Some thoughts on Solarium and Blockchain Dystopia

Art by Maryam Safdar - https://www.facebook.com/mari945/
(I chose this picture because it reminded me of Esprit)

The wind is kind of wild tonight and I can't seem to sleep. Before starting the DNRS program, I used to have insomnia several times a week. 😵 I've become patient with it and normally just try to do something to take my mind off it, like make steemit posts. 😉

I have always been a writer. My partner and I joke that I could ooze narrative in my sleep. I have a quick mind that sparks and makes connections and likes to run with things. I hate flat, unimaginative characters or narratives more than anything.

Stories teach us about the world around us and unimaginative stories perpetuate a flat view of the infinitely mysterious world we live in.

Solarium, my visual novel based on Hive account@steempunknet, was dreamed up one weekend sometime after I was asked to do a character interview. I was running the implications of a dystopian blockchain world over in my mind. The more I get involved in crypto, the more I see the same patterns as I did in my community work outside it. Folks rarely understand hardship they don't experience and thus inadvertently replicate systems that harm others. To many of us, blockchain technology represents freedom and a chance for a new world. But we can't usher in a new world without changing ourselves. That's part of the reason I love the Hive account@steempunknet narrative and was able to find in it a story I wanted to tell.

In that world, crypto didn't create a utopia. People didn't usher in a new egalitarian world. They used new technology to gain power. Corporations became so powerful through their use of crypto that they became judge, jury, and potentially even executioner of the people.

I am a cautiously optimistic person but strangely I find the idea of blockchain dystopia to be very grounding in the sea of air drops, big promises, and quick moving disruption. In some ways, I feel that this... misuse of blockchain that shapes the backstory of the game is something that many of us will experience if we haven't already.

Something that I like about the dystopia feeling as well is that it can light a powerful fire in me. I feel more hopeful about my own world if I see something like it achieve a certain kind of elevation. Utopian settings can bring that feeling as well, and often in my own worldbuilding I gravitate that way. But sometimes it can feel frustrating to build a world that doesn't exist yet and creating a story or work based on the work of someone else can give you a good chance to step outside yourself as a creative person.

I do not think I would create a dystopia on my own, but I can be fed creatively by playing with the ideas of one. And maybe that creativity will help me avoid the downfalls that world experiences. 😉