I have no doubt scaling will be (kind of already is 🤷‍♂️) solved; we’ll look back at this time & laugh (or cry, if we check gas.wtf 😅).

We got proper L2s & sidechains, we’ll be on PoS soon, so…

• Where do we go from there?

“In the opinion of many players, the 'real' game begins at end-game.” - From Wowpedia

We’ve been building & building but we forget to stop & ask ourselves what is it all for, let alone properly explain it to newcomers. It seems that most of the core community is here because they believe we can build a better world with Ethereum but these visions are rarely properly articulated & memefied.

Meanwhile, every bull run further dilutes the idealism & profit seeking becomes more of a driving factor. If the bull markets have shown us anything, it’s that normies will buy whatever is most memed or shilled. Fuck what makes sense, buy Doge & Cardano!

I wrote about this problem in the 2 Paths of Crypto a while ago but I think a big part of the reason this is the case is that there’s too much of “this will make you rich” & not enough “this is why it matters”. It’s hard to get people to pick the path of value creation over the path of profit maximization if we’re not at least offering compelling visions.

General consequences:

• Hard to make newcomers understand what we’re about
• Devolution to profit maximization being the goal for most
• Are we actually changing the world for anyone but ourselves?

This post is about:

• Some of the dominant memes
• Decentralized coordination - obstacles, pitfalls & solutions
• Building towards a decentralized future - but what kind?
• Inspiring people to think bigger & beyond personal financial freedom
• Some ways you could help if you think these things matter

Memes

First off, let’s go through some of the memes that have shaped or are still shaping the narratives of the Ethereum ecosystem.

World Computer

This was a cool one but unfortunately not a very true one as Ethereum is not really a computing platform. If you tried using it to compute something, you must be incredibly wealthy & have a lot of time on your hands.

Still, let’s not dismiss this meme - there was some great thinking done around it & proposing Ethereum’s theory of change in a series called “Can the World Computer Save the World?”.

Ultra-sound money

I think the fact that it was about more than just “better money” is what got most of us interested in Ethereum over Bitcoin in the first place, so why try to 1up Bitcoin if we can 1kup it? Disregarding potential negative side effects of deflationary money, let’s at least ask ourselves:

• Ultra-sound money for what?

The grand casino? Farming shitcoins & buying jpegs? Props to people buying NFTs to support artists, but let’s be honest - most people are buying them for speculation & signaling, to look cool or be a part of some exclusive club & hope for the moon.

Props to Moonshot Bots, Project Ark, Rainbow Rolls & others that are donating at least a portion of their revenue to good causes, but the vast majority of tokens of any kind, NFTs or not, seems to be about forking or copying others in hopes of quick profit - served to the above mentioned people that are moving from one shiny new thing to the next, mindlessly aping in eternal search for ever more gains.

A lot of degening & not enough regening.

ReFi - degen to regen

I love this meme because it kind of takes degening - an act of chasing profit in a high risk, high reward manner - and turns it into something positive. Instead of trying to change human nature, it exploits it to channel it to something good - public goods, Klima DAO being a great example.

I think we’re all in agreement that Ethereum is infrastructure for the societies of the future, but I’m afraid we’re not putting in enough care to make sure it’s actually a better future & a better future for everyone; that we’re not remaking patterns of the old world.

Read more about ReFi & Blockchain for Good or join one of the upcoming unconferences about it.

Ethereum is Solarpunk

“Solarpunk is an art movement that envisions how the future might look if humanity succeeded in solving major contemporary challenges with an emphasis on sustainability problems such as climate change and pollution.”

It seems lately that one of the biggest trends is “the metaverse” & building virtual realities vs solving irl problems & making actual living reality better - some even go as far as saying that’s what Web3 is about. This scares the shit out of me.

Meanwhile, Solarpunk is an art movement imagining a better future & Ethereum is a technology for building the future. If we want to build a great future, we might want to combine the two 🤷‍♂️

I get it - there are almost as many visions of better futures as there are people. But I think there are things that we can all agree on, things that are universally good. One of those things may be learning how to stop polluting & start living in balance with nature.

For Defeating Moloch

Kind of complementary to the above. Rather than imagining the future we want to live in, it's focused on fighting coordination failures that prevent us from building that future we want to live in.

It’s about Moloch as the God of Coordination Failure aka coordination problems caused by misaligned incentives, as the ultimate cause for our inability to solve problems that plague societies.

The problem is that most people have no clue who Moloch is & they are unfortunately highly unlikely to actually read the thing (if you’re one of those lazy ones, at least read this short version).

• There are also people who know about Moloch but not Meditations on Moloch, which makes them go “wtf does child sacrifice have to do with any of this?” 😂

Once you actually read the Meditations on Moloch, it does make you go “lets kill the bastard!” Because indeed, it does seem that our failure to coordinate is what got us into this mess in the first place…

Decentralized Coordination

And we indeed do have some pretty cool tools & incentive systems for better coordination! From basics like rewarding, staking & slashing to DAO frameworks that are slowly maturing in terms of their feature sets as well as the tooling around them.

It's been all about DeFi, then all about NFTs & now it's become all about DAOs. I’ve been waiting for this, not gonna lie - out of the three, DAOs are by far what excites me the most.

(If you don't know much about DAOs, go to the House of DAOs or take a course about it on DAOHaus.)

But the truth is, we’re still super early. All of these useful components & communities are all over the place & in various states of development. The tooling & interfaces around DAOs in general is still pretty basic for the most part & DAO2DAO interactions are only starting to become a thing.

Props to the folks at DAOHaus & PrimeDAO for being the DAO2DAO pioneers but the general focus is still mostly on singular DAOs, especially for the people just discovering DAOs - which is most people..

Early Game Obstacles

If you ever tried building a DAO, you know that the DAO framework itself is far from the only thing you need to build an effective decentralized organization. Most everything else you need is a jumble of different web3 & web2 tools, platforms, knowledge sources & communities.

Besides thinking DAOs are the future of human coordination, the main thing people inhabiting DAOs have in common is that they are all members of siloed discord communities that are all having a hard time operating their organizations.

Overall, there are a few kind of overlapping problems:

• It’s hard for DAO summoners to find everything they need to start a DAO
• It’s hard for DAO operators to see what’s going on & find everything they need to succeed
• It's hard for DAO contributors to stay connected & in the loop with more than a handful of DAOs

Late Game Perils

And where is the DAO space going? It seems obvious that the next step will be networks of interlocking DAOs aka Decentralized Autonomous Societies, dStates or however else you want to call them.

Does that mean we’re changing the world for the better? Not necessarily.

These things make coordination easier but don't solve the “what are we coordinating towards” problem. Looking forward to “Organ Harvesters zkDAO”? We can’t prevent that, but we can make sure we are using it for good & not just getting rich.

As all of these DAOs & networks of DAOs grow bigger, more powerful & more autonomous, we should be careful we’re not replicating patterns of the old world. The fact we’re building socioeconomic systems from the ground up allows us to rethink & create better systems than the ones we’re overgrowing.

So far though, wealth inequality is worse than in the real world, most DAOs are turning out to be plutocracies, capital is used primarily for speculation & no “metaverse game” has experimented with the Herberger’s tax.

Some are even starting to ask “should DAO workers have a fiduciary duty towards token holders?” But if DAOs are governed by tokens & DAO workers have a legal obligation to make as much money as possible for the token holders - aren’t we kind of back where we started?

Crypto in general seems to be devolving into ever more money games. Who wants to invest in local communities & economies when the APY is barely 2 digits - which you can get by simply staking!

• Are we really changing anything if capital remains what has the final say as well as the main goal?
• Decentralized coordination is great but what are we coordinating towards?

The Good

We’re not off to a great start in some aspects, but we’re doing great in others!

I get that it’s kind of dumb to make this comparison but its become uncommon for big crypto projects to have a bigger market cap than small countries’ GDP. Ethereum would rank as the 30th state, moving Israel, Norway & the rest a spot down, while Uniswap would sit somewhere around 135/213.

So, in fact, I don’t think it's enough to simply not be recreating the old patterns. Being more powerful & better coordinated than a bunch of actual nation states, it becomes our duty to take on some of the burden for things like preventing & regenerating ecological catastrophes or fighting humanitarian crises - not making it worse, which kind of seems to be the case currently.

Let’s not be like Silicon Valley bros, saying we’re “changing the world” by building a new app for the privileged while their streets are literally full of shit & homeless people. Every project should have a % of their total token supply or revenue flowing directly to public goods and other ecological & philanthropic initiatives of their choosing.

Unfortunately, it does seem that most people are in crypto chasing personal financial freedom, checking-out of “normie society” & living in their own little bubbles, physical as well as virtual.

Being the biggest platform & community in all of crypto, we should be setting an example & not turning a blind eye to the world that is burning.

Now What?

So, how do we then fight Moloch & create the Solarpunk future?

Here’s what I think we should do:

• Come up clearer visions of better futures
• Make it easier to create more building blocks
• Start assembling these building blocks into modular platforms
• Pick our fights & support causes outside of our bubbles
• Set great examples of what decentralized socioeconomic operating systems could be like & show them to the world

Better Future?

Yes. And a better future for everyone - not just those that bought in early. 😅

I want to challenge each & every one of you reading this post to dream up their own visions of it & write up short but inspiring stories from a not so distant future.

Stories about “the world after Ethereum”.

Stories about that solarpunk future, where Moloch manifestations are effectively being dealt with and humans are living in peace & balance with nature with nobody starving.

For this purpose, I have started this telegram group for anyone interested.

Here’s how it will go down:

• Everyone interested will gather in the group
• The ones serious about it will write a short story from the future
• The ones that write great stories will get invited to another group
• That other group may be a DAO with magical NFTs or some shit
• Maybe they compile these stories into a collection of NFTs, who knows

Seriously though, let’s stop it with all this dystopian sci-fi bullshit & dream up a future we’d actually want to live in 🙏😂

Meme Driven Organizations

Gave some thoughts to the above? If you’re seeing different ways these technologies could make the world better, you can probably help make it happen. Maybe you should go find or summon a DAO & do it.

If you’re building a decentralized organization, the most important thing to get right is the mission & to make sure the incentives are aligned on it.

The problem with corporations is that, with time, they become completely driven by profit. They might have “a mission” but their mission becomes skewed by the fiduciary duty towards the shareholders.

• Much like the famed paperclip maximizers of the dystopian AI future, corporations are the profit maximizers ruining the present.
• To hell with your mission statement if the incentives aren’t aligned to deliver on it but on profit extraction instead.

Token voting will almost inevitably result in the same practises we see playing out today, with capital always voting to accrue more. Extracting as much value as possible at the expense of everything else.

With DAOs, it's more important than ever to put the meme at the center of what we’re doing as the main point of alignment. It should be coupled tightly with a triple bottom line sort of thinking, maybe helping with specific causes besides being great at solving a niche problem.

• Build money meme driven organizations.
• Some higher purpose, but make it not just a facade 🙃
• Maybe adopt or write something like the MetaManifesto 🤷‍♂️

Building Blocks

Came up with your meme/mission yet?

If not, do know that there are plenty of great existing missions out there doing anything related to Ethereum, DAOs & Web3 in general 🙃

Anyway, there seems to be an overall belief that Ethereum is the core infrastructure for societies of the future, but how do we get there? Well, piece by piece!

There are many individual pieces that need to exist before we can start putting them together into functional decentralized societies. I know that because my whole idea with MetaGame was to “simply put the pieces together to form the bigger picture” - before realizing most of those pieces don’t actually exist yet 😂

Some of these are projects, some are groups of projects & some are knowledge sources - but all are about building the connective tissue, facilitating inter-DAO collaboration & helping others build the future.

Some of the pieces:

• Web3 Profiles, for interoperable profiles
• Skill Trees, for mapping skills & skill attestation NFTs
• Bounties Protocol, for sharing work among projects
• MetaLibrary, for indexing knowledge repositories
• Governauts & D.I.A; for research on governance
• DAO Stewards Network, for discussing hard problems DAO leaders face
• DAOnboarding, for building a generalized onboarding system
• Got more? Got duplicates? DM me pls 🙏

Note: This is by no means an extensive list of all the building blocks needed, these are just a few of the working groups we started or are members of.

We need to make it as easy as possible for the people to create more building blocks but we also need to start experimenting more with assembling these building blocks…

Bigger Pictures

Imagine how much value could be unlocked inside of your DAO if instead of having 100 channels, there were proper interfaces for getting a better view of what’s going on. What needs to get done, who are the people, what are their needs, offers & skills, what’s their time availability, where are the resources you might need for your own or your DAO’s advancement, etc.

Imagine how much more value could be unlocked if all of this was interoperable.

Discord & twitter just won’t do. To enable the flow of information & people between communities and allow everyone to be more effective, I think we’ll need proper platforms - just not in the way they’ve been built so far.

There won’t be “a chat platform”, “a social media platform”, “a freelancing platform”, or “an educational platform” - instead, all of these different interoperable building blocks will be assembled into platforms that are just right for this or that specific community & it’s goals.

These platforms will probably be more like mosaics of interoperable building blocks than monolithic platforms of the past; acting more like the glue holding together pieces built independently & making it easy to integrate new pieces - think of them as modular aggregators.

These super-platforms will basically be socioeconomic operating systems for decentralized societies - aggregations of aligned people & DAOs. Needless to say, they will need to be community-owned & open source.

These super-platforms… Should actually be possible to build, for the first time ever 😅

• And we’re building one of them 🙃

The Hope

Hopefully, we’ll be just one of many communities experimenting with assembling all of these building blocks into cohesive platforms infused with coherent visions of better futures.

Besides being open source, the main thing that matters is that all of these “brave new worlds” are as interoperable as possible - which is kind of what these technologies are good for.

The DAO space currently seems like the most vibrant part of crypto, a haven for the enthusiasts & dreamers. Although token voting is still fairly dominant, a lot are aware of its perils & working towards alternatives or ways to soften it.

These new tools are now fully immersing us into the age of unprecedented leverage. It’s becoming easier than ever to find people you share common interests with & coordinate around doing things that you wouldn’t imagine possible before.

This is a great time to ask yourself things like:

• If I could solve any problem or do the most epic thing, what would I do?
• What is the highest impact mission I could dedicate myself to?

Then find others & spend the next few years giving it all you got.

Now what, for real?

We all say we want to “make an impact” but I’m not sure we all spend enough time thinking about what kind of impact we want to make & what kind of causes we want to support..

You know how the cliche goes: “change starts from within” 🙃

So maybe you should spend some time thinking about your ikigai, what are the problems you want to be solving & how do you want to spend your 80,000 hours.

• What do you hope to accomplish in Web3 & in your life?
• What moves you?
• Why are you here?

So, if you’ve been thinking about starting a new yield farming defi thing or a pfp NFTs… I’d say, think bigger!

Things you could do right now:

• Spend some time figuring out your ikigai & how it relates to your crypto path
• Write about it &/or your vision of “the world after ethereum”
• Join one of the projects mentioned here or anywhere else you feel aligned
• Start your own thing & join 30 Days of Web3
• Drop some eth on all of this 🤷‍♂️

Wat u mean drop some eth?

Since Mirror makes it so easy to add crowdfunding to any post, I thought why the hell not try it out 🤷‍♂️

Where eth goes:

• Some of eth to the writers of stories & makes of memes
• Some of eth to the people that build something cool on Web3
• The rest of eth to MetaGame for building the MetaOS, onboarding people & all the other cool shit we did for the Ethereum DAO ecosystem like MetaSys or MyMeta

Let’s build the future we want to live in 🙏💪