i’ve been thinking this morning about the last two years on the social blockchain that we call steem has afforded me — mainly from a perspective of putting together this thirty day drip feed email programme for other people to be encouraged to give it a test drive and try and drive around the other hyped blockchains that are out there, I’ve been using this two years now so I can honestly say I know a little bit about it having become a permanent resident in the place, an early adopter if you will.
I’ve always seen steem as very much a basic income experiment in some ways, of course it’s more than that but at it’s core to re-activate me to be blogging again after nearly ten years of the same old same old it was a big deal for me to want to entertain any kind of blogging again, I just wasn’t into it, many reasons, the first believe it or not was not the money incentive — it was the time and maintenance for the return it brought me was the reason for leaving my old blogging and social behind..
.. back in the early days when I was doing monthly videos based on a strategy criteria from the agency for the brand it was always a road block to being creative with the work, it was someones else vision, it was on someone else time and money, no wiggle room, this is the brief, that’s what they want, these are the topics — you did the work to get the pay, don’t get creative just follow, do and produce, soul sucking eventually I’d find.
And the biggest problem was the time suck of opinions, quality judgements, expectations to do what was ‘current’ even if it was trash and littered with middlemen wanting to take what you had and then ‘apply the brand’ to it, removing any trace of identity or your humanity in the process — in short, we were a globally hired work force that eventually would have our output watered down and cookie cut into relevant sound bits of relevancy for punchy videos to sell a product on a hope and a dream, I grew to hate it.
I was out, I was done with it, all those people at events because hollow shells to me because I could see it was a bottom feeder exercise in a race to the bottom yet nobody wanted to stand up and be counted because that would be rocking the happy clappy social media boat — I got out, I vanished, I did my own thing, based on what I saw was already way ahead in american and decided to build out my own version of it.
. .. and that’s where the cellar was born, from an idea of non-comformist, almost anarchy media production, re-writing the formal often stuffy pre-meditated idea of packing together certain assets that the ‘general public’ would feel safe communicated by — I wanted something more urban, more street, gritty, real, authentic, open and loud and awkward.
For three years I got that and I rebuilt myself up again from a very dark place, I was lucky to have clawed that back in some ways, I avoided the middlemen as much as I could and did my own thing until I could not take the self serving attitude of the city and then eventually left — swapping my cosy momentum city life where everyones doing something but nothing and instead got back to nature in a big way.
Maybe I would have never used the blockchain in the same way if I had discovered it at city level, the timing of it seems weird to me, I mean would have i taken to it as well as I did two years ago if it existed before then — would I have made the studio out differently, would it have served me better in this blockchain powered economy than the one of chasing down work, grants and audiences? Maybe, who knows.
One thing I can say is that algorithms have been kinder to me than the majority of ‘business’ people have in my travels, they don’t come with emotional baggage and middleware controlling methods — they just run, they work, your time put in, your connections you make, the things you do, all have a number attached to them, your longevity here and your voice here matter to someone without judgement, you can travel to the other side of the chain and be in a whole new neighbour and just be quizzed as to what part you arrived in from, it’s liberation in it’s purest form.
It’s allowed me time to mentally breath, to take stock of who and what I am, to what level of quality I do things (or not) and the reasons have been and continually on a daily basis reflected back to me, it’s given me SPACE to think while incentivising me not to give up based on my CAPACITY to want to achieve more — I’m not under the social microscope for who and what I am but for the proof of my brain, no matter what working frequency and weirdness it might be at today, if anything, the blockchain has become a parallel running DNA strand unlike my own, like a buffer of stability and reason as the blocks of the ledger keep getting added — a subtle reminder of needing to keep grounded and build better foundations.
It’s allowed me mental freedom at my pace, it’s incentivised me to re-invest in my dreams and really dig deep as to what that means as a human being — we often banter about the notion of basic income but really it’s basic capacity, it’s a complimentary addition to your like that runs alongside you much bigger than a stream of revenue, it’s a stream of capacity that reflects back your own, that’s the true strength of a blockchain — to become aware and accountable for your actions, to check in on that brain of yours, to bounce out a packet to that digital dna strand in the cloud.
. . .. and yet you’re not here yet?
It’s time to be accountable to our actions on a micro level and share that alongside our daily lives on the chain at macro level, once these data sets start to be augmented we are gonna find some fascinating things about ourselves — personally, I can’t wait to have my own AI Jarvis assisting my own decaying brain be complimented by one that does not age…
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