Return to the Dunbar's number, remove the fantasy of infinitely extending time and space of magic web3, and pay attention to digital experiences that have boundaries! When new things are easier to create than old ones, enduring old things can acquire immense value.
This is my first article joining the GreenPill.Network, with the Chinese version concurrently published on Matters.town (mashbean). The GreenPill.Network Writing Program publishes one thousand-word article per week for three consecutive weeks, and everyone can participate in writing about web3 public actions from all around the world. Kevin Owocki, the founder of Gitcoin, launched the Green Pill Movement, calling on everyone to transform from Degens (traders) to Regens (cultivators). The movement is now in its second chapter - Global Local Connections, inviting web3 public actors from all around the world to write and interact.
In 2022, our organization, FAB DAO (Formosa Art Bank DAO), conducted a series of web3 experiments in Taiwan for different types of non-profit organizations, activists, and advocates. These were mainly local actions to assist fundraising, advocacy, and digital experiences. Some were successful, while others were not as satisfying. We have cooperated in various forms with art museums, art village, large-scale charity platforms, coral restoration organizations, animal protection groups, public schools, organizations for the elderly, human rights advocates, and others in Taiwan. I believe we have the credentials to provide some preliminary guidance for the local 'regens' in Taiwan.
For those willing to try in mid-2023, it is essential to see the pandemic era as a special event, with phenomena that are hard to replicate. The once-famous projects have now become moldy, and legends have turned into jokes. In that era, when we talked about blockchain or web3, we encountered a series of dreamlike words, such as decentralization, permissionless, trustless, scalability, etc. These blockchain features still exist today, but they don't have much to do with the solidarity of local communities.
Decouple these concepts from the actual people you interact with, and your mental burden will not be so heavy. While these concepts are indeed important and are the cornerstone of the public blockchain operation, they successfully created amazing miracles on a global scale during the pandemic, such as cross-border showing off wealth, war donations, etc. But now, as people live face-to-face again and see continuous warfare as normal, these underlying innovative concepts won't help you achieve advocacy or fundraising effects.
In a permissionless blockchain, everyone can join, but bounded communities are what create real action; trustless smart-contract machines can't automatically produce spiritual tokens that connect each other's trust, spiritual value needs proper context by local actors for the tokens to carry value effectively; in the progress of scalable blockchain technology, actual digital communities shouldn't emphasize rapid expansion of membership, as it will only diminish the chain of trust between each other. If we pay too much attention to the quantifiable benefits generated by tools, platforms, and tokenomics, local actors can easily fall into the anxiety of formalism, and we should now focus more on the process of actual solidarity. How to introduce resources, and how to use them well.
Therefore, in terms of cognition, it is very important to decouple the technological innovation layer from the decentralised society (DeSoc) layer. Community actors don't need to worry about how to improve the terrible user experience of web3, web3 tools are as hard to learn as they are to teach, when you want your participants to learn how to use it. Honestly, our past forcing the public to learn digital wallets, collect digital assets, was like "using a complicated period of growing pains to create a common life experience for members." Before the digital infrastructure related to public fundraising and public advocacy is mature, like local regulations, digital habits, and UI/UX, digital communities should focus on creating impressive digital experiences. This is the only intersection of the technology and society layers at present.
As the world enters an era of attention scarcity in digital life, we should focus on the people and things around us through the process of digital production. Like the virtual treasures in video games, the qualitative changes generated by digital creations give rise to a sense of ‘a sense of ownership’ in subjective consciousness. "I have that, do you have it too?" The sense of social identification created by these virtual items is a completely new mode. ‘A sense of ownership’ and 'rights of possession' are two levels of status, with the latter being defined at legal and social levels. When we own private property, that is a right of possession, such as cars, houses, intellectual property rights, naming rights, etc. However, the right of possession does not necessarily completely overlap with the subjective inner 'sense of ownership'.
Sometimes, we can even jointly own a piece of work, for example, a work has a hundred editions, each of us owns an edition, but we do not think we only own one percent of it. Often, we each feel like we all own one piece, even though it is identical in its bit data, and this can even create 'community identity' because we own the same thing together. This is what is referred to as 'positive externality'.
For instance, in 2022 we co-launched the Vanishing Family series with human rights artists. This is a series of the artist's past oil paintings. The image is a series of family portraits, with family members in the middle disappearing, being locked up in jail, or becoming death-row inmates. This was a very important period in Taiwan's history, ruled by China's dictatorial government, creating countless political prisoners. And to this day, Taiwan's political situation has been liberalized for less than 40 years. The artist and his works are excellent mediums for reflection on human rights.
We issued 100 copies of different works in this series, priced in dollars, and they were snapped up within a few blocks. This was because what we wanted to create was advocacy, and fundraising was secondary. The community members who participated in the collection did not think they only collected one percent of the fragments, but rather a story and a whole segment of history that actually happened in Taiwan.
The 'sense of ownership' is less like 'ownership rights' and more akin to the dissemination of knowledge. When we impart the knowledge in our heads to others, it does not diminish the value of our acquisition of this knowledge, just as a candle's light illuminates a room, these are all non-competitive and non-exclusive public goods. When public-interest or advocacy-type NFTs operate successfully, although their owners are of a limited number, their 'sense of ownership' increases exponentially through the process of user conversion. The best part is that the generated cash flow can be directly returned to the activists.
That's why I would urge non-profit activists who can afford to pay attention to NFT digital experiences at this time, because when new things are easier to create than old ones, enduring old things can acquire immense value, whether digital or not. This is my initial appeal from Taiwan to Regens around the world.