The web promised us a new world.
Twenty-five years in, it has delivered on a vast amount, created unfettered wealth and streamlined our world. Net net for the better certainly.
As someone who worked throughout this period from day one, building brands and markets, now working in the crypto space, there are serious letdowns from the former and dramatic expectations of what is possible to come.
It’s been well articulated how the decentralized protocols of the web evolved into a centralized stranglehold of the big five platforms today, monopolizing just about every facet of commerce and engagement.
And how crypto, as basically open source with money built in, incentivized at a protocol level has the potent possibility of making this next phase, dramatically different. More decentralized, more democratic, and just better for a broader swipe of the world’s population.
But there are two layers of the promise of web 2.0 and under the radar possibilities of a decentralized world, that are still inchoate and not getting enough attention. And with all the easy mouthing we give to projects for social good, are still not getting the thought, creativity and investment they deserve.
The first is about economizing the arts, the artisans, the unscalable as part of the march towards a more literate and inspiring world.
The world has changed dramatically certainly.
Work and its very structure has shifted. As you travel around, work in shared spaces, public parks with connectivity, you are part of the fiber of a changed world. More flexibility. More diversity. Greater specialization. Broadly distributed teams and a sense of possibility, of wealth, of intelligence, and collaboration.
This is the obvious.
But as a Humanities major with a long career in tech, a storyteller working in brand building and communities, the fabric of our lives is less influenced and uplifted by the arts than in the technologically primitive era that proceeded it. There is a case to be made that urban graffiti artists of the 70s had more impact on the cultural changes of the mainstream population than anything we have today.
Yup, artists like Keith Haring with spray cans painting the subways with more iconic importance that anything I bump into on my travels around in an always connected life on a daily basis.
This is just how it is, not simply a complaint.
A possibility that our reality today where there is the potential of economizing communities, more flexibility in movement and work, more need for diverse sources of inspiration, that there arises a way to elevate the artistic and the artisanal with the rising tide of our society itself.
That the core truths of experiments like Black Mountain College can find root and be integrated into changes of today. They are not as yet.
I’m interested to discover and participate in projects that are doing this today.
Here are some posts on humanities as a key piece of our world, on the need for supporting the artisanal, and on Black Mountain College as a possible approach towards education.
Important stuff not to get lost.
And true without bringing in the gross inanities of our government and its failures in supporting this core piece of our lives. Without that, this is still addressable and ours to fix.
The second piece of the web’s failure and the blockchain’s promise is reimagining the idea of non-profit and charity projects.
How we raise funds today to stem global warming, preserve a coral reef, establish game reserves, and close animal kill shelters—not to mention address education and homelessness—is no different than and more needed than it was three generations ago.
We have all the tools, little intent to do so it appears.
This has hit me hard.
As I look at the vast amounts of capital raised through tokenizing ideas and products—in the 10s of billions of dollars—I ask myself, how this congealing global community that is constantly rewiring itself, why we can’t tokenize intent for social good?
Why can’t we instantiate a currency of support and a platform of transparency that can not only change, but basically rethink the idea of charities, the concept of non-profit into something else?
Why we can’t harness the power of cryptoassets for art in the same way we can by fractionalizing ownership of the Manhattan skyline? Why we can find that piece of human intent that crosses tech, crypto, arts, conservation and science and redo, reinvest, rebuild an incentivized community of directed change to fix things?
Things that the governments of the world won’t. Things that people want. That possibly with incentivized crypto communities and currencies we can at least start to.
In this piece of the unfulfilled puzzle, there are more rumblings than in the arts scenario. And projects that I’m getting involved in that I’ll be making announcements very shortly.
But for all of us, this post is a challenge. Not a slap in the fact but a nudge. A forceful directional push.
If you give a shit and are networked with others likeminded or like bothered, what can you do to make a difference?
Not just in politics but in the endless list of discreet problems, extinctions, inhumanities that can be most likely be addressed only in this way.
Give this some thought.
I think the responsibility for this all rests only with ourselves. Excuses accomplish nothing.
We are seeing the smartest people on the planet dedicating themselves to decentralized realities. These pieces are very much part of that idea of a better world.