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(Crypto)Punks, Clubs, and Finding Belonging in Unlikely Places

Once upon a time on Twitter:

I was on the road and groggy with cold meds when this conversation happened, so I told my friend Rushkoff I’d get back to him when I was home and rested up. I thought that would be a week or so later. It’s been 2 months and I haven’t stopped thinking about it, in fact I’m still not entirely sure how to answer it. That complexity on its own is kind of interesting so I thought maybe exploring it in public might get a little closer to an answer, or if nothing else relieve my guilt of taking so long to respond.

I think the main question here is “is this replicable?” – that is, could another group look at what is happening in the cryptopunks community and mimic/apply/encourage something, and get similar results. But to answer that we need to answer another much more difficult question first – what is “community?” And that requires accepting that the word “community” has become a completely worthless buzzword in web3 thrown around by marketers who don’t know shit about what community is. Community comes from human relationships and shared experiences and camaraderie and giving a shit about each other. Community is not about profits, floor prices or bag holders. 

So I first need to define what I think about when I think of community, and in thinking about how to do that, I tried to think of other places where I’ve observed or experienced something similar and what those relationships are. At the core, it’s a trusted familiarity that comes when you’ve known someone for a long time, or you’ve been through a difficult situation together. There’s a feeling of being able to depend on each other, and a little bit of understanding who the other person is that doesn’t happen overnight. I have a small group of friends who I’ve known since high school and we all still talk regularly. We’ve taken different paths in life but we know where we all came from, and no matter today’s differences we know we can count on each other. I think in many ways this is the idea of “family” that is so idealistic but is rarely attainable, at least in my experience. We have the family we were given and the family we choose. Or more accurately in today’s global always online world – the families we choose.

As a kid I moved around a lot and never had the chance to build strong bonds with other kids. It wasn’t until high school and finding punk rock that I found people I clicked with and related to. I had a very lonely childhood when I finally found a place where I fit in, I never let it go. Ironically the place where I fit in is legendary for preaching independence, being yourself, and standing up for what you know to be right regardless of what others might think of you. I like to think I’ve taken those ideals to heart. That could seem unrelated, but it’s not. Keep reading.

I’ve written before about this and how it’s certainly driven my lifelong fascination with communities and subcultures and how people relate to each other. So any discussion of what an awesome community is will be informed by those experiences. People are diverse, but the commonality that they share lets them understand something about each other, and this creates a higher level of baseline trust that you’d find in just some random gathering.

This is a kind of intangible idea so it’s hard to quantify, but it manifests in different ways: supporting each other’s businesses and projects is obvious, openly sharing connections and networks is another. Looking out for each other, in public and private. That could mean professional services, or personal advice. It’s something like… “If you need something, I’m here for you.” That seems overly simplified, and maybe it is, but sometimes simple things are the most powerful. 

So how do you get that familiarity? Time. Time is the answer in 99% of situations. Put in the hours, prove yourself, and eventually the people who are still around have built something with each other. And when applying that to a group, when you put that time in is important. In most situations, most communities, you join and then work your way up or earn trust over time. Your cred in the group is tied directly to how long you’ve been there. However even though this is the most common I would argue that this isn’t always ideal. The well worn stereotype of the elder community member trying to squash the actions of the newer member comes directly from this. Sometimes the people who have been there the longest are also the most jaded and critical of anything they didn’t come up with themselves. Lots of ‘get off my lawn’ going in communities with age based seniority.

The other way provides some insulation against this, which is that a potential member has to prove themselves before being able to join. There’s a number of different ways this can happen which I’ll get to in a minute, but the result is attaining membership in the group itself becomes the vetting mechanism, so members can fast track through all the ‘getting to know you’ business and skip right to familiarity and trust with any other member they meet. 

An example of this from pop culture is the scene in Chuck Palahniuk’s “Fight Club,” where Tyler Durden makes wannabe members of Project Mayhem wait outside of the Paper Street house for several days while constantly and repeatedly being insulted and told to go away. The idea being that anyone who wasn’t really committed to the cause would give up and leave, while the ones who remain despite the abuse would eventually be welcomed as family. The (factually questionable) story says this comes from ancient Buddhist traditions where a potential monk’s dedication was tested by forcing them to wait outside of a temple for 3 days before being allowed to enter. Entry isn’t about participation but commitment. The friction ensures that those who join aren’t mere onlookers. And the people on the inside know that the new arrivals are serious.

But this idea exists outside of the realm of fiction, one well known example is the culture of motorcycle clubs. Potential members go through a prospecting phase before receiving their full set of membership patches. During this time, a prospect is both under the protection of the club but subordinate to all members of the club and expected to do anything asked of them, immediately, without question. The severity of this fluctuates wildly depending on the club and the chapter, but in any case this lengthy trust building phase is designed to weed out people who aren’t serious, and ensure that once someone is officially welcomed in any other member can trust them completely the second they meet them just by seeing their patches.

A friend of mine, a full patched member of a well known 1%er club once described the experience simply – “once you’re in, you’re in.” The bond was immediate, and like family. And while the ritual of it all obviously plays a role, at the end of the day it’s not just about the jackets or the bikes; it’s about the shared experiences, the ethos, the passion. This dynamic is echoed, perhaps surprisingly, in niche communities like Cryptopunks. Despite the obvious different stakes, the essence of belonging is strikingly similar. Ask anyone who, after first getting a cryptopunk, was bombarded with welcome messages and a flood of “one of us” gifs in one of the gated chat groups what that felt like.

(As an aside, “one of us” is a reference to the controversial 1932 film FREAKS which, at its core, is a film about a group of people, carnival workers, who built their own community, having been ostracized by mainstream society.)

And yes I recognize the hilarity in drawing parallels between gritty, underground subcultures and a community centered around digital art collecting. And no, I’m not implying that owning a Cryptopunk turns you into a knife wielding badass. But I am highlighting a common dynamic that prioritizes a sense of belonging through shared experiences.

And it’s not just bikers or carnies, for almost 25 years now I’ve practiced an esoteric Japanese martial art which involves training with old, very senior instructors often at their own private dojos or groups. These locations and schedules are not published openly, by design. The only way you get there is by having trained with the right people, built trust and earned rank. So if you are there (and there often is someone’s home), it’s because you know enough to be there – so some level of trust is implied. Again, this isn’t unique. There was a time in various surf/skate/punk cultures where being in the wrong place at the wrong time – a beach, a ramp, a venue – could result in a trip to the hospital. You had to earn the ability to be there, prove yourself in the scene to get access. While these places were technically open to the public, the public was in no way welcome. But for those who had earned the right to avoid harassment, you also knew anyone else there had your back.

I’m belaboring the point here and you may be thinking I’m an idiot drawing this connection because all of these things require time and potentially blood, sweat and tears to earn your way in, but consider this: There are no accidental Cryptopunk owners.

As we approach the end of 2023, if you are holding a Cryptopunk that almost certainly means one of a few  things:

  1. You were very early to all of this, you saw the importance and potential and jumped at it. But even more, you didn’t sell and walk away when these things were going for $150k each. That you are still here means you believe, even with everything that has happened, this is still just the beginning.
  2. You weren’t early enough to get in when these were free, but you understand the importance, and paid the very high price of entry because you didn’t want to miss out.
  3. Or, someone in one of those first two categories believed in you so much that they felt you needed to be in as well, and gave you one (or a big discount on one).

The process may be different but the end result is similar:  If you are here, you are here for a reason – and just the act of being here tells the other members something about you.

And this brings me to another important similarity. Most of these groups – bikers, skaters, punks, (even the fictional Project Mayhem devotees) experienced stigmatization. These people were viewed with suspicion or even disdain by mainstream culture. And we all know that NFT enthusiasts, with their “expensive JPEGs,” face sneers and scorn from skeptics who are still in the vast majority.

Being mocked or stigmatized for your interest can be painful. But at the same time these negative labels, when embraced by a community, become a badge of honor. It’s in the face of external social judgment that the true strength of a community shines. Finding solace among like-minded individuals can be empowering. Keeping this in mind, that FREAKS reference hits even harder.

Another example – the fiercely individualist Church of Satan describes its membership as a “mutual admiration society.” I love this phrasing. It underscores a base level of respect extended to each other automatically, especially poignant in a group that is totally diverse by design. These aren’t mere social clubs; they’re support systems. Strip away the surface differences, you find at the heart of each community the notion of mutual respect. This is huge, especially for people who may not experience that anywhere else. 

And this gets back to one of the “awesome” things I was referring to in my original comment – unlike most interactions today, where disagreements almost immediately devolve into traded insults, communities built on mutual respect facilitate enriching discussions. Intellectual discourse allows people to disagree and still maintain a level of civility. In an increasingly polarized world, the comfort found in these communities becomes ever more attractive. 

Don’t get me wrong – nothing is perfect. Bad actors exist everywhere and no community is immune to extractive leeches. And for sure there are some real goddamn assholes who own cryptopunks – but the high barrier to entry serves as a filter which keeps those to a minimum. Perhaps if you spend $100k to walk in the door, you aren’t likely to want to shit on the carpet. Conversely, if the cost of entry is only $10, there’s a certain kind of person who will happily pay up, then gleefully shit all over the place just to see the reaction.

Also, yes anyone with deep enough pockets could just buy a Cryptopunk tomorrow, but the opaque community structure and confusing web of unconnected chat groups almost requires a guide, some introductions and a bit of social vetting from within the community. It’s not exactly like being invited to a private dojo, an MC clubhouse, or a well protected surf spot – but it’s not entirely different either.

And similarly, there’s not just one thing. Just as Hell’s Angels have a different culture than the Mongols, and an SF chapter will have a different culture than a Venice chapter, just as skaters in New York have a different culture than skaters in Dallas, it would be silly to think all Cryptopunk owners are the same. And the community reflects this – the culture in the Discord is different from the culture in the Telegram group which is different from the culture in a local city group which is different from the culture in a private twitter group. There are subsections and they are drastically different by design, but it’s the commonality that they share which brings them together.freaks

So to find my way back to the original question of whether one needs to own a Cryptopunk to experience a similar community, the answer is as complex as the community itself. Two things I want to call out: Owning a punk doesn’t guarantee the same community experience, and similar experiences can be found in other communities. It’s also important to understand that none of this is static, people are ever changing and their communities with them –  a community today is different from that community yesterday, and tomorrow’s will be different still. 

While all communities have unique structures, I recognize some patterns – bottom up organization, mutual respect among members, and some barriers to entry. Having skin in the game, be it financial or sweat equity, feels important. It’s not explicit, but in a way we are talking about secret societies. Simply owning a punk isn’t an all access pass. The opacity of community channels and social vetting echo characteristics found in more traditional “closed” communities. Can’t ignore the irony there for a community built on a foundation championing indelible openness and transparency.

Cryptopunks aren’t the only multi-gated online community, and any number of other collections, open-source projects and even traditional social groups also offer pathways to similar experiences.  So, while the Cryptopunks community cannot be copied, its core ethos is not unreplicable. As communities continue to evolve in the digital age, perhaps the more important question we should be asking ourselves is not how to get in, but what we, as members or hopefuls, bring to these spaces to make them more meaningful.

Intentional Communities

When thinking about community, I always stress the value of intentionality. Often people first think of rules and what they don’t want in their community because that’s easy, but I always try to encourage moderators and community managers to reframe that and instead try to identify what they do what. Try to describe the community that you want, that you want to hang out in, by what it is, not what it isn’t. Try to write every point as a positive not a negative. It’s actually harder than you think to do this, but I believe it makes a powerful statement and attracts people who want the same thing as you as well as helping you fine tune your own intentions.

Two guiding documents I helped write that I’m really proud of are the Safecast Code and the Cryptopunks V1 Discord server etiquette.

For Safecast, the environmental non-profit I helped start in 2011, we wanted something for our volunteer community to act as our guiding principals, so in 2014 we published this:

We’ve been thinking about what describes the Safecast project as a whole, and came up with a list of 10 things that we try to incorporate into all of our efforts. This is something like our code of conduct, what are we doing, what we should be doing. We try to check ourselves against this list and encourage others to do the same.

  1. ALWAYS OPEN – We strive to make everything we do transparent, public and accessible.
  2. ALWAYS IMPROVING -We can always do better so use agile, iterative design to ensure we’re always refining our work.
  3. ALWAYS ENCOURAGING – We aim to be welcoming and inclusive, and push each other to keep trying.
  4. ALWAYS PUBLISHING – Results are useless behind closed doors, we try to put everything we’re doing out to the world regularly.
  5. ALWAYS QUESTIONING – We don’t have all the answers, and encourage continued learning and critical thinking.
  6. ALWAYS UNCOMPROMISING – Our commitment to our goals keeps us moving closer towards them.
  7. ALWAYS ON – Safecast doesn’t sleep. We’re aware and working somewhere around the world 24/7
  8. ALWAYS CREATING – Our mission doesn’t have a completion date, we can always do more tomorrow.
  9. ALWAYS OBJECTIVE – Politics skews perception, we focus on the data and the questions it presents.
  10. ALWAYS INDEPENDENT – This speaks for itself.

I’ve written before about the overuse and redundancy of Discord servers in the web3 space so with for the Cryptopunks V1 Discord I asked that we think of what didn’t already exist, but that we wanted to exist, and explicitly try to create that. I’m proud of these guidelines and think they’ve helped shape a friendly and welcoming community.

  1. We are inclusionary and you’re welcome here. No matter what you look like, where you come from, what you have or your beliefs; you’ll be treated with respect.
  2. We are here to have fun but not at the expense of others.
  3. We celebrate CryptoPunks and Web3 Punk culture in its entirety. We recognise the visionary of our creators, LarvaLabs; the current owners of the brand, Yuga Labs; and all of the wonderful Punk derivatives. We reject repeated, intentionally divisive or derogatory comments towards any in the Punk ecosystem.
  4. We show respect and positivity because we want to be respected by the wider community.
  5. We share our interests, achievements and current projects without incessant shilling. In general, if you’re repeatedly bringing up a particular topic without prompt, that could be considered shilling.
  6. We’re all at different stages of our journey and continuously learning. Teach others about your experiences, learn from others about theirs. All questions are good questions and our chat is an open forum.
  7. We recommend you turn off DMs and be extremely careful in the interactions you have here. Phishing, impersonation and all manner of trickery are persistent threats.
  8. If you post a suspicious link, NSFW/NSFL content our mods might act to ban or mute you immediately. If in doubt about whether something is acceptable, it’s better not to post.
  9. Mods are here to clear away bad actors and facilitate positive discussion. If a mod asks for a discussion to move on, or to an alternate channel, or reminds you of these guidelines; please heed their advice.
  10. We Punks are ultimately the moderators of our peers. If you see something that isn’t constructive to the community we’re building, say something.

While I’m not trying to suggest these are perfect or pat myself on the back too much, I think these are two really good examples of directional documents that can help a community shape itself rather than just leaving things up to chance. If you are a community steward, manager, curator or janitor I can’t recommend doing something like this enough.

The End of Social Media

Social Media is on the decline. Not just any one site but all of it. The entire idea. Traffic everywhere is down. What we once saw as a way to stay connected to our friends became a tool to be used against us. By advertisers after our attention, by politicians pushing their propaganda. Any passing thought potentially turned into ammo for haters years down the line, influencers and thought leaders trying to lead and influence our thoughts. People getting fired for likes and retweets, or executed for daring to speak out. It’s no surprise that these sites are less appealing than they once were. But where are people going instead? Private chats, direct messages, curated groups and gated discords. Back to our friends, away from everyone else.

Some of you might remember the running joke on Twitter circa 2009 where anytime anything bad happened we’d explain it by saying “Brands.” Why was the price of gas going up? Brands. Why weren’t my friends seeing my tweets? Brands. Why did the radio keep playing this song I hate? Brands. You get the idea. Thats about the time the site shifted from being a place to talk to your friends to being a place for brands to sell you things. Social media was exciting when it was a place to learn the news from locals talking about their own experiences, but that was quickly taken over by major media who wanted to capitalize on the attention. “That’s where people are, so that’s where we’ll go!” At one point I was arguing “we don’t need to say social media anymore because at this point all media is social” though at the time I thought that was a good thing, I thought that was a sign of news outlets giving in to our way of working, but it was actually them co-opting it for themselves.

At some people people started writing safety protocols for the younger generation signing up for the sites filled with thoughtful precautions none of us had ever taken ourselves. It took almost 20 years, but our worst fears all came true. I talked to my son about this and he bluntly said there’s nothing appealing about any of these sites, it’s just people trying to push shit on him and he doesn’t see any reason to ever spend time there. No one sees his posts anyway. He’d much rather hang out in a voice chat with a few of his friends. Thinking back to my own childhood and how much time I spent on the phone and how exciting 3-way calling was and even the introduction of Party Lines (though I was never allowed to try them) I can’t really argue with his logic. 

The thing that made the internet so exciting, the chance to connect with other people, has been turned into endless commercials and non-stop surveillance. That’s what we were trying to get away from in the first place. Writing this I don’t know why I still spend any time there either. If the algorithms don’t even let me see posts from my friends who I intentionally follow, what’s the point? Maybe I just want to see how it all ends.

I do find myself getting much more out of the private telegram groups and gated discord channels. Secret societies without all the pomp and theater, (not that there’s anything wrong with the pomp and theater) just people with shared interests connecting and hanging out. In a way, it’s what we wanted from Social Media in the beginning, but could never be done correctly by a company. We just needed a protocol that worked, a way to connect A to B without a need to jack up user numbers or meet profitability goals. Let Zuck and Elon and all those other fucks have the castles they built. They’ve become useless to us and we’re moving out.

I write that knowing it comes across with all the earnestness of a 7 year old storming into the kitchen and informing his parents that he’s packed up his favorite toys and is running away because he can no longer live under the oppression of their mandated bedtime. But I’m not pounding my chest acting like we’ll go build our own site and show them! I’m just saying that for most of human history people were able to communicate with their friends directly and it worked out pretty well, and for the last couple decades we tried letting companies be the intermediary to those relationships and it was a disaster, so we can just go back to talking to each other directly. Those sites need us, but we don’t need them. Sure there’s an entire generation or two that don’t know how to communicate without Facebook but the algo will get them too, or red pill them or whatever else causes their families to stop talking to them and they will have to pick up a phone. The change won’t be overnight, but it’s inevitable. RIP social media. You had your moment, and it was fleeting af.

From Ashes to Ether: The Paradox of Burning Cryptopunks

“If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”

Obi Wan Kenobi, Star Wars

Navigating the intricacies of 21st century life, we find ourselves wedged between the tangible and intangible. This delicate interplay, threading through all aspects of our lives, resonates most significantly in the realm of art. The convergence of physical artworks and their digital counterparts, alongside the rise of novel, purely digital art forms, prompts a reexamination of our deep-seated notions of creativity, ownership, and value.

Burning, a process of sending digital artwork to an inaccessible wallet address, presents an intriguing paradox. The work becomes both present and absent; observable by all, yet owned by none. Destroying a physical artwork is destructive and sometimes an act of violence, but burning an NFT is different as the work isn’t destroyed so much as made immortal. Over the past few years, this duality has come into focus with the burning of several Cryptopunks. 

For those unfamiliar, Cryptopunks is a genre-defining generative art collection from 2017 consisting of 10,000 individual characters which acted as a catalyst for the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) boom witnessed in 2021. It has spawned innumerable derivatives, causing a cascade of influence across the current artistic vista. Yet, Cryptopunks transcend the realm of mere collectables having been adopted as a form of digital self-expression. 

At one point utilizing a Cryptopunk as a profile picture bore resemblance to wearing a T-shirt from an obscure band–more than a mere fashionable statement, it became a conduit for conveying one’s identity and personal interests, a form of digital street cred. The emotional bond established with certain Cryptopunks is as profound, if not more so, as the deepest reverence we feel for any emotionally charged piece of art. Consider Cryptopunk #3831, now part of the LACMA permanent collection, is this a piece of digital art of a portrait of a famous collector? Depending on your perspective, perhaps both.

Within such a framework, a burned Cryptopunk echoes the poignant loss of other momentous artworks lost throughout history. Picasso’s “Le Peintre” was destroyed in a plane crash; Freud’s “Untitled Oil Painting” fell victim to an accidental garbage crush at Sotheby’s. Many artists have also destroyed their own work intentionally. Both Monet and Richter slashed several of their own canvases, with Richter later expressing regret.  Notably, Banksy’s “Girl With Balloon” was transformed into “Love is in the Bin” after the artist intentionally shredded the piece post-auction. Even more pertinently, the BurntBanksy project sold a video of Banksy’s original 2006 screenprint “Morons” being set on fire as a fractional NFT in early 2021.

The loss of these important art pieces strikes a painful blow to our collective consciousness, as they are irreplaceable fragments of our cultural tapestry. However, unlike these lost treasures, burned Cryptopunks are not compromised in the visual sense. Rather, they transition into a form of digital ‘commons,’ disrupting conventional perceptions of ownership and value. Should financial potential alone dictate value, thereby rendering a non-sellable entity worthless? Contrarily, I would argue that such a shift positions cultural value squarely in the spotlight.

When an NFT, symbolizing some collection of exclusive ‘property rights’ to a digital artifact, is burned, it propels us into a complex discourse on ownership, copyright, reproduction rights, and the overarching legal structure of digital assets. Artist Dmitri Cherniak, for instance, played with this paradox in his “Dead Ringers” collection, where each piece was dispatched to a randomly generated wallet address, rendering the NFT effectively ownerless, and at the same time allowing everyone to view and even print out a copy for themselves. The artist stated he considered this a celebration of “birth, life and death” and we can contextualize this duality of owned/unowned by everyone/no one similarly to Schrodinger’s Cat, simultaneously occupying both states.

Digital ownership, as exemplified with NFTs, lacks a clear historical parallel. Unlike museums that possess certain rights to their displayed works, the digital realm operates under a nuanced, distinct set of rules. With no recognized ‘owner,’ the rights attached to these burned Cryptopunks come into question.

The motives behind burning these Cryptopunks, like physical art, vary: accidental—through erroneous address copying or incomplete transaction submissions; deliberate—as a publicity stunt or conceptual commentary. As these digital assets appreciate in value, so does the weight of these actions, amplifying past actions and errors. 

As collectors, we are custodians of this art and we should consider the responsibility of safeguarding our possessions for future generations. While traditionally, destruction signifies loss and cultural regression, the implications of such ‘loss’ in the digital space are more open to interpretation. What constitutes ownership and possession in the digital realm, and how do these intersect with monetary and cultural value?

Burned Cryptopunks serve as a potent reminder, a warning, and perhaps a promise. As we traverse digital landscapes, we don’t discard the societal and cultural dynamics rooted in the physical world. Instead, these dynamics transform and amplify, their full implications still unfolding before us.

[this article is cross posted from my new site focused on documenting this – burnedpunks.com]

V1 Cryptopunks: Artistic Intention Vs Public Reception, or What Happens When Art Takes On A Life Of Its Own

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When we talk about Cryptopunks and the controversy surrounding the V1 contract, there’s always the question of respecting the artist’s wishes. In general I agree that an artist gets to decide what their art is and isn’t as long as they are working on it, but once they release that work to the public it’s out of their hands. Public reception to a piece of art and the artists intention are two wholly separate things. With Cryptopunks this gets a even muddier because we aren’t just talking about a difference between intention and reception, we’re talking about hindsight and ongoing revisions to a narrative. The artist’s intention when the work was released and how they feel about the work several years after the fact may not be the same thing and shouldn’t be conflated. Add to this a healthy dose of misinformation and misunderstanding, even from supposedly authoritative sources, and you have widespread audience confusion. I hope to help clarify some of that a bit with this article.

It would be impossible to address every rumor, however there are two core themes I hear time and time again; Firstly that V1 Cryptopunks were never intended to be released (this takes on various forms: I’ve heard claims that they were a beta release, only a prototype, or as I’ve just heard recently that they were an unreleased experiment, stolen years later by hackers straight from the artists hard drive) and secondly that the “artists wishes” are the end-all-be-all when it comes to art appreciation.

So let’s unpack this. As a refresher Cryptopunks were released to the public on June 9th 2017 as a free claim. They were fully claimed by June 18th which was also when a bug was discovered in the contract, a new contract was published on June 23rd. The “new” Cryptopunks were airdropped to people who had claimed the “old” cryptopunks and with minor exception until 2022 anytime anyone talked about Cryptopunks they were referring to the “new” contract. The primary problem with all iterations of the “they were never intended to be released” story is that it erases everything that happened between June 9th and June 23rd.

On June 16th Mashable published an article about Cryptopunks and both Matt Hall and John Watkinson (collectively Larva Labs) are quoted in it. It’s very clear from the article that they are talking about a project that has already been released, not a project they are planning to release in the future. A quick read of this thread by Matt Hall in the r/ethereum board on Reddit posted on June 9th, 2017 should remove any question that the project was released, Matt even explains how to claim a punk in the comments. It’s entirely safe to say that had a bug not been discovered this would have been the single Cryptopunks collection. Just as a revised or expanded edition of a book doesn’t magically undo the release of the earlier version, the new Cryptopunks contract published on June 23rd doesn’t change the fact that separate contract was released to the public 2 weeks earlier.

I feel like I need to be exceptionally clear here – I’m not arguing about which contract is “the real one” or challenging the fact that the V2 contract is unquestionably the official version, but the often repeated claim that the V1 contract was never intended to be released is entirely false. What is true is that when Larva Labs released the V2 contract they assumed because of the bug in the V1 contract which prevented sales, people would simply lose interest and forget about it. And for a while that is what happened, but the thing about code and bugs is that people often find ways to patch them, and the thing about history is people like the stories. So while it’s fair to say that after the release of the V2 contract the artists did not expect the V1 contact to be traded, it’s incorrect to say that at no point did they intend to release the V1 contract.

Skip ahead a few years to 2022 when people started trading V1 Cryptopunks (thanks to a newly released wrapper that patched the bug), there’s no question at all that the artists did not want this to happen and they stated as much publicly. Surely the artists position on their own art is important, right? Well, kind of… but on some level this is like a parent raising a child, they have hopes and dreams for their children but at some point their children grow up and move out and have their own lives independent of their parents wishes. When an artist puts work into the public, what happens after that is not really something the artist gets to control.

It’s clear from statements Matt & John made in 2017 that they were intentionally publishing something onto the blockchain in a way that was immutable and out of their hands, and part of the “experiment” as they called it was to see what people would do with it. I think there’s a very good argument to be made that the artists intention – part of the art in fact – was very much for the work to have a life of it’s own. The friction arises because the path that work eventually took wasn’t what they’d initially imagined.

Go! Be free! Wait, no! Not like that!!

But let’s abstract this argument a bit and look for other examples in art and culture where a creator made something, released it to the public, and then changed their mind. This happens all the time in fact, but I picked 3 well known examples to illustrate a variety of outcomes and interpretations, and asked my Twitter followers about them.

Blade Runner. In Philip K Dick’s book “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” the main character Rick Deckard is unquestionably human. For the movie adaptation screenwriter David Peoples made that much more questionable, and in the film itself which famously has several revisions of its own, director Ridley Scott is quite forcefully painting Deckard as a replicant. Public opinion has largely accepted that position, even though it’s distinctly not what the artist intended. Now you could argue that the movie and the book are different in many ways, and given that they were made by different people one is more accurately a derivative, or inspired by the other, rather than being a direct reflection of it and I’d probably agree with you, but I think it’s an important example none the less as it shows that most people aren’t even aware of how the character was originally written.

But what about an artist changing their own work? George Lucas did exactly that with Star Wars. The 1997 “Special Edition” made a number of significant changes to his 1977 film, primarily in the way of visual effect but also to the story itself. The most famous of these is the Cantina scene where Han Solo kills Greedo. In the original film, Han shoots first which casts him in the role of aggressor. In the update, Greedo shoots first and Han dodges and returns fire in self defense. This is a drastic shift in narrative for a beloved character, and while the “official” version has Greedo shooting first, and Lucas, the artist, has disavowed the original storyline, it’s quite clear the public is not on board with that. Even though all currently available versions of the film have this update, (this is an important detail – you can not buy or rent a current day production of Star Wars with Han shooting first) fans still insist Han shooting first is more authentic.

I say fans intentionally here because I’m talking about people who love Star Wars, love the characters and love the universe. These are not haters or critics, they are fans. Fans who love a piece of work created by an artist, and simply disagree with something the artist later changed. This is important to note because I often see people who speak fondly of V1 cryptopunks being accused of hating or trying to fud the V2 or “official” Cryptopunks collection and I don’t believe the to be true. I think these are fans, people who love the art, and simply disagree with the artist’s current position.

Another film example is Steven Spielberg who, for the 20th anniversary of E.T. The Extra Terrestrial digitally altered some scenes where FBI agents with guns are chasing children. Spielberg said that in modern context that could be interpreted the wrong way, and he replaced the guns with walkie talkies. Again here fans of the work had their own opinions about this change, some welcomed it and others argued this changed the entire feel of the film. They remembered being children themselves and watching these scenes and being terrified for the young characters in the film, a feeling that was lost with the FBI agents suddenly being less threatening. Years of debate raged on and for the 30th anniversary Spielberg actually put the guns back into the film and stated that he was disappointed in himself for making the change in the first place. In my poll this has a less decisive public opinion with an almost even split about which way it happened, and I think this illustrates well the separation between artist and audience.

These are well known examples but history is full of this kind of thing. From J. D. Salinger pulling his writings from publications after the popularity of Catcher In The Rye to Kanye West continuing to change his album Donda after it was released. “Done” is a fairly flexible concept to many creatives.

To belabor the point, artists intentions change over time. And people may connect with one position and object to another, but artists can’t dictate what people will resonate with or how their work is received. They can, as is the case of Star Wars, say “This is the real version now, and this is the only version I like” but even Lucas doesn’t deny the earlier version exists, and Disney who now owns the Star Wars franchise offers officially licensed merchandise embracing the debate.

My argument here is twofold – I maintain that there is no rule fans must agree with an artist’s feelings about their art, and that’s OK. I think people can be dedicated fans and deeply love a work of art while disagreeing with how the artist themselves feel about it. This is not inherently disrespectful, and these differences often create a richer story and fandom.

I also think this history is important. To the timeline, but also to the people who played a role in the story. 

Speaking again about Cryptopunks, Matt & John have stated that these were not immediately embraced by the public (it took almost 12 hours for the first Cryptopunk to be claimed) and for several days they thought the experiment was a flop. While a few people had claimed some, by the time the Mashable article ran on June 16th, a week after release, there were still a significant number of punks that hasn’t yet been claimed. The article kicked off a claiming frenzy and a day later they were all spoken for – but this is also part of the story and being able to look at the on-chain history and see if a particular punk was claimed before or after the Mashable article is fascinating. For some of the people who were there and claimed their punks before that article ran, this is a point of pride. That history is lost if you only look at the V2 contract, which shows all 10,000 Cryptopunks were claimed on June 23rd.

Like any of the examples above, this is something that some people might not care about but others care about deeply. And it’s those stories and history which makes things special. The story of V1 Cryptopunks being released, being flawed, being forgotten, and being brought back to life by the fans is powerful and adds another rich layer of texture to what is already the incredible story. As a fan myself, I’m glad others recognize this and I love learning more and talking about it with friends who share my passion.

To end this with a call to action, one that is potentially more important than this footnote makes it out to be – Yuga Labs, who is now the owner of the Cryptopunks brand (they are the Disney to Lucas’s Star Wars) has undertaken the not-insignificant job of placing Cryptopunks into contemporary art museums, with the intention of ensuring punks are protected and regarded as the culturally important artifacts that they are. Sadly, thus far these donations have only included the V2 Cryptopunk even though Yuga Labs is in possession of the V1 punks as well. While I understand they need to maintain a position on what is “official” I’m disappointed by their denial of the “original” and I sincerely hope they will reconsider, as Spielberg did, and donate the matching V1 Cryptopunks to those museums as well. Even Larva Labs kept the V1 & V2 punks together in the same wallet for over 5 years before transferring them to Yuga. This history is important and should be preserved for the next generation of fans to enjoy.


Decentralizing Social Media

From the very beginning of the internet we’ve wanted to talk to our friends. Or to talk to people who might become our friends. At first this was easy because there weren’t many people online so you could know everyone who found their way into an IRC channel or MUD or various other chatroom but as more people got online staying in touch with your friends became harder and it wasn’t long before our online social networks evolved into and were enabled by social networking sites (SNS). In my memory this starts with SixDegrees, for others it might be Friendster, Xing, MySpace or any number of other sites where you could subdivide everyone into a smaller group of people you wanted to connect directly with long before most of the world found their way onto Facebook. And everyone who has every used one of these sites has faced the same dilemma – leaving.

Not that it’s hard to walk away from any particular site but it is hard to walk away from the friends you made there, and in a very real way this became one of the tools used by these sites to keep you there. If you leave the site you are leaving your friends and you wouldn’t want to do that right? They used guilt along with various technical lock ins to make it very hard for you to recreate your social network on some other site. You might think of these people as friends but these sites look at your friends as valuable proprietary data. Of course this isn’t a good thing, they actually are your friends after all, but business models as they are with these sites want you to think you only have friends because they allow you to. So almost since there were social networking sites people have been trying to find ways to export their list of friends (or their social graph if you want to get fancy) and bring it into another site.

But just getting the information isn’t enough, if your friends aren’t using a new site then trying to connect with them there is going to be hard even if you somehow were able to bring over your friend list from another site. This is a problem with centralization, you need people to go to the specific place. There’s other privacy invasive options like uploading your entire address book but maybe you don’t want to show this company everyone you know, or maybe you don’t want to leak your friends private info, or maybe just because someone is in your address book doesn’t mean you want to connect with them on every social media site. Are they actually your friends or work colleague or ex-roommate or a million other potential classifications that makes this problematic? Anyway, this isn’t a new problem and smart people have been trying to solve it for a long time.

I first remember Ryan King talking about it in 2005 though he even notes then that this was a frequent conversation at the time. We were in the beginning of Web 2.0 but already imagining what Web 3.0 might be, and calling it The Semantic Web. (This is not to be confused with Web3 – the distinction between Web3 and Web 3.0 is still lost on a lot of people, and sadly a lot of the people who dreamed about Web 3.0 are missing Web3 because if silly biases, but that’s a different story for another time). Projects and proposals like Microformats and IndieWeb imagined an internet where an individuals personal data was owned by and controlled by themselves rather than by for profit companies. Rather than a website allowing you to see who your friends are you could choose to allow a website to see your friends. It was a revolutionary idea at the time, as Ryan notes, and unfortunately it didn’t catch on in the scale that any of us hoped it would. And as a result of that lack of adoption my Twitter feed right now is full of friends worrying about how they will stay in touch with each other if Twitter suddenly disappears. It’s got people talking about Mastodon again, which while open source is really many of the same problems in a different uniform. And so the dreams of 2005 have gone largely unrealized in the last 17 years.

Until now…

If you have been paying attention to whats going on in Web3 then this description of “own your own stuff” probably sounds familiar. And this is where things start getting really, really exciting. (Well, I mean if you are a nerd about this stuff it’s exciting, and I clearly am, and if you are still reading I’ll assume you are as well.) There are two new blockchain based protocols I’ve been playing with, Farcaster & Lens, which are super promising and already delivering on some of these dreams and I wanted to share them here.

Farcaster is a “sufficiently decentralized social network” which combines on-chain (ethereum) with off-chain to create something where people own their own information, their usernames, social graphs and posts, and decentralized enough that anyone can build something on top of those profiles – and enables people to switch between services without needing permission from a company. A quick look at the growing ecosystem shows how people are already putting this to work. For example right now the primary Farcaster application (which is not yet publicly released) doesn’t show public profiles, but Discove.xyz is built on the protocol so you can see my profile here.

(Farcaster as seen in the desktop app)

Lens Protocol is a decentralized social graph built on Polygon which takes the interesting approach of making your username an NFT and then minting NFTs of your connections, which then allows any application using the Lens protocol to just look at your wallet and then immediately build out your profile. For example here is my profile on Lenster which is currently the primary SNS using the protocol, and when I signed into Orb (another currently mobile only option) it instantly populated my profile, posts, and followers/following with everything I’d set up on Lenster.

(my profile on Lenster)
(My profile on Orb)

I didn’t need to export anything from Lenster, I didn’t need to import anything to Orb. Didn’t need permission or anything. When I updated my header image on Orb, the change was immediately reflected on Lenster. I looked at a few other Lens based sites and it was the same everywhere. Possibly even more exciting is that not only the posts were mirrored, so were the reactions. Hearts, replies, shares, etc.. all the same everywhere. It was mind blowing. Of course there are ways to syndicate out a post from a Web 2.0 SNS to others, using IFTTT for example you can write a script to send your Tweets to your Tumblr, or you can connect Twitter to Instagram so that a photo you post on Instagram is announced on Twitter, but the result is that these are still separate sites with individual comment threads and ultimately disconnected. With Lens it’s all the same, because they are decentralized and I as the owner of the post and the profile let each site access it from the blockchain. However we haven’t moved entirely from Web 2.0 to Web3 yet, so luckily there’s a way to send things back as well. I tested it out and it worked brilliantly – this post originated on Orb, was cross posted to Twitter and reflected on Lenster. Obviously any replies on Twitter stay on Twitter, but a reply on Lenster is seen on Orb. It’s magic.

(as seen on Twitter)
(as seen on Lenster)

Looking through the ecosystem lists on both projects I don’t see any option to sync the two yet, however I can’t imagine that is going to be too far away. Similar problems being solved in both and a lot of overlapping ideas. I’m really so excited to see this and to realize we don’t need to have the “____ sucks now because [policy/management] change, I’m deleting this app, where is everyone going next so we can connect there?” conversations every few years any longer. Obviously this is early days, these are beta applications on beta protocols but I can see where it’s heading and it’s so much of what I’ve been dreaming about for almost 20 years. I’m sure it’ll take a little while for this to click with everyone, and a lot of people are going to need to get past their crypto biases, but this really is the empowered user world we’ve been hoping for. If we’re friends, if we’re connected on one of any number of current social networks, I do hope you’ll check this out sooner rather than later. I don’t think mass adoption is an if, it’s a when.

Marilyn and Punks and Art, Oh My!

The TL;DR that you need to know before I get into this is that CryptoPunks is a “digital collectable experiment” from 2017 which predates but is also credited with kicking off the whole NFT craze, in fact helping define the standard. I wrote about the different versions of them earlier this year. One could argue, and I do, that most of the biggest and most popular NFTs are derivatives in one way or another of CryptoPunks. Randomly generated from a collection of traits, there are 10K individual CryptoPunks which people often use as avatars. Separately, CryptoPhunks is a 2021 derivative project which literally copied the entire CryptoPunks collection and flipped it horizontally (in either a cash grab or protest, depending on who you talk to and at what point in the story you are referring to – I plan to write more about this in the future), creating a mirror image and kicking off a huge debate about appropriation, fair use and IP rights in this wild west of digital art.

The CryptoPunks collection is incredibly influential, having spawned hundreds/thousands of derivative projects as well as millions of nasty replies from haters on Twitter with accusations of being a “crypto bro” for anyone who dares use one as their avatar. They get referenced all the time in clickbait articles proclaiming shock and awe about how much one of them sold for recently. Point being, people know about them. As a connoisseur of culture with impeccable taste I’ve really enjoyed seeing the creativity they inspire and I’ve collected some of my favorite derivative works in this little virtual gallery if you want to look around. I’ll be expanding that in the near future but it’s still pretty interesting at the moment if you want to follow the thread of inspiration a bit.

Recently I discovered an artist called PIV who has been doing studies of CryptoPunks in relation to fine art, namely Abstract Modernism and work in that orbit. I picked up a piece called “Pablo Picasso” which references the famous 1953 photo of Picasso by André Villers. 

l: Villers 1953 / r: PIV 2022

For the less visual and more musically inclined this is like Johnny Cash covering Nine Inch Nails “Hurt” or Guns N Roses covering Wings “Live And Let Die” or Redman referencing Cypress Hill with “Sawed Off Shotgun, Hand On The Pump.” It’s one artist giving a nod to another artist. If you know the reference it’s an immediate reward, if you don’t and you are curious it’s an invitation to discover work you might have missed. I love this kind of thing so fucking hard. So in this “Punkism” series PIV is very intentional with their work, limiting their palette to colors and pieces of CryptoPunks.

Putting CryptoPunks in this context of Pop Art is kind of brilliant especially when you consider the influence that Pop Art has on contemporary culture it’s hard to argue that CryptoPunks don’t have that same influence on digital art and culture right now. So it’s a fitting comparison. Obvious as it may be, you can’t talk about Pop Art without acknowledging Andy Warhol and indeed PIV did that directly but also almost in passing with an earlier work entitled “Six Marilyns.” This piece inspired a larger collaboration with Tom Lehman (former CEO of Genius.com which itself was previously Rap Genius and focused on annotating song lyrics to help people understand the references artists were making – just to bring that around even further). The pair teamed up to create a collection of “Marilyn Diptychs” which, using code most often used to create generative art like the CryptoPunks themselves, they made endless variations on a single CryptoPunk which itself looks a lot like Warhol’s Marilyn drawing a direct reference to Warhol’s diptych. 

“Foundation Supports Him” PIV & Lehman, Generative 2022
A collection of “OC Marilyn Diptychs” by PIV & Lehman, 2022
Marilyn Diptych, Warhol, 1962

Let’s talk about Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych for a second – did you know this was not initially intended to be a diptych? Art collectors Burton and Emily Tremaine were visiting and saw the two pieces displayed next to each other and suggested that they should be paired, which immediately seemed like the obvious choice. But Warhol’s Marilyn image itself is worth spending some time with. I really like Tina Rivers Ryan’s description of the work, she writes:

“Warhol’s use of the silkscreen technique further “flattens” the star’s face. By screening broad planes of unmodulated color, the artist removes the gradual shading that creates a sense of three-dimensional volume, and suspends the actress in an abstract void. Through these choices, Warhol transforms the literal flatness of the paper-thin publicity photo into an emotional “flatness,” and the actress into a kind of automaton. In this way, the painting suggests that “Marilyn Monroe,” a manufactured star with a made-up name, is merely a one-dimensional (sex) symbol—perhaps not the most appropriate object of our almost religious devotion.”

“Shot Sage Blue Marilyn” Warhol, 1962

Like most of Warhol’s portraits he didn’t ask permission which occasionally caused legal issues, but also directly relates to the issues of appropriation and fair use that surround the CryptoPunks and many of their derivative works, and in fact one might say much of the entire NFT market. Warhol’s intentional repetition of his images, which would degrade over time as screens were used slightly changing each one, were meant to both desensitize people to the image, but also reclassify the icons already present in his audience’s cultural awareness. In many ways, a 10k avatar collection does much of the same things, though I’d argue that wasn’t the initial intent.

Coming back to these new Marilyn Diptychs and to play with the tech even further, if you own one of the diptych NFTs you can extract any of the individual Marilyns from the piece into its own profile picture/avatar which is now not only a derivative of Warhol but of the CryptoPunks as well. Again, I love this.

9 examples of “OC Marilyn PFP” by PIV & Lehman, 2022

But as I said before, this is conscious. It’s intentional. It’s humans seeing one thing and taking something else and bending it to look similar to the other thing. Which is the art of it all, but it also got me thinking about the generative aspect more.

As many of you know last year I collaborated with my longtime friend, artist Shepard Fairey, on a generative NFT project called DEGENERATE/REGENERATE where we used scans and elements and details from his previous work as well as some of his better known iconography and using this kind of generative tech came up with 7400 individual pieces that are randomly generated but true to his aesthetic. They looked great, which we expected, but what we didn’t expect was that they would combine some of his work in ways he hadn’t previously considered sparking new inspiration which he’s taking back to his physical work. So you have this cycle of inspiration – human inspiring the computer, the computer then inspiring the human. The ever evolving body of work now has DNA from both going forward. It’s pretty exciting and I expect you’ll hear more directly from him about that in the future. But I’m getting off the point, which is about the ghost in the machine, so to speak.

PIV’s work is intentional. They consciously decided to make art that references other art. But CryptoPunks are not intentionally referencing other art. They are just a collection of individual traits – hair color, style, eyes, mouth, glasses, etc thrown into a generator which was told to spit out a 100×100 grid with 10,000 individual combinations (This is a little known fun fact, unlike most avatar NFT collections today which generate 10,000 individual images, CryptoPunks is just one single image with a grid of the individual punks). It was an art experiment – no one knew how it would work out or where it would lead.

CryptoPunks, LarvaLabs, 2017

This got me curious, without the human hand and intention – could I find a similar but unintentional reference? I narrowed down the traits to sort through and began hunting, eventually landing on CryptoPunk #3725 which is, to my eye, damn close to Warhol’s Marilyn. The only real discrepancy being the green eye shadow. Blue would have been better and there is a blue eye shadow trait but it doesn’t appear with the rest of these traits – the mole, the blond hair, pale skin, etc anywhere in the original 10k CryptoPunks collection. But there was something about it that still wasn’t right. It was facing the wrong way. I immediately thought of CryptoPhunk #3725.

l: CryptoPunk 3725 (2017) / c: Warhol’s Marilyn (1962) / r: CryptoPhunk 3725 (2021)

It’s perfect right?

I get so excited thinking about the randomness that led to its creation. A script blindly and emotionlessly assembles a hodgepodge of traits – essentially a realization of the infinite monkey theorem –  and makes an almost perfect match. Years later a reactionary protest act puts on the finishing touch. Neither of these two actions intend on this result, but we end up here nonetheless.

I knew it was a crazy long shot but I reached out to the owner of Phunk 3725 and made an offer. To my surprise and delight, they accepted and I am now the owner of Phunk 3725. This piece draws a direct, yet accidental, connection between these two eras of art. It’s incredibly important, and I’m psyched to be its caretaker.

Why Web3

In the summer of 1993 I saw the World Wide Web for the first time and to this day it remains one of the most exciting moments of my life. The possibility and the potential was so obvious. This was a place where anything could happen, and everyone could see it. Over the next few years it stopped feeling like a destination and I no longer differentiated between “the real world” and “online” – it was all real and always happening, sometimes I was away away from my keyboard.

By the early 2000’s these amorphous blobs of content we were putting online started to find ways to work together. Small pieces loosely joined. We were on the verge of connecting everything and it was going to be incredible. Tech conferences felt like summer camps. All the people you’d met online coming together and hanging out in hotel lobbies. We put faces to names, and stayed up all night imagining the future. That feeling changed in 2004 when the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference was rebranded as The Web 2.0 Conference. e-Tech became Web 2.0, officially.

That year I ran into a friend outside of the conference. They looked upset, almost distraught. I asked what was wrong. They told me they’d just taken an elevator that was packed with people they didn’t recognize. They’d looked at name tags to try and find a connection and rather than seeing familiar startups or friend’s projects they saw SAP, Oracle and various banks. I said “so what?” They said, “When the money and enterprise guys show up, you know it’s over.” I laughed off the comment at the moment but thought about it a lot in the following years. That was the beginning of the end, at least of our dreams of anything being possible.

It wasn’t a night and day change and of course there was plenty of talk of “users” instead of “people” in what we now call the “dot-com era” or “Web 1.0” though we didn’t call it those things at the time. But Web 2.0 brought in the big guns. The focus became controlling what people could do, and owning their information. Our content, our data, anything they could get their hands on. This was the golden age of luring people in with free services and War and Peace length Terms of Service that no one read, so we didn’t realize how much we were giving up. Once we did, it was too late.

If you’ve been with me over these years you know I’ve been critical of Web 2.0. I have spent a considerable amount of time talking about the web and what we do with it, what we could have done, and where we went wrong. I had so much hope, and felt so much disappointment. Obviously I wasn’t the only one, which is how we found our way to Web3.

Web3 is not Web 3.0. It’s not a sequel or an update to Web 2.0, it’s a separate fork. You could maybe argue it’s a prequel but one informed by the errors of what was yet to come. While Web 2.0 was the fire started by sparks from the dot-com era, this a rewind and do-over with flameproof lining. Web3 looked at Web 2.0, saw the foundation was rotting and rather then renovating decided to build fresh on the plot next door. I could keep running with these analogies but I’m sure you get the point. When you see Web 2.0 talking heads steaming and stomping their feet that “NFTs and Crypto are not Web 3.0!!” they are right, but just not in the way they think. Web 3.0 was The Semantic Web – it already happened and chances are you never even heard about it. Web3 is something else.

     Dialup ---> Dot-Com Era ---> Web 2.0 ---> Web 3.0
                     |
                     |----------------------------------- Web3

Web3 upends the power structures we’ve grown accustomed to and puts artists and creators back into the drivers seat. Without exception, every person I’ve spoken to who I know from my mid 1990’s internet adventures agrees this feels just like that. Suddenly there are possibilities again. Suddenly all options are on the table. Suddenly Anything can happen. It’s exciting. And scary. A little bit dangerous. It’s like the run down part of town where all the artists have studios because thats where they can afford lots of space. Sure you have to be careful where you park so your car doesn’t get broken into, but the creativity and inspiration around every corner is worth the visit.

After 2020 lots of people have been asking if there is actually a reason to go back to the office, to go back to a job they hate. Web3 is giving many of those people the ability to say no, they aren’t going to suffer through a 9-5 they hate just to barely scrape up enough to pay rent. Web3 offers a future where people are in charge of their own identities, not beholden to the whims of data hoarding corporations. People control their own accounts, own their own futures. Detractors are outraged that currency and wallets play a central part in this, but currency and wallets have always played a central role – the only thing that has changed is who benefits. It’s intellectually dishonest to pretend otherwise. In 1993 John Gilmore said “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it” and in a way that is what has happened here, but we’re talking about an economy rather than censorship. The Net interpreted walled gardens and institutional lock-ins as damage. Web3 is a creator economy like we’ve never seen – by and for the people.

Now that may sound idealistic and is, admittedly. Proudly even. Because that’s what a reimagining should be. If you are going back and starting over you need to be idealistic, you need to believe anything is possible and that the best outcome is realistic. The unified, decentralized dream is sitting right in front of us. Of course it’s not assured, and there are no shortage of power hungry or greed driven actors trying to centralize things for their own benefit. We’re already seeing compromises billed as simplification. We’re seeing sour grapes from people who called this a trend or a scam and expected it to fade away years ago. There’s no shortage of self proclaimed early adopters who didn’t adopt this early enough and are mad that they made the wrong call. That’s OK, it’s to be expected. The good is the momentum is strong and things are moving in the right direction. The secret is it’s not too late. We are still so incredibly early. The surface has barely been scratched.

Another incredibly important thing here – the kids all get it. For every person over 40 arguing about the legitimacy of cryptocurrency or the value of JPGs there are 2 people under 20 who don’t even question it. Digital gold, a catalog of avatars and identities – this is the world they grew up with. It made sense in countless video games, why not everywhere else? And when you take into account that there’s been a financial crisis almost non-stop since 2001, with an ever growing list of shysters and conmen getting caught for decades of scams and frauds, or politicians getting pay offs, or secret back room deals where almost everyone gets screwed – the appeal of a public ledger for all transactions becomes crystal clear. The next generation is all to aware of the short end of the stick they’ve been left to hold, and they are simple deciding not to.

So if you are asking “Why Web3?” The answer is simple. Web3 is the future.