Amongst the noise of a desperate bear market, I can’t help but feel gold is about to be struck. You look at checks vv by @jackbutcher & it’s no surprise that a designer of this caliber made a splash when he decided to jump in head first. A firsthand lesson in the need for UI/UX I hope is the bare minimum we take from his experiment.
The tide on AI outrage has shifted from art & moved to chat. In part due to the capricious nature of modern day ‘ragetainment’; but I also speculate the cause is more self centered.
Everyone can write words. Everyone can make art. But most people only believe the former is true. Now they feel their own world shifting, and what artist do with their pixels has lost its shareholding in collective unrest (atm). A fortuitous occurrence in my opinion, as art expression needs freedom to do what it does best.
The proverbial ‘they’ say that one year in crypto/defi is more akin to 3-6 years depending on how you splice it. While my ego would like to lean toward higher estimates for self congratulation, I’ll compromise with saying a couple years is certainly weighted much heavier in newborn industries. The learning curve is far from its plateau.
Two & a half years on and I feel many of the ‘rookie’ mistakes have been crossed off my list - if not by me directly, then by those I interacted with. In the midst of the bear, I see a repetitive pattern to degenery that was much more novel in 2020-2021 personally. A sign that should I be fooled again, shame on me.
Outside of self indulgence, this is all context for my hunch that significant development is on the horizon. In art surely. Thus, culture as well. In decentralized governance and world building too I predict.
Look at organizations like Nouns, Zora, Manifold, Public Assembly, & a few more I haven’t done enough due diligence on to mention. All taking the shape of city states with no burdens of rent or physical damages.
Beyond my personal interest of building a decentralized ecosystem of fine art culture, it seems coordination of sovereign individuals with localized capital is becoming less hope and more reality. The implications of this bridge being built are hard to overstate.
“Culture is the aggregation of us.”
This quote came into my purview recently and it is the perfect Lego block for where we need to go next.
If culture is what provides foundation for worlds to be built & simultaneously is a representation of ‘us’ as a world… then it is crucial, arguably, to connect sovereign individuals with financial firepower. Connect being an intentional word choice here.
It is a matter of existential significance in my estimation, and it’s not so obvious to me that we’ve really figured it out. Look at the land. Inspect the discourse. Dive into the meat and potatoes of the most heralded ‘cultures’ of crypto/defi/NFT land. We have much more work to do. We have scratched the surface of functional intentions, with some headway on upgradeable distribution models.
But again, I see new horizons. In a time of ‘inflationary information’ the industry seems to be skinning itself of the fraudulent & deceptive.
I wonder when artists and collectors will realize the part they have to play in this dance.