“The trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don’t yet know. But what we see is the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all.” - Robin Kimmerer

Note: Gold Passes have SOLD OUT, but two-day passes are still available here. Collect an NFT for entry to any two days of your choice, including chefs tasting, musical performances, immersive art, and our closing dance party on Friday night. All proceeds to The Rainforest Foundation

Eco Oasis is a 24-hour oasis themed lounge throughout NFT NYC.

June 21st to 24th we will host 150 loungers from the web3 and ecodao communities in a divine Williamsburg townhome with greenhouse, garden, and multiple spaces for lounging, recharging, meeting and conversation.

Everything is drop-in whenever, however, whatever, with a full schedule of musical performances, wellness activities, immersive art, and chef tastings to stumble upon whenever you do arrive. Pop by when you can or check the schedule released week-of.

NFT holders will enjoy early access to any future oases put on at major conferences throughout time and space.

Artwork by Nate Mohler Experience Design by Dan Hunt Cuisine and Cocktails by Nadia Irshaid Gilbert Theatrics by Taylor Myers & David Schafran Performances by BRUX, Frozen Fields, Lexi Lowell, and more Experimental Connectathon by Backdrop & Rehash Proceeds to Rainforest Foundation

Eco Oasis Week Pass [SOLD OUT]

Please see below for day passes, which are still available.

edition://0x8BE62c3Ad4A0dca4Cf1F762Ff38B3de091D4674B?editionId=0

Eco Oasis Two Day Pass

All-access pass to the oasis for two days of your choice during NFT NYC.

Each day includes a chef’s tasting, wellness activity, musical performance, and fireside chat. Day passes also provide admission to Friday’s closing ceremony and dance party even if that’s not the day you choose.

You may buy two day passes if you’d like a week pass. All proceeds will be donated to the Rainforest Foundation.

edition://0xB0cc69f786572764cdd458d6C63Db036cc7756F3?editionId=0

After you’re all done please token-gate into our telegram group at guild.xyz/eco-oasis to stay up to date with the eco oasis event and ecodao community! 🌱

Oasis Schedule

Tuesday June 21st

**The oasis will open on Tuesday at 2pm 2pm: Chef's Tasting with Gina Bruno & Opening Ceremony 5pm: Happy Hour with live musical performance 6pm: Fireside with Elizabeth Stark

Wednesday June 22nd

2pm: Chef's Tasting with Nadia Irshaid Gilbert 3pm: Meditation with Andrew Thomas6pm: Speak-easy themed Happy Hour

Thursday June 23rd

12pm: Experimental Connectathon by Backdrop & Rehash 2pm: Chef Tasting with Gina Bruno 3pm: Breathwork & Cold Plunge with Othership 5pm: Happy Hour with Cacao Ceremony by Azalea Kemp 6pm: Fireside with Rafa

Friday June 24th

2pm: Chef Tasting with Nadia Irshaid Gilbert 3pm: Embodiment with Ryan Daniel Beck 5pm: Happy Hour with Harpist Lexi Lowell 6pm: Fireside with Sirsu 9pm: Closing Ceremony & Dance Party with BRUX,  Frozen Fields, Johnny Hwin, and Bastion

Background

At ecodao, we host occasional, pop-up events to facilitate connection between communities and artists who support ecological causes.

The first half of the ecodao cycle is that of traditional fan-artist relationships: the community collects work from values-aligned artists, who then perform or create exhibits for the community.

But it’s the second half of this cycle that’s unique to web3 DAO structures: an artist can produce work that inspires entire communities to arise, hang out, and get to know each other, even if the artist is relatively unknown. The artist enables fans to have a space to build relationships with one another, develop their own objectives, and, yes, just chill.

It’s this fan-fan relationship, rather than fan-artist relationship, that’s particularly special in web3 and that we hope to foster at ecodao—with proceeds supporting art and the environment.

Admittedly, we’re still figuring it out. What does it mean to properly engage a community of values-aligned participants to erupt out of thin air, riff on each other’s ideas, and fall in love with each other as friends?

It looks, we hope, something like our next endeavor — an eco oasis available all day and night throughout NFT NYC for holders to enjoy vegan bites, fresh-pressed juice, plant-inspired cocktails, and a series of activities and live performances ranging from mini-concerts to meditations to DJ sets to a mysterious experience for a lucky few. ✨

All proceeds go to our featured artist Nate Mohler and The Rainforest Foundation.

edition://0xEA8891E76bAA7ecA791daC1C6feB738565b8c061?editionId=0&editionOpenSaleId=6

The Two of Swords shows a blindfolded woman, 2 crossed swords representing protection from painful feelings, surrounded by turbulent emotions. "Tension & anxiety" is what connects this to the song Bitches Want Pictures—written about society's obsession with self-image, unhealthy addiction to social media and extreme vanity. Two of Swords is the single artwork for BRUX’s 2019 release Bitches Want Pictures.

Bitches want pictures, the illusion if you’re rich or not. It don’t matter where you are, you gotta get that shot. On your phone girl 24/7, you lap it up, not laugh it off.

The Empress, “I’m Back” Feb 11 release 2eth, 5 editions

edition://0x1487b66A3cc2B39dA54218241807f6a006031FCf?editionId=0&editionOpenSaleId=8

The empress holds a lot of power. She stands for sovereignty, creative expression and birth of new beginnings—her crown has twelve stars representing her dominance over the year. It holds tremendous personal meaning for me: this encapsulates the energy of BRUX overall. This single was the first original BRUX release, marking the birth of a new era. “I’m Back” communicates a narrative flip on objectification of women. The empress embraces her sexuality and regains power where "shame" and "guilt" once lived. The Empress is the single artwork for BRUX’s 2018 release “I’m Back.”

I see how much you flex for me, but let’s skip the steps, it’s sex I need..all your other bad girls I put to shame…about damn time they put a face to a name...strung out for your body…you got me hooked so I’m back again.

Ten of Cups, “Paper Boy” Feb 11 release 1 eth, 8 editions

edition://0x4130a5F5EDBB7bCb43A1432a488f9a0cb88198B3?editionId=0&editionOpenSaleId=9

The Ten of Cups represents contentment and abundance within relationships— however, when it shows up in a reading as reversed (the card flipped upside down), it represents seeking greater harmony and connection. “Paper Boy” communicates that yearning. The Ten of Cups is the single artwork for BRUX’s 2018 release “Paper Boy.”

All that I want is to hold something real, all that I need is to feel...

The Moon, “Belong” Feb 10 release 0.75 eth, 12 editions

edition://0xC67cb8aFbd16e9044863eDaCb5ff998AAC9A489f?editionId=0&editionOpenSaleId=7

The Moon represents fears and illusions, projecting fear into our present and our future, based only on the past. “Belong” emotionally sits in that pocket of euphoric feeling that the right person has come along, alongside the simultaneous disbelief and feelings of doubt. The Moon is the single artwork for BRUX’s 2019 release Belong.

“Oh I’ve waited so long, (high above you must’ve fallen from) clear the air to my lungs…I’ll go wherever you go”

The Devil, “Bound To You” Feb 08 release 0.25 eth, 28 editions

edition://0xd4bAf9980D58c9966A18776e7cE8d7649C959185?editionId=0&editionOpenSaleId=5

The Devil card, representing darkness within. The shadow side, the negative forces that hold us back from being our authentic self. Lyrically, there's a yearning for deeper connection with something we're already tethered to, when we're already too far in. The Devil is the single artwork for BRUX’s 2019 release Bound To You.

Show your feelings, I can't help but read into their meaning, I can't stop... I'm bound to you

Ace of Wands, “In My Dreams” Feb 07 release 0.1 eth, 66 editions

edition://0x89cc6A2dfEAF070bA8ffE30ECfeCFA32DB30fa67?editionId=0&editionOpenSaleId=4

Ace of Wands symbolizes willpower and creative strength, growth from within, daring with a sense of urgency. It’s the urgency and boldness that the card exudes that connects to the song. Ace of Wands is the single artwork for BRUX’s 2018 release In My Dreams.

I want you, all of you, every particle, every cell, everything, everyday, everytime, every way.

***

ecodao is thrilled to announce “BRUX ORIGINS,” a collaboration with one of the most talented producers, singers, artists straddling the web2/web3 multiverse—BRUX. BRUX ORIGINS is an audiovisual collection of six otherworldly masked figures that visually and sonically articulate the journey from a place of tension and doubt to a place of creative strength, sovereignty, and power—a path many of us have traversed. For the first time in the piece below, BRUX reveals her specific journey that ultimately gave rise to the project we know of as BRUX.

In collaborating with BRUX, we are pushing the bounds of what it means to hold an ecodao NFT. Each piece in the collection represents an access pass to

(1) our live event on February 19 in Denver, where BRUX will performing a DJ set premiering new work (2) our community of patrons of the arts and the environment (3) future BRUX works (including exclusive audio clips from our event in Denver) (4) a badge of support for your donation to the Rainforest Foundation

Each day, we’ll release one of the ORIGINS on this page. Just follow @ecodao_ on Twitter, and we’ll leave instructions after the drop for how to enter our community, so we can welcome you to our corner of the universe.

As always, when you collect, 50% of the proceeds will go to BRUX, 25% will go to the Rainforest Foundation, which supports indigenous communities with land rights and reforestation to fight climate change, and 25% will go to ecodao to support art collection, tech and community development, and events like our event in Denver. You can read more about our vision here.

We’re proud to present BRUX ORIGINS. — Ria Bhutoria and the ecodao team

Artist Statement by BRUX

The beginning of my new era manifested itself in digital form—via 3D-animated, masked beings inspired by handpicked tarot cards of creative and spiritual significance to me.

These masks are the origins of the BRUX project—a departure from my pop and rnb roots to experimental electronic club-pop. Each mask is tethered to the first six standalone singles that I released from 2018 to 2019. They were constructed in collaboration with Radimir Koch and Micah Milner from the inside out, starting with a 3D cast of my head and torso.

In creating these beings, I wanted to present a multi-faceted character that revels in mystery and anonymity, a character that radiates power and depth, a character that transcends time.

The idea of anonymity is part of my larger story—deflecting my female identity to shift the focus to my music. It was also a way for me to exist somewhat “behind the scenes.” Ambiguity was how I learned to fit into a man's world—by being mistaken for male and respected—instead of being objectified as a “female producer” and treated as a novelty.

I know my experiences are not unique, and there are artists in more restrictive circumstances than me. So I feel inclined to create art that demands space and regains power for us, for me. These masks have allowed me to put my talent at the forefront and direct judgment purely towards my music, rather than my personal identity.

Each mask represents a tarot card that encapsulates the theme of each single to which it is matched. The Empress is tied to ‘I’m Back’, 10 of Cups is tied to  ‘PaperBoy’, Ace of Wands is tied to ‘In My Dreams’, The Moon is tied to ‘Belong’, The Devil is tied to ‘Bound To You’, and Two of Swords is tied to ‘Bitches Want Pictures’ (in order of release). The precise story behind each mask will be described in detail as each mask is released.

I’m inspired by the art and divination of tarot, as clairvoyance is a gift that runs in my family. This piece of work was a way for me to depict that part of my identity. I recognize that the practice of tarot originated with and belongs to the Romani* people and believe it’s important to respect and pay homage to a cultural practice that is core to their heritage. Below, we have provided additional resources about the Romani people and their tarot practice.

For this NFT series, I used each individual mask as an input to generate a unique chromatic etude. The process consisted of synthesizing sound from an artificially drawn spectrogram. After this point, the compositions were further developed by extracting the midi and using it to trigger a drum machine and softsynth piano.

The sonic results are bizarre—as if they are radio interferences from another dimension…they bring these figures to life and give them new context.

The masks that we will unlock over the next six days are a retrospective of my artistry, as BRUX. They were a new beginning for me as I embarked on this project. I hope for you—my collectors, my supporters, my peers—they mark a beginning where we are revered for our contributions above all.

***

If you’d like to learn more about the Romani people, their culture and their fight, please see these resources below: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_society_and_culture ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_society_and_culture)<https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/explainers/roma-and-open-society ](https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/explainers/roma-and-open-society)https://www.romasupportgroup.org.uk/history.html

There’s a few things we care a lot about at ecodao: 1) ecological causes, 2) supporting and promoting the work of great artists, 3) pushing the bounds of what’s possible with NFTs.

We’re a bit nervous, our fingers darting in the air over the keyboard, but with our next drop, we’re excited to be doing all three.

What would it mean to collect a work by an artist that let you see their show and not only get future work but a unique recording of the show itself? This is what we’re trying to imagine with our drop with BRUX.

An FWB fellow described as “masterful” by Rolling Stone, a exemplar of “pop earworminess” (yes) by Billboard, BRUX is one of the great music producers & artists of her generation, the sounds of industrial mania often swelling into a respite of diffident, bad bitch club-pop—its catchiness enveloped in a yoshi-like whirl of synth, rattles, and drum rolls.

It's that ambience—those layers of sonic texture—that BRUX has been pushing to explore in her most recent work, which reimagines the ways an artist can become aware of their hidden powers internally by becoming better aware of the external world. Mining a full-fledged mythology that lets us hear the rustling, crackling, and whimpering of this universe, BRUX’s latest audiovisual work is something like the recording of the ecology of another world.

For this drop with ecodao, BRUX will be presenting six music NFT masks, each corresponding to various of her works, that combine tarot-inspired talismans (designed in collaboration with the artists Radimir Koch & Micah Milner) that were then used as inputs to generate inextricably linked chromatic etudes from the outer edges of this universe.

Each work will serve as:

• Rare art and artifacts from the world of BRUX’s future work, integrating visual and sound in a form unique to NFTs

• An exclusive pass to see BRUX premiere new work for the first time ever live in a DJ set on February 19th at ETHDenver — you will need one to get in

• A pass for collectors to collect future works and drops…possibly including a live recording of the show for attendees and video demos

• A pass to join the ecodao community and support and curate NFTs for artists and the environment

• A badge of giving for supporting the Rainforest Foundation, which supports on-the-ground indigenous efforts at reforestation while leveraging blockchain technology to optimize efforts.

50% of proceeds will go to the artist, 25% to the Rainforest Foundation, and 25% to ecodao that we use to pay all core contributors for their work and curate one-of-a-kind IRL experiences that allow our community to celebrate our mission, our work, and each other.

Every day from Monday the 7th to Saturday the 12th, we’ll drop one mask in limited editions, around 11am ET. We highly encourage following the ecodao twitter and leaving notifications on to get access to these limited drops, which all be here at eco.mirror.xyz.

Details for each of the works are below, and we’ll see you Monday around 11am ET.

Ace of Wands, “In My Dreams” Feb 07 release 11am et 0.1 eth, 66 editions

The Devil, “Bound To You” Feb 08 release 11am et 0.25 eth, 28 editions

Two of Swords, “Bitches Want Pictures” Feb 09 release 11am et 0.5 eth, 15 editions

The Moon, “Belong” Feb 10 release 11am et 0.75 eth, 12 editions

Ten of Cups, “Paper Boy” Feb 11 release 11am et 1 eth, 8 editions

The Empress, “I’m Back” Feb 11 release 11am et 2eth, 5 editions

Each of these pieces also holds a talismanic weight as the first ever released by ecodao, and as such, they’ll entitle holders to additional powers as well. Each will be a passport into the ecodao community that will offer owners the right to first purchase of ecodao’s token if they’re holding when ecodao decides to tokenize—pending, yes, legal confirmation and tokenization.

More immediately, each will also be a passport to ecodao’s first party, late-night on November 5th, at a secret location in Williamsburg DJed by BRUX. Once you’ve collected a work, you’ll just need to pull it up in your wallet at the door to get automatic admission. Just head to our Discord here when the work hits your wallet, and we’re excited to welcome you to our own little alternate universe—and, we hope, to meet next week.

*Oh, and: when you collect, 50% will go to Yan, 25% will go to the Rainforest Foundation, which supports indigenous communities with land rights and reforestation to fight climate change, and 25% will go to ecodao to support events, art collection, tech development, and what we hope will be the first artist UBI—and first web3 museum. You can read more about our vision here.*

With extreme gratitude for helping make ecodao what it is, and in the spirit of speculative futurism, for enabling it to be all it will be. — ecodao

***

Scroll down to see all entries

edition://0xDF5b5ee15CC96ba7d0CB6BD9b2c0fc4417ab6445?editionId=459

In elementary school, I tried to imagine myself as a goldfish.

What would it feel like to be a goldfish, with a few seconds of memory, no linguistic capabilities and maybe no specific mechanism to differentiate objects? Of course, I would never actually be able to imagine a goldfish's experience, but the thought experiment always took me to a visual field in my mind where the boundaries of “objects” dissolve, everything is alien to me, and I don’t even have a self-awareness to observe through.

Creating this series was in some way a form of invoking that state of existence—or rather that experience I call “primordial vision.” It is seeing before language, and even before distinguishing ‘things’ apart. What lies within this visual field is alien, unknowable and unknown—not least because there is not yet a power dynamic between the perceiver of the vision and what is perceived. There is a suspension, a gasp in our processing--

I started thinking and reading a lot about nature and biology this year. My initial exploration of olfactory arts and technologies shifted to reading about fungi, algae and alternative food systems—I began musing on a future of fungal technological systems—and to reading Donna Haraway and Timothy Morton. I started taking a bioengineering class. Recently I read about biofabrication and synthetic biology, and picked up A History of Biology.

Looking back, it was a logical reaction to the pandemic. After spending the majority of my waking hours clicking and typing in front of multiple screens for a year, I was ready to exercise my sensory muscles more dynamically and immerse myself in both nature and learning about nature.

edition://0xDF5b5ee15CC96ba7d0CB6BD9b2c0fc4417ab6445?editionId=460

Growing up in a city of 20 million people in China, I compartmentalized nature as either a “thing” outside the zone of human existence—like the mountains my dad would drive hours to take me to hike during the breaks—or the patches of carefully assorted trees and flowers in the fancier neighborhoods. It took me a while to realize that “nature” as I understood it was a concept constructed just a few centuries ago.

We are standing at the cusp of some paradigm shift with biology. So much of what biologists are doing in real life today, I, an artist, could not have imagined in my wildest mind. We can take a gene from a single-celled algae species to make a blind man see shapes. We can make xenobots that treat DNA as a cellular hardware implementing rewritable physiological software, which means genome editing isn’t the only way for programming species. We can 3D print tissues like brain organoids, from a real human cell, to test drugs on mini brain models for more precise medicine. There’s a new CAD software that scientists use to perform de novo whole-genome design of new cells from any species. Recently synthetic chemists and synthetic biologists worked together to create interactions that wouldn’t have otherwise existed.

The way I created Primordial Vision: 02021 was very much like a combination of alchemy and 3D printing. In the software, I layered images, gave them varied heights and roughness, mixed their colors and opacities, stacked them in specific orders, and added weathering or other natural effects. The result is these orbs, floating in a slightly tinted void that even I, the “creator”, don’t completely understand. I view them with the same fascination as an interested audience, perhaps just like how biologists today must feel about their own field.

Primordial Vision: 02021 is my intuitive imagination of future relationships amongst materials, regardless of their “alive-ness.” But more than that, I want to bring back a sense of magic. Before the 16th century, magic and science were very much the same. The “things” around us seemed to have some intrinsic nature that enchanted us precisely because we could not place it. Today, we linger in the vertigo from the naive illusion that we were close to knowing everything, which we briefly held a century or so ago. In a time when value has long decoupled from fact, we simultaneously suffer from being directionless, due to the lack of a guiding ethos, and having a dangerously singular direction, because of the technological determinism too many people in power hold.

edition://0xDF5b5ee15CC96ba7d0CB6BD9b2c0fc4417ab6445?editionId=461

Modern science brought us to an increasingly mechanistic view, with great precision, of our relationships with ourselves and the world around us. We’re now able to code genes and synthesize novel chemical reactions, which makes it all the more urgent for us to restore an organic understanding of technology. I’d like to quote the contemporary philosopher Byung-Chul Han: “It’s not objects but information that rules the living world. We no longer inhabit heaven and earth, but the Cloud and Google Earth.”

How do we live through rapidly evolving technologies and sciences, and thus constant updates to our model of the world, while retaining an organic view of the universe and remaining enchanted and awed? I find myself grappling with this question through all my intellectual and creative explorations this year.

When the framework of the Anthropocene was proposed in 2000, it made us urgently aware of our species’ capacity to significantly alter our environment that’s co-inhabited by countless other organisms. We seem to have immense power over nature. But the climate crisis is a crisis precisely because it poses a near-existential threat upon us: the power we felt was an illusion, and we are still very vulnerable within nature.

These days we talk, or joke, nervously, a lot about the end of the world. It doesn’t require a lot of technical knowledge to become acutely aware of the many ways in which we face near-existential or existential risks. The atomic bomb opened the first chapter of our serious thinking on extinction, though it seems a small harbinger of the risks we were yet to conceive. Thomas Moynihan, an Oxford historian of ideas, observed: “the discovery of human extinction may well yet prove to have been the very centrepiece of that unfolding and unfinished drama that we call modernity.”

edition://0xDF5b5ee15CC96ba7d0CB6BD9b2c0fc4417ab6445?editionId=458

While we are standing at the mesmerizing cusp of unlocking new understandings of the natural world in a degree of complexity and precision unimaginable to us not too long ago, we are also just beginning to live with the idea of our death. I use 02021 to denote this year in the work’s title, to hold a more expansive timeline of humanity. But more importantly, we need to collectively instill a long-term worldview that includes all sentient beings.

This is where artists come in, in cooperation with other thinkers: to reimagine a future encompassing the terrain past human sight and reason, a terrain that nevertheless already surrounds us on this earth. After all, so many crises come down to our models of what we are, and how we relate to other “things.” We are not ever gods, and we need to intentionally walk away from an instrumental view of nature as objects to tame, or manipulate, for our own enjoyment and survival.

Maybe you could look at these orbs as planets. Not as planets we will inhabit or that Earth will become. But as planets inhabited by some aliens that have different ways of moving and interacting with the substances around them. What is their nature, what is their technology, and what, frankly, is the difference? — Wendi Yan

edition://0xDF5b5ee15CC96ba7d0CB6BD9b2c0fc4417ab6445?editionId=441

Siena had grazing lands, down toward Grosseto, and the grazing rights worth 10,000 ducats a year. On the basis of taking it for his main security, Cosimo underwrote a capital of 200,000 ducats, to pay 5 percent to the shareholders, and to be lent at 5 percent; overhead kept down to a minimum, salaries at a minimum and all excess of profit over that to go to hospitals and works for the benefit of the people of Siena.

And the lesson is the very basis of solid banking. The CREDIT rests in ultimate on the ABUNDANCE OF NATURE, on the growing grass that can nourish the living sheep.”

— Ezra Pound, “Social Credit: An Impact” (1935)*

“When we speak of these not as things or products or commodities, but as gifts, the whole relationship changes. Gratitude creates a sense of abundance, the knowing that you have what you need. In that climate of sufficiency, our hunger for more abates and we take only what we need, in respect for the generosity of the giver. If our first response is gratitude, then our second is reciprocity: to give a gift in return.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer, “The Serviceberry” (2020)

***

One challenge of defining public goods is that the public has always been, after all, fairly private, if not entirely privatized. A public road in France helps France, an entity defined by borders separating it from neighbors; these roads may help it conduct trade of vital materials to regions historically crippled by French colonization at exorbitant prices in order to extract more money to enrich the French nation.

Let’s speak simply. Traditionally-cited public goods like the “national defence” of the military and police gear often serve a dominant coalition to extract value from a global underclass in a kind of violent mirroring of private powers—sweatshops, landlords—that extract value from the labor of the working class. The 20th century political spectrum does little to help align our views. Rightwing police departments, communist dictatorships, and giant oil corporations are all, after all, centralized authorities that willfully plunder global reserves of what we might consider a truer public: a commons of people, plants, and animals whose epitaphs are written, if at all, on a balance sheet.

The issue is not public goods, per se; it’s that we often speak of a “public” that in many ways operates as private power in the wider scope of competing states, rather than the traditional framework of competing firms. But in that sense, the internet has in some ways given us our first real public commons. In theory, at least, the internet is an unbounded landscape of infinite abundance, free information, and open-source development; any scarcity of data is artificially imposed. For once, the commons is a commons. It knows no bounds.

There are, however, two issues. The first is that this theoretical internet, a beautiful sandbox where we can create our own identities and economics as a form of play, awkwardly abuts a material world that finds us tethered to capitalist economics and the various, largely terrifying ways that history has inscribed and contextualized our real-world identities. Even to be on-chain requires not only the technology but the time to pursue collectivization and socialization online. And so, there is no on-chain self that is not, at least in part, a product of a more embarrassing off-chain self that inevitably trails us like an overly-gregarious dad crashing his own kid’s pizza party—a kind of phantom of The Real.

The second issue is that even on its own terms, the internet is stuck within, well, its own terms, as an entirely human-founded and human-focused enterprise that increasingly enables a hyperfinancialization that can make all art, thoughts, feelings, and relationships legible as data. Yes, the internet is a culture, a commons, a public terrain for public goods that allows us to code new opportunities—but what if it also forces us to reductively decode these opportunities in dollar signs?

We step back to see the more terrifying implication. Even if we accept that the internet truly is a utopian commons—a big if—it can only be one to the exclusion of a burning natural world.

But what if we imagined an internet that could learn from ecology—and support it in turn?

***

Ecology, we’ve learned, has a lot to teach us about economics.

For one, ecology tends to be far better at allocating limited resources than our monetary economies. Note how snow leopards have one or two offspring that live solitary lives compared to a domestic cat’s four-to-eight that often live semi-communally: the difference is one of optimizing resources for the cold. Males of many species often die after mating so as not to compete with mothers for resources that ensure the propagation of their species. Fungi, meanwhile, have an advanced economic system of “deals and embargoes” in trade networks that enable trees to shuttle excess carbon to seedlings and injured elders in need of support, even while denying nutrients to plants that have denied nutrients to the network historically; in exchange, they exact a variable commission in natural resources that can soar when plants are desperate for help.

The point of such limitations, in fact, is to ensure that all species have more than they need, that they exist in a state of surplus. With proper economic allocation, natural resources no longer appear limited either—rather, as the botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer has suggested, their abundance enables gift economies in nature. The tree produces a fruit, its sweetness a surplus that feeds a bird who spreads its seeds. Both benefit from this surplus, this consumption. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” might describe the ways that, per Kimmerer, “those who have give to those who don’t, so that everyone in the system has what they need.”

Let’s take two lessons from this ecological economy. First, nature is an expansionary economy, as long as we have a sun. Light can continue to be provided to plants to develop their populations as well as those who feed on them, and this abundance is what enables the growth of grass as well as the growth of, say, two sheep to four to eight in an expansionary offering of wool blankets and clothes. In a free-market economy, the money to grow a business would need to come from within the economy, from the paychecks of consumers or the expropriation of land, in a game that would be zero-sum if not for the fictional capital of loans and debt, but in nature, a wealth of nutrients comes from outside in the inflationary supply, if you like, of sunlight. That means that all creatures offer, in some way, excess resources to be redistributed ecologically at large. We all have the sweetness of the berry to offer the commons. We are designed to perform public funding.

The second lesson is that the diversity of functions, consumption habits, and complementary needs across lifeforms allows this economy to thrive. Economic systems in nature operate as relationships between species. Lifeforms position themselves in relationship to different lifeforms with which they interact everyday; they have their “on-chain” world—a world exclusive to their own communications—that serves primarily to help them navigate an “off-chain” world of each other.

So as long as we only think of the human, we are still privatizing the public. As Kimmerer puts it, “this specialization to avoid scarcity has led to a dazzling array of biodiversity, each avoiding competition by being different. Diversity in ways of being is an antidote to scarcity-induced competition.” This ecological-economic model of abundance through diversity is, in some ways, a kind of rejoinder to an electronic-economic model of abundance through homogeneity, through the reduction of human behavior in human-exclusive spaces online to strictly financial terms.

And here we see our challenge. Our human economy doesn’t just fail ecology’s two lessons—it actively works against them by plundering natural resources for financial gain. Despite our best intentions in trying to construct a sustainable economic model online, we’re faced with the terrifying proposition that we may only be able to draw value from an offline human economy that expropriates the resources of the land to provide us with more glossy Penguin jpegs. This is, per Kimmerer, the threat we must work against, “a grotesque economy that grinds what is beautiful and unique into money, a currency that enables us to purchase things we don’t really need while destroying what we do.”

***

If you believe the above, you might conclude that we need to create entire new economic systems. And you might conclude, happily, that it’s possible to do so with DAOs that can create their own tokens that each serve as a kind of loan for the future value—emotional, spiritual, ecological—we’ll provide each other. A social token is our berry.

The problem is that this token must be equated to some value in fiat terms: that it must intersect with our current economic models, just as we must live under these in our own life. Hyperfinancialization is inevitable, and there is no separating our on-chain fantasies from our off-chain afflictions in a world of climate crisis.

The way to change this system, then, is not simply to be permissionless but to be intentional. Undoubtedly, permissionless building unleashes creativity that has traditionally been stifled and siloed by centralized corporate structures. The issue is that when everyone has equal permission to invest time and money, those most likely to do so are the ones with the most resources, education, and risk-tolerance to enable and incentivize them—the ones with the most human capital to invest. Though permissionless systems in web3 lack any inherent inequalities of their own, they can only replicate the inequalities of the off-chain world if they fail to build a strong community intentionally.

Intentional building, then, works to actively confront real inequities in order to create a better world on-chain—deliberately picking a diverse team of talent whom the DAO can support in effectively working for its workers. Intentional building, in other words, ensures that resources are going to those who will benefit from them most and might be least likely to receive otherwise. It is this team, after all, which not only will make the foundational decisions for a DAO in its first year by building on each other’s work and filling in each other’s gaps, but provide the fundamental talent drawing newcomers through the one real moat available to web3 protocols: community.

ecodao is intended to be exactly that kind of community. An artists’ collective supporting ecological causes, ecodao is structured to enable members to drive value to each other through an internal gift economy inspired by the same ecology it intends to support—while actively recruiting and drawing outside talent as well.

The model is open to revision at the discretion of ecodao’s members:

• ecodao releases and promotes artists’ work in limited editions representing community membership to ecodao and access to events.

• 50% goes to artist; 25% goes to ecodao; 25% goes to ecological organizations selected by each artist, minus platform fees. Parties receive a proportional percentage of all resales as well.

• ecodao funds events to build meaningful community between collectors and artists: parties in particular will be exclusive to ecodao members and those who collect specific works.

• Participating artists shared governance control in order to determine fund allocation and recruitment of future artists—or delegate to those who want to play such roles.

• Editions of each work are donated to or bought by the DAO, so artists own each other’s work. Works may also be airdropped as gifts to individuals approved by ecodao.

• ecodao is gradually decentralized as more and more artists participate.

To be clear, ecodao’s underlying objectives include both communal wealth redistribution in the absence of a coercive state—and, yes, a thriving and joyous community that can do fun things together. These goals are not mutually exclusive.

Let’s break that down. One way to understand the entire history of art is a series of investments patrons have made to build their own social capital in various forms: art, we might say, has always been finance’s finest abstraction layer. So NFTs, as a form of financial capital in disguise as social capital and vice-versa, offer artists new opportunities not only to earn, but to build a sustainable gift economy by collectivizing.

For Artists Promoting and Selling Work

A successful artists’ collective can enable artists to support each other not only as curators but in drawing patrons to back underrepresented creators. ecodao aims to be a value-add intermediary that can continue sustainably by claiming less value for itself than what it offers its participants. To that end, ecodao will work to provide value for artists not only by promoting work through fundraisers and events, but by thoughtfully contextualizing work with interviews and original writing, introducing artists to a collector network, giving artists an online community to support each other, and cultivating ongoing streams of resources that help them maintain stability so they can focus on their craft. After all, an artist’s future work is dependent upon their ability to cultivate abundance consistently in the present.

In that sense, ecodao is inspired by many of the great real-world galleries run by artists. Most significantly, however, NFTs offer three new ways that a collective can provide far more value to artists long-term than galleries traditionally have been able to do.

First, by offering a commission on resales, NFT fundraisers offer a value-add that traditional art fundraising would not: artists enjoy the upside on all future sales of their work for the first time in history.

Second, the multimodal nature of NFTs means that they can gain value by adding a communal, participatory layer to the experience of collecting—serving as passes to ecodao’s parties and events, rights to tokens, puzzle pieces that unlock new functions when combined, or keys to experience live events in new ways. On the simplest level, they let artists get paid more for their work—and get more out of their work—by serving as real-life passports to join in-person events and an online community around the globe.

And finally, NFTs are badges, status symbols that are visible to the entire digital universe. Whereas an important work of physical art might only be seen by close neighbors, an NFT can be seen by everyone—and confer particular status when it represents not only acclaimed art but a donor’s giving to a worthy cause. Eventually, NFTs could even be renewable energy certificates.

In its own small way, ecodao aims to shift towards a world where our status symbols no longer stand for what we’ve gained, but rather for what we’ve given.

And as all art plays on the edge of legibility, it’s possible that in their own way, these badges will themselves serve to educate a wider public as reflections on the artists of the natural world—the beavers, the robins, the wasps.

For Artists Building a Sustainable Economy

Because artists who participate will have joint governance rights over ecodao’s treasury, the collective could simply vote to disperse funds among its members. Or they might even just choose to use the treasury to buy each other’s art while setting price floors on each other’s work.

But many other options are available to artists in how they might use ecodao’s funds from sales. For example, they might vote to fund smart contract development of new NFT uses: audio NFTs that could be used in multiplayer DJing at live events, composable NFTs that would unlock experiences when different wallet holders met in the same space, NFTs that could be scanned as tickets, and so on. ecodao could then develop these into free and open-source protocols of their own that would only earn commissions when monetized by users.

Likewise, the money could be used as a kind of UBI for participating artists. Artists could choose to use the money to collectively purchase a house where they could stay and offer residences to emergent artists. ecodao could, in exchange, take a commission of work produced during the residence. And finally, artists could simply invest the treasury in DeFi and distribute a portion of the annual interest among the members as a dividend.

The final decision will be left to ecodao’s governing members—the artists and governance committee—and as the DAO grows, it may even split into smaller pods with portions of the treasury to handle as they each like. The intention is to create a true gift economy where each new artist will not only have their work presented and promoted thoughtfully while giving back to to ecology—but to participate in the formation of an organically expanding, mutually beneficial community of artists, patrons and facilitators offering a lifetime of economic support.

For Collectors

As consumers’ growing demand for interactive communities forces industries to shift from passive “read” to participatory “read-write” experiences for their users, it is tempting to see the outsized importance of “community roadmaps” in NFT projects as a sign that web3 collectors, too, are consumers who consume for the sake of social engagement above all else. In fact, this has always been the case: for patrons, art has always been the currency of community, and collecting art has always been a form of social signaling to identify as part of a tribe (traditionally, “the ultra-wealthy”)—as well as to attend community events like openings, galas, and fundraisers.

In code, no less, ecodao dares to articulate the art world’s tacit presumption that art is a gift and a ticket to community: for collectors, individual works will entitle them to individual parties and events. In that sense, ecodao certainly offers opportunities to acquire passes to these events as an investment in art rather than a traditional expense in tickets. Above all, however, ecodao aims to introduce the web3 community to artists they may never otherwise have encountered—and vice versa.

Finally, for collectors looking to support ecological causes, NFTs are far better vehicles for giving than traditional donations because here, too, they represent an investment rather than an expense. While standard donations are tax-deductible, NFTs have the potential not only of recouping their original cost but rising in value. As a result, donors would be incentivized to spend far more—perhaps ten or twenty times as much—for an NFT whose proceeds are not only donated to charity but can also generate a return on investment. Compared to a traditional donation whose cost donors could never recover, NFTs offer a massive unlock for charities to raise far more funds than they could in the web2 world.

***

Challenges remain. It is important to ensure that the charities supported actually, well, make some worthwhile difference in the world. (The Rainforest Foundation, which supports indigenous efforts at reforestation, will be the recipient of the initial exhibitions.) A more sustainable economic model that prevented gains from accruing to the ultra-wealthy might cap the upside of the investment to any purchaser. Within the DAO, governance mechanisms will need to be devised to handle growth and delegation. And forging genuine connections between artists, patrons, curators, and writers online requires an organic process that can’t necessarily be streamlined or scaled.

But it is important to emphasize that NFTs have one other advantage over traditional art as well. They easily allow multiple editions of works to be minted and held by the DAO itself as an NFT treasury that can even be collateralized to create its own token, which could in turn be distributed to participating artists while gaining value with each addition to the vault. The DAO would be in its own way, then, a gift economy: one enabling each member to share their work with favorite artists, and in so doing, inviting them into the community as well to share their work too. The principle of reciprocity is one of sustainability, to be sure, but done right, it can also be one of growth and expansion.

For in our own lifetimes, art is our own berry-like produce we make to share our identity and ideas with an outside world that can recompose these as its own. Creation, like sunlight, is inflationary—a gift produced in perpetuity, its process enabled when creators are granted the freedom of time and space, through ongoing support, to honor cycles of output and rest. Liberating time and space for individuals liberates creation for our collective world. At its heart, then, ecodao doesn’t exist simply to funnel financial support to the environment; it works to create a sustainable expansionary economy, an ecological economy, that should increasingly become our objective in caring for a commons that extends well beyond humans, to plants, animals, fungi, and all the illegible wonders of the dirt and sky.

*No, this essay is not an endorsement of Ezra Pound, nor of his abysmal politics.

**ecodao will offer a slow launch. Throughout the next month, we’ll be dropping a series of multimedia works by artist Lani Trock across multiple platforms as genesis pieces for ecodao (owners will have access to presales as well as a share of tokens if they’re holding at a given point before (if) ecodao decides to tokenize). Likewise, ecodao will be throwing its first party late-night on November 5th in New York for collectors of its first full exhibition of works by artist Wendi Yan. All drops will be announced 24 hours in advance on ecodao’s twitter.

Special thanks to Ria Bhutoria, Scott Moore, Brenda Sandoval Cuervo, Kinjal Shah, Lani Trock, Jasmine Wang, and Wendi Yan for their edits, comments, and support.