“One of our greatest fears is to eat the wildness of the world.
Our mothers intuitively understood something essential: the green is poisonous to civilization. If we eat the wild, it begins to work inside us, altering us, changing us. Soon, if we eat too much, we will no longer fit the suit that has been made for us. Our hair will begin to grow long and ragged. Our gait and how we hold our body will change. A wild light begins to gleam in our eyes. Our words start to sound strange, nonlinear, emotional. Unpractical. Poetic.
Once we have tasted this wildness, we begin to hunger for a food long denied us, and the more we eat of it the more we will awaken.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Secret Teachings of Plants
The centralized internet has become a prison of our collective imagination. Today's information ecologies set the limits of what we can think, and what we can dream.
[Shots of NeuraLinked infants suckling GMO formula from synthetic breasts / cut to images of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez partying on New Years 2022 / cut to robot police dogs with automatic weapons on their heads jumping out of the backs of trucks]
People often ask me "what is Web3?" – but I think a better question is "why does Web3 matter?" Web3 matters because choice matters. Self-determination matters. Now, maybe more than ever.
[Shots of a Google search bar with the words 'mass formation psychosis' being typed in letter by letter / cut to slow motion shots of wheat farmers harvesting crops in Ukraine screen left / a chart of wheat prices going parabolic screen right]
Web3 matters because it's a space for the reclamation of our imaginal capacities – a place where we get to dream again. A place where we can extend our awareness further than late capitalist society wants it to go. It's a frontier in the truest sense: a place where our relationship to our environment, one another, and to what this new world becomes are still up for grabs.
Those of us who are pioneering this place have a deep responsibility to keep it wild. To not monocrop the rainforests of the emerging metaverse. To protect the innocence of our childlike dreamscapes while cultivating a maturity and skillfulness that can outcompete the old system. There is no time to waste.
[Close ups of Zuckerberg giving beady-eyed testimony to congress screen left / a fast montage of Indian farmer suicides following Monsanto's biological and market takeover screen right]
There are few cracks in the fabric of the current system large enough to harness the energy required for us to break free. The Late-Capitalist-Web2 stack is everywhere, always-on, relentlessly enclosing all it can subsume. "We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Resistance is futile."
There are not too many paths left available to us. We've effectively defutured our world down to a handful of dystopic attractor states. Backs against the wall. Your move, dreamers.
[CNN Newsreel of the future assassination of Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador, after his defiance the World Bank by making Bitcoin legal tender / cut to shots of Michael Vick smiling as he presides over a vicious dog fight in his backyard]
The arena of the wild naturally evokes a savage actor.
The west's image of the noble savage can be traced back to Ancient Greece and reemerges vividly in the collision of European culture with the Americas. Yet, as David Graeber illustrates in The Dawn of Everything, our conceptions of the nature of the human, the role of social structure, and our concepts of civilized and uncivilized have a much more complex dialectical history than the cartoonish caricatures many of us learned in grade school. Savagery is not what we think…
[Animated images of a world map showing flows of international weapons deals across borders over the past forty years / cut to slow-motion images of a hunter gutting an Elk]
Who, in fact, is savage? And who, in fact, is civilized? On the frontier, that's up to us to decide. For we are still early in the process of norming this wild place. The hard- and soft-coded governance protocols DAOs are experimenting with can incentivize new forms of heterarchical mutualism that draw on more civilized modes of human interrelationship (say what you will about the relative success of (3,3), the intention is in the right direction). Or we can create digital savagery, mind-control-level censorship, and techno-feudal panopticons at a scope and scale that humanity has never known. The choice is ours.
[Images of Snowden sweating bullets just before meeting Greenwald for the first time / cut to graphs of the exponential rise in chronic disease rates worldwide screen left / shots of children with shaved heads receiving chemotherapy screen right]
History will still be told by the winners. Or by the survivors, if there are any.
Our relationship with the wilds of our own being will be embodied (or excluded) by the technologies and social systems we create. To all you creators, investors, builders, and onlookers, I urge you to ask: where inside myself do I lead from? What is the source of my creativity? My drive? Am I in touch with the wilderness of my own soul? Or am I simply in it for the upside?
Consider this deeply. The stakes could not be higher.