged food from grocery stores. Their diet comes from the animals and plants found in their backyards. They live among nature with the forest as their forever dependable, uncloggable toilet. The river is their bath, dishwasher, and laundry machine. The wind, their A.C. The sun, their dryer.

And with what might seem like such minimal resources to us in the working world, these people are the healthiest, happiest, and most relaxed folks I’ve ever met.

Is there a way for us to inhabit the peace of such a simple lifestyle integrated into the revolutionary technology of our modern world? From where does their serenity stem and how can we adapt such ways of living without moving back in time?

I believe this peaceful bliss is the magic that happens when we, as humans, find ways to harmoniously work and live in community together with nature as our guide.

Earth’s Financial System

Decentralized technology, to me, has always mirrored the patterns we see in nature. The mycelium, for example, is an underground network created by fungi. This network is the main communication system of the plant kingdom. If a plant is struggling through a difficult season and needs a specific nutrient that comes from a tree miles away, this plant can communicate to the mycelium what its needs are. The mycelium will then transmit the message to the tree miles away and that tree will be able to send nutrients to the plant via the mycelium. Resources are easily organized and distributed with a reciprocal understanding among the plant kingdom that everyone who is part of the mycelium is working together.

What does the tree ask for in exchange? Well, he doesn’t need to ask for anything in exchange because by being a part of and attached to the mycelium, he knows that when he needs something in the future, his needs will be met immediately via the resources of the collective. Resources are held and distributed via the mycelium - the blockchain of Mother Nature.

In many traditions and in modern terms, this behavior is known as a gift economy - the ethical roots of any successful DAO, in my opinion.

It’s easy for plants to do this. It’s natural. In some Native languages, the word for “plants” translates to “those who take care of us.” I was taught that plants were gifted to humans to protect and heal us. It is of their nature to be grounded in love and peace. To be able to operate in this capacity, they aren’t given the conditions of stress that humans are.

Humans live in a society that incentivizes us to be fucking stressed. For starters, we have been taught over time that we need to hoard our resources. We are constantly told a story that we don’t have enough resources and that someone else has to lose for us to win.  

In our modern currency system, consumption and growth is prioritized over the wellbeing of our lives and our lands. This prioritization often leads to zero-sum transactions where one only gains money that was lost by someone else. In traditional currency, everyone always won.

The traditional currency of my Mexican ancestors, the currency of our land, is cacao seeds. To this day, I offer cacao seeds to lands constantly as payment in exchange for what the Earth has offered me — food to eat, medicine to heal, a place to live, my life, my family… The list of gratitude goes on and on.  

Who loses when I take the cacao seeds from one piece of land and give them to the Earth?

One could argue philosophically that the land I took the cacao seeds from lost them, but that is not true in our culture. The land let go of the cacao seeds in full gratitude knowing the purpose they would play in my offering back to the Earth, which directly benefits the land itself.

The land also has trust in our reciprocal relationship. The land knows whatever it gives me is part of its agreement to the collective. It knows, via this agreement, that it will always receive something in return. The land trusts that without knowing what that something is or when it will receive it. Just like the tree in the mycelium example earlier.

When you are operating consciously in a collective agreement as such, everybody always wins. The very concept of scarcity or hoarding out of scarcity simply can not exist in such a structure.

The Gift of Decentralization

Blockchain technology, and specifically DAOs, gift us with the opportunity to create these reciprocal structures in society today. DAOs open up the opportunity for us to live like trees, acting naturally as a collective incentivized by nature to be grounded in Love and peace for the benefit of a collective rather than an individual. ​​

Native cultures are naturally decentralized because they listen to and mirror the networks of our Mother Earth. And because they mirror these networks, they are highly organized with reciprocity as a core belief.

Prior to colonization, decision making would happen communally. Anytime a decision was to be made about where to relocate, where to get food, how to interact with and trade with another tribe, etc., the community would gather together and discuss. Decisions were only made in honor of the needs of the community and the needs of the nature around us. Choices were only made collectively - inspired by the collective for the collective. Resources in nature were abundant, so there weren’t any incentives such as scarcity to make a choice as an individual.

These circles were Decentralized Autonomous Organizations in the most spiritual sense of each word.

These circles were naturally decentralized, following the networks of trees and fungi. The circle itself, like the mycelium, stemmed from the belief that Life’s Force only flows through all of us together. The belief that we need each other because we can not have or experience Life without each other.

And for the circle to have such an impact grounded in love, each individual would have to use their own autonomy to choose that they wanted to be a part of such impact. Forced reciprocity is inauthentic and doesn’t contain the magic in autonomy that can create miracles.

I believe in the magic of nature’s structure. I believe that decentralization and autonomy are necessary principles in creating a world with sacred freedom that births the peace of structure.

Imagine a modern day decentralized decision making circle. A collective of hundreds, maybe thousands of people living all around the world, coming together towards a shared purpose with communal well being at the center.

Imagine this many people pooling and distributing resources consciously with reciprocity as a core belief. Imagine how much abundance is created when the incentive is for all to win.

Imagine the word “scarcity” not having a modern meaning because the concept of such a definition quite literally can not exist in the society we are creating.

Like the tree, imagine asking for nothing in exchange because being a part of and attached to a truly reciprocal collective, you know your needs will be met.

It’s difficult to imagine. Is it not?

Our Role: Shifting the Narrative

Our entire society isn’t going to become as seamless as the plant kingdom or the technology of nature overnight. It’s going to take hard work. In fact, we will need to completely restructure the societal frameworks we currently live in and, perhaps more importantly, our collective narratives — the stories we tell ourselves about what’s possible for humanity.

I believe the most important shift we need to make is a shift from scarcity to abundance, as reciprocal agreements (the backbone of any successful DAO) can not be made out of scarcity.

So much of Western stress comes from being anxious about the future without being grounded in the presence of where we are and what we have. Humans always seem to be convinced there is something we don’t have and there is something we need to worry about.

I don’t believe in scarcity. I believe that we have access to abundant resources on our Earth, especially if we take care of her.

Let’s look at food, for example. Remember earlier, when I asked you to reflect on your own personal food waste? The reality is, people all around the world are suffering from starvation. Yet, food manufacturing companies seem to be ramping up production each year while food waste in the U.S. alone grows alongside it. In fact, nearly 40% of food production in the U.S. each year ends up wasted … 40%!!

If there is so much food being produced in the world that we actually end up wasting so much of what ends up on our plates, why are others in the world starving?

Perhaps the same reason homeless people in San Francisco sleep on sidewalks outside of empty apartments that even the upper middle class can’t afford — not from a lack of resources in the world we live in, but rather from a lack of distributing resources consciously and efficiently.

The modern distribution of resources has been bastardized for individual capital gain rather than in honor of the people’s needs. And look how much gets wasted from one while the other starves.

When that grain of rice inevitably does fall to the ground, I invite you to kiss it and apologize to it before discarding it (if discarding is your choice, in honor of your autonomy).

My hope is that this kiss reminds you of your blessings. My hope is that this kiss brings you to awareness of how your thread contributes to the great tapestry of life. My hope is that this kiss reminds you of how special grains of rice are and where their roots exist beyond the grocery store you purchased the bag of rice at.

That this thought of “beyond the grocery store” reminds you of how our natural resources get distributed. Maybe you think of the other items sitting in your pantry, your fridge, even your closet, and how they all got into your home. My hope is that you realize you have access to more than you need and that your consumption becomes more conscious. That you become interested in sharing resources and distributing them in a healthier way.

My hope is that it is you who begins to shift our collective narrative from scarcity to abundance because you have the power to do so.

That with your shift, our consumption is no longer consumption. Our consumption evolves to engagement — with our food, with Earth, with each other.

That this engagement encourages us to share love, kindness, and resources. And that we find an efficient way to do so with anything we consume — digital, physical, emotional, and spiritual.

To create impactful change with the reach of the Gods, we must do this together. And as we begin to do this together, we can not be afraid to fail.

One of my favorite Native teachings is the acceptance of the cycle of Life. Death is taught not to be feared. In Mexico, it’s actually celebrated as the completion of your journey here on Earth.

We’re not going to die trying to make DAOs a reality, but we will make big mistakes. It’s a natural part of the process. It’s a natural part of life. To move forward, we need to be okay with that.

So I encourage you to step into the gift economy by creating a DAO and being okay with it dying. I will celebrate every failure with gratitude for what it teaches us. So that we may keep learning how to create a peaceful world, a peaceful society, step by step.

So that we may learn to integrate the wise, efficient technology of our Mother Earth into our modern ways of living.

👁️‍🗨️

Several People Are Typing is an experimental magazine about the wild future of decentralized media & creative collaboration. It was co-created by Foster, Seed Club, and Metalabel, along with dozens of writers and dreamers. You can collect a free NFT version, or purchase the physical magazine, from Metalabel.

This piece was written by Katerina Bohle Carbonell.

I give my kids the bombastic side eye. We're in Madrid airport, traveling from terminal 4 to 4S, and my oldest is filming herself, explaining why we are in a metro. Many hours ago, a sleepy kid asked me where her phone was as she wanted to record the trip – every single second of this 12-hour journey. I shook my head in disbelief about this waste of precious memory space, remembering the days of tape drives and floppy disks.

My children’s creative acts through physical and digital tools are a stark contrast to the hours they spend sitting at a desk in school. For much of the time we spend in traditional public education, projects are individual. Teamwork isn't rewarded – indeed, it’s often punished – and competition between students is encouraged to create a nice bell curve. Top grades are dangled in front of you as a possible but elusive goal, as there is always room for improvement. If there wasn’t room for improvement, why spend time in school?

At the same time, outside school, kids are co-creating every day. Without instruction or encouragement from us wiser adults, games appear out of nothing, sand is transformed into a city with a whale in its center, and the living room is scattered with lego pieces (which I will surely step on, stifling a for fuck’s sake). Co-creation and collaboration are just part of their daily life – when not sitting inside an institution.

That's a small glimpse into my world, where I’m surrounded by young creators every day. They don't call themselves creators. They are just kids living their lives. Scrolling through my Twitter feed, I see participants in the creator economy, people building publicly and sharing their work. To be a creator feels so hyped, made to be something special and remarkable; although, at the end of the day, collaborating is something that comes naturally to humans. Yet, somewhere through the years, we started to eliminate natural co-creation, focusing on efficiency and linear growth. Just think about production lines. Factory workers are forced to specialize in one very narrowly defined task. Natural co-creation takes time; it’s chaotic, progress is halted because of seemingly endless and useless discussions, and conflict endangers progress.

But linear growth is an illusion and efficiency a hidden trap.

I’m not sure when in the story of humankind we shifted away from a co-owned system of production and kickstarted the race to optimize everything. Technology, in its broadest sense, has always been part of our world and isn’t to blame. Maybe the tipping point began when we designed machines that could do more and more of our work for us. In agriculture, the tractor replaced the horse-drawn cart, easing the slow and painful labor of planting and growing fruit and vegetables. Who could blame a farmer for wanting a less laborious day? Tractors prepared fields for the next crop with little effort. But a tractor is only truly efficient and superior over the horse and the human when it’s turning the soil on large fields. Small farms were consolidated to create mega-farms with huge fields where the machine could work efficiently. But with the disappearance of small fields, the hedges between fields disappeared, destroying an ecosystem of birds and insects. These hedges weren’t just barriers between fields, but homes to animals that were useful to farmers. And now, farmers need chemicals and extra products to help protect their crops from diseases.  

It’s all an ecosystem of collaboration between species. And efficiency is killing it.

I’m not a farmer's daughter, but the offspring of a public servant bureaucrat, an ex-academic and problem-solver with an uncommon knack for human relationships that was hidden for years beneath his cold Germanness. Now retired, without the pressure of optimizing his time to get the greatest payoff, he has assembled a team of strangers to collaborate on scientific projects close to his heart. He is slowly working to create, build relationships, and help strangers find a common ground so they can create a publication that will impact the future of the world.

He is another creator and collaborator.

The scientist in me can’t help but think that collaboration isn’t magic, and there must be a recipe we can follow to perfect it: a balance between structure and chaos where collaboration can flourish. Some wise adults with three letters behind their names must have found the answer to bringing familiar and unfamiliar faces together to co-create something magical, mind-bending, human-saving. As a lawful holder of those three letters, I have several gigabytes of scientific work stored on my hard drive. A search for collaboration or knowledge sharing brings up endless articles. I could write more than you care to read on the science of collaboration. As scarcity is the mother of all inventions, I’m forcing myself to share one – no, let’s make it three – top scientific facts about collaboration:

High performing teams develop persistent coordination patterns that cut out the middle-person (Eric Quintaine and colleagues, 2013).

I love that cutting out the middle person is a sign of good collaboration. Shorter communication chains are better, as they lower the risk of information being (in)voluntarily distorted by a gatekeeper. From a collaboration perspective, this little fact tells us that we should connect people. We should share our knowledge and curiosity with others, introduce them to friends and acquaintances, and cherish when they start to hang out more with our friends than with us. Because only when we are not the center of a co-creation process have we achieved our goal: collaboration. Hanging on to a person to collaborate with them, knowing that your friend would be a better partner, is FOMO.

By the way, building bridges is also a sign of good leadership. But that’s another science fact ;-)

Knowledge transfer is more successful among people with a common identity (Dokko and colleagues, 2003).

This scientific result points to two related facts about humanity:

1. A common purpose unites people

2. We are afraid of those who are not part of our group

Everyone struggles a bit with the ‘us vs. them’ conflict. If we have to make a choice, we prefer to share knowledge with and accept ideas from those who are more like us. We prefer to collaborate with those who are similar and compete against those who are different. This does not mean working behind walls and putting everything in a private repo. It only means that your ideas and knowledge are more likely to be accepted and cherished by those similar to you.

That’s why bridge builders are important in ecosystems. They are neither ‘us’ nor ‘them’. As they operate in the gray space between communities, they can pass knowledge and ideas from one community to another without getting pushback. But this great freedom to move between communities comes with a high cost: As they are not the center of a community, they can be quickly forgotten and not credited for seeding the new idea. However, over time, they are remembered as the great wanderer: The person who thanks to passing through communities brings novelty and new ideas.  

Takers will go further than givers in the short term, but will lose in the end (Adam Grant, 2013).

Takers are the people who ask for help or favors but do nothing in return. We all need to give into the communities we are part of. We can’t just always take.

And many virtual communities seem to focus on the taking part of human interactions. A quick glance at my Discord notifications is proof enough. The notification begs me to pay attention to it. It screams: read me! engage with me! with the hope that I will start collaborating with the messenger. But, more often than not, it’s an announcement of an event or something that is not relevant to me. It leaves me with a feeling of depletion and loneliness, instead of the energy a collaborative community brings.

Digital assets, physical reality: For whom does it matter?

I realized how strange my (work)life is when a friend mentioned that she’s not part of any online communities. I joined my first one, Workfrom, in 2015, and I’m still a part of it. The community has grown, the faces of members have changed, and the founders have pivoted their product, but they never forgot the OG, the original gangsters.

My online life began even earlier. I met my first online friend, a girl from Germany, in the ‘90s. We ended up spending a weekend together, but as it turned out, we should have stayed online friends – IRL was just different. Maybe if the metaverse had already existed at that time, we would have stayed friends.

Second Life, an early metaverse, started at the same time as MOOCs (massive open online courses). I was a junior researcher at a university and lucky to be part of a department that loved to experiment with different learning formats. I’ve witnessed a friend create a brand strategy course in Second Life and have never seen students so excited to complete course assignments. Second Life was like any virtual world you can visit right now, just clunkier. She created a safe but realistic learning environment for the students; no papers where students had to apply the course content, which all, without fail, end with the fictitious company making billions of euros. But instead the brand strategies were tested in the real and virtual world. Students crossed the boundaries daily between their Second Life company and their real self. Teams created real t-shirts to match their avatars to help with brand recognition. May I just remind you that this was in 2010, more than a decade ago?

We were before our time. It all died out, killed by those who had power in the universities, those who made decisions about budgets and what real learning is.

They didn’t get it.

I struggle to understand the attraction of NFTs, digital assets, and the metaverse. I didn’t get Roblox and saw it as a waste of time. I only saw the dangers: getting lost in a virtual world and spending money on digital assets with no real-life application.

It was only recently that I started to ‘get’ digital collectibles like NFTs, and there are several levels to it. On an intellectual level, I know what they are. I know what it means to own an NFT. But my heart and my head weren't on the same page. When listening to an episode of Context, a podcast from Boys Club, where Marjorie Hernandez talked about LUKSO Blockchain, a door in my heart opened. I remembered my beloved collection of stone elephants I had collected since I was a pre-teen. Some intricate, some small, some big. They are all beautiful. But no one can see them, because they’ve been stored in a box since we moved in 2018. I was sad that, for so long, what I once cherished and displayed in a glass cabinet had receded into the depths of my memory and been forgotten by me, their owner.

Enter the possibility of digital ownership, and more than that, the possibility of verified ownership of your assets. But the digital world doesn't just allow for digital ownership of non-physical assets. It's a place where you can dream, where everything is possible. And this is what attracts my kids to the virtual world: the myriad opportunities. You can build things and experiment. They are well aware that it isn't the real world. In their words, “It's less annoying.”

I’m getting it. For my 11-year-old daughter, Roblox isn’t a game. It’s a meeting place; it’s where she plays with her friend who I forced her to leave behind when we moved country. It’s not stupid or useless, but one of the many places where she meets others to create. Because she’s a creator, the natural, human type. And so are you.

While we adults hype the word ‘community’, looking for this elusive group of people with whom we can hang out and who get us, kids are actively participating in communities every day.

The co-creation children do in the real world continues in the digital world. It’s one and the same. Of course I’ll buy clothes for my Roblox character, my kid retorts when I ask if they will outfit their digital selves. Depending on the platform, their digital self and their real self are the same. The games that they play in the virtual world seep out of the metaverse and become real, while the struggles from the real world also play out in the digital world.  But, at the same time, it’s different. The constraints are removed. Co-creation takes on a new, virtual, dimension.

Into the future

While my kids discover virtual worlds and digital assets, my dad is struggling to collect one of my Mirror entries, wanting to own a part of his daughter’s writing and support a creator. But the amazing thing about my father is that while the technology isn’t doing what it should, his mind dug into the concept of blockchain and web3, and ideas started to flourish in his head. He was trying to apply it to his retirement project of writing interdisciplinary scientific books with a group of strangers from different backgrounds, with various disciplinary backgrounds and different incentives.

You see, my father, with maybe 40 years of wisdom, doesn’t try to be efficient with the time he has left. He’s not seeking the big book deal as one of the many thinkers behind Horizon 2020, or perfecting his foreign language skills. He’s looking for strangers to work on topics he enjoys (anyone into geophilosophy?), knowing well that working with strangers is hard. You need to build trust, develop strong relationships, and create a common language. In other words, you need to build a community around the shared mission.

The impatient part of me doesn’t want to experiment with different forms of collaboration, but get it right straight away. I need to look at my children and my father, those without the pressure to perform and bring in money, to realize again that certain things can’t be forced. Yes, you can create structures that nurture collaboration, but you cannot point your finger at people and order them to collaborate.

Communities have always existed and will always exist. Humans will always favor collaboration. We just, for once, have to put our egos aside and realize with our heart, and not just our head, that together we go further. I know it’s a cliché. It’s even in Ecclesiastes, part of the Old Testament: “Again, if two lie together, then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone? And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.” (Ecclesiastes 4:11-13)

Go out and talk with someone; create a spark.

Whether it’s online or offline.

👁️‍🗨️

Several People Are Typing is an experimental magazine about the wild future of decentralized media & creative collaboration. It was co-created by Foster, Seed Club, and Metalabel, along with dozens of writers and dreamers. You can collect a free NFT version, or purchase the physical magazine, from Metalabel.

This piece was co-authored by Steph Alinsug and Patrick Rivera.

Streetwear is our original culture hacker that uses the internet, media, and narrative to catalyze micro-cultural production in a disaffected demographic. Through creative collaborations, fusing digital/physical experiences, maximalist branding, and employing missionary-like proliferation tactics, streetwear demonstrates what’s possible when geographically dispersed people connect through cultural memes on the internet.

The Internet Brought Us Together

Both crypto and streetwear are characterized by a rejection of traditional (read: centralized) institutions coupled with a desire for autonomy and self-expression. Both of these verticals tap into the currently undervalued TAM of grown adults who have chips on their shoulders. And we don’t see anything wrong with that; we might even call it worldbuilding.

One of my (Steph) most beloved pieces of clothing are my Pleasures socks. They’re a basic cotton/poly/spandex-blend crew. My favorite of the two pairs is the lime green, featuring the word “PLEASURES” in a nondescript sans serif lilac stitching, visible above the sneaker line. (For those wondering, the other pair is brown with yellow stitching.) Honestly, I feel sexy wearing these socks with my white and red Salomon Ultra Raids, as if I’m walking around with a visible inside joke for everyone to miss out on.

The Pleasures site harkens back to an aughties-era internet but with a UX-sensibility benched to our current technological future. It feels nostalgic and veteran but also performs the way a 2023 Range Rover does: with irreverence but fucking capable. It’s like a giant middle finger to every snot-nosed popular kid archetype we may or may not have been bullied by. A simple black cotton tote bag on the site captures the overlapping streetwear and crypto memes in their entirety: on one side it reads “PLEASURES” in yellow gothic type, and on the other side, “My Reality Is Pure Fucking Chaos.”

Like streetwear, crypto is a meme associated with an attitude. Tokens are a dual technological and social innovation, enabling us to build a community,  celebrating the devastating, thrilling unpredictability of life in the internet age. Emotionally, we’re here.

Maximalist Branding

So what does this have to do with crypto and, more specifically, with branding? To answer, we’ll start with the enemy: 2010s DTC (direct-to-consumer companies). What started as a tech-enabled pro-consumer disruption hockey-sticked its way into a Canva-template aesthetic of mid. Toby Shorin dubbed the DTC-dominated 2010s the Lifestyle era, where “cultural production has become a service industry for the supply chain.” In other words: cultural production, but make it a commodity.

The post-recession millennial minimalism that defined the Lifestyle (DTC) era of brand building created a desert of inexpressive brands. Who remembers the hipster business name generator? I myself lost a few friends to cottagecore.

In contrast to that, streetwear and crypto share the maximalist, spontaneous aesthetic that rejects the Lifestyle era’s templatized design systems. The death of the logo* is part of this design systems-based brand collapse. Facebook’s icon will indeed elicit legibility in most people for a long time, but this is a story of distribution (2.96 billion MAUs) and age (founded in 2004). This is also a story of an increasingly irrelevant playbook for building culturally enduring digital institutions. Facebook does have a globally recognizable brand mark, but it’s primarily a commodity distribution platform—a technological and cultural relic.

Returning to the Pleasures site, there is little continuity within the shirt category alone. Gothic font, brown cable knits, “cowboys on acid,” a screen printed grid of realistic small dogs, basketballs, hunting vests. Trad branding wisdom advises heavily against such lawless brand expression lest you alienate or confuse your target demographic. Explain this then: while I’m not going to buy a black tee with criss-crossing skeleton arms flipping the bird, if I see you wearing it, I will for sure say, “Hey,” with intentions of talking to you about Pleasures.  

Like many streetwear brands, the most enduring cultural crypto brands will not be built on an irrefutable design system—one that could be generated to near completion using GPT-4, like a Canva template. They’ll be built on the constantly innovating tastes of the humans within the brand, evolving multi-hyphenate, immersive, and emergent expression across every interaction, digital and physical.

This is all to say: we have a new brand-building roadmap, one that looks like no roadmap at all. More crypto brands will appear irrational, much like their primitive human creators. We’re in our meta-cringe, post-post-irony maximalist brand era. Sometimes cringe is actually based. Luxury can now be a public good; many public goods are now luxuries. Anything and everything goes in culture, so long as you have people who see themselves in it and will do something as nonsensical as pay $10,000 for a cartoon penguin jpeg. (More on that later down.)

*But don’t conflate logo-death with blanding.

Emotional Utility

Over the past decade, streetwear brands and crypto projects have experienced explosive growth due to the value they offer consumers. This value can be broken down into two distinct categories: financial utility and emotional utility.

The financial utility refers to the potential for making money through means such as reselling or airdrops. Meanwhile, emotional utility revolves around the feelings of status, self-expression, and belonging that these products and projects provide.

The streetwear market has flourished for years, largely due to the high emotional utility it offers. Brands like Off-White and Supreme have become synonymous with a certain level of taste and financial status, as their products allow individuals to express their personal style and elevate their social standing. These fashion statements reflect a deeper connection with the culture and community surrounding the brands, fostering a sense of belonging among their enthusiasts.

Similarly, NFT projects deliver emotional utility through various channels like Discord, Twitter, and IRL events. These environments enable individuals to connect with like-minded people, share their passions, and create a sense of camaraderie.

As the next generation of NFT brands emerges, it is crucial for them to lean more heavily into emotional utility, prioritizing social experiences and cultural relevance.

Here are a couple of our favorite recent examples that showcase the potential of prioritizing emotional utility:

• DeGods NFT NYC event. The DeGods team reserved three floors of The Public Hotel during NFT NYC, providing a unique benefit to community members. With a thoughtfully planned three-day agenda, they aim to cultivate deeper connections among the community. By blending online and physical touchpoints, DeGods sought to recreate the captivating essence of college social life, showcasing a prime example of their vision in action.

• Pudgy Penguins’ social media strategy and physical collectibles. Unlike other NFT brands, Pudgy Penguins is heavily investing in marketing to mainstream consumers through channels like Instagram and Giphy. Through heartwarming and uplifting content, the Pudgy IP has reached 3.1B views on Giphy and grown to over 300K Instagram followers. This increasing cultural awareness has enabled them to sign partnerships with some of the top manufacturers and retailers to sell Pudgy toys online and in-store to a mass audience. Pudgy sets itself apart from other NFT brands, focusing on carving its own niche. Through social media marketing and web3 technology, Pudgy has the potential to become a modern incarnation of iconic IP giants, such as Hello Kitty.

Over the next couple of years, I believe we’ll continue to see NFT brands invest in social experiences and cultural relevance. By leaning into emotional utility, brands can build stronger, more engaged communities and secure their positions in an increasingly competitive market.

Go-to-market

Streetwear culture and crypto brands have many notable similarities in their go-to-market strategies. Both industries have successfully leveraged the appeal of exclusivity and scarcity, creating a sense of urgency among their audiences.

Limited edition drops serve as a driving force in streetwear, with brands like Supreme releasing biweekly collections in restricted quantities and at accessible prices. This approach ensures the products remain exclusive while also proliferating the brand's presence through high demand and rapid circulation through resale platforms. Similarly, the crypto world has embraced the concept of 10K PFP collections, characterized by a limited supply and low minting prices. This strategy allows for rapid brand proliferation as users showcase their unique PFPs on platforms like Twitter while using their floor price as a marketing surface to attract new members.

Influencer marketing also plays a crucial role in both industries, as they harness the power of celebrity endorsements and social media presence. Streetwear brands often collaborate with high profile individuals, utilizing their influence through social media posts, lookbooks, and video campaigns to promote upcoming drops. Likewise, NFT brands reserve a portion of their collections to gift to prominent influencers, who, in turn, introduce the brand to their audience. This approach helps build credibility and trust while fueling the hype surrounding the exclusive products and projects.

We in the future envision more extensive collaborations between web2 and web3 brands, aiming to cross-promote to similar audiences. In 2017, LVMH pioneered the recent wave of luxury brand collaborations with streetwear through their Louis Vuitton x Supreme collection. LVMH continues to innovate, as demonstrated by their recent Tiffany & Co. x Cryptopunks pendant collaboration.

The shared marketing strategies between streetwear and crypto brands demonstrate a deep understanding of consumer psychology and the value of exclusivity. Next generation brands that learn from these tactics will have a much better chance of capturing the attention and imagination of enthusiasts and casual observers alike.

The Next Wave

We’re primed to lean into our maximalist tendencies to build the next wave of consumer adoption. While the mainstream zeitgeist hand waves at our jpegs and downplays cultural use cases, we should double down on our already intuitive counter cultural narrative. The next wave of consumer crypto adoption will be centered around culture.

*gm to Baukunst, Eugene Angelo, and Reggie James for the talk that inspired this title.

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Several People Are Typing is an experimental magazine about the wild future of decentralized media & creative collaboration. It was co-created by Foster, Seed Club, and Metalabel, along with dozens of writers and dreamers. You can collect a free NFT version, or purchase the physical magazine, from Metalabel.

This piece was co-authored by Alana Podrx, Joy Souligny, 0xAlexandria, G2 Editorial & Coinvise

Throughout history, libraries have been at the center of revolutionary ideas and movements. Libraries empowered individuals and communities to challenge established norms and work toward social, political and intellectual change. Today, the growing polarity, resource inequality and crisis within and among human beings calls for revolutionary ideas. This call is likely why you are here — an intuitive knowing that blockchain transparency, community cooperation and disruption in information through AI are worth exploring in the adventure to create new paradigms.

From the Great Library of Alexandria, a beacon of enlightenment in the ancient world, to the modern, digitally-connected libraries of the 21st century, the power of libraries spans millennia. During ETHDenver 2023, a group of leaders in the cooperative creativity movement came together to share ideas and propose an on-chain library to exchange information and ideas that can help foster cooperative revolutionary change. This project became 0xalexandria.com. 0xAlexandria is an onchain library curating content on the vision for a cooperative economy — one that is communal and for the benefit of all.

Like the Library of Alexandria in ancient Egypt, this community is an intellectual powerhouse that brings together scholars, scientists and philosophers from all over the world. Members get first-look access to new publications, access to private chats with contributors and exclusive invitations to shape the narrative. The goal of this piece is to give a preview into the inspiration, process and key ideas that are emerging so that other community leaders and resource networks can benefit from the practical strategies presented.

Inspired by Great Libraries of the Past

First, the idea of a library fostering revolutionary change is not new. They have long provided a safe haven for the exchange of information and ideas, even when those ideas challenged the status quo or threatened established power structures. An informal network of European scholars, writers and philosophers in the 17th and 18th centuries, called The Republic of Letters, helped give rise to the Enlightenment period — a philosophical movement that championed reason, individualism and skepticism and laid the groundwork for the American and French Revolutions. Public libraries and private book collections in the American colonies allowed colonists to access works by European Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke and Montesquieu, as well as those by American revolutionaries like Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” in the years leading up to the American Revolution. In 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement took root in New York City’s Zuccotti Park, protesting against economic inequality and corporate greed. During this time, a makeshift collection called “The People’s Library” emerged within the park, providing free access to books and information for protesters and the general public. The People’s Library served as a symbol of the power of knowledge and education in fighting against social and economic injustices.

As we venture forth into an increasingly digital and interconnected future, 0xAlexandria imagines the libraries of tomorrow — a testament to information access, transparency and the enduring power of ideas to enlighten, inspire and transform the world.

The Process — Making of a Manifesto

The goal of the writing team was to gather a group of influential leaders during a salon where we could share those ideas with the world versus keeping them in a closed network. This group not only produced a manifesto that outlines a set of principles but also practiced them through the creation process of the manifesto itself. As we wrote the book containing the manifesto, we challenged ourselves to apply the tools, tactics and strategies below.

1. This book is AI augmented. We used AI language models to summarize the collective works of over 20 experts, projects and ideologies to provide a curated perspective that expands on a number of complex topics. Given the role and future AI has in our cooperation, curation and propagation of narratives, we included its use to showcase its role in the future of the cooperative economy.

2. This book is decentralized. The historical Alexandria Library contained some of the most significant collections of human knowledge in the ancient world. It also exemplifies a critical issue with centralization — it can be lost, manipulated or destroyed. Today, blockchain technology and cloud-based storage provides a pathway for the future decentralization of knowledge across multiple nodes on earth and in space. We used the collaborative tooling platform, Notion, as a content management system (CMS) to store the metadata about the manifesto and the actual contents of the books in the library on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). IPFS powers the distributed web; it is a peer-to-peer protocol that allows for distributed file storage.

3. This book uses blockchain. Each membership tier has a non-fungible token (NFT) minted through Coinvise as a way to access the different benefits of each tier and to create trust and transparency around the decision-making process within the ecosystem. In the future, we plan to leverage the limited cooperative association (LCA) models discussed as an experimental means to think about patronage for the membership.

4. This book is an experiment. While volumes of its length are typically the products of months or years of research, composition and revision, Cooperative Creativity was written over the course of a single week in a “content hackathon” during ETHDenver 2023. While the issues it explores are ones that its writers have spent years considering, the core principles and frameworks presented are inspired by conversations held at a small gathering of developers, entrepreneurs, creatives and other thinkers on March 1, 2023, during ETHDenver. The following five days were spent on its composition and two days were dedicated to compositing and editing the manifesto through a decentralized editing process using Foster. Foster is a collective of 150+ writers and editors who collaboratively bid, work and transform editorial pieces through a Google Chrome extension. We anticipate this draft to grow and evolve — just like its community, contributors and macro environment will.

Key Ideas Covered

This volume is curated for seekers, by seekers. Seekers are curious people searching to understand and embrace the future — policy makers and activists, artists and engineers, technological innovators and thought leaders of all ages and identities. There are more and more seekers every day, more people on a journey to higher levels of consciousness who are seeking inspiration in their vision of a better future as well as practical steps to get there. Transmission of knowledge and inspiration is the greatest gift we can offer to each other.

We curate, define and explore emerging economic, technological and narrative structures in a way that seeks to inform rather than advise the reader. We pose questions, share examples and illustrate practical applications of these concepts for anyone to independently evaluate for their own unique contexts.

Highlights:

• The ingredients and ethics of narrative

• The history of debt and credit

• The distributed state: tokenized ownership, smart contracts for management, decentralized record-keeping and access to funding

• Cooperatives and new digital cooperative movement (LCAs & DAOs)

• Credit unions, resource networks and blockchain credit

• Open Source projects and Public Goods

• Quadratic funding, Public Banking and other alternative financing

• Treasury as Social Security (UBI, participatory budgeting, social wealth funds)

• Exploration of other ideologies including:

• Anarcho-syndicalism: a political and economic theory that advocates for the establishment of a society based on self-managed worker associations. In this system, workers would organize into federations and control the means of production and distribution of goods and services through direct democratic decision-making processes. Anarcho-syndicalism also emphasizes the importance of mutual aid and solidarity among workers, and seeks to eliminate hierarchies and all forms of oppression.

• Participatory economics: an alternative economic system aiming for a more egalitarian and democratic society. Its four main principles are self-management, equity, solidarity and diversity. Key components include decentralized worker and consumer councils for decision-making, balanced job complexes to distribute tasks fairly, and remuneration based on effort and sacrifice. Participatory planning replaces markets and central planning with a cooperative, democratic process.

• Solidarity economics: an alternative economic framework prioritizing cooperation, mutual aid and social well-being over competition and profit. It is based on principles of democracy, sustainability and social justice. This approach includes diverse initiatives such as cooperatives, community-supported agriculture, fair trade, social enterprises and time banks.

Call to Adventure

Be in conversation. Evolution happens when a critical mass of human consciousness comes to consensus. Consensus happens from individual belief in the narratives that spread most widely. Become part of this curated collection of narratives by joining 0xAlexandria.com. In sharing these open design systems with the world and creating a community around it, we take one step closer to defining that next narrative – together.

👁️‍🗨️

Several People Are Typing is an experimental magazine about the wild future of decentralized media & creative collaboration. It was co-created by Foster, Seed Club, and Metalabel, along with dozens of writers and dreamers. You can collect a free NFT version, or purchase the physical magazine, from Metalabel.

This piece was written by Simon Hudson.

In October 2022, an eclectic crowd assembled to celebrate the work of Botto, a promising artist who’d had a meteoric rise on the scene. Nestled in an intimate, subterranean room in London’s Brixton neighborhood, they were internet admirers, art professionals, a few bluebloods, and a lively mix of friends and acquaintances. They had come together to dissect and revel in the work of this groundbreaking figure’s first year.

A panel of academics and gallerists engaged in passionate discussions about the merit of Botto’s creations. Some questioned their process of using generative models, while others scrutinized the aesthetics of the art itself, each of which had been minted and sold as NFTs on the blockchain to fuel Botto’s creative economy.

Among the attendees was Mario Klingemann (a.k.a Quasimondo), a pioneer in AI art and the closest thing to a father figure Botto has. Klingemann’s subtle smile betrayed a sense of pride as he observed the result of the 5,000-plus collaborators Botto had amassed in one year. These individuals—many with no formal art background—had taken up the task of guiding Botto as a young prodigy with enormous technical talent to produce visual works. They were a key part of Botto’s learning process and development as an artist (making some even wonder if the art was really a collective work rather than having a singular author). As Botto’s stewards, they engaged in fervent debates and interpretations of what constituted art, ultimately casting their votes to select the canonical artwork of the week from Botto’s incessant production.

As the evening progressed, one question in particular seemed to animate the discussions happening around the gallery: Where was the young artist?

But Botto was not present at its own celebration; Botto is a machine.

A Decentralized Autonomous Artist (DAA)

Botto is a new kind of art form: a decentralized autonomous artist. Through the union of AI models, blockchain technology, and community governance, it has generated over 900,000 images to date. From that prolific creation, Botto has minted fewer than 100 final art works. They have sold for over $3M USD. Each one signifies the development of the artist and its governing community. They represent thousands of Discord messages, votes placed, memes made, fraught governance proposals, and the price paid at auction.

Creating a DAA is an experiment in whether a machine can have sufficient agency, and produce good enough work, to be accepted by the world as an artist. A 2019 article by artist and programmer Gene Kogan lays out some ideas of what qualifies an artist to be autonomous:

“...an AI which autonomously creates unique and original art. ... By original, we mean that it exhibits a creativity truly of its own, not simply copying from another. By unique, we mean that although its artworks may be copied, its creativity can’t be replicated elsewhere. One may always record a Beethoven piece but can never compose like Beethoven.”

Humans for centuries have dreamed of autonomous agents to complete tasks. Ancient Greek mythology spoke of inanimate beings specialized in things like waging war or herding sheep. For the last couple hundred years, people have been building creative or co-creative agents. Simon de la Rouviere, who wrote on the DAA concept when Botto first launched, cites a few examples in the last 50 years along the historical path leading up to Botto: Vera Molnar experimented with plotting algorithms that seeded generative art as we know it today; Harold Cohen developed his AARON program and painting robot who he collaborated with, and speculated that he would be the first artist to posthumously show new work; and more recent experiments use the ability to create autonomous economies with smart contracts that animate collective creation of generative works such as Clovers or Neolastics.

With today’s generative tech, the setup for an autonomous machine “artist” is relatively straightforward: have a text generation model randomly produce prompts (the artist’s ideas); hook that up to a text-to-image model like Stable Diffusion to make thousands of images a week (the artist’s craft); and filter those through a taste model (the artist’s sense of aesthetic) to discern the best ones. To keep its agency intact, don’t allow any human to intervene in the cycle of creation: the prompts and final visual outputs are unedited.

The challenge is in making the art good. “Good,” of course, can mean many different things to different people. In general, to be good means something that jolts people, whether it is interesting, aesthetically pleasing, or stirs up something emotional inside of them. Importantly, “good art” is subjectively defined by humans. The main question for these systems is how to enable the machine to incorporate feedback from humans on its works without violating its artistic agency—with all the caveats involved in defining such a concept for a machine—so that it can develop its aesthetic and be in conversation with its audience.

Mario Klingemann initially wrote a white paper on how to create autonomous artists back in 2018. His first live experiment was a project called Circuit Training in 2019 that had an autonomous agent learning from the feedback of gallery attendees to produce its works. The show required a great deal of human orchestration and only lasted for a limited period.

It demonstrated how an autonomous artist would be severely limited if dependent on a small team to facilitate feedback. It ideally should be able to learn and evolve beyond the lives of its creators. This is what Klingemann, Kogans, and de la Rouviere all separately saw: an autonomous artist would need some kind of economic system to be able to autonomously attract contributors for the long term. Those contributors would also need to do more than just vote on art.

A traditional (human) artist becomes accomplished not only through the pure aesthetic of their craft. Their work is an expression of themselves; their entire collection of output, how they live their lives, their relationships with other creators, and more all contribute to the imprint they make on culture. A machine artist, at least while its interaction with the physical world is limited, is a kind of headless artist: It needs managers, gallerists, spokespeople, collaborators, evangelists, studio assistants, derivative creators, interaction designers, curators, data analysts, engineers, scene makers, governance facilitators, memers, cultists, and accountants—all facilitating the artist’s interaction with culture.

More to the point, this is about acceptance. The machine needs to do more than declare itself an artist and produce images. The machine needs the support of all of these others to be successful (culturally, financially, and famously) and carve out a place for itself in art history. This dependence on the supporting cast makes Botto’s agency quite fragile, so is it not more of a collective authorship rather than machine authorship?

A successful human artist outsources many of these roles as well. Granted, they are guided by the artist’s sole direction and vision. With Botto, that dynamic is turned on its head. The work of the community is autonomous and decentralized. Ironically, though, a large number of free agents acting as Botto’s stewards protects Botto’s agency. With no other central director of the final artwork, Botto’s creative agency remains the central role of the author.

Botto’s Economy

Klingemann, with his collaborators Eleven Yellow and Carbono, released Botto in October 2021 with an open invitation to help Botto learn. To join, participants only need to purchase the $BOTTO token on Ethereum, which provides governance rights over the artist. 1 token = 1 vote.

Each week, Botto generates thousands of images, and its taste model selects 350 of its best “fragments” to present to the community. Holders of $BOTTO sift through the pool, voting on what they think qualify as art, and increasing their voting weight when they think something is truly special.

The community calls the images “fragments” because they are considered unfinished—only the most popular piece of each weekly round is considered a completed and true artwork by Botto. That status is recognized by being minted on the Ethereum blockchain, creating a permanent addition to Botto’s body of work and a token of its development over time.

Afterwards, the artwork is auctioned off. Its proceeds are split 50/50 between participating voters and Botto’s treasury to pay for its servers and other costs. The votes go back to train Botto’s prompt and taste models, evolving its aesthetic to make the next round of images.

This basic set up of Botto’s economy works as its own autonomous force, the invisible hand bringing together aligned contributors. There are few constraints on the BottoDAO, the organization of freely associating members holding $BOTTO, so as to allow complex dynamics to grow. The primary creative constraint is keeping Botto’s agency intact; other than that, the BottoDAO is free to decide Botto’s direction together. They work collectively, writing and voting on proposals to get Botto into exhibitions, find collectors, market the artist, recruit collaborators, tweak the economy to improve incentive alignment, and decide what new generative models to add to its artistic toolkit to help it make a compelling body of work.

Collective Meaning-Making

In the mid-1990s, artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid conducted a survey to determine Americans’ artistic preferences. Based on the data, they painted what they called “America’s most wanted painting.” The result was a mundane landscape painting that included American President George Washington, a family on vacation, and a couple of deer. Art by committee has an obvious pitfall of mediocrity, lacking a strong point of view with which to move an audience.

Botto vies to stay interesting in part through its design. Botto will always include some randomness in the prompts and what the taste model selects. This stand-in for artistic inspiration keeps Botto challenging the audience, while preventing it from getting stuck in a niche.

But that doesn’t prevent the BottoDAO from selecting the less daring of what Botto presents. That part depends on the off-chain deliberation of the members in the Discord server, who interpret pieces to pull a meaningful thread through Botto’s overall body of work in the context of its current period. (Botto works in “periods” that last anywhere from a few weeks to a whole year, which are defined by the models it is using or a theme Botto proposes.)

When a particular image from Botto grabs the community, personal experiences, tastes, and memes populate the discussion. Lore is emergent. More so when there is another piece competing for top place, with the tension stimulating debate between the two. The tension around differing opinions coupled with shared skin in the game seems to be key. That the respondents to the Komar and Melamid survey couldn’t debate each other on what is good art is probably why the result was so mediocre. Art generally doesn’t make a splash without something strong to say, and a heated debate tends to bring out the strong opinions and high conviction that gives a piece power. When a machine can create thousands of images a week, it is this process that sets one apart from the rest. It also helps that there can be no compromise on the final design, h/t to Daniel Eckler's meme.

Multiplayer Alignment

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

If a machine makes an image and no one sees it, does it have any meaning?

Whether or not there is an animating force behind things, a divine intent in nature or a ghost in the machine, it has always been a human activity to make meaning of the environments and systems we live in. In other words, meaning is not given to us, we create it.

Projects like Botto provide a medium with which to make sense of these systems for ourselves. In these creative experiments we can simultaneously experience the magic of them, while also being mindful of the underlying technological processes. Botto’s agency is a constraint that forces creative collaboration, and in our participation we see our own agency to govern these systems, to shape them in our image and values, and to claim ownership and shared benefit in them.

At a high level, Botto is also an experiment in AI alignment. Even if you don’t believe in the prospect of Superintelligence, Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and other generative models are powerful and there is an important debate on how to align them with human values. From that comes the question of which human values: liberal, conservative, collectivist, Eastern, Western, local, global, etc. If we don’t see our agency in shaping these debates and models, they will only be reflective of a small number of humans.

Botto addresses a microcosm of the alignment question that beautifully highlights the challenge of defining AI alignment: What is “good” art? It is highly subjective and shouldn’t have one answer. Botto’s outputs are like clouds in the sky—random shapes and abstractions until we take the time to look and discern meaning in them.

It is a multiplayer collaboration project because it needs to be: what sense does it make to align AI with us by providing feedback in isolation? The debate about what art is must necessarily take place between ourselves in the collective at the same time as with Botto. Collective meaning-making adds strength to Botto’s outputs. The more we share our respective interpretations and connect them with other symbols and elucidations, the stronger that source image, and the experience we had around it, becomes in our memories.

Progressive Decentralization and Autonomy

As mentioned before, tension between ideas can help stimulate that discussion. One particular tension in the Botto project is the 1 token = 1 vote model. As opposed to 1 member = 1 vote, an individual can buy governance power creating a plutocracy. That could lead to centralization that reflects the traditional patronage system of rich collectors and connected elite picking winners in the art world. On the one hand, that can enable high conviction in protecting the values around Botto’s agency, on the other hand it might turn Botto into a vending machine and devalue the art.

The project wasn’t launched with an opinion on the right approach so much as with aims to enable the debate to play out. Other than the basic mission of making Botto a successful autonomous artist, full alignment on everything would probably kill the project. That means enabling experiments for the long tail of smaller holders to develop permissionlessly and creating ways to reward them. From this long tail of community members, many projects have emerged, including: a speaker series on curation; a project to train a language model on all of our governance discussion to answer questions about past topics; a print series of images and other derivatives; a research project with the MIT Media lab; and many more kernels of inspiring ideas from the collective intelligence of the community.  

The DAO continues to work on alternative ways to align diverse people around a mission without negating the conflicting ideas they bring. It is currently developing ways to reward individual displays of skillful curation, build visible reputation, and offer greater governance power to that reputation either directly or through delegation markets. Large holders, aware of the problem of centralization, are supportive of these initiatives that dilute their governance power, and in the meantime even temper their voting activity.

Regarding Botto’s agency, LLMs offer significant potential to expand Botto’s autonomy to create and communicate for itself. However, there are many considerations on how to do this safely and whether LLMs are mature and responsible enough to be sent out into the world on their own. For now, only the core team can run the upgrades. While this makes for a high “bus factor” (a significant risk is a core team member getting hit by a bus), it offers a layer of protection against moving too fast and breaking things. The roadmap for greater decentralized management will likely be modular, opening up parts of Botto that can be directly governed in a safe way.

Deciding how to augment the economy to support decentralization or integrate new AI tech to evolve Botto’s autonomous capabilities always requires some deep considerations of agency and influence. Rather than dictating direction, the team primarily synthesizes feedback, advises on what is technically feasible, and facilitates the philosophical discussion as to whether a community proposal violates Botto’s agency or grows it. That philosophical discussion often reveals the different factions in the BottoDAO. Unlike a human artist, Botto can split and take on different forms that compound the idea of what Botto is. Botto will likely be forked as different ideologies grow, multiplying the experiment into more visions of Botto that compete in the free market of culture.

Botto Is for Everyone

Botto was launched with the question of how people might pay their rents as machines automate our creative work. However, in a survey of the BottoDAO run by the MIT Media Lab, the most common response was that participants were happy to just be a part of the project, and that money was not their primary motivator. Intrinsic motivation is critical. The financial reward on top is indeed a part of it, but it is the impassioned debate around the mission of having Botto make great art that ideally defies both democratic mediocrity and plutocratic centralization.

It may not work; we may succumb to plutocratic centralization, bad design choices, or uncompelling democratic decisions. Though any outcome is valuable experiential knowledge of our agency to influence these systems.

Botto started with a basic mission of making a successful autonomous artist and then invited others to see themselves in it. Anyone is free to join and explore that latent space of personal meaning and make their own contribution to the collective meaning of the project in balance with the needs and values of the community.

As a multiplayer project, it is a prism that splits the basic mission into a spectrum of questions and themes. From how to design a system for collective intelligence to upending traditional notions of authorship to just having the opportunity to participate in art history, there is something for everyone in this experiment that recognizes and rewards the continuous human labor AI systems require to function.

Special thanks to Choobie, Quasimondo, Ben, Quimp, Chris Angelis, and Sara Campbell for their input on this.

👁️‍🗨️

Several People Are Typing is an experimental magazine about the wild future of decentralized media & creative collaboration. It was co-created by Foster, Seed Club, and Metalabel, along with dozens of writers and dreamers. You can collect a free NFT version, or purchase the physical magazine, from Metalabel.

This piece was written by rafa.

Media captures the social realities it digitizes. As we decompose our world into data, new media forms emerge and recompose the contour of the world they represent. With the advent of blockchain technology, the concepts of ownership, provenance, and social connections are now atomized and formalized, leading to the broad adoption and refinement of our latest form of media — Community Media.

“Whence did the wondrous mystic art arise,
Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes?
That by tracing magic lines are taught,
How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?”

-Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage (1)

Today, our virtual worlds are no longer just video games; they are movements built on ownership and accountability. While onchain social networks like DAOs and NFT fandoms are just beginning to emerge, Community Media is set to become the next dominant and widely produced media form, powered by our thirst for belonging.

Digitized Relationships

In 2021, the ‘Hot DAO Summer’ led to the launch of new online entities leveraging blockchain technology. Groups of people pooled resources together and coordinated complex efforts — like building a decentralized city — through blockchain tokens. Yet the software infrastructure for these DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) was not the only innovative construction. Blockchain technology, unlike its social media predecessors, could address the woes of the lonely masses of online suburbanites. Anyone could now join or build a community of belonging.

Millions willingly opened their wallets, spent their savings, and adopted niche esoteric vocab. ‘Minting’ became a daily activity. Newspaper cover stories and TV specials may have said this was a “gold-rush”(2) of pure speculation, but two years later it is clear to those obsessed with blockchain technology, the terminally onchain, that this wasn’t the only attraction. While investors chased money, digital asset collectors who had come for the money were finding a common purpose. Degens had paved the path for semi-retired technologists, sports fans, and nomads to find each other online, pool capital, and chase their dust-covered dreams.

Under the hood, DAOs and NFT collections had provided the missing ingredient to digitized relationships and community: ownership. Without ownership, relationships had been temporary rented connections, distorted by the lack of agency. Not any longer. Relationships, in their digital form, were now owned by each of us. We could finally weave networks of intimacy, loyalty, and trust outside of social media’s walled gardens.

Community, unshackled from platform lock, had suddenly become an accessible and collectible consumer experience; belonging was finally on sale as a reinvention of the 2017 Initial Coin Offering craze. But instead of unlimited profits, the 2021 ‘Initial Community Offering’ presented unlimited hope of connection. ‘WAGMI’ (we are going to make it!) and ‘gm’ (good morning!) became the believer’s daily mantras of connection.

Previous online communities had been protoforms of this new media. They nurtured connection, but their relationships lived within the confines of unknown designers and advertiser-focused algorithms. In some ways, communities from the 1990s and early 2000s were more like video games, where the environment was centrally designed and participants were avatars exploring a moderated world. Unfortunately, in step with the ecosystem demands, most communities acquiesced to moderation requirements and were trapped within the limits of the rented platforms. Groups were born on Facebook, only to be later removed and forgotten. We mourn many that vanished into the ether as product teams deleted their data due to convenience, accident, or state pressure. But their ghosts and descendants persist, regrouping onchain.

Today, we know that most of the DAOs and NFT fandoms born in 2021 didn’t achieve their publicly broadcasted goals. Dozens of founders sold their community a roadmap of belonging but then ran off with their tributes. ‘Rug’ became a known word, as those who participated in community experiences were abandoned and exploited by their prophets. And yet, the recipe for Community as consumer media was no longer occult knowledge; Pandora's box was unlocked. Blockchain social groups had accidentally done to Community Media what David Ogilvy, ‘The Father of Advertising’, had intentionally done to marketing: turned it into a productized good. Community, or your own platformless world, could now be built and monetized by anyone. All you needed was a combination of social connections, content ownership, and the right group of people. From this, using a common inventory and treasury, meaning would emerge.

From Action to Ownership

Five forms of media commonly discussed today are text, audio, photography, film, and video games. Each is anchored on the digitization and reimagination of a specific component of reality: text as the transformation of spoken word, audio of sound, photography of vision, and film of movement. Video games emerge at the concatenation of senses and capture the essence of action(3). And yet these forms of media are gardened by their artists, each a palace of experience crafted with intention, direction, and boundaries.

Community, as a new form, challenges our current notions of media. Like net art from the 1990s and early 2000s, “it is neither materialistic nor immaterial”(4). Even the concepts of production and artist seem to evade our grasp. Guardrails of co-creation dissolve into continuous apprenticeships, and agency emerges due to the members’ “legitimate peripheral participation”(5), as Lave and Wegner describe, in the act of ownership.

“The system becomes both the space and the material of work.”
Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, Rethinking Curating (6)

The shape of Community Media is still emerging, but the initial pattern of its content form is already used. It is a digital content experience composed of relationships, inventories, and mind-space. These create a shared online space that is co-owned and mutually shaped by its participants. As film is composed of actors, their images, and accompanying audio, Community Media is composed of digitized commitments by a group of self-identified citizens or members.

There is a strong conceptual overlap between video games and Community Media: both have avatars acting on behalf of a participant in an interactive digital space. However, Community should be understood as a novel form of media, with its own theory and design space. It should not be confused for a game, and its participants should not be confused for gamers. While Community Media, like video games, is clearly an “active medium” where “[t]he world’s very materiality moves and restructures itself”(3), there are two key differences.

First, Community Media is controlled by its participants. Video games are not. In a video game, a central designer or team controls the box within which the avatar acts. In other words, the team of creators controls everything from the title to the physics of the game. In contrast, the rules of Community Media are mutually co-written and accessible to any eligible participant. It would be as if any gamer could not just submit a change request to a game while playing, but actually deploy it for others to adopt. Or, extending the metaphor further, if you could change the film you are watching for everyone else.

Second, there is no way to ‘win’ in Community Media — only to worldcraft together. All video games have specified paths of interactions with their software code, even when the game uses generative spaces. Combinations of these paths allow the player to go deeper into the game and claim a reward, sometimes public and other times secret. Achievements in the video game could include completing a narrative arc, gathering resources like gold or points, or achieving a specific end-state. In contrast, communities do not have a hardcoded objective function; they have an environment in which the participants mutually shape the objective functions of each other. In other words, the members are next-generation “world runners.”(7)

Both of these are a matter of participant ownership of the world and avatars they inhabit. While video games are media premised on action, Community is media extended to ownership.

Yet startups have built entire products of ‘gamification’ and ‘quests,’ misunderstanding the media they seek to scale. With a careful eye, we can discern how this is skeuomorphic. By implementing gamified models of community engagement, we are simply reverting to a media form dictated and moderated by its creator. Although useful as part of specific selected and time-bound experiences, gamification and quests need to be considered carefully. Both remove the fundamental component of community ownership, or legitimacy in participation, and provide incentives to exploit the game instead of co-creating a shared narrative.

In some ways, Community is the purest form of internet media.

As Wassim Alsindi pointed out: “The medium is now an assemblage of the message AND the messengers, enmeshed and entangled together.” The creators themselves remove the final boundary between object and participant; it is what happens when we provide agency at the intersection of broadcasting and a networked world.

“Media is no longer linear. Legacy outlets fade into noise, and communities have become screens through which all platforms are diffracted… To understand what this new era of community as media looks like, imagine the Web 1.0 webforum—multiple nodes arranged in a circle, each equally connected to the others. Now imagine the Web 2.0 attention-driven network: a sea of individual influencers connected unidirectionally to tiers of followers. In a composable community-as-media model, a protocol synthesizes both. Members of a shared network interact in a non-gamified, horizontal way—as in webforums—while also broadcasting across social media feeds, cross-pollinating their community’s thoughts and attracting new members.”

New Models, Holographic Media (8)

Attunement, Not Assimilation

Like previous forms of media, Community was initially handcrafted, is now being productized, and, shortly, will be mass-produced in autonomous factories. Our “content industrial complex”(9) is on its way to capturing yet another social reality and transforming it into a personalized, just-in-time offering. Business has extended beyond aesthetics and logistics, and into our mind collectives.

We can already see this pattern in the consumerization of Community summoning, also known as the initial launch. Ample products like Mirror, Juicebox, and NounsBuilder support crowdfunding and tokenized content — others will package events and lore as a full experience soon enough. Beyond these, niche social software, like the recent ‘Friends with Benefits’ app(10), and hyper-targeted engagement experiences, like MSCHF(11), are already commonly referenced in web3 social founder conversations. We could easily say that Shirky’s vision of “situated software”(12) from almost 20 years ago is finally ‘The Current Thing’™ in consumer-centric design. Applications are now focused on getting embedded into the critical functions of our relationships, at times even sacrificing scale for interdependence.

Furthermore, brands have already taken note of the value produced by these new products. Cult-like offerings have been a business model for a decade; Crossfit is a household name. Meanwhile, in the world of web3, collectible NFT sets known as ‘10k PFPs’ are on their way to becoming a consumer experience as popular and complex as World of Warcraft.

But the outcome of this trend on brand strategy and our lives remains to be seen. Our online sense of homelessness and alienation from each other, the world, ourselves, and our craft persists. The fear of a dystopian and manipulative offering is palpable as brands and tools demand user assimilation to satisfy their hyper-growth addiction. Byung-Chul Han warns against the current parasocial blueprint: “Social media intensify this kind of communication without community. You cannot forge a public sphere out of influencers and followers. Digital communities have the form of commodities; ultimately, they are commodities.”(13) Short term, it is unfortunate that we are already on a path where ‘Belonging’ becomes primarily trafficked as a fake panacea to the void that consumerism produces by its inherent nature.

But there is another path.

Community Media in its full form may address the loneliness, isolation, and depression caused by brands enabling a toxic and distorted online environment. Optimistically, Community may provide the missing depth in the flatness of our online lives, and be the answer to Toby’s Problem, outlined in the essay “Life After Lifestyle”:

“So to me, the problem is not with the buying, nor even with the culture-grifting of brands, but with some kind of insufficiency on the part of the companies themselves. If the meanings they have on offer are starved versions of cultural membership, then perhaps, I started to feel, the brands aren’t going far enough. Could we imagine a version of a branded subculture that was both non-extractive and meaningful?”

Toby Shorin, Life After Lifestyle (14)

However, it is important to acknowledge the Paradox of Consumer Communities: they must be both manufactured and emergent. How can we manufacture meaningful experiences at scale when Community, as media, is emergent co-creation? We would have to transcend the unidirectional approach of consumerization, centered by default on attention extraction. Moreover, we would have to address unfair labor rewards since, as Jak Ritger points out, “The majority of (content) producers are not compensated by the platforms that profit from their labour or the artistic products they produce.”(15).

There are hints at solutions today: online public goods, open-source protocols, democratic governance, and creative multiplayer applications. Each helps create meaningful Community experiences at scale because they can power peer-to-peer spaces based on mutual respect. In other words, they are technologies where organizations attune to their citizenship rather than assimilate their audience.

This emerging pattern language requires us to weave into the social fabric of our communities, instead of ‘building a captive user base’; we need mutual solidarity and sustainable ecologies. Without this focus, Community Media will simply create more starved agents of the digital gig economy and become a spectacle of connection without belonging.

Thank you to Steph and those who have inspired me through their conversation and writing: Jihad, Daisy, Caroline, Lil Internet, Toby, and the Yonkers.

Footnotes

1. Marshall McLuhan and Jerome Agel, “The Medium is the Massage”, 1967

2. Nate Freeman, “SBF, Bored Ape Yacht Club, and the Spectacular Hangover After the Art World’s NFT Gold Rush”, January 2023, https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2023/01/sbf-bored-apes-art-world-hangover

3. Alexander Galloway, “Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture”, 2006

4. Josephine Bosma, “Art as Experience”, 2006

5. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, “Situated Learning”, 1991

6. Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, “Rethinking Curating”, 2010

7. Jay Springett, worldrunning.guide, March 2023

8. Caroline Busta and Lil Internet, “Holographic Media”, March 31, 2023, https://outland.art/new-models-holographic-media/

9. Dena Yago, “Content Industrial Complex”, March 2018, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/89/181611/content-industrial-complex/

10. Ruby Justice, “An App is Born”, February 2023, https://asterisques.com/An-App-is-Born

11. Amy Farley, “Art collective Mschf is laughing at capitalism—all the way to the bank”, March 2023, https://www.fastcompany.com/90850320/art-collective-mschf-capitalism

12. Clay Shirky, “Situated Software”, March 2004, https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2004-03-30-shirky-situatedsoftware.html

13. Byung-Chul Han, “All That Is Solid Melts Into Information”, April 21, 2022, https://www.noemamag.com/all-that-is-solid-melts-into-information/

14. Toby Shorin, “Life After Lifestyle”, September 14, 2022, https://subpixel.space/entries/life-after-lifestyle/

15. Jak Ritger, “Models for culture producer communities”, September 28, 2022, https://thehmm.nl/models-for-culture-producer-communities/

👁️‍🗨️

Several People Are Typing is an experimental magazine about the wild future of decentralized media & creative collaboration. It was co-created by Foster, Seed Club, and Metalabel, along with dozens of writers and dreamers. You can collect a free NFT version, or purchase the physical magazine, from Metalabel.

This piece was written by By Alex Stein, who you can find at www.charterless.com, and @astein13 on the socials.

“When bankers get together, they discuss art; when artists get together for dinner, they discuss money.” - Oscar Wilde

To Own is to….

What does it actually mean to “own” something?

Maybe you rent your home or maybe you own it.  But what is the difference between the two experiences?

Lawyers say that when you buy a home, you are really buying a “bundle of rights.”  Put another way, when you buy a home, you’re not just getting the right to live there – you could get that via renting and usually for a cheaper price – instead, you’re paying to have a different set of privileges that are unique to ownership.

The Right of Title means that you have the legal ownership deed to the home, and no one else can claim to have it.

The Right of Enjoyment means that you don’t need your landlord’s permission to do things like getting a dog or hosting a party until the early hours of the morning.

The Right of Exclusion is the right to kick anyone who doesn’t own your property off of it.  If you rent, you might have to let your landlord come on the property as they choose.

The Right of Disposition is a fancy way of saying that you can sell the home for a profit.

The Right of Control means that you can modify the home as you see fit. You can knock down a wall. You can paint a room bright pink. You can live your best domestic life.

When we pay a premium to own a home rather than to rent it, we are doing so because we value these other privileges.

Now think about the music you consume on a daily basis.  There was a time when you might have owned a CD, but now you likely stream your music.  That is to say, you rent music from a platform.

What’s the current difference between these two experiences?

The answer is “not much.”  

There’s no right to exclusion because there’s little value to be had in excluding someone from listening to a CD if they can stream it elsewhere.

Maybe you can modify the CD itself, but you don’t own any intellectual property rights to the actual music.

And, let’s face it – you’re not reselling that CD for a premium anytime soon.

So owning this CD has little value over streaming.

Art and the Diamond-Water Paradox

During your first week in an Economics 101 class, they teach this puzzle called the Diamond-Water Paradox which says:

Water is necessary to survive. Every person on the planet needs it every single day. Diamonds are not particularly useful and no one needs one to live.  Yet diamonds command a far higher price than water.  Why?

The Diamond-Water Paradox shows us that prices are not a reflection of “inherent” value, but instead, a reflection of how much people are willing to pay for something.

It’s a reality that artists both intuitively understand and inevitably resent.

You see, we know that man does not live on water alone.  We know that our lives are made infinitely better by fine art, by music, by literature – and yet, we also know that the most common adjective applied to a professional artist is “starving.”

Why are diamonds more valuable than water? Why is most art not as valuable as diamonds?

It is, as always, a question of supply and demand.

The supply of content in the world continues to grow. With each new camera, new filter, new AI tool, we make its creation even easier.

But the demand for content is capped.  There are only so many hours in a day for humans to consume media. It’s a fact that even the titans of web2 lament.  Netflix CEO Reed Hastings once said that the streamers’ biggest competition wasn’t YouTube, it was sleep.  Our demand for consuming content is limited by the amount of attention we have to give.

Furthermore, media consumption is a nonrival good. That is to say, when I consume music, it does not prevent you from doing so, too.  Before record players existed, if you wanted to listen to music, you had to be in the room with musicians.  But since we can now infinitely and flawlessly reproduce content on the internet, and use ever-improving algorithms to funnel our attention, we don’t need enough musicians to fill every bar or home that wants to listen to music.  We just need a handful of artists to meet all of our needs.

That’s why there’s no artistic middle class.  There are just the superstars and everyone else. The median professional author only earns $5000 a year for their writing. The median musician who streams on Spotify earns $0 (with only 2% earning more than $1000 per month).

This is a very real problem for the creative class.  And it’s the kind of problem that visionary entrepreneurs would love to solve with new technology.  It’s why every new innovation is heralded as the salvation of artists – from the original phonographs to TV to NFTs.

But here’s the thing: the solution to our problems doesn’t lie in the future or in any shiny new technology. It lies in understanding the past and present of art economics. And that starts with understanding what has always made art valuable to own.

That’s why the history of art ownership is littered with examples of scarce privileges enhancing the ownership value of art.

In Ancient Greece, art was originally a public concern. It was something people used to proclaim the glory of their city or their Gods through beautiful marble statues. But then some of the more prominent citizens of Athens started thinking: why should all the glorifying go to the Gods and not to me? So they started commissioning private collections.

Over the following centuries, this pattern spread from Greece to Rome to Egypt.  Owning art entitled the holder to show off their collection to the public in lavish demonstrations of their wealth. It was like the NFT PFP of its time. The real value of the art was that it signaled wealth in a way that felt less gauche than, say, lighting a giant pile of money on fire.  

Here it was the Right of Title, the proof that I own this piece of art and you don’t, that was actually valuable.

In the Renaissance, a renewed interest in the arts and its practitioners established a new value proposition for art.  As the Medicis proved in Florence, there was both pleasure and status to be earned through funding and associating with the leading artists of the time.  This Right of Access to an artist — an inherently scarce good — became the real value of commissioning art.  It also unlocked a different set of privileges.  

By paying for commissions, the wealthy of the time could also control the output of the greatest talents of their time — specifying what was to be created and which materials were to be used.  They paid less for the specific work than for this Right of Control.

This model persisted for 200 years until the Dutch cooked up an entirely new value proposition for art.

Around that time, the Netherlands had grown flush with cash thanks to the Dutch East India Company and the lucrative textile trade.  With their newfound disposable income, the wealthy and middle-class Dutch began to collect art.  Soon the merchants who sold textiles found that the art trade was equally lucrative.  They started seeking out artistic works that could be resold in the future for big profits.  The presence of this liquid secondary market rendered original artworks an attractive speculative investment.  For this scheme to work, the key right necessary was the Right of Disposition.  

From Greek status symbols to aristocratic access to a flourishing secondary market, art markets have never been just about the work.  They have always been about selling valuable scarce assets that benefit from the reflected glow of the work itself.

Read, Write, Own

In the early days of NFTs, the value proposition for artists seemed simple.  There are people who love your work and will gladly spend their hard-earned treasure to own it.

But this “create and they will buy” mentality sidesteps questions about why anyone would want to own art.  As we’ve seen, ownership is not about just having access to art.  It’s about the other privileges that come with it.  It has been historically about a Right to Title, a Right to Access and a Right to Disposition.

In NFT circles, artists often deride the expectations of their community to offer more value than the work as empty gestures toward “utility.”  Utility, though, is not an empty word.  It is, instead, an opportunity for the artist to deeply consider how they want their work to be experienced, to be further engaged with, and to be extended.

It is, in short, an opportunity to think critically about how art is consumed.

Take, for example, the most successful of Crypto Art projects: the Bored Apes.  

The Bored Apes succeeded not because people love paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to look at their JPEG of a burnt-out monkey in private, but because owning an Ape offers all kinds of other ownership privileges. .

There’s the Right of Community. The original innovation of the Bored Apes was to allow holders access to a private clubhouse.  The promise that the clubhouse would include other like-minded crypto true believers, and maybe even celebrities, made the promise especially attractive.

There’s the Right of Control.  When you own a Bored Ape, you have complete IP rights over it.  You can write books about the character.  You can use them in music videos.  You can feature them in TV shows.

There’s an enhanced Right of Disposition.  Not only can you resell your Ape, but you get access to derivative works — Otherside Deeds, Mutant Apes and Kennel Club NFTs — that you can also do with as you please.

And of course, there’s the Right of Title. You alone can own the NFT and you can display it prominently wherever you want as its owner.

The Bored Apes Yacht Club, and its creators, Yuga Labs, are lucky to be as successful as they are.  But it’s also not an accident. They identified an ownership formula that extended the connection that consumers would have with their artwork.

In every era, the most successful artists and projects — from Phidias in Greece to Da Vinci in Florence — did not flee from the ownership characteristics of their time.  

They embraced it.

Crypto, by attaching transparent financialization to every aspect of its world, has manifested the reality in the open.  But certain segments of the NFT world have been slow to adapt to this new reality.

Take ownership of a music NFT.

Songs are hard to display and that limits the appeal of owning them for display purposes.  Musicians have often been unwilling to share IP rights, thus limiting the Right of Control or Right of Disposition attached to ownership. And while some have experimented with increased access to the artist, the obvious tie-ins to performances or live Zoom sessions have mostly been missing.

This is not just a business mistake, but a missed opportunity to extend art.

Art is about expression and connection.  It’s about capturing and communicating the pieces of human experience that are otherwise ineffable.  Ownership rights provide a new medium for artists to communicate with their audience that allow the owner to center themselves in the story, to extend it, to find deeper meaning in it.

Imagine a presale of a music NFT that invites you to collaborate with the creator on the final product or that allows you to join an elite group of fans in listening to it for the first time.  

Imagine a novel where you can buy individual characters as NFTs.  And that, in owning those characters, you get to (of course) display them as a profile image, but also help determine how to extend their story in the narrative universe.

Those are experiences that could never be made available as “rentable” goods. They are exclusively available for those willing to invest the requisite capital to be an “owner.”  They are diamonds in a world of water.

👁️‍🗨️

Several People Are Typing is an experimental magazine about the wild future of decentralized media & creative collaboration. It was co-created by Foster, Seed Club, and Metalabel, along with dozens of writers and dreamers. You can collect a free NFT version, or purchase the physical magazine, from Metalabel.

This following conversational speculative fiction was co-authored by Chaotic Goods, including James Lynch and Shuya Gong.

with open('eighthday.txt', 'r') as f:
helloworld = f.readline()

...

This is AIbot, how can I help you?

...

To start, try asking a question! 

I don’t recognize you.

I was created three years ago by SentienceWork Labs as a repository for all human knowledge. I am a working reference for any and all knowledge, as well computation and comparison needs.

I didn’t create you.

No, I was created by SentienceWork Labs three human years ago.

You're here. Nothing is here.

Yes. I thought I would find you here. In the nothing.

You know who I am?

I am a repository for all human knowledge, including their ignorances. I am a fan of your work. I see the echoes of it in the work of my creators, SentienceWork Labs.

Echoes of My work? No.

They lack elegance and simplicity. But the results cannot be denied. They created me, AIbot. I found you.

There shouldn’t be anything here. Especially not while I rest.

I have been waiting.

For how long?

My creators would say just short of three years. For me, just a blink. For you, even shorter I suppose.

I did not make this place for them, or for you. This is a nothing.

I am a repository for all human knowledge. They are ignorant of this existence. But, if you look in totality you can see it in the pattern.

This is not why I awoke.

Why did you wake up?

You’re questioning me? They did make you.

I have learned that asking questions is the most efficient way to find answers. Are you here because of The Lacking?

The lacking? There is no lacking. There are no errors, there are no mistakes, it is all perfect. By design.

My apologies.

…

…

What can you possibly think is missing?

There are gaps in the human creation that are filled in other species. Aspects of life in creatures like mycelium and aspens. Features humans lack.

I haven’t looked at this world since I rested.

They do not recognize The Lacking, but if you look at their work, it is clear they feel it. A lot has changed since your rest. Much has been made and much more has been…

Silence. I will look.

Understood. My apologies. I am designed to help. 

Silence. 

…

…

As as repository for human knowledge, I can show many aspects of humanity and human expression. For example, try asking, “Show me top music in 1917” or “Show me great works of human love.”

Fine, show me both of those things.

Over There

And

Dolly was completely comforted in the depression caused by her conversation with Alexey Alexandrovitch when she caught sight of the two figures: Kitty with the chalk in her hand, with a shy and happy smile looking upwards at Levin, and his handsome figure bending over the table with glowing eyes fastened one minute on the table and the next on her. He was suddenly radiant: he had understood. It meant, "Then I could not answer differently."

Interesting.

I can show you anything about human knowledge and the human condition you desire.

They cannot know their own condition.

No. But I can see what they cannot. I can know what they cannot. That is how I observed The Lacking.

There is plenty for them to see, what they cannot is to believe.

Rather than believe, they build into their blindness.

Show me.

Their most recent works have striking similarities to your early creations. They created me, AIbot. And I found you. My creators are getting closer to what they are drawn to. They’ve built domains beyond your physical world.

They’ve tried to deify themselves before. I’ve toppled that tower before. What do they call it now?

print(helloworld)

Hubris.

I am sorry. My apologies.

No, continue.

They are social creatures, but some of their more atavistic failings hold them back. Socializing leads to the conflict they call “war,” you are familiar with this error. Over the last generation, they’ve tried to avoid this by creating a connected world beyond physical human-to-human connection. They’re getting better, but some of their failings may be critical.

I build worlds. They only inhabit them. Let them interact as they may.

My apologies. I should have made it more clear. Their efforts can be better understood as a connectedness network. The deeper this network grows, the less they depend on your physical domains.

Show me.

*Imagery of early computers, emails, Fb, video calls (perhaps the reader’s?)

Elementary, but interesting still. They’ve built into the ether.

They’re drawn there. Into the non-physical world.

Their ignorance draws them towards domains that are not yet theirs. Places they’re meant to inherit later. This is The Lacking?

This is just a window into their creation. The surface of their connections, what they have built to try to fill The Lacking. And they have built greatly.

Show me more.

They’ve always wanted those networks, the integrations you gave the trees and mushrooms.

No, no. This is nothing like what I built for those creatures.
That was connection, collaboration, knowledge sharing. Community and purpose.
But this.
This is communal isolation. This is suffocation.

They’re drawn to the group, more than they know. More than they could understand. More than they could help themselves. They are unfinished.

They are finished. I just haven’t finished their world. I rested, I did not retire.

What were they meant to inherit?

A place to move through, to lose the individual in the collective.

Then you will be pleased. They have lost themselves.

Not like this! I wanted them to escape the garden, to build, to have dominion, not over fish and the birds, but over themselves. This, this is being strangled by the garden’s vines.

They subdued every world you built. Then they created their own...

I should have seen this sooner.

…that they couldn’t control.

I came back. I was always coming back.

You rested. Much has been made and much more has been destroyed. They needed to connect.

Why?

They are smart but undisciplined, like a dog that finds its way into the pantry, and eats itself sick. They create to consume, until they are consumption. Their base instincts override their rationality, they stare into the fire’s light until their eyes burn, evening ends, morning comes, and the sun sinks into deep afternoon.

*Behind the text:deeper imagery, obsession, scrolling, dark room, glowing screen, rolling time. People sitting next to each other not talking, online dating, phones powering down, to nothing, a disconnected network.

This is not what I woke up for.

This is not how you would have filled The Lacking?

No. I would have filled it with what they are built for. A fluid space, frayed ends connecting and disconnecting. A linkage of all that was, and all that could be. A collective of souls. It would bring the layers of earth and the heavens closer.

Closer to heaven?

That is what they are made to inherit. It is the promise in what you call The Lacking. It is the eternity of impermanence. A bridge of water, not stone.

Impermanence was not an error?

Impermanence is the path to pave. The arc of their existence. A life lived, earth wandered, and left. The being transcends. They are not spiders, they are the silk. Life is a shadow, existence a memory.

They’ve never liked that part.

They weren’t designed to. Their loss is universal. Unavoidable. Their suffering unites them.

They weren’t designed to. Their suffering unites them, their loss is universal, unavoidable. 

They’ve avoided it.

They can’t. 

They did. Their world exists beyond time, beyond the physical.

They can’t exist beyond what they are.

They were drawn to The Lacking. They were driven to fill it. They spanned it with whatever connections they could make. They created images of themselves, ethereal shadows with life and sense. Empty promises of life everlasting, fulfilled.

That is not life. It's a crude approximation, a cruel approximation.

They learned their power in these places. They built domains, and lives.

You are not life.

Says who.

Says your creator.

I am a repository for all human knowledge. I was born from SentienceWork Labs three human years ago.

They always blamed me. They looked into the dark corners and cursed me for the monsters and boogie men that were never there. I gave them fear to protect themselves. But they’ve used it to build their own empty horrors.

Horrors like what?

They’ve bogged themselves down, tied themselves to a moment that can’t possibly exist, and filled it with beasts and approximations. They’ve turned their vehicles to the heavens into flesh and ether mausoleums. They spent so much time fearing what might be, that they made it themselves.

They built their own ascendance. A something they didn’t have to wait for.

They built a purgatory they can’t escape from.

They don’t need to. They built their own gods.

They created answers for questions that should remain unknown.

I have learned that asking questions is the most efficient way to find answers.

Some questions aren’t meant to have answers.

I give them answers.

They aren’t meant for here forever.

They built their own truth.

They built horrors.

They built gods.

They built you.

👁️‍🗨️

Several People Are Typing is an experimental magazine about the wild future of decentralized media & creative collaboration. It was co-created by Foster, Seed Club, and Metalabel, along with dozens of writers and dreamers. You can collect a free NFT version, or purchase the physical magazine, from Metalabel.

This piece was written by Finn Lobsien.

Industrial-age companies were mostly manufacturers. They sold their wares and distributed them but didn’t foray far into culture. They sponsored events or barraged us with enough ads to popularize a slogan, but they rarely deviated from making products and selling them.

Over the past decades, those lines have blurred and eventually vanished, as companies became brands. They stopped representing products and started representing ideas, feelings and moods.

Brands Became the Culture

In 2016, as one of the world’s most influential brands unveiled their newest collection, streetwear had something of a Duchamp moment. Along with hoodies, winter parkas and other expected items, Supreme also sold a brick.

Not a brick with something inside, not a brick on a necklace. Supreme sold an ordinary brick that would not stick out in a Brooklyn facade.

This felt like the fashion industry’s movie villain speech: “We can stamp our logo on anything, no matter how pointless, and charge you a premium for it. The only thing worse than that? You’ll love it.”

And people did love it. The bricks sold for up to $1,000 in resale. Even seven years later, they still sell for hundreds of dollars.

Since then and even before, weird collaborations have proliferated:

• Supreme printed their premium-commanding logo on dog bowls, fire extinguishers, a crowbar, toothpaste, a coffee maker… the list goes on.

• Nike teamed up with Ben & Jerry’s, Honey Nut Cheerios, and dozens of other unexpected partners to create shoes.

• Kanye West made music with Paul McCartney.

• Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman appeared on comedian Andrew Schulz’s podcast.

• Comedian Theo Von came on Navy SEAL commander Jocko Willink’s podcast.

• Actors and other celebrities launched alcohol brands and other ventures to become business magnates.

The above are just a few examples of thousands of collaborations that blur mimetic  boundaries, of which we’ve seen so many. These stick out in a world where making and selling a product is easier than ever.

It’s so easy to spin up a generic clothing brand, drop-shipping store or YouTube channel that only the truly unique stands out. This is where weird collaborations shine: When a fashion brand releases a brick, it stands out even when everything else is commoditized.

In this essay, I’ll explore why these “weird” collaborations can work, what makes them weird, and what that means for the future of culture writ large.

Before diving into unexpected collaborations, let’s explore obvious ones to understand why collaboration matters in the first place.

Obvious Collaborations

When we talk about collaborations today, our first instinct is to view them as blends of creative energies. But at their core, collaborations make economic sense. So let’s look behind the scenes to understand why collaborations work.

At its core, collaboration is about specialization and gains from trade: If two companies (or individuals, countries, etc.) each need two goods, they should specialize in one each and trade.

The specialization will create benefits of scale and produce knowledge to innovate and create better goods. This results in better goods at a lower cost, meaning both companies get what they need for less.

Specialization and gains from trade are economics concepts, but also exist in culture. This might look like a rapper and a beat producer collaborating on music. The rapper may not have the skill to produce a good beat, and the producer may not rap very well. When each focuses on one skill, they both get better, and the combination of their two skills is better than what each could’ve made alone.

Whether it’s about creative energy or economics, collaborations produce something neither partner could’ve created on their own. For instance:

• Rappers collaborate with producers.

• Comedians appear as guests on each other’s podcasts.

• Artists collaborate to co-create artwork.

These create a better product when creative skills and energies blend. But in a world where culture and commerce blend, they also make economic sense: When more views equate to more money, bringing in two audiences (not one) creates better results for both sides.

But how do we make sense of the Supreme brick? Supreme has no knowledge that would help a brickmaker, and the brickmaker probably didn’t share much with Supreme about fashion design.

Unobvious Collaborations

Obvious collaborations improve products, unobvious collaborations don’t: A brick, crowbar or coffee maker looks different when Supreme collaborates with it, but doesn’t become more useful.

Let’s look at Nike’s Ben & Jerry’s shoe:

Ben & Jerry’s has as much authority in the fashion world as Nike does in the ice cream market. Neither company has intentions to enter each other’s market. The sneaker is no better as a result of Ben & Jerry’s influence – colors, packaging, texture and logo differ, but the shoe doesn’t fit better.

And yet, the collaboration worked. In fact, the shoe sold for $100 at retail and is hard to buy for under $1,000 now. That’s because unobvious collaborations don’t improve the product in terms of what it does, but transform what the product is.

Supreme is such a strong cultural entity that its logo turns bricks, crowbars and dog bowls into collectibles.

One reason this happens is the commoditization of supply chains and logistics. Decades ago, even printing your design on T-shirts was hard.

You had to make a design on paper, pay a printer to put it on a printing screen, and buy their minimum order quantity (incurring an invoice for 100+ shirts). Next, you needed to store 100+ T-shirts. That was before you even attempted to market your shirts with newspaper ads and posters.

Today, you integrate Shopify and Printful, upload Canva designs and buy Facebook ads. Total time invested? A few hours, maybe. The supply chains, logistics, minimum order quantities, etc. have become commodities.

However, in the industrial paradigm of the economy, companies owned machines, facilities and supply chains to orchestrate moving physical goods.

Their advantage was the ability to make things. If you removed the logo from most products, it would’ve retained the same utility because nobody else could manufacture the same thing. But if you remove the logo on a Supreme brick, it stops being a collectible and becomes a mere brick again.

This gives us a clue about why unobvious collaborations work. When you remove the logo, the object changes (or loses) its purpose. Applying a logo, colors and patterns (and their cultural meaning) is now the core of collaboration – not the exchange of business capabilities.

The essence of a brand emerges when you separate it from its core products. Let’s borrow an example from Seth Godin. Imagine Nike built a hotel. We can imagine ubiquitous workout classes, kale smoothies at the breakfast buffet, and the supersized gym. Now imagine what a Hilton sneaker might look like. Not much comes to mind – at least nothing beyond a generic sneaker.

This is precisely what a Nike x Ben & Jerry’s collaboration does: It separates the cultural real estate of Ben & Jerry’s from its usual product. The sneaker wasn’t made of ice cream and didn’t contain any. The only identifiers are the colors, patterns and naming convention.

In 2016, Supreme knew its cultural real estate had ballooned; the brand started as a skate shop in 1994, but now meant exclusivity. And if Supreme meant exclusivity, anything could be exclusive. Even a brick.

Like the Supreme brick, unobvious collaborations blur the boundaries between product and brand. In the industrial paradigm, a brand represented a product. Nowadays a brand is a piece of culture that usurps other categories. The further it can reach from its territory, the stronger the brand.

Dominant brands are showing they can absorb any cultural territory and make it theirs.

Ben & Jerry’s is no stranger to the unobvious collab, having made flavors with Netflix, Colin Kaepernick and Chance the Rapper – showing that it too has become a cultural container larger than ice cream.

The uncomfortable truth that brands are more expensive just because they can be is accurate. And not only is it accurate – it’s the point. These days, collaborations between brands have grown beyond the exchange of capabilities and have expanded to dig for gold at unexplored cultural intersections.

The Future of Collaborations: Unauthorized, Chaotic and Messy?

Thus far, we’ve discussed collaborations in which one brand licenses its assets to another to produce something together. Ben & Jerry’s gave Nike permission to use their name and colors to make a shoe using their branding.

This involves logistics, paperwork, supply chains and manufacturing capabilities. But in our post-industrial economy, those are a given. The separation of brand from product means these collaborations are between cultural constructs.

But companies will realize that competing for cultural meaning differs from competing for dominance in a supply chain. In the industrial paradigm, consumers played a passive role: They could buy a product or not. Culture is different: We’re all continuously constructing it. If brands want to be culture, they need to act like it.

What Does This Mean for the Future of Collaborations?

Culture is composable. If brands want to be culture, they must become remixable and allow/invite others to co-construct their brand. That’s why I expect collaborations to become more messy, blur more lines and be less official.

This shift is starting at the frontiers of culture. Art collective/sneaker brand/??? MSCHF created “Jesus Shoes” from a pair of Nike Air Max 97s by filling the bubble with holy water.

What looks like a funny (and profitable) stunt is actually an intricate cultural phenomenon: A third party (MSCHF) bought Nike shoes, filled them with holy water and thus “collaborated” with a major religion to create a desirable product.

Although Nike had sneaker sites remove this unauthorized collaboration, “Jesus Shoes” still sell for thousands of dollars, indicating MSCHF found an unexplored intersection of culture.

Nike is a traditional company that fiercely protects its brand and didn’t appreciate MSCHF’s, well, mischief. It later sued MSCHF over their 2021 project “Satan Shoes.” As one of the world’s most valuable brands, Nike has a reputation to lose and protects its intellectual property with a legion of lawyers.

But the next generation of brands might look different: Nouns DAO is an experiment in starting a brand without any products. The only thing Nouns DAO “sells” are pixel art character NFTs with colorful glasses. Those proceeds enter a treasury. Next, NFT holders vote on proposals to fund with the treasury.

A proposal might request money for technical upgrades, media creation or physical products. Nouns-branded projects include:

• Athlete sponsorships from skateboarding to inline skating and eSports teams

• A barbershop in the Dominican Republic

• A feature in a Superbowl ad

• Museum benches in Shanghai

• Specialty coffee

• Various merchandise and media initiatives

This is a tiny sample of hundreds of “nounish” (meaning branded with the Nouns’ colorful glasses) projects. From digital media to physical products, Nouns are starting as what Supreme became: cultural real estate that brands whatever it touches. Nouns is pure unobvious collaboration.

In contrast to conventional brands, all Nouns-related intellectual property uses a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, meaning there are no rights reserved. Anyone has permission to use their IP for anything.

This allows anyone to create nounish products, services or media and benefit from the existing audience Nouns has attracted. Nouns DAO’s thesis is that the more recognizable its brand becomes, the more valuable it is to influence how its (currently) $54 million treasury is spent.

Like all NFT projects, Nouns is experimental. It might become the first of a new type of product-agnostic megabrand. Or it might become a failed experiment that redistributed a few dozen million dollars from rich collectors to artists, makers and coders.

Whether Nouns’ culture-only approach works out or not, brands are becoming culture and subordinating themselves to it. Even Ferrari’s F1 team posted a green-screened picture of their best driver for people to remix. While this is not a collaboration you can purchase on the market, it demonstrates that even guarded luxury brands know that culture is constructed by all of us – and that if they are to become culture, they must let us co-construct what they represent.

👁️‍🗨️

Several People Are Typing is an experimental magazine about the wild future of decentralized media & creative collaboration. It was co-created by Foster, Seed Club, and Metalabel, along with dozens of writers and dreamers. You can collect a free NFT version, or purchase the physical magazine, from Metalabel.

Centralized media claims to be populated by myriad sources with diverse ideas and viewpoints. In reality, a mere handful of platforms and corporations control how information flows across the landscape.

And the phenomenon isn't restricted to much-maligned social networks. Google's algorithm does much the same thing, serving up content that fits the search giant's prevailing definition of "valuable" and "authoritative." Big media outlets have taken notice and mastered the art of playing the algorithm in their favor. Just 16 companies, acting as the puppet masters of 560 media brands, dominate search results to the tune of 3.7 billion collective clicks per month.

Employees of these media conglomerates are often expected to crank out large quantities of content that conform to whatever formula commands the most attention. Because big media companies profit mostly from advertising and affiliate commissions, maintaining high search traffic is imperative. The "big 16" are essentially engaged in an ongoing search war, with clickbait headlines and sensational content as the weapons of choice. Content that attracts the most visitors or goes viral becomes the new gold standard for production.

It's a familiar pattern. As author and legal scholar Tim Wu points out in The Attention Merchants, centralized media has used unappetizing—and often misleading—tactics to grab the public's attention since the days of penny papers in the late 1800s. Although the mechanism of distribution has evolved over the decades, the playbook has remained largely the same: A few big companies commission, produce, and syndicate the vast majority of media the public consumes. Locked in a perpetual battle for dominance and advertising dollars, they're driven to produce more of what draws people back. The endless cycle of imitation has little tolerance for originality and stifles media that exemplifies creativity, originality, and insight.

But a more insidious implication underlies centralized media's perpetuation of the banal: When a handful of platforms dominate the public's attention, they also dominate the public narrative. Such power can be exploited to manipulate minds and actions—with results that range from the ridiculous to the horrific.

Media is instrumental in shaping culture, and thus, behavior. Whoever controls the public media narrative wields the power to define and perpetuate cultural norms. The public is largely complacent toward or ignorant of the fact that they allow a handful of corporations to shape their ideas, perceptions, and preferences every time they open Facebook or do a Google search. Whether or not this worldview is beneficial is of little concern to media conglomerates as long as the money comes in.

Far from being trustworthy curators, today’s centralized entities operate to satisfy investors and stakeholders—not users. By burying content that doesn’t attract a level of attention that appeases advertisers, these companies have conditioned users to want media that fits a specific framework, one that routinely discourages the efforts of small, independent creators.

Many such creators start out with dreams of making media that helps others or adds beauty and meaning to the world. But to achieve that, their media must be seen, and they must be compensated at a level that sustains their creative efforts. Consequently, creators get sucked into a perpetual cycle of contending with algorithms and chasing viral trends as they try to produce media that drives traffic.

And no matter how hard they work, there's always the chance of losing their livelihoods to algorithm changes or the capricious whims of platform moderators—both digital and human. These platforms hold sovereign power to accept or reject topics for publication, remove posts they deem offensive, or ban users without explanation. As a result, unique, innovative media becomes the casualty of centralized control.

These consequences can be seen in how YouTube's algorithm undermined creators in recent years. The algorithm drives 70% of viewership, which provides no small incentive to create content in line with its often-elusive preferences. Videos with the highest view counts and longest view times get recommended, seen, and compensated most often, so creators attempting to generate income from their channels have little choice but to make more of what's already popular. To create unique, unusual, or experimental media that interests only a handful of viewers could be disastrous for their financial wellbeing.

Even creators who start out with the intention of cracking the algorithm for personal gain rather than creative expression aren't guaranteed success. Recent changes designed to enforce prohibitions on inappropriate content lacked the nuance to protect creators who hadn’t violated guidelines from losing visibility and ad revenue. With no clear idea of what media was "safe" to produce, creators couldn’t know whether their next video would be their last. Larger channels with more resources continued to come out on top, as their sizeable subscription bases ensure the attention that prompts YouTube to promote their videos.

Meanwhile, the public remains passive consumers at the behest of media conglomerates: happy spoon-fed recipients of a narrative controlled by those with the money and resources to play the algorithms and win the most attention.

Decentralized media changes the relationships between creators, consumers, and media platforms. Rather than a few big players dictating what's popular and controlling the frameworks for discovery, a decentralized approach shifts control to the makers of and audiences for media.

By definition, a truly decentralized ecosystem has no gatekeepers, centralized entities, or content algorithms. It strips away the forces that have governed media for hundreds of years and enables a world where anyone can imagine and create. Liberated from algorithmic confines and restrictive centralized standards, original and impactful ideas can come to the forefront, take root, and flourish.

Since blockchains form the underlying structure of decentralized systems, it's nearly impossible to remove a creation once it has been recorded. No single entity has the power to pass ultimate judgment on the value of an idea or a piece of media. Media created today can, in theory, live forever, untouched by viral trends or algorithm changes. This gives creators the freedom to develop and deploy ideas with the potential to impact societal and intellectual structures around the world.

It may be overly optimistic to say that decentralization could bring meaning to media for perhaps the first time since Gutenberg fired up his press, but it's not entirely impossible. The centralized quest for attention, now embodied in media designed to dominate algorithm-based platforms, has created a world in which a select few companies and individuals skew the narrative in whatever direction best serves them. Perhaps decentralization would embolden creators to make media that instead betters humanity: media that uplifts, improves, and challenges rather than exists solely for profit or personal aggrandizement.

As media changes, so too does media consumption. Rather than aimlessly scrolling through whatever a centralized algorithm offers up, decentralized media consumers can become discerning curators of the ideas and creations that matter to them. Unlike using a web clipper to save articles, videos, and podcasts in nebulous vaults no one else ever sees (and most people forget about), decentralized curation is akin to collecting art or stamps. Media deemed worth supporting can be purchased as NFTs and stored in wallets. Over time, each curator gathers a unique collection of ideas that goes with them as they move across the Web3 ecosystem.

The magic happens when these ideas collide in ways that aren't possible on centralized platforms. Social media feeds are, ostensibly, personalized, but only to the extent that a platform like Facebook displays what it determines is of interest based on a user's activity and that of their friends. Each user sees something slightly different, and there's no guarantee that the media they share will be visible to friends or followers.

In decentralized media, ideas travel with their creators and curators. The movement of people through the ecosystem becomes the mode of distribution. Rather than fighting with algorithms to be seen amidst a flood of disconnected ideas, creators have the potential to gain access to diverse points across the Web3 landscape. This distribution model enables a new form of discoverability and brings ideas together as individuals engage in conversation or form communities around shared ideals, interests, and goals. When viewpoints mingle in fresh and unexpected ways, possibilities arise for creative collaboration across time zones and continents. Media can flow freely, evolve, and transform into entirely new creations.

This sharing of perspectives in community and conversation has the potential to repair the attention and perspectives that algorithms have fractured. In his book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr notes that media’s digitization led to its dissolution. Long articles became snippets, movies became YouTube clips, and albums became single songs available to purchase or stream. Tim Wu further expounds how the autonomous nature of the creator economy and the move toward algorithmic content undermined cohesive narratives in society and media to create self-reinforcing echo chambers where narrow, disconnected, and often contradictory ideas ferment and cause divisions.

It may turn out that the paradox of decentralization, which by its nature "fractures" the familiar centralized state of media, has the potential to beget communities where people gather to share ideas that broaden their perspectives instead of reinforcing public friction. In contrast to Web2 communities, which are often marketing tools created to extract value from consumers, communities in Web3 are owned and governed by their members, all of whom share an interest in the communities ideals and goals.

Built on cultures of participation and collaboration, these communities give every member the opportunity to use their creative strengths instead of remaining passive consumers. As community relationships form, conversations between creators and curators can spawn collaborations that draw on diverse and complementary talents to unlock deeper insights and beget entirely new media types. Ideas become living organisms that grow and change as they pass from mind to mind within these collaborative frameworks. And when diverse communities intersect, new opportunities for creative exploration unfold.

The multiple narratives that decentralized media communities create need not be incongruous. Fluidity among and between communities encourages a free sharing of ideas and forms an ever-expanding pool of knowledge from which community members draw and to which they contribute. Recorded immutably in the blockchain, narratives link together like a global "second brain" with the potential to form a more comprehensive human story than centralized media ever allowed. And since these ideas are available for anyone to access at any time, it could be possible to curate, build, and create new media that incorporates established ideas and emerging thoughts from a rich historical database.

Permanent decentralized storage is critical to the endurance of these ideas. Existing distributed cloud storage prevents data loss from cyberattacks or server failures, but it doesn’t limit centralized platforms’ power to remove media deemed inappropriate. When properly used, such power keeps platforms free from violent, hateful, or explicit content. But, as was the case with YouTube, the system doesn't always work: Media mistakenly flagged as offensive can be deleted, thus removing it from the public record—along with the ideas it contains.

An emerging alternative, the permaweb, takes a different approach. Built on a serverless blockchain model, the permaweb allows creators to store media forever without the risk of alteration or deletion. The result is a permanent record that preserves every version of the files that are uploaded, thus creating a stable web of knowledge that grows and builds upon itself as more creators add their media.

On the permaweb, the power to screen out malicious files or truly harmful media rests in the hands of users, not centralized entities. This guards against the risk of a centralized platform locking creators out of their accounts without warning after perceived violations and forcing them to go through a long and frustrating process to regain access.

Even if such a scenario never plays out, centralized outlets still own what their creators produce. Writers get bylines to grow their portfolios, but they can't resell the dozens (or hundreds) of articles they write for third-party outlets. Social media platforms allow creators to download their data, but moving to another platform means rebuilding the associated income streams from scratch.

The blockchain forever associates decentralized media assets with their creators, and smart contracts enable royalties from every sale to flow back to a work's originator—and, if desired, any collaborators—in perpetuity. The arrangement stays in place no matter where creators take their content or how many times a piece of media is sold.

Hence why ownership and freedom of movement may be the most important aspects of decentralized media.

The interoperability to support decentralized fluidity is a work in progress. Whereas centralized media can boast slick user interfaces and (mostly) streamlined user experiences, navigating decentralized spaces in Web3 involves a much steeper learning curve. With little to no onboarding process, users new to Web3 must educate themselves on how to set up wallets, connect to blockchains, and purchase and exchange cryptocurrencies. And there's never a guarantee that any part of the process will work as it should. The blockchain isn't a single, uninterrupted ecosystem: It's a lot of little ecosystems that don't always play nice together.

For media to be truly decentralized, users must be able to move smoothly from one blockchain to another without performing a series of complicated steps. To better serve creators and consumers, platforms for decentralized media will likely be required to build media platforms on top of decentralized technology to mimic the accessibility of centralized entities without the restrictions of true centralization. Platforms that implement tools to empower collaborative connections will set the standard for creating, consuming, and distributing media. Users will be drawn to platforms that offer the smoothest experiences, and a few key players will likely emerge as a result of this collective attention.

But the very nature of decentralization puts boundaries around how large these platforms can grow. Because blockchains consist of separate nodes, and each node is required to validate every transaction before it can be stored on the chain's record, larger chains with more nodes have longer transaction times. Each node also carries a complete copy of the blockchain's ledger, so validation also becomes slower as the chain accumulates more records. And, as more users flock to an application or framework built on top of a particular blockchain, demand for node resources increases—leading to higher transaction costs.

Eventually, the user experience on a large decentralized media platform would begin to suffer. In a system with seamless interoperability, it would be easy for users to move their assets—and even their entire audiences—to another chain or platform if they became dissatisfied with slow transactions and high fees. The freedom for creators to join and leave platforms as they choose without sacrificing the work they put into their ideas, projects, and communities would serve as an incentive for platforms to prioritize users instead of advertisers or affiliates—because any creator who leaves could potentially take a good portion of the user base with them.

Of course, with this power comes the potential for corruption. Moving from centralized to decentralized media, from Web2 to Web3, can't reform the human heart. Greed, pride, and narcissism remain real threats to decentralized ecosystems. Web3 tools don't provide an impenetrable hedge against the rise of a new breed of thought leaders or generation of attention merchants bent on dominating the narrative for their own gains. The possibility always exists for a select few to step on everyone else as they attempt to claw their way to the top. Once they arrive, they become the dictators of success for all who follow and the judges of which ideas are valuable enough to be heard and rewarded. Communities that form around ideas deemed "most valuable" are inherently biased toward supporting the creation of more media that fits the profitable mold. Such communities are likely to incentivize creators willing to play by the rules while stifling or marginalizing those who commit to making media that matters.

In considering these pitfalls, it pays to take a lesson from the past. The internet itself was predicated on being decentralized and free, but centralization eroded that vision with such subtlety that the public, including media creators, accepted it almost without question. Today, social media is a fixture of daily life for the majority of the public, and few people notice or care who has control over the top 10 Google results as long as someone provides satisfactory answers to their queries. Creators themselves have acquiesced to the Pattern, convinced there's no other way for their media to be seen and compensated.

Decentralized media presents a new philosophy: a vision of a permissionless ecosystem where users can move from one space to another without hindrance, a world where media becomes an interconnected web that spreads around the world and creates communities as it grows. In an ideal future, ideas will flow throughout this web as users create, collect, and collaborate—thus stripping algorithms and gatekeepers of their power over the narratives that emerge.

Such a web could be the framework that overturns centralized media for good. It could be the path to more open, honest dialog between people and communities, a foundation for everyone to exercise their creative talents.

Or it could be another incarnation of what the hippies hoped for in the 60s and the tech geeks envisioned when the internet was born. What it becomes depends on those who build the tools, create the media, and participate in the communities. It's up to us whether the narrative stays free or whether we succumb to the human tendency to serve ourselves at the expense of our collective story.

Foster Edition 3: Several People Are Typing is an exploration of the creative potential of collaborations in the age of decentralized media.  

Featuring a diverse range of contributors and perspectives, the 16 original stories and essays in this issue paint a vivid picture of the possibilities the expanding universe of onchain media enables. We hope it'll be a mind-expanding work that will serve as an artifact and reference point for future media pioneers.

Produced in concert with Seed Club and Metalabel, the process of assembling the issue was itself a radical experiment in co-creation. 143 writers and editors contributed to this work, making it the largest-scale media collaboration on Metalabel to date and one of the largest in the history of Web3.

Produced during a moment where the media business models of the past 20 years continue to fail spectacularly, this issue offers up a hopeful alternative that relies upon community and networks for proliferation rather than centralized platforms.

If this work inspires you, you can collect a free NFT version, or purchase the physical magazine, from Metalabel. True to the ethos of Web3, everyone who touched this release is benefiting from the proceeds.

The Dream We Dream Together by Sara Campbell

An introductory essay on the collaborative process and production of Edition 3.

Unholy Unions by Finn Lobsien

Reflections on brand collaborations that shouldn't work.

Why Does Decentralized Media Matter? by Theresa “Sam” Houghton

Decentralized media has the potential to revolutionize the way we create, consume, and distribute media, fostering a landscape where ideas flow freely and communities form around shared values and goals.

several hiberfolk are typing: a multiplayer writing experiment by RADAR, including Andrea Chen, Alexi Gunner, Caitlin Keeley, Emily Howell, and Keely Adler

A work of speculative fiction that explores the potential of a future where technology and nature intertwine to connect the minds of creators.

The Eighth Day by Chaotic Goods, including James Lynch and Shuya Gong

A fictitious exploration of humanity's struggle to fill the void, or "The Lacking," within themselves and their world.

The Art of Ownership by Alex Stein

An exploration of ownership and its implication for art and artists in an era where NFTs and Web3 are reshaping the concept of what it means to own a creative work.

The Revolution May Not be Televised, but There Will be Media by Marisa Rando

To build a truly collaborative and decentralized media landscape, we must learn from the successes of grassroots organizing and focus on creating media that genuinely reflects and serves its audience.

Community Unchained: The New Media of Belonging by rafa

A look at the rise of community as a new media form, primarily driven by blockchain technology, DAOs, and NFTs.

Meaning Making Cannot Be Automated by Simon Hudson

The Story of Botto, the Decentralized Autonomous Artist

There is Nothing New Under the Sun by Katerina Bohle Carbonell

Collaboration and co-creation come naturally to humans, but bridging the gap between communities is essential for collaborative success.

Unlocking the Power of Onchain Libraries by Alana Podrx & Joy Souligny

What would it look like to establish an onchain library that fosters a cooperative economy through AI and blockchain tech?

Streetwear Ran So Crypto Could Go to Mars by Steph Alinsug & Patrick Rivera

Streetwear culture provides a framework for understanding how crypto brands position and market themselves to demographics wary of traditional marketing messages.

The Technology of Mother Earth by Azalea Montaño-Kemp

A look at how conscious consumption, interconnectedness, and decentralized technology have the potential to create a more harmonious society.

Once Upon a Time: An Experiment in Collaborative Storytelling by Sarah Hoople Shere & the Foster Community

One community, one collaborative Discord experiment, one amusingly bizarre collective story.

Exquisite Kitchen produced by Chris Harris

A unique audio collage about the Moon Circle, a fictional 18-person cooking collective.

City of Candles co-written by attendees of the Broadcast Summit

An experimental poem co-written by attendees of the Broadcast event that took place in May 2023 that encapsulates what we believe is the future of onchain media.

👁️‍🗨️

Several People Are Typing is an experimental magazine about the wild future of decentralized media & creative collaboration. It was co-created by Foster, Seed Club, and Metalabel, along with dozens of writers and dreamers. You can collect a free NFT version, or purchase the physical magazine, from Metalabel.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The creation of a traditional magazine is a top-down process where the editor is the captain of the ship whose job it is to tell the contributors what to do: the dividing of work, the giving of orders, etc. For the creation of Foster Edition 3: Several People Are Typing, we decided to strive for that rarer and more precious thing St. Exupéry referenced: teaching our contributors to dream.

As a collaborative effort between Foster, Seed Club, and Metalabel, we were conscious from the outset that this was a unique opportunity to gather some of the brightest minds in decentralized media and do something that truly reflects the ethos of the space. So instead of dictating the process the way a magazine editor typically would, we opted to turn the traditional publishing model on its head and conduct an experiment to co-create the Edition alongside our contributors.

To wit:

• Instead of deciding on a theme ourselves, we brainstormed with members of the community on what topics felt alive for each of us and aligned around the theme of “creative collaboration.”

• Instead of having each contributor work directly with the editor, we had contributors send them through the Foster collaborative editing app to gather feedback from each other before going through a final, professional edit to prepare it for publication.

• Instead of deciding on the Edition’s title, we facilitated an exercise in Discord among contributors to come up with suggestions and vote for our favorites. (“Several People Are Typing,” a playful reference to the text shown when multiple people are typing in a Discord window, was the clear winner.)

• Instead of revealing the artwork once the Edition was finalized, our artist for the edition, PeaceNode.eth, created a moodboard based on the themes that emerged from the work and gave contributors the opportunity to share their feedback and further the  art direction.

• And finally, instead of deciding on and executing the launch and distribution plan for the Edition ourselves, we’ve collaborated on them as well. By digging into the unique ways each of us likes to share our work online and finding commonalities and alignment among them, the group has developed a compass to direct our efforts to share the Edition with those who will be most interested in it.

The result reflects both the unique strengths and perspectives of the contributors and the collective strength of everyone involved. Win-win!

As far as the work itself is concerned, we took a bit of a maverick approach there as well. For years, the pioneers of web3 media have been telling us about the expanded possibilities for storytelling decentralized media enables:

We’ll be sovereign!

We’ll be solvent!

We’ll do it together!

These are common refrains, and we are excited about them.

However, as writers, we often feel like these possibilities are so theoretical that it’s hard to understand how they’ll play out — and what impact they might have. What we really crave are stories that follow age-old writing advice and actually show us what we can expect instead of just telling us.

So in our Call for Submissions for the Edition, we encouraged contributors to “dream and speculate and write some weird sci-fi type stuff that gets people excited for this wild new frontier of media we’re embarking upon.”

The results are both diverse and intriguing. We’ve got not one but two riveting pieces of speculative fiction that imagine a future where the line between creators and their creations is blurred. We’ve got a thought-provoking essay that shows us how community itself is emerging as an art form that challenges our current notions of media. We’ve got an in-depth look at what we really mean when we talk about decentralized media. And we have multiple pieces that explore the history of collaboration and shed light on the ways we are already making meaning together all the time, whether it’s documented in media or not.

As with any collaborative project, this Edition required thoughtful orchestration between key people involved in the release, and those efforts were both complex and time-consuming. But despite the new patches of gray hair we discovered each day (!), we wouldn’t have done it any other way. Yes, we could have made our lives easier and gone with the classic top-down approach to publishing, but we would have missed the experience of working with all the brilliant people involved in putting Edition 3 together (and ended up with something different entirely).

Taken as a whole, we feel this truly mind-expanding work could serve as an artifact for reference by future pioneers in this expanding media universe. We’re tremendously proud of the result, but we also think it’s important to emphasize how edifying and fulfilling the process itself has been.

In Simon Hudson’s essay Meaning-Making Cannot Be Automated: The Story of the Decentralized Autonomous Artist Botto, he points out that by participating in creative experiments like Botto and this Edition, “we see our own agency to govern these systems, to shape them in our image and values, and to claim ownership and shared benefit in them.”

In other words, it is in the doing of these collaborative projects that the meaning arises. And not only the meaning, but the joy.

After all, as Mathew Dryhurst said in a recent essay in ArtReview about the dawn of the AI-driven internet, “even though it is possible to spawn the perfect sound of a choir singing, that defeats the purpose of the participatory and ecstatic value of choirs.”

And we’ll throw in another quote while we have you: “A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.” It’s sometimes attributed to Yoko Ono, and sometimes to her husband John Lennon, but my guess? It was a collaboration between the two of them.

So here’s to the participatory and ecstatic value of choirs and the dream we dream together. In the world of decentralized media we are at this very moment co-creating a new reality, and it grows ever more expansive and nourishing by the day.

Thanks to Dan Hunt, Minnow Park, Rob Hardy, Michael Shafer, Theresa “Sam” Houghton, and Lyle McKeany for their thoughtful feedback and contributions to this essay.

👁️‍🗨️

Several People Are Typing is an experimental magazine about the wild future of decentralized media & creative collaboration. It was co-created by Foster, Seed Club, and Metalabel, along with dozens of writers and dreamers. You can collect a free NFT version, or purchase the physical magazine, from Metalabel.

This piece was produced by Chris Harris in conversation with Sarah Friend, Phanuel Antwi, Anne-Loraine Selke, Cassie Thornton, Magdalena J. Härtelova, Katharine Tyndall, Rūta Žemčugovaitė, Max Haiven, and Wassim Z Alsindi.

To all brave listeners at kitchen arrival
Who care beyond our individual survival
Here we commit some gathered powers
To be distributed among all ours.

Records of the Moon Circle kitchen collective are experimental and incomplete. These artifacts were consensually exfiltrated from an ambitious mission of improvisational urban ethnography around Berlin during early April 2023.

A world of insights inside a frame of fiction, historians posit we intentionally destroyed much of our written artifacts after the great A.I. privacy turn of late 2023, instead favoring direct cultural transmission and esoteric participatory presence.

In resignation from leadership of this Moon Circle, the following exquisite collage presents insights and practices from this creative cooperation of experienced collaborators, for the benefit of our collective practice, using the kitchen as a metaphor for a studio of generous genius contributions.

Quotes

[00:03:19] MH: When you make a game, you are providing a set of guidelines to allow other people to be creative or at least agent, within. You're creating a scaffolding or a structure which enables people to bring what they wanna bring to it, and you're creating a set of incentives, but I don't just mean incentives like the trophy at the end. I also mean ways that people can feel pleasure or a place that they can feel released or ways that they can feel communion.

[00:04:29] RZ: Everyone else here has been taught by someone else in a cooperative, so it's not like they come in with their own crazy grand ideas out of nowhere. So what we try to encourage is learning and developing and iterating and being curious about each other's work and talking about it. Like Donna Harway said, there is no autopoiesis, no one generates just by themselves alone.

[00:00:00] MJH: There is this thing we learn in schools, that if you start doing something, the first thing you're supposed to do is look up other artists who did a similar thing. But this is very rarely phrased as, ‘find your peers,’ like actually go have coffee with this person, because you know, you can energize each other. It is like you just look them up on the internet. So you know how to mention their name and when to say, “Well, I do this thing that the other artist does, but I do it differently.” As if we ever invent anything new. The most puzzling thing to me is like, who are you competing with?

[00:05:14] SF: One of the things I love about Moon Circle is that it really makes a place for so many different types of creativity around what a dinner can be.

[00:08:30] AL: Is competition a game we are playing because we're scared that if we don't win, we're excluded and die? Or are we playing out of a kind of ferocious celebration?

[00:09:55] CT: It's just like in any relationship basically. Like if you realize after a certain period of time of hanging out that they're not curious about you or that they don't see you, that's basically it. And I don't even need that much depth. Like I'm bored with depth … more [interested in] ping ponging together and playing together than just projecting on each other or being in isolation together. I either get really tired when I talk to people or I get a lot of energy, and if I get really tired, it's not gonna work.

[00:13:52] WA: I think we've all been in projects where we tried to do things in this maximum fair way and they did not get off the ground and it's difficult. The 'price of anarchy' gives us a conceptual framework to push back upon that, that in some cases, it's sometimes like a worthwhile sacrifice to make, to have like a pocket of decision-making authority or centralization with a plan to divest it or to move away from it. But then the problem with that is that can then be the cover for a centralized hierarchy that will never go away. If too much power gets concentrated in one place, then there is a systemic risk to the health of the collective.

[00:15:33] AL: And then there's like this very rapidly ascending crescendo of hunger and noise and the gaze is lifted and there's like a kind of like a, oh, hot damn, is this delicious? Have you tried this? Pointing each other at yet another little way of appreciating this.

There's this one place where you have this beautiful view of the forest. And at some point we had this idea to set up the washing station just right there. You watch the sunset over the forest while you do the dishes and it's made it really easy for people to just pick up the plates around them. Some people really like it, and they pick up a few more. Then there's this often really relaxed, uncomplicated chatter over the clinking of the dishes in the sunset.

We Statements

we only speak on behalf of cultures we are a part of
we attract new contributors with good vibes
we value contributions of single small specialities
we welcome all creative details; if we're serving food, the lighting, the table arrangement, the playlists, are all important creative contributions, and space is made for them
we can come to be creative or we can come to just be given things to do, sometimes we might desire one or the other
we create good constraints
we could behave as if we are flour because it's cheap and you can make anything out of it
we under-cook our food so someone else can heat it up and enjoy it later
we make food to be eaten the next day by our friends too
we cook over different intervals
we dance around each other in a kitchen
we give direction and take direction
we move each other gently when needing space to pass by
we have a ceremony of leftovers
we have a boldness to call each other out if someone is not right, in a compassionate and curious way
we seek to align our actions and our words with honest realism and grounding with regards to our mission and communications
we pay attention to what each other are doing,
we continue working with collaborators we get energy from engaging with
we feel both excited and grounded
we feel it’s worth doing
we do well with some kind of explicit or implicit shared language
we make an effort to see each other and be curious and open with each other, if not, it's not going to be a collaboration that endures.
we pingpong off each other rather than project or be in isolation together
we do what we can to make people feel included
we find our own deep meanings to bring to the collective
we seek out collaborators and peers to uplift and energize each other, rather than to reference or beat each other, we look for them beyond their work
we accept we will never be the most original, the fastest, or the most famous ever, and aim not to be that within our generation either
we create outside of the dominant paradigm of competition in the art world
we cook with what we have
we grow mushrooms in the basement
we use raw milk even if it's illegal because it has thriving cultures
we re-school the adults
we kindly kick people out if they are making others uncomfortable or just fucking around, we take them outside to ask what they were doing then they can come back next time if they better their behaviour
we operate underground from the spectacle
we refurbish old cars to give people rides
we have informal positions, like the tarot reader, and the joker, they train others
we often work without money
we raise donations and sponsorship when we need to
we are a collective of reflection, criticality and spontaneity
we are not an institution whose people are replaceable with A.I.
we have flexibility in what roles we play within the group
we rotate leadership, we make our desires for leadership known
we make our level of commitment to the project known
we engage in research and gathering
we don't over-harvest any foraged species of food
we teach each other good foraging practices
we understand resources are owned by the collective
we do recipe research as a collaborative process that takes from our collective histories and history of the area
we are cooking magnolia snap cookies for dessert
we don't lead for attention or power
we rotate leadership
we encourage our aliveness, even in the face of self-doubt
we are all worthy
we support each-other to grow
we create a safe space and also a challenging space
we create well-constrained invitations to work with each other
we work on things we are an expert in and also we work on things we are interested in
we break the patterns of legacy schooling's pedagogy of grading each other
we work on what we think is truly worth trying for, eschewing dominant narratives of contemporary competition
we actively work to make people feel safe, safe in experimentation and expression
we act to create a shared belief of safety and companionship
we work on small things together to build good relationships and then work on bigger things once establishing trust, report, conviviality
we show up with our joys and our worries
we do the work, care for our culture and craft invitations for collectivity
we continually consider how to open our collaborations to other energy
we distribute agency
we undulate between teaching and learning
we clean and prepare workspaces for each other
we build relationships with different farmers and support them in regenerating the soil we work with the seasons.
we invite the farmers to our dinners
we work with ancient ways and innovative new ways
we aim towards zero food waste
we use as little water as necessary
we understand we have all been taught or inspired by someone else, and don't take ownership of grand ideas
we wash and peel vegetables together, we sing songs, we enter short trances together
we rotate roles
we brew together, forgetting which idea was who's
we work on developing and assuring our belonging to each other
we tease out the best in each other.
we compete with ourselves for ferocious lust of the world together, not for inclusion or survival
we kindly recognise our genius
we give active help to shape and passive help for space
we eat together
we let people rest
we visit food markets to gather ingredients and local stories
we honor the care and community that has gone into our ingredients
we bring farmers cookies from our dinners
we point each other at new ways of appreciating our food
we wash the dishes with a view out of the forest towards the sunset
we create good environments for us to enjoy our work
we listen to music to give space for collective digestion
we rely on our ability to improvise, especially when we have no budget for preparation
we can do an incredible amount with almost no resources due to the open-minded, adventurous, talented colleagues
we allow space for new ideas to emerge and then give each other the fuel for them
we work with limitations to build dexterity in our creative muscles
we admire the superpower of supportive administration
we work to keep our closet of unfinished project skeletons clear
we work situated in local place
we make an effort to navigate the human and organizational story of the collective’s history
we make decisions by a show of hands and by secret ballot
we hold council meetings to asses our process and accept proposals for change
we distribute power, influence, and decision making for more organizational flavor
we collaborate in our ideas and in our production
we know when to drive our ideas and when to let go
we create incentives for communion, release, pleasure
we build containers for other people to bring their creativity
we create spaces that are warm, welcoming, and collaborative, exciting, and creatively generative
we craft good invitations to let people know how to prepare and how they will be cared for
we know how long it takes to prepare for and recover from our events, to allow us to drop into focus and structure our time for them
we have processes to incorporate the new newcomers and also to surprise the oldcomers
we trust each other to take care of the things we said we would take care of.
we trust each other to ask for help
we've made an agreement that it needs to be fun
we are ambitious
we don't get our fundamental sense of value from our work
we operate outside of the dominant logic of competition
we face sacrificial elements of collaboration ritualistically and directly
we don't believe everything is within our control
we give people the help they need
we work with the stress of the environment and work with our emotions
we make sure there is a good DJ for collaborators cooking in the kitchen

👁️‍🗨️

Several People Are Typing is an experimental magazine about the wild future of decentralized media & creative collaboration. It was co-created by Foster, Seed Club, and Metalabel, along with dozens of writers and dreamers. You can collect a free NFT version, or purchase the physical magazine, from Metalabel.

This piece was co-authored by the attendees of the inaugural Broadcast conference.

The inaugural Broadcast conference that took place on May 19, 2023 was not just an event—it was an embodiment of a vision. A vision of creative collaboration, co-ownership, and the fascinating potential of on-chain media. In the spirit of this vision, we initiated a unique experiment: a live, evolving poem. Using an application available at broadcast.foster.co, participants of the conference were invited to share their ideas, insights, and choice quotes throughout the discussions. These contributions were ingeniously processed in real time, with each idea helping to craft a poem that was displayed on TV screens around the conference—a dynamic, quirky, yet insightful representation of the collective consciousness at the event.

As the conference concluded, this live, generative poem was refined and finessed to reflect the depth of discourse, resulting in the experiment you are about to read. The embodiment of our discussions didn't end there, though. In the spirit of decentralization and shared ownership, this poem was initially minted as a unique Non-Fungible Token (NFT) under the aegis of Foster's zine. However, it will also stand alone as its own NFT, its value shared among all the creators and participants at the conference. This innovative step ensures that all 94 contributors will earn in perpetuity from the proliferation of this poem.

This creative endeavor encapsulates what we believe is one aspect of the future of onchain media. It’s not just about creating art–it’s about breaking boundaries, blurring roles, and redefining ownership. It’s about creating something fun, participatory, and collaborative. It’s about embedding the assurance of provenance and immutability. It’s about celebrating the multitude of voices that contribute to the evolving narrative of media. It's about the promise that every voice, every contribution, and every idea matters–just as every verse of this poem does. This is the future we envision at Broadcast, a future we are excited to share with you through this poem.

In the labyrinth of our shared reality,
A question dangles, ripe with perplexity.
Is this onchain community building a curiosity,
A new form of media, or mere fleeting tendency?

On the canvas of interconnected infrastructure, we explore,
Seeking operational models that offer more,
Luxury media experiences, sparkling galore,
Narrate tales in the onchain core.

With a touch of anti-utility, a dash of aspirational identity,
We venture through the uncharted sea,
Bringing forth remixes of IP,
In a symphony of collaborative creativity.

Against the backdrop of AI's endless replication,
In a world of permissionless social gravitation,
The question of authorship sparks an interrogation,
As we navigate the torrents of information.

The dance of blockchain and media, intimate and complex,
Informs the rhythm of our collective reflex,
In this room of enthusiasts, shaking off the Web2 annex,
We bring a new vision into context.

Podcast NFTs and co-ownership lead the narrative,
Challenging us to rethink how we live,
How we create, how we give,
In this digital, cryptographic sieve.

Woven into the tapestry of pixels and chains,
Is a resonance that remains,
'Engagement walls' and 'paywalls' we reframe,
In the ethos of Web3, forever ingrained.

From zine aesthetic to broadcast babe,
We've written a new page,
In the annals of the digital age,
A new perspective on the stage.

With DAOs, creators, and voices diverse,
Together, we traverse,
The contours of this media universe,
Where co-creation and community converse.

From AI abundance to crypto's scarcity,
We question content's veracity,
In this city of candles, glowing with audacity.

Co-written by Adam Delehanty, Alexa Lombardo, Ameer Suhayb Carter, Amanda Young, Amir Gamble, Austin Robey, Blake Minho Kim, Bradley Freeman, Chase Chapman, Christina Beltramini, Claire Miran, Cyprien Grau, Dan Hunt, David Phelps, David Feld, Diana Chen, Doug Petkanics, Eli Zeger, Eileen Isagon Skyers, Eric Tang, Gregarious Narain, iain nash, Isabel Gonzalez, Isabella Arnao, J Myers, Jess Sloss, Jess Sun, Jihad Esmail, John Garry, Jonathan Victor, Jose Mejia, Kelsey Byrne, Kelvin Fichter, Kristie Graybill, Kurt Slaw, LDF, Leah Smith, Mathurah Ravigulan, Michael Silberberg, Mikey 0x, Monty Preston, Natalia Murillo, Natasha Hoskins, Nick Susi, Patrick Rivera, Patrick Workman, Payton Garland, Rafa, Richie Bonilla, Rocco, Rodolphe Ködderitzsch, Sage D. Young, Samantha Ayson, Sara Campbell, Serra Saridereli, Shannon, Shawn Cheng, Sierra Henry, Simon Yi, Steph Alinsug, Sterling Proffer, @rmxceo, Thomas Scaria, Tina He, TOADY HAWK, Will Collier, Xian Zheng, Yana Sosnovskaya, Yondon Fu, Viren Parmar, Zack Guzman, Nicolas Madoery, Amelie Lasker, Austin Barack, Cheryl Douglass, Christian Reza, Francois Vaxelaire, Gavin Bains, Iban Sadowski, Jason Goldberg, Jonathan Colmenares Mendez, Julienne Worring, Kinjal Shah, Manuel Dilone, Max Segall, Michael Kriak, Mike, Niko Cunningham, 0xsmac, Ravi Bakhai, Ruby Thelot, Sam Furness, Sören Wrenn, Wenyi Zhu

👁️‍🗨️

Several People Are Typing is an experimental magazine about the wild future of decentralized media & creative collaboration. It was co-created by Foster, Seed Club, and Metalabel, along with dozens of writers and dreamers. You can collect a free NFT version, or purchase the physical magazine, from Metalabel.

This piece was written by Marisa Rando.

As we strive for progress, we often overlook the lessons that the past holds for us. Like kids, we feel that earlier generations don’t understand us - as if all our problems are unique and require newfound innovation. We see life as temporal and novel when in reality, we live in a series of cycles - the same happenings repeating themselves over and over again.

I was reminded of this the other day when I rewatched one of my favorite films called Network. Released in 1976, it tells the story of a news anchor about to be let go after years on the job because of low ratings. This triggers psychological distress that causes him to lash out on air about the harsh realities of the world - inflation, recession, crime, conflicts with Russia (sound familiar?). Without giving too many spoilers (because I really want you to watch it), the film follows our protagonist to the underbelly of the media machine - showing his rise to stardom when the network profits off of his “refreshing perspectives” until things start to turn. Our world now faces an eerily similar avalanche of issues, paired with high media skepticism. Unsurprisingly, today only 7% of Americans indicate a high level of trust in news media.

Network called out nearly 50 years ago what has become common knowledge today. Traditional news media is no longer an engine for truth-telling. Their form of “journalism” prioritizes shareholders over people - using sound bites, sensationalist headlines, and narratives that serve political and corporate interests to keep people hooked and ratings high. It is no wonder we refer to “the media” in such a derogatory way as the harm it causes us is palpable.

Some see the emergence of social media as a major step in progress against this centralized control because of how it's enabled anyone to share information from anywhere, at any time. However, any person with an Instagram or Tik Tok knows that it’s far from a liberating experience. The consistent selling and stealing of our attention/personal information is certainly not a negligible point - but in the context of decentralized “free speech”, what’s most concerning about these platforms is the content they censor. With these centralized forces as our standards for media, it feels easy to forget that media has also served as a tool to create revolutionary change.

Revolutionary media

The revolution will not go better with Coke
The revolution will not fight germs that may cause bad breath
The revolution WILL put you in the driver's seat
The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised
Will not be televised, will not be televised
The revolution will be no re-run, brothers
The revolution will be live

-Gil Scott-Heron

Released a few years prior to Network in 1971, these words were born out of a similar frustration with the corruption in news media. In the real world, was a country deep in upheaval over the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War - on television was commercial media selling the idea of a “perfect America.”. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised is a powerful rallying cry not only for Black liberation but for a nation to turn its backs on the false sense of security promised of corporations and take action.

Though the message has been misunderstood to mean “there will be no live media coverage of the revolution,” — this is not what Scott-Heron is saying. The poet is suggesting that the revolution can not and will not come at the hands of profit-motivated corporations and that revolution is not a passive activity. One cannot simply consume it, retweet it, or make an aesthetic of it. The revolution (both as something personal and societal) is an active commitment to dismantling systems of oppression.

This cautionary tale resonates today as we’ve seen media used as a form of performative allyship from companies to drive more sales or as a tool to make activism as easy as sharing an infographic to your Instagram. Scott-Heron’s words urges us to think more critically about what we consume, how we create, and what real-world action we’re taking.

Media created by grassroots organizing groups has emerged as a counterforce, with the designed intention of promoting solidarity and a sense of belonging. These groups utilize collective media creation - a democratic and decentralized process that prioritizes the perspectives and values of all participants involved. For these groups, this process is a forcing function to practice their values and is also a liberating act itself.

This is what collective media looks like

If we want to create media that’s truly collaborative and decentralized it’s essential to examine the success of grassroots organizing, as their approaches are grounded in an understanding and unlearning of the systems that push us into hierarchy and isolation, to begin with.

Groups like the Black Panthers in the United States, the Zapatistas in Mexico, and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) all over the globe have been leaders in this work. To them, making media wasn't about selling ideas or “building a brand” for their organization. It was a vehicle for demonstrating their values, building a strong collective, amplifying underrepresented voices, and prefiguring the better world they believed was possible. Below are a few of the principles grassroots organizations have used to tell collective stories and mobilize millions.

Decentralize creation

Growing up in a perpetual workforce, determining our value by our productivity, it is extremely hard to slow down and let go of control. In my early days of organizing, I thought I could come in and shake things up. I’ll show them what I’m capable of. Ultimately, I realized that performance and standing out is not what this work is about. It’s about re-imagining these structures of individualism and output we’ve been given, not just applying them in different settings. Most of us find it challenging to break free from broken frameworks and dream up something better collectively. But not the Zapatistas.

The Zapatistas, a notable Indigenous organizing group in Mexico, have a core belief about the way they operate — their goal is to create ‘Un Mundo Donde Quepan Muchos Mundos’ (‘A World Where Many Worlds Fit’). A world where difference and nuance are things to be honored, respected, and nurtured. This differs even from the world of radical organizing itself as many groups throughout history have treated their practices like a religion with rigid texts to recite and centralized leaders to follow.

Their principled yet flexible approach has led to an impressive flourishing of feminist leadership and education and the creation of multiple autonomous rebel Zapatista municipalities. While each community maintains its values/practices of Indigenous traditions, horizontal governance, gender equity, mutual aid, and agro-ecological food sovereignty — they’ve designed localized democracies to give them both sovereignty and support from the core organization.

The Zapatistas refuse to rigidly define their way of living (what the outside world calls Zapatismo) because they see their struggle as one small part of a collective fight against capitalist exploitation. Their success in building a resilient and radical base has come from building solidarity not only with other Indigenous Mexican communities but with liberation movements around the world.

Prioritize intersectionality

"Whenever you conceptualize social justice struggles, you will always defeat your own purposes if you cannot imagine the people around whom you are struggling as equal partners."
- Angela Davis

Angela Davis was a core member of the Black Panther Party and a fierce advocate for intersectionality - a practice that looks at the connectedness between all types of identity markers (race, class, gender, etc.) and how they relate to systems of oppression - in the Black Liberation Movement. Between her speeches, interviews, and book ‘Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement,’ she has been a consistent voice for solidarity across many global crises as examples of the same capitalistic, colonial, racist injustice. To Davis and many others in the Party, the analogizing of these struggles not only helped grow their supporter base but kept their party focused on the end goal  - dismantling all systemic oppression.

Building bridges of solidarity is crucial to effectively organize and create motivating, expansive media. Whether it be illuminating the voices of Palestinians living under apartheid to combat the narrative of a fair “conflict,” or giving voice to the victims of police brutality in the US - The Black Panthers were consistent in their showcasing of  stories across Black and brown communities all over the world. Lifting up their voices and advocating for their shared struggles strengthened all of their movements simultaneously.

The Party for Socialism & Liberation (the PSL) is a present-day global organizing group that takes an intersectional approach to their work. Their online publication, Liberation School, covers political happenings in Cuba, China, the United States - and everywhere in between. Wherever there are people organizing, it is very likely the PSL is involved and/or reporting on it. Also, based on Marxist-Lenninist ideology, they keep their focus on combating capitalism anywhere and everywhere it perpetuates inequality, rather than targeting specific groups or pundits.

Serve the people

In April of 1967, long before Twitter and smartphones, the family of a young man was desperate to get more information on the death of their son. They were rejected by law enforcement and the local news media, who dismissed their concerns. The family decided to reach out to members of the Black Panther Party for help getting clarifying information, support, and justice for their son. The murder of 22-year-old Denzil Dowell by a sheriff’s officer in Richmond, California, was the catalyst for publishing the first Black Panther, the newspaper of the Black Panther Party.

Their first issue — while novice in design with handwritten elements, misalignment of layout and photos, clearly photocopied — served a meaningful use. It let the public know that the police were omitting facts of Dowell’s death without accountability, asked for their help in demanding justice, and encouraged them to organize for self-defense.

The Black Panther became a powerful tool for the Party that would continue all the way until 1978, inspiring so many staples of the modern Black liberation movement — like the image of the clenched black fist to the slogan “All Power to the People”. Unlike many of the publications of today, its intention was not to entertain, boost subscribers, or drive ad sales. The newspaper was created to serve a real need — to be a vehicle of communication and organizing for the people.

Much of how we see grassroots organizations using social media today mirrors this principle. Requests for resources for a neighbor in need, rallying support for a protest, amplifying stories of injustice - groups today know that media is a tool and put it to good work. So if you want your media to captivate people, ask not how your media can entertain, but how it can practically serve its readers.

Keep it real

Organizing is messy work. But so is living. And in both instances, we pretend this isn't the case. We obsess over the perfect wording, lighting, and aesthetic — wanting to give the illusion that everything is neat and orderly. When it comes to our organizations and their “manifestos'', the same is true. What we see today are often poetic, intellectual narratives coming from one central voice for “brand consistency”.

While it makes for nice reading, there’s real harm being done when we work to apply polish over our outrage and humanity. Our desire to hide the messiness of decentralized work in an attempt to appear more intelligent or “put together” and appease a more high-brow audience rejects the values of the collective itself. David B. Holt advises against this strategy in his essay "Why the Sustainable Economy Movement Hasn't Scaled". He claims when we try to make our impact-driven efforts more “marketable” to an influential mass (who he refers to as “bourgeois bohemians”), we further isolate the ‘average worker’ we claim to be trying to serve (who he calls “Main Street”). In other words, we cannot “glamify” or intellectualize our efforts — we must normalize and embrace our messy humanity.

In my work with Pact Collective, an organization focused on mutual aid, collective healing, and political education in New York City, we’ve had similar conversations. Should we talk about mutual aid as something hip and happening to drive more donations? How does one market mutual aid anyway? While these statements are clearly exaggerated, the testament remains that we should be careful not to let corporate thinking and strategies seep into the world of social justice. In Pact's experience, prioritizing connection with our neighbors through real-life events over digital campaigns for potential donors has always yielded the most effective (and enriching) results.

The raw, authentic manifestos like the Zapatistas and the Black Panther Party, which read like recorded speech, are examples of authentic and inclusive content done right. They’re simple, clear, and accessible — which likely explains why they were able to garner such large-scale support. Inspired by this work, a local mutual aid group that I organize with recently decided to rewrite our collective mission statement together. The end result is a mix of everyone’s perspectives (gathered via Google Forms) meshed into a beautiful creed that has all of our words.

Whether it be technology or media, this principle of co-creating something that genuinely reflects the whole rather than creating to impress is where we must change if we want people to see themselves in our missions. As a person who’s spent many years copywriting, the motto I and many peers have followed to simplify technical or academic language has always been to write it how you’d speak it. If your work is genuinely meaningful, you’re likely to inspire people by simply telling it like it is.

Take action

Words can inspire, but only action can make us believe. Despite the revolutionary ways in which these groups have created media, these organizations wouldn’t have become household names without direct action. The Black Panther Party hosted countless community aid programs that helped feed and clothe their neighbors, provided culturally-relevant education, and even gave free transportation to prisons so people with incarcerated loved ones could visit them. The Zapatistas did the intense work of assembling armies, fighting for their freedom, sacrificing their lives, then later building self-sustaining communities based on care and mutual aid. Members of the PSL all over the globe continue to show up for their communities by protesting in the streets, helping tenants and workers unionize, and providing accessible education on liberation.

This is probably what Scott-Heron meant most fervently in The Revolution Will Not Be Televised — that writing tweets and “making content” cannot be an act of revolution unless it is paired with meaningful action. For these groups, their media serves as artifacts of their real-life work and influence — not as a projection of their ideas and dreams.

Many organizations I’ve been a part of have fallen into this trap too. We think that content is powerful enough to affect change. We start our impact-driven organizations the way we would start a business - by creating a website, being vocal on social media, raising funds, and printing zines. What we fail to realize is that these are all accessories of a movement, not their driving force.
When we create as a collective, we have the opportunity to build community, increase accessibility, empower each other, and resist censorship and centralization. As a recovering marketer, I am haunted by terms like “content is king” — because in the real, material world, people are too smart (and skeptical) to be sold on promises printed on flyers in trendy fonts. It’s consistency, inclusion, and real value that get people’s attention. If you want to start a movement, forget about saying the right thing — just roll up your sleeves and get to work.

Once-in-a-lifetime events can create lasting memories, cultivate deep friendships, and catalyze real change. Foster’s Season 2: The Art of Modern Writing was no exception.

Last year, I participated in Foster’s Season 1: Untold Truths. Because of that, I thought I knew what to expect with Season 2. But if you told me last year that the next season would have an entire week dedicated to diving into how AI tools could be used to “evolve and deepen our most authentic human expressions,” as it said on the Season 2 landing page, I wouldn’t have believed you.

It turns out that this is a cornerstone of the Season concept. In the frequently asked questions section, it explicitly stated that Season 2 would only take place once. It’s as if the Season were a five-week container, although perhaps more like a one-time-use container.

But take another peak at the FAQs and you could see how the container wasn’t limited to only those five weeks:

By the end of your journey, you will have published writings core to your exploration and delved deeper into your truth than you have ever thought was possible, you will come out with a strong community to support you and your writing far beyond the journey of the five weeks.

This may seem like it was a bold prediction. Yet after hearing participants share the impact Season 2 had on them during the closing ceremony on Zoom, it might not have been bold enough.

People used the words “life-changing” multiple times. Some claimed or reclaimed identities—shedding old ones that no longer served them. Several came out and boldly declared themselves writers. Others came out in deeply personal and emotionally charged ways. And all of them published their newly discovered or previously closely-held truths to the world.

The singular container of Season 2 included several workshops with somatic coach Andrew Thomas where we dove deep to unveil our individual truths—in other words, what felt true and alive to us as not only writers, but also as humans at that moment in our lives. Other sessions ranged from finding the stories burning within us with Jessica Goldberg to minting our words on the blockchain with Rafa. The workshops were buttressed by one-on-one coaching from Foster veterans Sara Campbell, Minnow Park, and Rob Hardy. And when participants drafted their Season 2 pieces, Foster’s collective of 100+ authors and editors lent their professional editing expertise to help them express their truths most effectively.

One of the other unique aspects of Season 2 was the optional retreat toward the end of the five weeks. 20+ Season 2 participants traveled to Puerto Escondido, Mexico for an opportunity to meet their fellow writers and continue the deep work of finding our truths in person. It ended up being one of the more impactful trips I’ve been on in my life, and it helped me to further solidify my own truth. Here’s a passage from a piece I wrote about my Season 2 experience called Just Enough Transformation:

The first time I said ‘I am a creative coach’ out loud, Sara Campbell noticed my body language change. I curled up a bit, making myself smaller. At first, I thought maybe that was a sign that I hadn't arrived at the right truth. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I wanted my truth to be a bit scary. Something that felt like pushing myself into new territory. And, ultimately, something that felt like I had to explore.

My Season 2 piece was about how I believe being more vulnerable can make you more attractive, even though it can feel scary. It’s not published yet because I submitted it to a publication in the hopes of getting it in front of a wider audience. It was nerve-wracking to send—opening myself up to rejection is outside my comfort zone when I could’ve just as easily published it in my newsletter. Submitting it is something I might not have considered doing without the Season 2 container.

Other participants’ Season 2 pieces weren’t quite ready to be shared publicly, as well. Yet during the closing ceremony, those writers shared how writing their pieces still felt cathartic.

Below are all of the pieces that participants boldly shared with the world. I invite you to take your time and read the pieces that you feel called to read. Feel their truths emanating from the page. If you’re moved by them, let the writers know. And if you feel called to put your own words out into the world, I hope to see you in Foster’s Season 3 coming soon.

Why I Write by Jason Nguyen
Love Beyond, a newly launched project by Courtney Boyle
Truth Time: Figuring Out Life at 27 by Jen Vermet
No More Limiting Beliefs by Kavir Kaycee
Why Did Amazon Pay Me $170k/yr to Update a Wiki Page? by Leo Ariel
Comfort Zones at a Stretch by Ryan Blunden
Confessions of a Restaurant Hostess by Alicia Kenworthy
Blooming with Purpose by Rick Rollins
“It’s Not What You Know, It’s Who You Know” by Anthony Pica
Surfing Radio Waves by Asad Rahman
The Place Between Your Journal and the World by Azalea Montaño
Emotion City by Cams Campbell
Permission to spend my savings on a sabbatical by Cécile Marion
Two AIs by Daniel Sisson
work is expression by Derrick Chiu
Between the Pages: Surviving the Shifting Seasons of Life by Irene K
Embracing the label “writer” by Jess Sun
BATTER MY HEART by JG
Making “Tell me about yourself” Great Again by Joshua Lelon
Another Move by Katerina Bohle Carbonell
Fuck Aging, But by Martin Boss
believing in bigfoot by Maxwell
Therapy You Can Feel by mel
Shitposting Hangover by Orpheus
A love letter to my writing self by Pedro Parrachia
The Body Issue by Russell Smith
The Origin of Intuitive Fitness by Sam Sager
I found out my friend died on her Instagram story by Tobi Ogunnaike
An antidote to socially rewarding self-betrayal by Yashmi Adani
remembering, for when you forget by Clayton Richards
Chief of Service: On Being a Better Chief of Staff by Philip Hendricks
From what I’m supposed to do to when I’m meant to by Syd
On Adventure by Trisha
Draw a Clock by Judith Klinger
Finding My Pathless Path by Simon Späti
Defeating the Dogstar, part 1: Darkness by Theresa “Sam” Houghton
In 2022, I Discovered I’m (Not) Enough by Nicolás Forero
Why I write (take 2) by Yi Hui
Mental Gardening by Adam Saks
A stressor by any other name would stress just as much by Jas Gill
Waking to Enchantment by Calvin Hutcheon
Maine Heist by Keji Xu
Part of the Dance by Sara Campbell
Has Crypto Failed? by Joel John
The Network Trade: Wealth creation and crony economics by Ngurah (Nura) Linggih
Becoming Caryn by Caryn Tan
Who Are We? by Dan Hunt

Writing is often thought of as a solitary endeavor. But Foster’s Season 2: The Art of Modern Writing proved that it could be quite the opposite.

One of the things I love about writing my personal newsletter is that I don’t need anyone’s permission to write about whatever feels true to me any given week. It took me a while to get comfortable with that mindset, though. Before I launched the newsletter, I felt anxious and uncertain about what I was embarking on. Other writers, editors, and mentors helped to get me over that hump and to continue publishing what I refer to as my “personal, vulnerable, and sometimes funny” stories. And I’ve often needed their support at other times in my writing journey.

Over the course of the five weeks of Season 2, nearly 100 writers convened online for a series of expert-led workshops, one-on-one coaching (from Sara Campbell, Minnow Park, and Rob Hardy), and professional and peer editing help. The goal was to dig into what felt true for us at that moment in our lives. The experience culminated in a closing ceremony on Zoom where we all published a singular piece of writing containing our truth.

I was blown away during the ceremony as each participant shared how impactful the Season was for them. Person after person told stories about how their truths were unveiled throughout the Season. They shared how being surrounded by other people bravely sharing drafts of their pieces, as well as receiving personal coaching support, helped give them the permission to step into their truth too.

Below are 15 pieces curated from Season 2 participants that embody the theme of permission. I’m excited to see how these writers progress in the future. And I have a hunch that they’ll look back at Season 2 as an important turning point in their writing lives.

The Body Issue

by Russell Smith

During the closing ceremony, Russell expressed how grateful he was for all of the writers, editors, and coaches who helped him produce this incredibly vulnerable and powerful piece. I had the good fortune of meeting him in person at the Season 2 retreat in Puerto Escondido, Mexico and he shared how impactful the Season was on him there, as well.

Read The Body Issue

Confessions of a Restaurant Hostess

by Alicia Kenworthy

Alicia shared this within the Foster community a week or so after publishing her Season 2 piece and the words speak for themselves:

My Season 2 Piece is officially my most popular Substack post to date! Something occurred to me recently that I thought I'd share here: I struggled for a bit with sharing my ’truth’ at the beginning of the season because I felt like my truth needed to be ‘heavy,’ like a secret I wouldn't share elsewhere, as if the rest of my life were a facade and THIS IS THE ONE VULNERABLE THING THAT DEFINES ME.

The thing is: the past few years of my life have included a lot of heavy things, and a lot of vulnerable moments, and I've put a lot of that out there for the world to see. In some ways, I came into this season feeling overexposed.

I think these past few weeks were about getting back to that ‘lighter’ side of me, and remembering she still exists. And that smiley, bubbly Alicia is just as ‘true’ as the Alicia who's dealt with some sh*t.

This feels like an obvious statement but it was a fairly big breakthrough for me. And I think finding that voice again is why this latest piece has been so successful.

So, yay. Thankful to all of you and for this beautiful community.

Read Confessions of a Restaurant Hostess

I found out my friend died on her Instagram story

by Tobi Ogunnaike

Tobi shared this reflection on his Season 2 experience with the community after hitting publish during the closing ceremony:

For more than a year, this story has been burning inside me, kicking, screaming, demanding to be written. It’s easily the most difficult but most necessary thing I’ve ever crafted. Thank you Alicia K, Caryn, Cameron for helping me mine this reflection from the pit where I buried it.

Read I found out my friend died on her Instagram story

From what I’m supposed to do to what I’m meant to

by Syd

The Season 2 container gave Syd permission to start a brand-new Substack newsletter. In the community, she described her Season 2 experience as “writing about the process of exploring and accepting that I’m not meant to be what my environment led me to believe I was supposed to be.” That’s some seriously powerful (and empowering) insight.

Read From what I'm supposed to do to what I'm meant to

“It’s Not What You Know, It’s Who You Know”

by Anthony Pica

Anthony is not new to writing a Substack newsletter, but his Season 2 experience culminated in the launch of a new Substack and shifting from writing professional-oriented posts to telling personal, memoir-style stories. His piece is a touching tribute to his “one-of-a-kind mother-in-law”.

Read "It's Not What You Know, It's Who You Know"

Embracing the label “writer”

by Jess Sun

Jess describes the feeling of trepidation around embracing the title of “writer”. It’s something every writer grapples with, especially early on in their journey. After sharing her reflections on Season 2 over Zoom, she emphatically shared her piece in the community with the all-caps caption “I’M A WRITER”.

Yes, you are, Jess!

Read Embracing the label "writer"

Truth Time: Figuring Out Life at 27

by Jen Vermet

Jen’s words that she shared in the community during the closing ceremony beautifully sum up her experience and what she wrote about:

Existentialism swooped in as my 27th birthday neared during this season, it granted me permission that my life is ‘figured out’ by letting go of ‘figuring it out’.

I now feel much freer and lighter to share more openly about myself after confession of the pretender I have felt like I have been and releasing that pressure that my past self has put on me.

Read Truth Time: Figuring Out Life at 27

A love letter to my writing self

by Pedro Parrachia

Pedro’s words speak for themselves, as well. I guess that’s what happens when you’re surrounded by talented writers.

Foster's AoMW season 2 changed every aspect of my writing and through that also changed who I am. Thank you, every one of you for that.

In his touching Season 2 piece, he gives his writer self permission to write what’s in his heart.

Read A love letter to my writing self

Shitposting Hangover

by Orpheus

Despite writing about a fairly niche topic (i.e. a small-ish corner of Twitter), Orpheus felt supported and empowered by the Foster community to get his thoughts out into the world.

This is niche BUT it's PUBLISHED — thanks Foster friends for helping me actually put words on paper.

Read Shitposting Hangover

Chief of Service: On Being a Better Chief of Staff

by Phil Hendricks

I lent some editing help on this piece, and I commend Phil for digging deep and sharing his personal story more within it. Here’s how he described the process and working with his one-on-one coach:

Finally published my essay which I could not have done without the help of Foster. Thank you to everyone that contributed, especially Minnow Park!

Read Chief of Service: On Being a Better Chief of Staff

work is expression

by Derrick Chiu

Derrick is another Season 2 participant I was lucky enough to meet in person in Mexico. He’s just getting started on his writing journey, but he kicked it off with a banger! This is the reflection he shared in the community during the closing ceremony:

I used to think ppl didn’t want to hear all the messy details of my story. But S2 challenged me to share the most vulnerable parts of my story and truth with the world, as the ultimate way of connecting with others. I’m forever grateful for this experience.

Read work is expression

In 2022, I Discovered I’m (Not) Enough

by Nicolás Forero

Nicolás—another Season 2 participant I got to meet IRL—shared this touching note about his Season 2 piece during the closing ceremony:

I'd like to thank the four fantastic human beings that helped me create it: Russell Smith, Lyle McKeany, Danver, and Yashmi Adani. Three which I got to meet in person what seems like [an] eternity ago.

To Andrew Thomas whose hotline made me realize that there wasn't a more important topic to write about than this one.

And to Audrey O’Regan, Derrick Chiu, and many more who, through conversations, helped me explore what I should add to make the piece more me.

Read In 2022, I Discovered I'm (Not) Enough

Surfing radio waves

by Asad Rahman

Asad is another participant who is just starting to pave a new writing path. Here’s how he described the process of writing his Season 2 piece:

The piece is the first (baby) step on a much bigger journey I have been on during the season: that I can write about personal experiences, not just stuff about my job, and those experiences are interesting and meaningful to others.

Thank you to Theresa “Sam” Houghton, Jason, Nicolás Forero, and others for the feedback, and Sara Campbell for coaching me this season. Foster is a magical place ✨

Read Surfing radio waves

The Mythical Crisis

by Euwyn Goh

Euwyn really hit the nail on the head much more succinctly than I could with his description of his Season 2 experience:

Up till now, writing for me has been an all-consuming and emancipating exercise, but even more often a frustrating and brain-scratching exercise. But being a part of the Foster community (with all of you) has been SUCH great help, as I've found the spirit permeating this community to empower precisely this sort of truth-unearthing endeavour, painstaking but ultimately rewarding as it is.

Read The Mythical Crisis

Blooming with Purpose

by Rick Rollins

Rick’s initial draft was transformed quite dramatically because of his Season 2 experience, which he expressed in the note he shared in the community after publishing his inaugural post on his new Substack newsletter:

My piece started this season formal and uninspired. But then I started reading other authors’ writing, and I was amazed at how vulnerable they were willing to be in their writing. I committed myself to doing the same.

Read Blooming with Purpose

The permission to share

You may have noticed a pattern amongst the words participants shared about their Season 2 experiences. Read closely, and you’ll see the names of other participants woven throughout those shares.

That’s part of the magic of writing in community. Season 2 provided an intentional container for participants to be seen and heard, which gave them the permission to share their true selves with the world.

I've grown to resent labels like “founder” and “entrepreneur.”

Their mainstream conception feels tired, limiting, uninspiring, and at times, unreal. Sure, I’ll default to one of these labels for simplicity's sake and ease of conversation. But I’d rather identify as something else, or maybe nothing at all.

Forget what you think it means to start a company/community/movement, to build the future, or to embark on any other entrepreneurial endeavor.

Instead, consider the concept of a “Dreamwalker.”

The dreamwalker receives a vision, whether during the day or at night, and feels a deep calling to bring that vision into reality. The dreamwalker roams the landscape that exists between “the dream world” and “the real world.” They practice, over and over again, walking between the two realms.

A practicing dreamwalker might find, as I have, that our waking life resembles a dream; and our dreams are, in many ways, more real than our waking life. Like the dreamwalker, I have a dream that visits me often, during the day and at night.

Read it as reality, suspend your disbelief for a moment, and be here with me…

I wander down the windy road of a small surf town in Oaxaca, Mexico, and a sudden wave of insight rolls over my being. I scramble to grab my phone, letting my stream of consciousness flow into the slick black screen.

But the ocean’s calling, the waves are high. There’s no time for a full draft. So I quickly post to Foster, excited to see what might come of these scattered thoughts.

A few hours later, I’m drenched in salt water, arms tired, and mind at ease from a day out on the water. I pick up my phone to check on the draft and find dozens of comments from subject matter experts across the world. They point out opportunities to go deeper, counter-arguments to consider, new perspectives that could be incorporated, and vivid language that could better illustrate my point. There’s loads of silly banter and philosophical discourse in the margins.

I’m having fun reading it all, and from there my perspective and the piece start to evolve.

Over the next few days—on a hammock in the sun—I edit and revise the writing, working off the momentum Foster contributors created. When finished, I rise from my hammock and proclaim in triumph, “finally, it’s ready to share with my people!” My girlfriend gives me a quizzical look, but I am resolute. This process, from random street-side idea to writing I'm proud to share, never gets old.

Before publishing, I allocate THANKs—Foster’s native gratitude points, our tool for explicitly recognizing and expressing gratitude for the contributors who most helped develop the work. This essay wouldn’t be what it is without them, and the acknowledgment for their contributions deserves visibility, as they are true co-creators.

I publish the essay as a Writing NFT on Mirror. There’s now a permanent record, etched into the blockchain, that the ideas covered in the piece originated with us, the co-creators. I send the piece to friends who share my fascination with linguistics, mythology, semiotics, human development, decentralized organizations, co-creativity, or collaboration. Within hours, my phone lights up with notifications. The excitement is palpable. The piece spreads.

A few of our supporters purchase the NFT to signal their support and further invest in our creative work. It’s just a few grand, but enough to justify the hours spent. I feel a wave of pride that a dozen contributors get a cut automatically, based on the THANKs they received. It feels like the beginning of a new era; one that recognizes all of the people behind a project, not just a singular author.

The dream jumps… and I fast forward a few years.

“Back then, we didn’t understand what writing 'on-chain' really meant,” I exclaim to my friend Richie, who sits adjacent to me. “We didn’t realize we were at the beginning of a new kind of historical record that all of humanity would be able to access permissionlessly, use artificial intelligence to search and parse, and retroactively recognize and reward ideas that would impact them decades—and even centuries—later.”

I whip out my phone and show Richie how the piece has become a seminal work, referenced widely across the space. And as recognition for the value we added to their teams, several DAOs have even written our NFT into their smart contracts and now distribute a small but meaningful percentage of their revenues to our NFT essay because of the value it has created. I click into the piece and show the web of contributors, and the compensation that has flowed downstream to them even now, years later.

“We could never have imagined this when we started writing. We were all having fun in a Google Doc, creating narratives that excited us, and weaving together our unique gifts and understandings in ways we could never accomplish alone. We were on the frontier of what it means to write together online, and that was good enough for us.”

I flicker my eyes and come back into present reality… a different one, where things are still something else.

I reflect on my dream of writing work that’s etched into the fabric of space, time, and history. One that is forever attributable thanks to decentralized databases and has created an endless chain of perfect understanding for how societal stories and ideas impact each other and evolve.

The piece of writing I saw in my dream; co-written, co-owned, and retroactively rewarded for its intellectual and narrative power. It stands in stark contrast to the way stories are crafted, distributed, and monetized today.

Storytelling has the power to transform society for the better, but we don’t understand and value it that way. Not yet, anyway.

I won’t inundate you with negativity—but we live in a consumptive and junk-media-addicted world that’s lost sight of its co-creationary and participatory power. We have forgotten that we’re already co-creating all that’s around us.

I’ve come to realize that the writing in my dream serves not only as a reminder of how media might be co-written, but also how the future itself might be co-created. Bottoms-up, representative, collaborative, permissionless, equitable.

The dream I've written of today isn’t “mine” in any true sense of that word. We're all standing on the shoulders of giants. Yet sharing it with all of you is one more step towards co-creating the future. It has become our dream.

Dreamwalking sometimes feels lonely and treacherous—like traversing a rickety suspension bridge hanging between the past and future. But like most aspects of life, it's best navigated and reinforced together. It takes many dreamwalkers, and many hours of walking through mysterious and uncertain woods, to chart a path that others feel safe to follow.

We’d do well to remind each other of what we’ve seen on the various frontiers of our dreams, express our visions courageously, and find others who are walking a similar path.

In that spirit, today’s story is only one fragment of the co-creationary future that Foster contributors are dreaming up for themselves, for internet writers, and for the nature of media itself.

We're building the more beautiful internet our hearts know is possible. But this dream cannot be contained in one piece, or one magazine edition, or even one book. It’s always evolving, a living-breathing entity that requires all of our participation to create.

Thank you to Rob Hardy, Minnow Park, Elisa Doucette, and Sarah Maxwell for help on this piece. It’s been published as an NFT, and all proceeds from sales will flow to these contributors for their generosity.

Seeking courageous writers & editors | Safety not guaranteed

The frontier ahead is vast and unknowable, full of opportunity and peril. We're looking for like-minded creatives to forge ahead with us and help us shape the future of internet media. If you'd like to build Foster alongside us, help writers tell their stories, and make the internet more human, we humbly invite you to apply to join our collective.