Hi friends, my name is Taylor. I'm a photographer and digital artist. I remember signing up to Instagram when it was a fledgling app that didn't even let you import photos (you had to take them in-app with your phone's camera). It was exciting times. I chose the username '@'taylor on my first try and started posting. I wasn't convinced it would amount to much, but I thought what the hell, at least it's a creative exercise.
I'll never forget those first comments from complete strangers. The rush of feeling that I was suddenly connected to the veins of society, that people I didn't even know were seeing my work and sharing theirs. I started making friendships with artists and photographers in Sweden, Turkey, Denmark, Canada. Everyone wanted to share. Everyone wanted to connect. It was game-changing. I fell in love.
As time passed, and this young community grew to become one of the most popular social networks in the world, the atmosphere began to change with it. More and more, the meaningful interactions that first captivated me were replaced with comments like "f4f" and "shoutout?" and "can I have your username?"
I watched as my feed began to transform into hollow, sponsored posts by Insta-famous models, bots, and brands. Struggling artists with hundreds of thousand of followers were hawking their lightroom presets and print sales just to get by. And then the ads came. And then Facebook came. And then, even the posts appearing in my feed became dictated not by the content I chose to follow, but by the interests of a profit-driven machine learning algorithm, finely tuned to direct my eyes and my likes toward what was most profitable for them, rather than what I chose to see.
It's been hard to create recently. I'm tired. We're due for something different. A paradigm shift. And I think the blockchain is exactly that.
That's why I'm here. Because I want to believe. And I want to be a part of a new fledging community, one that we can build on a different set of values. And either way, what the hell. At least it's a creative exercise.
-Taylor