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steph alinsugA Culture of Intimacy: a thesis for building enduring web3 communities
We need more intimacy on the internet, but not the kind of intimacy you might think. As operators in tech, we’re bombarded with oversimplified notions of growth fixated on exponential increases across quantitative metrics. Consider the ubiquity of crude mantras like number go up and up only. This strategy is misdirected within DAOs where the foundational function is community-building. While multi-thousand email waitlists may be beneficial for distribution, high-velocity member growth in earl...
steph alinsugIt’s All Connection, It Always Has Been
Like 29,999 (supposedly) other crypto mfers, I went to Denver last week. Things were feeling a bit stale for me online this first half of Q1. Crypto in Jan 2023 was a very different place than crypto in Jan 2022. It’s winter in all interpretations of the word. And even within exploring the chillier side of crypto with fellow operators, covering such boilerplate bear market themes like downsizing, burn rate, runway, focus — vibes were undeniably electric at ETH Denver. https://zora.co/collecti...
steph alinsugWeb3's Language Problem
It's time web3 divests from stale colonialist words like frontier, jungle, and pioneer.If the promise of web3 is in fact truly revolutionary then let’s start with how we talk about it. There’s a family of words floating around web3 that people are using to talk about the current state of the web’s third act. I’m talking about words like pioneer, frontier, settler, wilderness, explorer, and the like. We choose these words to convey the felt sensation of thrill, of simultaneously building ...
Let me start by saying what decentralized media is not: decentralized media is not decentralized content creation.
Decentralized content creation is a skeuomorphic mental model that we ported from web2. Web2 social apps already provide the conditions for decentralized content creation. We can look to the meme and narrative network effects enabled by web2 social as a starting place for web3 decentralized media, but we shouldn’t glorify decentralized content creation as an end. Decentralized content creation can be a component of decentralized media, but it’s not a precondition.
Let’s talk about what is decentralized media in web3.
Media in web3 is the meta-container for everything related to the DAO or Tokenized Community’s narrative network effect. This means Media is responsible for ensuring the narrative and POV (vision), brand (strategy), and marketing (execution) are aligned across the entire community ecosystem.
Functionally this stack includes media creation, media curation, and media distribution. By media here I mean anything that the DAO or Tokenized Community outputs. Editorials and podcast episodes are obvious examples, however we should broaden our interpretation of what we consider media; a governance proposal is a great example of media. (Side note: I believe we should treat governance proposals as media to ensure narrative alignment. If we create governance proposals with the community’s canonical narrative as the first principle, then the proposal will have a greater likelihood of success.)
Progressive decentralization of media starts at the bottom of the stack — distribution. The community supports the narrative network effect through peer-to-peer sharing. This looks like someone Tweeting about a piece of media, or even about the community itself. Decentralizing distribution is one way to engage the community in storytelling.
At the top of the stack is media creation, the facilitation of which should live within whoever is closest to the vision and strategy. This is usually the instigator, founder, and /or core team. These stakeholders should develop the initial narrative and POV and codify it as canon. This canon then provides the necessary guardrails for decentralization progressing down the media stack. If the DAO or Tokenized Community narrative and POV are clear, compelling, and actively practiced then the community will be more inclined to distribute the narrative through their own experience of it in action.
(For more on the role of canon within decentralized communities, listen to this episode of web3 with a16z featuring Rob McElhenney. McElhenney demonstrates one way in which progressive decentralizing starts with a canon through the creation of writers rooms in his project Adim.)
Finally, curation lives in the middle of stack. Curation allows community participation in the DAO or Tokenized Community’s media while also ensuring quality assurance and narrative alignment.
I argue that DAOs and Tokenized Communities should stand up media verticals in the way that we stand up working groups, guilds, or teams to facilitate other critical outputs such as Product, Community, Operations, etc.
In web3, we’re engaged in the unprecedented exercise of shaping the culture of our individual organizations while simultaneously shaping the culture of an entire movement.
We do this via narrative, facilitated by media.
If we acknowledge the role of media in the physical world as the fourth estate, its principal function is to influence the body being governed. Media is agnostic of the specific governing ideology but serves a similar function across ideologies. From the United States pseudo-democracy to autocratic Russia and China, the core functioning of the media is to inform (influence) or outright control the body being governed.
Layering this line of thinking on top of DAOs and Tokenized Communities, we understand the need for media within all decentralized communities. All DAOs and Tokenized Communities are engaged in decision-making processes; governance is the catchall word for how decisions are made. Narratives — facilitated by our media — is how we shape governance, the culture of our individual organizations, and the culture of the web3 space at large.
Body Language is a web3 serial investigating the tensions that flow from our pursuit of the next phase of digital evolution. As we’re building the infrastructure, finding shared purpose, and establishing digital coordination norms at dizzying speed, it’s easy to forget that we’re still complex and divergent humans collectively traumatized by a previously unimaginable global pandemic. Body language is here to help us remember. Subscribe.
Let me start by saying what decentralized media is not: decentralized media is not decentralized content creation.
Decentralized content creation is a skeuomorphic mental model that we ported from web2. Web2 social apps already provide the conditions for decentralized content creation. We can look to the meme and narrative network effects enabled by web2 social as a starting place for web3 decentralized media, but we shouldn’t glorify decentralized content creation as an end. Decentralized content creation can be a component of decentralized media, but it’s not a precondition.
Let’s talk about what is decentralized media in web3.
Media in web3 is the meta-container for everything related to the DAO or Tokenized Community’s narrative network effect. This means Media is responsible for ensuring the narrative and POV (vision), brand (strategy), and marketing (execution) are aligned across the entire community ecosystem.
Functionally this stack includes media creation, media curation, and media distribution. By media here I mean anything that the DAO or Tokenized Community outputs. Editorials and podcast episodes are obvious examples, however we should broaden our interpretation of what we consider media; a governance proposal is a great example of media. (Side note: I believe we should treat governance proposals as media to ensure narrative alignment. If we create governance proposals with the community’s canonical narrative as the first principle, then the proposal will have a greater likelihood of success.)
Progressive decentralization of media starts at the bottom of the stack — distribution. The community supports the narrative network effect through peer-to-peer sharing. This looks like someone Tweeting about a piece of media, or even about the community itself. Decentralizing distribution is one way to engage the community in storytelling.
At the top of the stack is media creation, the facilitation of which should live within whoever is closest to the vision and strategy. This is usually the instigator, founder, and /or core team. These stakeholders should develop the initial narrative and POV and codify it as canon. This canon then provides the necessary guardrails for decentralization progressing down the media stack. If the DAO or Tokenized Community narrative and POV are clear, compelling, and actively practiced then the community will be more inclined to distribute the narrative through their own experience of it in action.
(For more on the role of canon within decentralized communities, listen to this episode of web3 with a16z featuring Rob McElhenney. McElhenney demonstrates one way in which progressive decentralizing starts with a canon through the creation of writers rooms in his project Adim.)
Finally, curation lives in the middle of stack. Curation allows community participation in the DAO or Tokenized Community’s media while also ensuring quality assurance and narrative alignment.
I argue that DAOs and Tokenized Communities should stand up media verticals in the way that we stand up working groups, guilds, or teams to facilitate other critical outputs such as Product, Community, Operations, etc.
In web3, we’re engaged in the unprecedented exercise of shaping the culture of our individual organizations while simultaneously shaping the culture of an entire movement.
We do this via narrative, facilitated by media.
If we acknowledge the role of media in the physical world as the fourth estate, its principal function is to influence the body being governed. Media is agnostic of the specific governing ideology but serves a similar function across ideologies. From the United States pseudo-democracy to autocratic Russia and China, the core functioning of the media is to inform (influence) or outright control the body being governed.
Layering this line of thinking on top of DAOs and Tokenized Communities, we understand the need for media within all decentralized communities. All DAOs and Tokenized Communities are engaged in decision-making processes; governance is the catchall word for how decisions are made. Narratives — facilitated by our media — is how we shape governance, the culture of our individual organizations, and the culture of the web3 space at large.
Body Language is a web3 serial investigating the tensions that flow from our pursuit of the next phase of digital evolution. As we’re building the infrastructure, finding shared purpose, and establishing digital coordination norms at dizzying speed, it’s easy to forget that we’re still complex and divergent humans collectively traumatized by a previously unimaginable global pandemic. Body language is here to help us remember. Subscribe.
steph alinsugA Culture of Intimacy: a thesis for building enduring web3 communities
We need more intimacy on the internet, but not the kind of intimacy you might think. As operators in tech, we’re bombarded with oversimplified notions of growth fixated on exponential increases across quantitative metrics. Consider the ubiquity of crude mantras like number go up and up only. This strategy is misdirected within DAOs where the foundational function is community-building. While multi-thousand email waitlists may be beneficial for distribution, high-velocity member growth in earl...
steph alinsugIt’s All Connection, It Always Has Been
Like 29,999 (supposedly) other crypto mfers, I went to Denver last week. Things were feeling a bit stale for me online this first half of Q1. Crypto in Jan 2023 was a very different place than crypto in Jan 2022. It’s winter in all interpretations of the word. And even within exploring the chillier side of crypto with fellow operators, covering such boilerplate bear market themes like downsizing, burn rate, runway, focus — vibes were undeniably electric at ETH Denver. https://zora.co/collecti...
steph alinsugWeb3's Language Problem
It's time web3 divests from stale colonialist words like frontier, jungle, and pioneer.If the promise of web3 is in fact truly revolutionary then let’s start with how we talk about it. There’s a family of words floating around web3 that people are using to talk about the current state of the web’s third act. I’m talking about words like pioneer, frontier, settler, wilderness, explorer, and the like. We choose these words to convey the felt sensation of thrill, of simultaneously building ...
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