• Change header visual to “story of stories” or a visual of crypto permeating culture

Thoughts on How Crypto is Re-Shaping What We Cannot See

Outline

• Culture as the Story of Stories
• Stories - A Definition
• Crypto x Culture

Intro

There is a revolution happening. As we sit today, crypto’s total market cap sits near $2 trillion with nearly $50 billion being transacted daily. The construction of Hotel Cryptofornia is progressing quickly.

At the same time that we are focused on these novel structures, something equally profound is occuring behind the scenes. Renovating old structures is as critical to construction as building new ones is, and crypto is not immune. While new chains, NFTs, and layer 2s are all the rage, remodeling is occuring at the societal level for industries that have existed for hundreds of years. Sectors of society such as fashion, entertainment, and business are all being reshaped by the promises of crypto.

It is somewhat intuitive to understand the ways in which crypto will re-shape financially oriented sectors of society - it began, after all, as a way to orchestrate decentralized financial payments. Its most concrete value propositions are directly oriented towards eliminating the inefficiencies of our financial infrastructure, helping us deal more directly with dollars and cents.

Yet the overwhelming majority of society is not financial in nature - it is something else entirely. We may demarcate clothes or tickets to sporting events in black and white terms (the "cost”), but what drives that cost is something inherently grey. We call it “culture”.

Culture: The Story of Stories

Culture is difficult to define clearly. In his book Maps of Meaning, Jordan Peterson provides a framework for doing so, stating the following:

“Our cultures (which we absorb as children, through the process of imitation) consist primarily of patterns of activity, undertaken in a social context. As parents are to children, cultures are to adults: we do not know how the patterns we act out originated, or what purposes they currently serve. Such patterns are in fact emergent properties of long term social interactions.”

We can thus think of our cultures as stories, or maps, that direct our action. These stories have solidified over many years, creating narratives that tell us what to value and how to act in a world filled with uncertainty.

Culture exists at both the macro and micro level, with each broader ‘culture’ consisting of many smaller ‘sub-cultures’. Take American culture, for example. Each aspect of American society plays a role in describing what it means to be ‘American’, from the food we eat, to the sports we watch, to the clothes we wear. We can think of these sectors of society as chapters in a book, each weaving their own narratives to create a larger one. When we stitch them together, we get the bestselling novel.

Through this lens, culture is thus the story of stories.

Insert visualization of “Culture is the story of stories" → books inside of books

If this is true and culture is in fact the story of stories, then the only way to understand what culture means is to understand what a story is, how it forms, and what it means.

Storytelling Foundations

The world is messy, and humans are on a never-ending quest to make sense of what we experience around us. From the moment we come out of the womb, each of us embarks on a journey of making order out of chaos, locally reversing entropy to the best of our abilities.

Yet to do so alone is impossible - the feedback loops are too loose, the learning curves too slow. Trial by error is a highly effective learning mechanism, but one can not undergo all of the trails in the world alone.

Enter stories.

Stories have dominated our cultural landscape for centuries, taking many forms over the years. They have been drawn in caves with rocks, passed from person to person by word of mouth, pened on papyrus scroll, and printed by typewriters. In their current forms, they exist as internet native articles.

Few things have permeated our existence since the beginning of time, yet stories are a part of this hallowed class. They have been here since the beginning, shaping the world around us as we in turn try to make sense of it. It is a delicate, cyclical dance on the search for understanding.

Yet for as long as they have existed, and for as large of an impact as they have had on the world, our understanding of what they mean and how they come about is surprisingly limited. So we must ask ourselves - what is a story?

Let us provide a simple definition: a story is a cultural map that tells us something about the world, in turn signifying for action.

Insert visual of maps signifying for direction and stories signifying for action

In the same way that maps help us navigate an unknown territory, stories help us navigate an unknown world. They provide us direction on how to act in light of specific circumstances, regardless of whether or not we have experienced them before.

In describing the purposes of a map, we can synthesize them down into two main areas:

• 1) Orientation - They tell us where where we are in relation to something (frequently in space, but also in time).
• 2) Direction - They tell us how we can go about getting from where we are to where we would like to go.

Stories function in a similar way to maps by helping us chart out the landscape of society. They tell us where we are in the giant schema of the world (orientation) and provide us rubrics for how to act at any given moment (direction).

Were I to step off of a plane in an unknown location and notice an abnormal amount of people wearing Berets, I might assume that I am now in France. In response, I might instinctually incorporate more ‘bonjour’s or ‘merci’s into my vocabulary than I would under other circumstances. Here, the Berets are simply a story used for both orientation and direction - they tell me where I am (France) and orient me as to how to act.

Yet while both orientation and direction are important, both are irrelevant without the last step in the equation - action. Once we have identified both where we are and where we would like to go, action must be taken to move from the former to the later. It is not enough to simply know that a story exists, we must know why it exists and what it tells us about how act.

If stories are at their core are about what they signify for action, then it follows that the stories we tell ourselves can be teased out by observing our behavior. We can further draw on Peterson here, as he writes:

“The behavioral patterns that make up our stories might therefore be regarded as ‘stored’ in our (social) behavior. This implies that such patterns may be abstracted from that behavior, at any time. The “collective unconscious” is, from this perspective, embodied behavioral wisdom, in its most fundamental form - is the cumulative transmitted consequences of the fact of exploration and culture on action.”

In other words, stories create behavioral patterns while behavioral patterns reveal stories. In novel situations we have yet to experience, we can rely on the context of the situation and the subsequent stories that

We utilize stories to tell us how to act in a given situation, depending on the context of our environment. Even without having personal experience, we can lean on those of others and the stories that have emerged as a result to give us clearer direction.

They work in the other direction, as well, We can identify what the world likely looked like to someone based off of the action that they took.

Stories are thus the bridge between circumstance and behavior. Through them, we can derive both context from action and action from context, in the same way that maps can tell you both where to go and from where you came.

Culture - The Story of Stories

Now that we have zoomed in to the micro level of stories, let us take a step back and return to the higher level topic of culture.

Earlier, I presented a simple definition for how we can think about it: the story of stories.

Since we have described a story as a map of the world that signifies something about action, we can build a more robust definition for culture. If culture is the story of stories, then it follows thats culture is about the ways in which stories are strung together to direct the action of society in all aspects of life.

Like taking a map of each continent and pairing it together to create a map of the globe, culture takes the maps of each sub-culture and stitches them together to create the full picture of society.

To helps us understand this concept, let us borrow an analogy from topographical maps.

Stories function in a similar manner to how one might stack translucent maps of a building floor plan on top of one another. Take maps of a coffee shop, for example. Each layer represents a part of the building, but none represents the entirety of the space. A print of the building dimensions would not tell you where the coffee roaster is nor where you can find the creamer, in the same way that a map of the shop’s accessories would not tell you how big the common area is. Yet when layered together, one on top of the other, the entirety of the coffee shop can be appreciated.

In the same way, we stitch stories together to get a clearer picture of reality. We are slowly mapping out the world around us, adding layers on top of layers to move from uncertainty towards certainty - directing our action in the process.

Insert image of layering stories on top of one another creating full picture (A + B + C = ABC)

Notes

Culture: The Story of Stories

• Peterson → “The individual cannot live without belief - without action and valuation… we must nonetheless put our faith into something.”
  • We must all pick a story → the one that you choose will orient your beliefs
• Culture is explored territory. It is the part of life that we have created maps for already, telling us a story of perception and subsequent action.
• And since stories orient our action, they are the most powerful things in the world:
• Punk6529 thread on Memes → https://twitter.com/punk6529/status/1424127515476598796?s=20&t=pTABrDfzufwIqTZaejgceA
• Culture is inherently grey and ever changing. We cannot state what it is explicitly, even if the definition “story of stories” provides a helpful framework for attempting t to do so. The reason that culture is inherently indescribable in its totality is simple: if culture is the story of stories, then its representation depends entirely on the sub-stories. Yet each story is simply a map, not the territory - they are our best representation of the world around us, but none are bulletproof or 100% accurate in regards to the world around us.

Crypto x Culture - Notes

• Crypto is allowing for the gray areas of society to be financialized.
• It is unlocking previously frozen IP and asset classes.
• Crypto x memes is simply the financialization of stories. Gary Vaynerchuk w. Raoul Pal interview
• The model for identifying where new sectors will be transformed is simple - in what areas of society are there underlying principles that are aligned with the crypto ecosystem?
• Things will start as a ‘bear on unicycle’ phenomenon. The intersection of sports x crypto will be fascinating at its start, as these two things have not been seen together prior. But as time goes on and crypto is more heavily integrated, it will becomes just what we know.
• In a sense, each project in Hotel Cryptofornia project is telling a story - whether that is a blockchain or an NFT project. How much people resonate with that story will determine the project’s success.
• Stories can take many forms, but most frequently represent them symbolically. American flag, Nike swoosh, etc.

Cut Sections

There is an analogous triad to the orientation-direction-action framework of a story when applied to the realm of human experience.

In Maps of Meaning, Peterson describes three elements of stories (also called myths) that are derived from human experience:

“Stories or fantasies that guide our adaptation, in general, appear to .… embody three permanent constituent elements of human experience: the unknown, or unexplored territory; the known, or explored territory; and the process - the knower - that mediates between them**.”**

Each of these three things - the known, the unknown, and the knower - are densely connected in the world of human experience. On the human level, there are things that each of us (the knowers) already understand (the known) and things that we do not (the unknown). On the societal level, there are aspects of our world that are clearly understood (eg: the geography of the United States, how to make cold brew coffee) and aspects that are not well understood (eg: the geography of the ocean’s deepest trenches, how to reach Mars).

Stories exist to help us make sense of each element.

In the case of the known, they represent the explored territory of society. They blunt the uncertainty of the world for the individual based on the past experiences of others. One does not need to have been burnt by fire to understand what will happen if they stick their hand inside an open flame. In this way, we are able to rely on the trial and error of others before us, creating a collective conscience to inform our actions rather than relying on our individual experiences alone. These maps of reality in turn create a sense of security, rendering both things and behaviors that we encounter predictable.

In a sense, knowing how to act in a given situation is as simple as knowing the right story.

The unpredictable plays a critical role in the mapping of human experience, too. The balance between known and unknown, and the stories that describe both, show the evolution of human behavior over time. Take the invention of the light bulb, for example. It is a story we are well familiar with today (ie it is known), yet for centuries prior to Thomas Edison’s innovation it was inherently unknown. Innovation, perhaps, could thus be said to be the process of taking a story of the unknown and mapping it to the known.

As a species that is drawn towards what security and comfort, the unknown plays a unique role in our experiences. It offers us both the promise of possibility alongside while being inherently uncertain and frightening at the same time.

Stories about the unknown thus describe where we might go next as a species.