Reprinted from January 17, 2023

For those of you new to Web3, “GM”, (Good Morning) is the new daily greeting in the metaverse. Not “Whatsup”, or “Hello” or “Peace, man” — just “GM”. If you’re reading this, you’re more than likely an email subscriber and we’ve traveled some miles together. We’re modernizing our relationship so I say unto you “GM”. We’re in new territory, driving a new set of wheels.

These are exciting times, for we are witnessing major cultural and technological shifts. No doubt you’ve read all this because you are a savvy group, but I am here to talk with you about how blockchain specifically affects CarCulture.

Last week, I took a break from the endless hours I’ve invested delving into computer code and watched a spaghetti western by Sergio Leone entitled Once Upon a Time in the West.

This brutal Western saga, starring Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Jason Robards, and Claudia Cardinale, holds remarkable parallels to today’s crypto and blockchain wars. If you haven’t seen the film in a while, I recommend you treat yourself to this very slow, visually stunning film about the development of the railroad across America.

After the film credits roll, reflect on the development of the automobile. Even today, when many people own a sophisticated computer that fits in the palm of their hand, automobiles are still the most advanced technology in most people’s lives.

The strife, turmoil, greed, technological innovation and opportunities developed during railway expansion are directly comparable to the development of blockchain technologies. The need to move cattle and supplies between the midwestern railheads and big cities of America was the initial impetus to span the vast spaces between the east and west coasts. But, it was the discovery of California gold that drove the final rail lines to coast-to-coast completion.

We are early in blockchain technology but the parallels between the development of the railroad are remarkably similar. There are turf wars, the fight over right-of-ways, referred to today as the L1 and L2 blockchains: (Ethereum, Bitcoin, Polygon and many others), and the inevitable quest for gold. The gun slingers of the wild west are computer coders today. Mob rule in the pursuit of blockchain gold has captured headlines over the last eighteen months.

But what does blockchain mean to us, the automotive cognoscenti? The simplest explanation is to declare blockchain a tabula rasa upon which we can imprint our memories and knowledge about car culture.

This is my mission. I am creating an experimental first Collection of CarCulture NFTs named “CarMania”. Currently, the NFTs are appearing on OpenSea and Coinbase. Twitter will be the initial NFT release announcement platform. Not all are for sale at this time. Each NFT is a time capsule, a digital artifact holding more than artwork which will evolve over time.

https://opensea.io/collection/carmania-by-carculture

https://nft.coinbase.com/@carculture

The CarMania NFT collection, as you watch it unfold on the Car Culture website, gives me an opportunity to masquerade as the Great, Invisible Oz! Behind the curtains, I am pulling the levers to run experiments.

The fascinating automobiles many of us are acquainted with through shared life experiences driving on the streets, the racetrack and the car show field are my subjects. We’ve lived a life together, and we should attribute it and preserve our heritage for future generations to learn from and discover.

Why blockchain? The knowledge encrypted within my NFT tokens is persisted through blockchain technologies and I believe will endure over time. I have taken great care in choosing my technologies to stand the test of time. Arweave is the base decentralized storage used to persist the high res images and stories associated with the NFT. Our initial smart contracts run on EVM.

If you’re reading this, you more than likely know me from frequent automotive events. I have cataloged our collective car culture for many years through sheer fascination. At my grandmother’s insistence, I notarized all of my artwork through regular copyright registrations at the U. S. Library of Congress. The metadata I have attached to each of the cars in my archive can be fed into the blockchain to deepen and enrich the provenance surrounding the cars we all love for future generations.

This is a long journey we are embarking upon, but one that you can hand down to your grandchildren and say “we owned this car from 1963-1967” or “this is the car we brought you home from the hospital in when you were born”.

So buckle up, and stay tuned. Your next mission is to arm yourself with a blockchain wallet to collect NFTs of the cars you love. Metamask is a popular crypto wallet, but if you are comfortable with Coinbase it is certainly easier to use at this stage of evolution. In the coming months, new ways to legally acquire NFTs through credit cards and fiat will appear. Car Culture is building a railroad in the Wild, Wild West of blockchain. I’m laying the rails, driving the spikes, and navigating the right-of-ways.

At the moment, we are in a crypto bust, but a blockchain renaissance. What greater time to begin learning its mysteries? Speculation has ebbed, and the greed factor has waned. But the paradigm shift will endure so learn all you can. Subscribe to this newsletter to ride the rails alongside me.

In the end, for Car Culture lovers, the journey will be about imbuing the blockchain with our precious memories, and not about trading crypto on margin. We will find a way. I hope you will collect the NFTs I am building, because you and your cars are part of the digital record. I’m sending my love into the future.

Your Drivr.eth,

Cindy

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