Designing an Onchain Culture

What are you talking about?

The world, and more particularly the market, doesn’t know shit about art. I’m not talking about taste either. I’m talking about what ‘art’ is, what it does, and what it is capable of. Some say it has ‘healing powers’… they’re totally correct, but I’m not even talking about that. I’m talking about art as the next bedrock of digital culture, the meme economy, and permissionless/decentralized network states. The next fucking renaissance.

I’ve tweeted plenty about this already and even written a few chaotic essays on it ( you can read them here and here) so I’m moving past that explanation. I want to show the schematics here. How 1000 pieces of fine digital art are going to spur on a movement of decentralized creator centric network states.

Above is the overall map. Below are the individual pieces:

Funding

There are 877 pieces left to be distributed for passionate cryptoart collectors. These will be auctioned 1 per day with all funds routed to a club treasury. The main goals of this treasury are:

build infrastructure of the club protocol
low risk defi LP for treasury maintenance
propasol funding for clud member ideas that benefit the brand
fund collabs with other DAOS (buying assets with voting power, etc)

Starting Structure

Things will naturally develop from here, but for the duration of the auction (around 2.5 yrs) it will look something like this. All 1000 piece owners will get access to:

Hypera raw ai collection discounts & raffles
$LGHT cryptoart collection discounts & raffles
Digi-abstract collection discounts & raffles
Travel photography collection discounts & raffles
PRIMES project airdrops & allow list
MEMEWARE project airdrops & allow list

Weights

The first 123 pieces already distributed are all animated. There will be another 77 of this kind left to be collected and the remaining 800 will be static. The funding graphic mentioned ‘voting weights’ and this graphic mentions flat out ‘weights’. Let’s clarify that here:

The club treasury will have many participatory initiatives, of which club voting will determine the outcome (similar to many DAOs). Rewarding the og collectors, their votes (#1-123) will carry 2x the voting power while the remaining 877 will be 1 painting = 1 vote.
The club benefits will be numerous and varied through the six bullet points above. Here we will grant og collecters a 3x multiplier on any benefit given, the 77 remaining animated paintings will receive a 2x on those same benefits, and the 800 static will receive the benefit as presented.

For example: a 20% discount offered on something for club members

OGs are eligible for a 60% discount
The 77 are eligible for a 40% discount
800 receive the 20% discount as is

Outside of the Club

Outside of what we have going on internally it is very important that we build things in public for the public. Many people will want to understand who we are and what we are about before they ever decide to join us internally.

For this we have three verticals:

Curation

“Taste is the new skill” Claire Silver so eloquently put it. In the age of information and entertainment surplus it is valuable to provide high signal low noise curatorial content.

Our three subject areas are:

Fashion

discounts & raffles for club memebers
affordable designer fashion for the public
artist collaborations for select designer packages

Music

curated playlists for lounge, work, and outing atmosphere
specialized for an industry of degens sitting at computers all day

Newsletters

one per month

highly editorial covering cryptoart, crypto, design, memes, etc

free digital version
hardcover collectible set and individual editions

Culture DAOs

AV Club being more decentralized than a corporation and less centralized than, say, NounsDAO means that we have some room for fully decentralized protocols as well. This is where Culture DAOs come into play. Organizations that do not require people to join AV to participate. The focus for us will still be on culture though.

The specific structure of the DAO ecosystem will continue to be honed during our 2.5 year distribution of Abstraverse. Whether it will be three seperate DAOs or one large DAO has to be worked out. However, the above shows where our interests lie and what org we are going to be spearheading. For now those are:

live sports & gaming

watch parties
competitive in house gaming
prize pool competitions
fandom hub

culinary & travel

irl meet ups and trade
digital meet ups and trade
recommendations and networking

entertainment & writing

recommendations repository
writers guild for current and aspiring
irl & digital viewing parties
networking and decentralized building

Any funds, initiatives, voting, etc will be exclusive to these organizations.

CC0

The last bit of outside club business resides in the public domain. XCOPY, NounsDAO, Cryptoadz, and many more have made their entire asset base cc0 (meaning you can commercialize and do whatever you wish with the ip with no fear of prosecution).

Though we will not explicity go after people who use AV ip, it truly isn’t the most versatile for extracuricular mechanisms beyond the club’s native direction. All the in house ip is very ‘centralized’ in that it comes from my (LGHT) creative vision. But we still believe in cc0 and thus have created this extension as means of backing up our claim.

There are two branches here:

Asset pack curation and filing
Open Source Memeware™️ free to public section

Asset packs

A nice way of saying ‘creative tools’. Nouns is currently the easiest to download assets from, but they are busy building the protocol beyond that. We are working on building out a library of all the pertinent cc0 assets in the cryptoart/nft space for anyone that needs.

We will do the same with curated AV assets, things like our character figures, certain color packs, etc that we feel will help others looking for design boosts in their own work. And we will also curate our favorite public domain assets from outside of web3 into this library as well.

The goal is to build a fun house of public domain assets that artists, designers, and creatives of all mediums can enjoy with ease.

Open Source Memeware

If software is the programs and other operating information used by a computer, then ‘memeware’ is the programs and other operating information used by the mind. It is updateable, gets buggy sometimes, and can be designed. Thus a new project centered around ‘ip design’ for creators and web3 protocols has risen.

I wrote a thread on it that will summarize the intentions if you’re interested. All that you need to know here is that there is a free to the public section of this project. Within that section we will also:

provide a design library
provide free access to the course
provide all future updates to that course for free

You can read the thread here:

Fin

And that about covers it for now. I saw an opportunity for art to become something new and interesting. I got tired of people telling me it was priceless (their way of saying ‘remain free’). I spent two years on trial and error… and now I am ready for the next phase.

We keep going.