I wrote something the other day.  The words came to me after reading an article on paragraph written by @chloee.  It was about women in web3.  She is one of those women.  I am not a woman.  I think it’s time to say something more than that, though.  Time to set the table a bit.

I went to great schools up until 12th grade.  After that, it’s not that I went to bad schools, it’s that I became wholeheartedly disinterested with traditional education, in almost any form.  I wanted to learn from the book of experience.  I was done reading, I was done writing, I was done having someone tell me how to think.  I wanted to learn by being wrong.  So, I did.  It took me twelve years of my life to finish college.  I dropped out twice, back to back, right in the beginning.  I made no friends during both of those one semester terms at two different schools that ended in failure.  I felt alone, but the goal wasn’t to fix that.  The goal was never ‘to be seen’.  

After those two immediate failures out of High School, my fate was sealed - I was a dropout.  All that money on those good schools was a waste, or so they said.  What happened after that was a grind, a reinvention of self that torqued me into what you see before you today.  Not much to look at, I’ll give you that - but I can think.  I know I can think, because when everyone told me I was a fucking failure - I thought.  Day after day, I worked, I moved around, I lived my life under the guise of failure, but I never stopped thinking.  

And so, I worked my way up through four different jobs and eventually found a path to system admin by way of a popular retail computer store, but that’s the boring part of the story.  I made friends at each job I worked, friends I still have today even though I left those jobs - unlike my short terms in college.  I met a girl.  That girl came with a double wide trailer and more animals than I have fingers and toes.  That girl was eighteen and I was twenty-one when we met.  She found me at the summit of my failure and she married me anyway - but that is a story for another day.  

Something else happened while I was being a failure for the past twelve years - I got my degree in cyber forensics.  Twelve years, for someone that was groomed from day one to knock the everloving snot out of anything cerebral.  Thousands upon thousands of dollars pumped into making me a test taking machine and I shit the bed for twelve damn years.  I could make this a simple lesson - never give up.  

No, Fuck That.  

It’s not that simple.

I don’t have simple things to say, because whether or not we realize it, we all have something in common - we are dying.  Everyday, a little more, bit by bit, shit by shit, we are racing each other to the finish line.  

So, you see… It’s not that simple.  

There are so many things that happened to me over those twelve years.  They all happened before I finished my degree.  The degree meant nothing to me.  It hangs on my wall as a certificate of twelve years of not giving a damn about traditional education.  I was a Level III Admin before I finished it.  I was married.  I had 6 loving cats pass through mine and my wife’s life and we now are down to just Rascal. Every animal we had - they were found, they were rescued.  We started in a double wide trailer, to graduate to a house in Baltimore City, to finally land in our new house now in PA.  

You see, it’s just not that simple.  

I can hear my eleventh grade English teacher grumbling, “Get to the fucking point already, Dave”.  Good thing I can do whatever I want now… Quiet now, teacher, BE GONE!

I did all that failing very much alone. Yes, you could argue against that in the traditional sense, everyone has ‘people’ in their lives, however - look at where I am writing this, look at where you are reading it, this new world we are making - if we are measuring by this new standard of social interaction we bore into the world - then, I did that all utterly alone.  I engaged with social media nada, zip, zero, zilch, outside of consuming it as entertainment and staying in touch with family and friends.  A few videos of my different hobbies on Youtube, just between my friends and I, with no real direction or purpose other than capturing the moment.  

What we have made, though, is an internet market around ‘being seen’.  I have a good job.  I have a good life.  But, there is always a but.  I know many that do not, and they aren’t in the realm of internet acquaintances - they are my family.  I don’t have it that good to help them the way I want to, but we created an internet market for people that like to think.  And so, here I am - the thinker. 

What I said in response to Chloe’s article is that we need to write from the soul.  The soul has no discernable parts - it is a soul.  Many believe in it, but no one has seen it.  You have no idea what it is, you have no idea of it’s makeup, it’s composition: male, female - it doesn’t work.  You might think this an argument for non-binary, you would be wrong, because again - It’s not that simple.  You might want to put it in that box, and I feel for people going through that, but this is about being seen.  It’s not about one box, it’s about THE BOX itself - the square.  The "us versus them" mentality of being seen.  My box and the people I fill it with are better than your box and those people you fill it with.  

You see it.  I know you do, because it’s real.  It’s the Group Mentality of Being Seen and I am going to be honest with you, it’s traditional - it’s like traditional education, the clicks in the school cafeteria.  It is, “Let me gather a group of like minded thinkers and become a huge unavoidable blob of identical thought”.  Identical thought turns very quickly into a cult, and the top of that pyramid will win.  This is the ultimate perfection of capitalism, these attention markets.  I hope we all realize this to some degree, and it will come with all of the downsides of capitalism incarnate.  That’s why we tried to curb capitalism with democracy - to act like we care about those less fortunate.  That seems to be failing, and born out of that failure, we have whatever ‘this’ is.

So… I am over here not as a full unyielding believer in Base.  I am over here as a user, something I get to do all too little, because I am the one behind your computer screen whose name you do not know that keeps your entire system online.  I am the failure, the dropout, the one who did not care about being seen.  The goal, quite clearly and definitively, in every sense of the words now is: TO BE SEEN. 

And my point… 

Those that were good at being alone.  

Those that were great at being failures.

Those that went their own way.

They have a distinct advantage.

Because they care very little about actually being seen.

I care about what you are saying and why.

I care enough about it to engage with you in a meaningful way, no matter who you are.

Meaningful doesn’t mean agreeing.

If we all agree on everything - we are a damn cult and we are just fucking noise.

Funny, the guy wearing a Meme Coin NFT PFP telling you not to be a cult…

Telling you to think for yourself.

 I’m willing to bet group mentality in a decentralized internet economy of attention favors those who don’t give a shit about THE BOX.  I will dip my hand into every single box there is and touch someone in that group somehow - because I can think, because I can feel, and because I am fucking human.  

You love God:

Great, I think one might exist, I'm speaking about souls aren't I? I’m a big fan of scientific processes as well.

You speak another language:

Translation apps are free.

You are a feminist:

Great, I love my wife and she needs a better job with more time off and a better work schedule.

You are a misogynist male:

Well… I have a weiner, and somewhere inside me there is an asshole. In fact I know there is, we all have one.

You love communism:

I love philosophy and 100% pure capitalism can get pretty ugly… I think we might find that out soon.

You love animals:

If that’s all we ever talk about then we won’t get very far knowing each other, but that won’t stop me from buying your dog and cat pics on Zora.

You like taking pics of food:

I’m always hungry

If you are LGBTQIA+:

By all means, take that soul quote from me. I had more to say, but it fucking works.

If you want to see where I draw my lines:

Bring it.

…………………………………..

I think you get the point.  This is the breaking of the chains of traditional followership.  This is the unmasking of the people that are not on social media.  This is the, “Engage now or forever hold your peace”.  And when you engage, if all you ever do is echo the sentiments ricocheting off the walls inside your box, soon - I would imagine you will be the only one in that box.       

I have never done this and I have no clue how to do it.  What I am telling you is, I never gave a shit about being seen.  I failed my way to some form of success by not caring about traditional education and just letting life come to me.  If I had to bet, in the long run, this is going to be about being human and being able to communicate directly with other individual humans in a meaningful way. It is going to be about dipping your hand in all these boxes we built to divide us and touching another human being right in the fucking soul. So much so, that they look around them in that box of theirs and wonder… Who the fuck are these people?  Better yet, Who the fuck am I?

Till next time.  

Perhaps up next, 

The story of how my wife and I met… 

The origin story of The Warlock, The Witch, And the Double Wide Trailer with more animals in it than I have ever seen in my entire life…