On Thursday, May 26, Li Jin (@ljin18), co-founder of the Variant Fund and frequent writer on what she terms “the passion economy” posted a Twitter thread that began …

“Unlike visual nfts which naturally had a surface area on which to flex ownership (Twitter & particularly the profile pic), other categories of NFTs don’t naturally have a space for showcasing ownership. Music NFTs, fashion NFTs, writing NFTs all need new consumption experiences.” (emphasis mine)

She followed up with a question, “If status is utility, then what will be the places to accrue status for those other verticals of NFTs?”

Certainly not the first Tweet that commented on what is becoming a central issue in the NFT space … one of value and utility.

Since BAYC and similar projects first gained an audience and certain notoriety, buyers have been snapping them up like so many Ferraris and McLarens, and using them as their Twitter, and other social media, profile pictures.

It is, as Li Jin said, “a surface area on which to flex ownership.” It is “status.”

Certainly nothing wrong with seeking, gaining, or showing off your status. But is that the limit to what NFTs mean? Is it the limit to the value and the utility of the concept?

I don’t think so and as I browse NFT Twitter, I find a hunger for something more. Something to satisfy that need to more than just a pretty picture. Something that has some tangible benefit, some value beyond status.

But how? How do we as creators demonstrate this, then provide it? And how do collectors trust the claims of utility and expansion of our projects as detailed in our roadmaps?

In the last several days, there have been a flurry of Tweets beleaguring the practice of new NFT projects to tout their utility and display their grand plans in their minutely detailed roadmaps.

The consensus seems to be that most claims of utility are mere attempts to grab marketing spotlight and motives are suspect, at best.

“I learned that anyone can make a ”roadmap” and the word “utility” is so used and abused I legit don’t know what it means anymore when it comes to NFTs.” — Errol Gray, @errolgreynft.

This leaves both NFT creators and NFT collectors in a bit of a quandary.

For the creator, it is a question of how do I communicate the value that I want to bring with my project and prove that my plans, my roadmap are legit? How do I prove I’m not gonna rug?

Certainly most creators don’t go into the creative process with the intent to rug. It happens, but creators want to create and share their work with the public. Money is (usually) a secondary consideration.

And as one Tweet I saw last week said (sorry, I didn’t screenshot it!), the simple fact is that many artists have never made much money from their art so when they are suddenly saddled with millions of dollars after a successful NFT launch … well, Fiji is an awfully inviting place and with all that sudden weath … !

Not good. And certainly not excusing the behavior. But sometimes reality.

So creators are stuck with how to communicate value. Communicate the legitimate utility that they’re attempting to bring to life.

For the NFT collector and/or investor, the issue is the same but from the opposite perspective … how do I know if this interesting looking NFT project is legit? If I drop 1ETH, or more, on this NFT, how do I know the creator won’t just disappear? Will the promises in her detailed roadmap made become reality?

Creators want to prove the utility of their project and prove the promise of their roadmap.

Buyers want to believe but have been either burned too many times by rugs or just poorly executed launches that will never come to full realization of the roadmap promises, no matter how well intentioned.

Both parties are blinded by the shrill light of everyone hyping their projects and the “status” hodlrs will have “if they just ape in … !”

The shilling and over hyped but under supported projects, and the focus on that status as the utility, are undermining the opportunities on both sides.

Which circles us back to the Tweet from Li Jin, “If status is utility, then what will be the places to accrue status for those other verticals of NFTs?”

An excellent question, but I don’t think that is the right question to ask. I don’t think that it will be the places to accrue the status that will be the savior here. There is simply no easy way to turn my 7,097 word short story into a profile picture or other symbol of status gained by its ownership. It doesn't have the portability of a jpg.

To evolve the NFT universe, we need to shift the thinking away from “status” and to IRL utility.

Wait! WTF does that mean … IRL utility?

What I’m referring to here is anything beyond the “look at me, I own XYZ” kind of pseudo-celebrity status … all about ME-ME-ME.

What I’m referring to is something we can take into the real world and use to make things better.

Listening to music inspires us, cools our mood. It “soothes the savage breast” to quote English playwright and poet William Congreve (1670 – 1729).

Reading stokes the fires of the imagination, providing adventure, escape, a window into new worlds.

One of the first acronyms that I learned in this space was #WAGMI — We’re All Gonna Make It.

I love that!

I love the Tweets I see on a regular basis from large Twitter accounts asking for shout outs for smaller accounts. “Let’s help them out; raise their reach.” Not something you see in brick and mortar business who see the other guy as competition.

That kind of activity is what makes the NFT space special. It is the emphasis on others, on putting the concept that “a rising tide lifts all boats” into practical application.

The polar opposite of the current ME-ME-ME status seeking approach.

IRL utility, in a nutshell, simply answers the question, “NFTs are assets so I wonder, what can I do with this asset? and that’s the utility” (emphasis mine) — crytpoquantic.eth, @CryptoQuantic

If I buy a cool jpg, what can I do with it? I can make it my PFP on Twitter and hope someone thinks that’s cool.

If I buy a music NFT, what can I do with it? I can listen to it any time I want to, and I know that I’ve contributed to the creation of that song/album.

If I buy a fiction NFT, what can I do with it? I can support an author whose writing I admire and whose story speaks to me.

IRL, I can contribute to the creation of a piece of artwork, supporting the creator.

IRL, I can give that artist the creative space to work, because creativity is hard enough without the hassles of a daily J.O.B.

IRL, I can provide services to that creator, like providing marketing or promotion or accounting or legal or even just moral support.

It boils down to one simple thing … COMMUNITY: the coming together of like minds and common goals to build up not the individual but everyone.

That, I’ve said in several Tweets and comments, is “the killer app” of the NFT space.

We gain status by becoming part of a community. That is exactly what happens when someone buys a Bored Ape or a CryptoPunk. They become a member of a very exclusive club and one whose membership alone is worth serious bank. Real privilege.

American Express … eat your heart out!

So maybe Li Jin’s question is appropriate after all. Maybe status is important, IRL.

But to answer her question, maybe it comes from the communities we as NFT creators and we as NFT collectors/buyers create together. Not from who owns what jpg. Not from who spent the most to acquire that jpg. Or who owned it before we snapped it up.

The status we gain comes from the community we build.

If we are going to see the NFT space through this current bear market and emerge from the other side stronger for it, we have to band together. We have to look beyond our own personal status and look at the greater good.

It is not about self-sacrifice nor giving up personal gain. Nor even giving up status (within or outside of any given community, or because of it).

I think this idea is summed up beautifully in the paper Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul by E. Glen Weyl, Puja Ohlhaver, & Vitalik Buterin.

“… individuality emerges from the intersection of social groups, just a social groups emerge as the intersection of individuals.”

They are specifically discussing concepts of identity security, privacy, as well as community membership for validation of identity. However, I think it sums up nicely how community is the ultimate IRL utility.

This still begs the question of how to communicate this without becoming just another wannabee NFT marketer screaming his head off to try and be heard over the rest of us yelling about our own projects?

How do creators demonstrate their IRL utility and build community?

How do buyers know that the promises made in a roadmap aren’t just pie-in-the-sky ideals that will never see the light of day?

How do we bridge this gap between what creators see and buyers spend money to acquire without getting lost in more hype and louder marketing claims?

There is an old adage in fiction writing: SHOW, DON’T TELL.

It means that, as a fiction writer, it is never good enough to relate a bunch of events and expect a reader to become involved in our story.

To use an example from my own short story that will soon be available as a 1/10 NFT, I open by describing my private detective protagonist’s office as he enters after a night on stakeout.

What I do not say is, “He walked into the spartan room on the third floor of the dilapidated building and found a dead man laying on the floor, his brains splattered on the far wall above the couch.”

Sure, that tells you the facts and sets up the story. But it is just facts. No emotion. No personal attachment.

What I did say was …

He was still dead.

But, somehow, that hadn’t stopped him from fucking up my day.

Or the wall of the reception area of my office cum living quarters and filling the air with an acrid iron odor. It was going to take hours of scrubbing to clean the blood and brain matter off the wall. And more than a few coats of paint to cover the red stain.

I am putting my reader immediately into the mind of my hero, letting them see and experience the sights and smells, as well as the emotional (or lack thereof) reaction to this unpleasant discovery.

As fiction writers, we must create an environment within our story that is like quicksand … our reader is sucked in and drawn down into the story environment. We must create a place where the reader becomes so invested in the story that he loses all track of time. All cognizance of pages turning.

Perhaps you’ve had that experience reading a great novel.

You reach the end of a chapter and the start of a new one that, with its formating to indicate a new chapter, jars you out of the story. You flip back and realize you have no recollection of turning pages.

But the story is familiar. You read it.

You were sucked so deeply into the story that you were no longer reading, you were experiencing.

In Writing Twitter, I often see Tweets with a line or two from someone’s book. Some turn of phrase that, to the author, is pure gold. Something they imagine emblazoned on a t-shirt.

But out of context, without the emotion and story, it is meaningless. Pointless purple prose.

Great if you’re Shakespeare and individual words matter; not great if you’re an average writer just trying to tell a story.

SHOW, DON’T TELL simply means that instead of telling me the sun is hot, show the character tugging at his necktie, rolling up his sleeves, wiping his brow.

The same concept applies to writing about our NFT projects. It applies to how we communicate the utility we’re building into our project and how we explain our roadmap.

Good marketing copywriting is also about communicating the value (aka, utility) of whatever we’re selling. The old adage here is “Sell the sizzle, not the steak.”

In other words, BENEFITS not FEATURES.

Nobody cares about what governance rights they’ll gain; they care about the ability to contribute to a project and help guide it with their skills and knowledge.

Nobody cares about being in a community; they care about this community and how being a member helps them accomplish their goals, both personal and community goals.

Nobody cares about getting whitelisted for the next moon; they care about being on the inside track and not missing out on a great investment opportunity.

The problem is that the NFT community as a whole is still focused on “status” rather than developing and communicating real value to those with the money to invest in our projects and help us grow our communities.

We see everything through the jaundiced colors of the latest jpg NFT phenomenon. And that blinds us to other possibilities.

What Li Jin asked in her Tweet is relevant.

But, I believe, until we see beyond NFT ownership as a status symbol and only as a status symbol, the entire space will be stuck.

Bear market or bull. It won’t matter.

But there is opportunity here. If we can recognize that the definition of art goes beyond a pretty picture but includes music, poetry, fiction, film and animation, graphic novels/comics, even dance or other forms of movement like martial art katas, we can realize far more than even the strange imagination of a pulp fiction writer can conjure.

If we can refocus off of the pretty pictures, off of the status and ME-ME-ME, and instead look at how we build communities, how we work together to promote each other and help each other build projects, we can begin to see that the IRL utility of NFTs is not the ownership but the contribution.

That is the opportunity here.

Especially now during this (apparent) bear market when prices are down. As so many Tweets have said, now is the time to build.

Let’s build something new. Something fantastic. Let’s build it together.

In my next essay (which I’ll publish here on Monday, 6 June 2022), I’m going to focus on one way that we can build something new and do it together.

(Hint: it has to do with this short YouTube clip from the Bankless Podcast and a concept called composability, although I’m taking a slightly different tack on applying it specifically to decentralized storytelling.)

Read the rest of the essays in this series by visiting my main page and checking them out. Like a typical blog, start at the bottom:

https://mirror.xyz/0x839846a00f25f01DcB7446A50C92AfB5B24E1b03

The Pulpeteer (pronounced pulp·ateer; taken from an essay by pulp writer Lester Dent who created the Doc Savage character and series) is a full time author and the warped mind behind the metaverse fiction NFT project — THE JOE SPUTNIK CHRONICLES, a metaverse hardboiled detective fiction series — where he is exploring the concepts and practical application of decentralized storytelling and open source character IP as a means to tell better stories.

Follow the saga of Joe Sputnik, PI in 2047 New York City as he battles hidden forces that threaten to dominate what has become a fully decentralized world → www.jspi.xyz

Or follow his thoughts on decentalized storytelling and open source character IPs on Twitter → @jspi_nft

On Thursday, May 26, Li Jin (@ljin18), co-founder of the Variant Fund and frequent writer on what she terms “the passion economy” posted a Twitter thread that began …

“Unlike visual nfts which naturally had a surface area on which to flex ownership (Twitter & particularly the profile pic), other categories of NFTs don’t naturally have a space for showcasing ownership. Music NFTs, fashion NFTs, writing NFTs all need new consumption experiences.” (emphasis mine)

She followed up with a question, “If status is utility, then what will be the places to accrue status for those other verticals of NFTs?”

Certainly not the first Tweet that commented on what is becoming a central issue in the NFT space … one of value and utility.

Since BAYC and similar projects first gained an audience and certain notoriety, buyers have been snapping them up like so many Ferraris and McLarens, and using them as their Twitter, and other social media, profile pictures.

It is, as Li Jin said, “a surface area on which to flex ownership.” It is “status.”

Certainly nothing wrong with seeking, gaining, or showing off your status. But is that the limit to what NFTs mean? Is it the limit to the value and the utility of the concept?

I don’t think so and as I browse NFT Twitter, I find a hunger for something more. Something to satisfy that need to more than just a pretty picture. Something that has some tangible benefit, some value beyond status.

But how? How do we as creators demonstrate this, then provide it? And how do collectors trust the claims of utility and expansion of our projects as detailed in our roadmaps?

In the last several days, there have been a flurry of Tweets beleaguring the practice of new NFT projects to tout their utility and display their grand plans in their minutely detailed roadmaps.

The consensus seems to be that most claims of utility are mere attempts to grab marketing spotlight and motives are suspect, at best.

“I learned that anyone can make a ”roadmap” and the word “utility” is so used and abused I legit don’t know what it means anymore when it comes to NFTs.” — Errol Gray, @errolgreynft.

This leaves both NFT creators and NFT collectors in a bit of a quandary.

For the creator, it is a question of how do I communicate the value that I want to bring with my project and prove that my plans, my roadmap are legit? How do I prove I’m not gonna rug?

Certainly most creators don’t go into the creative process with the intent to rug. It happens, but creators want to create and share their work with the public. Money is (usually) a secondary consideration.

And as one Tweet I saw last week said (sorry, I didn’t screenshot it!), the simple fact is that many artists have never made much money from their art so when they are suddenly saddled with millions of dollars after a successful NFT launch … well, Fiji is an awfully inviting place and with all that sudden weath … !

Not good. And certainly not excusing the behavior. But sometimes reality.

So creators are stuck with how to communicate value. Communicate the legitimate utility that they’re attempting to bring to life.

For the NFT collector and/or investor, the issue is the same but from the opposite perspective … how do I know if this interesting looking NFT project is legit? If I drop 1ETH, or more, on this NFT, how do I know the creator won’t just disappear? Will the promises in her detailed roadmap made become reality?

Creators want to prove the utility of their project and prove the promise of their roadmap.

Buyers want to believe but have been either burned too many times by rugs or just poorly executed launches that will never come to full realization of the roadmap promises, no matter how well intentioned.

Both parties are blinded by the shrill light of everyone hyping their projects and the “status” hodlrs will have “if they just ape in … !”

The shilling and over hyped but under supported projects, and the focus on that status as the utility, are undermining the opportunities on both sides.

Which circles us back to the Tweet from Li Jin, “If status is utility, then what will be the places to accrue status for those other verticals of NFTs?”

An excellent question, but I don’t think that is the right question to ask. I don’t think that it will be the places to accrue the status that will be the savior here. There is simply no easy way to turn my 7,097 word short story into a profile picture or other symbol of status gained by its ownership. It doesn't have the portability of a jpg.

To evolve the NFT universe, we need to shift the thinking away from “status” and to IRL utility.

Wait! WTF does that mean … IRL utility?

What I’m referring to here is anything beyond the “look at me, I own XYZ” kind of pseudo-celebrity status … all about ME-ME-ME.

What I’m referring to is something we can take into the real world and use to make things better.

Listening to music inspires us, cools our mood. It “soothes the savage breast” to quote English playwright and poet William Congreve (1670 – 1729).

Reading stokes the fires of the imagination, providing adventure, escape, a window into new worlds.

One of the first acronyms that I learned in this space was #WAGMI — We’re All Gonna Make It.

I love that!

I love the Tweets I see on a regular basis from large Twitter accounts asking for shout outs for smaller accounts. “Let’s help them out; raise their reach.” Not something you see in brick and mortar business who see the other guy as competition.

That kind of activity is what makes the NFT space special. It is the emphasis on others, on putting the concept that “a rising tide lifts all boats” into practical application.

The polar opposite of the current ME-ME-ME status seeking approach.

IRL utility, in a nutshell, simply answers the question, “NFTs are assets so I wonder, what can I do with this asset? and that’s the utility” (emphasis mine) — crytpoquantic.eth, @CryptoQuantic

If I buy a cool jpg, what can I do with it? I can make it my PFP on Twitter and hope someone thinks that’s cool.

If I buy a music NFT, what can I do with it? I can listen to it any time I want to, and I know that I’ve contributed to the creation of that song/album.

If I buy a fiction NFT, what can I do with it? I can support an author whose writing I admire and whose story speaks to me.

IRL, I can contribute to the creation of a piece of artwork, supporting the creator.

IRL, I can give that artist the creative space to work, because creativity is hard enough without the hassles of a daily J.O.B.

IRL, I can provide services to that creator, like providing marketing or promotion or accounting or legal or even just moral support.

It boils down to one simple thing … COMMUNITY: the coming together of like minds and common goals to build up not the individual but everyone.

That, I’ve said in several Tweets and comments, is “the killer app” of the NFT space.

We gain status by becoming part of a community. That is exactly what happens when someone buys a Bored Ape or a CryptoPunk. They become a member of a very exclusive club and one whose membership alone is worth serious bank. Real privilege.

American Express … eat your heart out!

So maybe Li Jin’s question is appropriate after all. Maybe status is important, IRL.

But to answer her question, maybe it comes from the communities we as NFT creators and we as NFT collectors/buyers create together. Not from who owns what jpg. Not from who spent the most to acquire that jpg. Or who owned it before we snapped it up.

The status we gain comes from the community we build.

If we are going to see the NFT space through this current bear market and emerge from the other side stronger for it, we have to band together. We have to look beyond our own personal status and look at the greater good.

It is not about self-sacrifice nor giving up personal gain. Nor even giving up status (within or outside of any given community, or because of it).

I think this idea is summed up beautifully in the paper Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul by E. Glen Weyl, Puja Ohlhaver, & Vitalik Buterin.

“… individuality emerges from the intersection of social groups, just a social groups emerge as the intersection of individuals.”

They are specifically discussing concepts of identity security, privacy, as well as community membership for validation of identity. However, I think it sums up nicely how community is the ultimate IRL utility.

This still begs the question of how to communicate this without becoming just another wannabee NFT marketer screaming his head off to try and be heard over the rest of us yelling about our own projects?

How do creators demonstrate their IRL utility and build community?

How do buyers know that the promises made in a roadmap aren’t just pie-in-the-sky ideals that will never see the light of day?

How do we bridge this gap between what creators see and buyers spend money to acquire without getting lost in more hype and louder marketing claims?

There is an old adage in fiction writing: SHOW, DON’T TELL.

It means that, as a fiction writer, it is never good enough to relate a bunch of events and expect a reader to become involved in our story.

To use an example from my own short story that will soon be available as a 1/10 NFT, I open by describing my private detective protagonist’s office as he enters after a night on stakeout.

What I do not say is, “He walked into the spartan room on the third floor of the dilapidated building and found a dead man laying on the floor, his brains splattered on the far wall above the couch.”

Sure, that tells you the facts and sets up the story. But it is just facts. No emotion. No personal attachment.

What I did say was …

He was still dead.

But, somehow, that hadn’t stopped him from fucking up my day.

Or the wall of the reception area of my office cum living quarters and filling the air with an acrid iron odor. It was going to take hours of scrubbing to clean the blood and brain matter off the wall. And more than a few coats of paint to cover the red stain.

I am putting my reader immediately into the mind of my hero, letting them see and experience the sights and smells, as well as the emotional (or lack thereof) reaction to this unpleasant discovery.

As fiction writers, we must create an environment within our story that is like quicksand … our reader is sucked in and drawn down into the story environment. We must create a place where the reader becomes so invested in the story that he loses all track of time. All cognizance of pages turning.

Perhaps you’ve had that experience reading a great novel.

You reach the end of a chapter and the start of a new one that, with its formating to indicate a new chapter, jars you out of the story. You flip back and realize you have no recollection of turning pages.

But the story is familiar. You read it.

You were sucked so deeply into the story that you were no longer reading, you were experiencing.

In Writing Twitter, I often see Tweets with a line or two from someone’s book. Some turn of phrase that, to the author, is pure gold. Something they imagine emblazoned on a t-shirt.

But out of context, without the emotion and story, it is meaningless. Pointless purple prose.

Great if you’re Shakespeare and individual words matter; not great if you’re an average writer just trying to tell a story.

SHOW, DON’T TELL simply means that instead of telling me the sun is hot, show the character tugging at his necktie, rolling up his sleeves, wiping his brow.

The same concept applies to writing about our NFT projects. It applies to how we communicate the utility we’re building into our project and how we explain our roadmap.

Good marketing copywriting is also about communicating the value (aka, utility) of whatever we’re selling. The old adage here is “Sell the sizzle, not the steak.”

In other words, BENEFITS not FEATURES.

Nobody cares about what governance rights they’ll gain; they care about the ability to contribute to a project and help guide it with their skills and knowledge.

Nobody cares about being in a community; they care about this community and how being a member helps them accomplish their goals, both personal and community goals.

Nobody cares about getting whitelisted for the next moon; they care about being on the inside track and not missing out on a great investment opportunity.

The problem is that the NFT community as a whole is still focused on “status” rather than developing and communicating real value to those with the money to invest in our projects and help us grow our communities.

We see everything through the jaundiced colors of the latest jpg NFT phenomenon. And that blinds us to other possibilities.

What Li Jin asked in her Tweet is relevant.

But, I believe, until we see beyond NFT ownership as a status symbol and only as a status symbol, the entire space will be stuck.

Bear market or bull. It won’t matter.

But there is opportunity here. If we can recognize that the definition of art goes beyond a pretty picture but includes music, poetry, fiction, film and animation, graphic novels/comics, even dance or other forms of movement like martial art katas, we can realize far more than even the strange imagination of a pulp fiction writer can conjure.

If we can refocus off of the pretty pictures, off of the status and ME-ME-ME, and instead look at how we build communities, how we work together to promote each other and help each other build projects, we can begin to see that the IRL utility of NFTs is not the ownership but the contribution.

That is the opportunity here.

Especially now during this (apparent) bear market when prices are down. As so many Tweets have said, now is the time to build.

Let’s build something new. Something fantastic. Let’s build it together.

In my next essay (which I’ll publish here on Monday, 6 June 2022), I’m going to focus on one way that we can build something new and do it together.

(Hint: it has to do with this short YouTube clip from the Bankless Podcast and a concept called composability, although I’m taking a slightly different tack on applying it specifically to decentralized storytelling.)

Read the rest of the essays in this series by visiting my main page and checking them out. Like a typical blog, start at the bottom:

https://mirror.xyz/0x839846a00f25f01DcB7446A50C92AfB5B24E1b03

The Pulpeteer (pronounced pulp·ateer; taken from an essay by pulp writer Lester Dent who created the Doc Savage character and series) is a full time author and the warped mind behind the metaverse fiction NFT project — THE JOE SPUTNIK CHRONICLES, a metaverse hardboiled detective fiction series — where he is exploring the concepts and practical application of decentralized storytelling and open source character IP as a means to tell better stories.

Follow the saga of Joe Sputnik, PI in 2047 New York City as he battles hidden forces that threaten to dominate what has become a fully decentralized world → www.jspi.xyz

Or follow his thoughts on decentalized storytelling and open source character IPs on Twitter → @jspi_nft