A while ago when Mfer was on fire, there was an article written by Satoshi called "What are Mfers", and just a few days ago I saw a post discussing whether hippie spirits are outdated, so I started thinking about who we are, what hippies are, and whether I could also write an article about what HippyGhosts are.

XD (@web3nomads), SS (@seanouyang), and I (@dailycafi) have known each other for a very long time, we started coding Web3 products only from 2020, but we actually have been involved in building other traditional web2 projects for many years. XD and I were college classmates, we lived on the same floor, and played FIFA every week from 2009 to 2022. He is now my best friend because of lots of things. I met SS in Bay Area when we worked together in a startup. The startup did not have a good ending but knowing him made the experience not a waste of time.

Each of us started our own business in the past few years, until XD sold his company last year, and I finished an AI medical project. After a short time after that, a cafe next to his company let us use his basement for free. We simply cleaned up and finished a few Defi projects there.

One day SS drew HippyGhosts, I can remember his earliest explanation was that Ghost is the lonely wandering soul of the Web3 world, I actually didn't know much about Hippy Spirits at that time, I just thought he paid his respects to Punk ...... later he said it expressed a kind of rebellion, at first he even wanted to call this project FuckTheShit, to satirize the early low-quality NFT project from the designer's dissatisfaction.

My understanding of the name HippyGhosts was an added bonus while preparing for an AMA, before that my mind was filled with the trident peace signs, LGBT, Volkswagon minivans, endless road trips, rainbow gypsy costumes, or Jenny from Forrest Gump. I only know songs from Pink Floyd and Bob Dylan but did not read the lyric carefully before. I thought hippies are someone in some deserted corner of Nevada, some people who live a minimalist life for their beliefs, chasing "psychedelic utopia". These symbols may be still easy to see in some parts of California, such as the small stores on Castro Street in San Francisco, but they are somewhat difficult to see elsewhere.

But in reality, this symbolic view is imperfect and unfair, perhaps even with some artificial distortions, making the campaign the opposite of what it was intended to be (he was at odds with the traditional "American spirit"), the movement started by the "middle-class kids" from the 60s to the 70s, although some people deliberately created trouble in the process in order to oppose authority, the spirit can be pioneering, but never extreme. It can be anti-authority, but never violent. They oppose the establishment and mainstream culture, but they are not anti-intellectual, they oppose what people value about too much in daily life, oppose unjust power. They asked people to stop a little while, and think about the true meaning of life, they want more people to become poets instead of bankers

My Twitter feed was just getting enthusiastic recently. When I was involved in the Web3 world, I unfollowed all the non-Web3 people and focused on what I felt were "fellow travelers" living in a new web3 world, but lately, it's always reminded me of Allen Ginsberg’s quote. "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness". More and more threads are about political bickering, more and more are discussions about everything related to money, and there is less and less meaningful discussion.

Till one day I felt a tear in my eye when I saw this tweet:

When I saw that I found something was wrong lately: we were trying to join in the madness, and even worse, not doing it very well. Our project started in January this year, and we tried to do a marketing round in the way "everyone is doing it", but the result of this was not only to find some small investors who were expecting us to make a small profit from our project but also a very small group of supporters who were interested in our project, but also taught us: Firstly, we are good at coding and making product, but not that good at marketing, we can only do it first to attract people who agree with our product; secondly, we are not happy doing this; and it is not hippy at all, it can really fuck the shit up.

So now we are ready to go back to the beginning to do what we are good at, this time we found the name HippyGhosts actually appropriate, reminding us to keep their original appearance, still to do those things that should be done, but easy to ignore.

We are now focusing on building, as we've done in other startups over the past few years, a little ghost camp in the middle of a desert-like the original hippies did decades ago, and we put up a camp flag with HippyGhosts painted on it, maybe now it is very small, but hoping that one day we'll just be part of a large camp field.

Now we come back to the beginning of the question, so who do we want to move into this camp with us, what are HippyGhosts?

HippyGhosts have their own attitude, gently standing against the low-quality and short-term profit-seeking projects of the Web3 world.

HippyGhosts will contribute their skills or use good products to attract other community members.

HippyGhosts don't get involved in politics and real-life hot topics now, and don't get involved in seemingly politically correct things like donate to increase their exposure.

HippyGhosts don't need to be loud, but they can insert a small flower into the noise source or write romantic poems that belong to Web3.

HippyGhosts are friends.

Join us, Ignore the noise, let’s keep building.

Let's hippy.