IntroductionAustin, just like several other southwestern American cities, is not built for walking. However, after several years of becoming familiar with its terrain (primarily through driving), I discovered discrete pockets up and down the superfluous city grid that run against this popular notion. I was fortunate enough to find a home in one of these blocks, where I can walk to a grocery store, a coffee shop and a bar within 15 minutes, but my luck has run out. The little co-op grocery sto...

Welcome to Folklore, a community exploring the labyrinth of networked worlds. In this newly-commissioned essay, Kei Kreutler reflects on standardization and technological interoperability through the metaphor of the fictional spaceport. Kei’s work explores how cultural narratives of technology shape what worlds we can build.No one knows how to repair a spaceport. This is because spaceports primarily exist as a fiction. Spaceports imply the existence of inter-Solar System, if not intergalactic...

A Folklore Essay by Leo Nasskau (FC: @lsn) There is enormous interest in building new movements today. But you don’t have to start anew if you want to change the world. Communities lie on a spectrum in terms of their origins: either they have been created to achieve a goal, or they appear to have been created almost by default; no purpose, they just exist. Who can harness the latent power of those default communities? What power do they have?Digital ContextsWhen we examined historical sources...

Last summer, Rafa (@rafa on Farcaster) joined the Summer of Protocols to explore how protocols shape our lives. During his research, Rafa looked into how people, bots, and content are coordinating in digital spaces. Here we present an excerpt of the full research for Folklore readers. The full essay is available as a PDF here. On the internet, we are part of swarms: networks of people, bots, and content, coordinated through algorithmic feedback loops. Swarms are harbingers of misinformation, ...

Folklore has a mission to explore and understand our evolving digital worlds. Today, we’re happy to dive into the $DEGEN memecoin – a crypto-native fungible digital asset, tied to a social media meme – that emerged within the most recent break-out web 3 consumer social protocol called Farcaster. Before diving in, a note of gratitude to Bountycaster, for enabling us to find the right person to document $DEGEN. Tips and earnings from this post will be split among those that submitted essays for...

We’re excited to be able to support ghostcontext.xyz in their new initiative!Calling all context designers, remix artists, divergent dreamers, seekers and hyperconnectors! Recognizing that the utility of ghostcontext.xyz is currently limited by what we have chosen to collectively bring and mint onchain, we understand that its value might be held on reserve for your future selves. With that in mind, we hope engaging with the conceptual underpinnings of ghost context can still prove to be a rew...

The curious swarm navigates the labyrinthWith this post, Folklore is seeding (and ceding) its graphic identity to its community. This identity consists of no approved assets, no brand guidelines, no official typefaces nor colours. In their place, Folklore offers the source material of these canonical objects: seeds, prompts, references, and an open-ended narrative concept through which to imagine Folklore’s activity: the curious swarm navigates the labyrinth. What follows are some reflections...

Welcome to Folklore, a community exploring the labyrinth of networked worlds. In this commissioned essay, Rue Yi and Ruby Justice Thelot explore the nature and consequence of our diverging online spaces. Rue talks into their screen in a room in Toronto. They keep a green hardback journal with them in case any good ideas want to make themselves known in the shape of daydreams. Ruby is a designer, cyberethnographer and artist. He is the founder of 13101401 Inc. and Adjunct Professor of Design a...

Welcome to Folklore, a community exploring the labyrinth of networked worlds. We’re happy to showcase a guest post by Timour Kosters. Timour is an investor and builder working in crypto, governance, and ml. We encourage you to support Folklore by minting and sharing this article. Want to join the Folklore community? Purchase your membership here.If walls could talk I have a vivid memory of a particular moment in 2019: it was a sunny spring day, and I had just picked up the keys to my new apar...

Folklore’s first season has officially closed. Following this, I’m happy to announce that memberships for Season 2 are now open. The first season, started on August 20th 2022, has been so much more than we could have envisioned. Season 2 will probably be just as fun. What comes next is up to all of us. As always though, our path is slow, gentle, stern. nft://10/0x2451761FeD91d394AD6BA01215f8b46aBe70fC96/?showBuying=true&showMeta=trueOur HistoryFolklore launched in August 2022 with a simple mi...

Author: Wassim Z. Alsindi Welcome to Folklore’s first external commission. We are proud to have commissioned work from Wassim, a brilliant mind exploring online cultures. To support Folklore’s mission of creating a sustainable community of writers, please mint this article. The earnings will be split equally between the author and Folklore, which will commission more high quality content related to the digital humanities. Author’s Note: This text is a heavily abridged version of a longer text...

This is a journey to summon a portal to Us, our collective wisdom.Folklore is nearing 300 pieces of curated content. The knowledge accumulated by the community is becoming increasingly valuable for research, not just curiosity and leisure. How can we make this information accessible? How can we begin to derive insights from the connections between the content?Let us create our first Mind.Community MindsFolklore is not the first, or only community asking these questions of knowledge and memory...