What’s new?

• 🎉 The most requested feature update is finally here — three long days after the first public release. Full Lens collection module unlocked! If you have a Lens profile, you can do what you already do: Head to Inari Synth, enter a prompt, select the image you want to post on chain to share with the world. But now, you can take that extra step to choose how it can be collected. From whether it’s available for free or how much can be paid to get it, who can collect it, whether its availability has a time limit, set a referral fee, and decide how many of them can be collected.

• 👀 More responsive for all types of screens. Have a Lens profile and a few mins to give targeted feedback on mobile? Responsivity testers wanted.

• 🐞 Fixes and improvements. Not really any more of these than usual.

The intention for Inari is to remove distance between thought and creativity –– between decentralized social media activity and image synthesis –– for web3 ecosystems like ours. It’s not clear enough still for all but the nimblest early adopters what NFTs really are, why they matter, why bridge between IRL and virtual, why fashion, how local factory production and supply chains need shaking up, why image synth, or even, after almost 20 years, what the real value of social media is beyond endless unserious distractions, clickbait, and dopamine exhaustion.

Nevermind the ways centralized information has been weaponized.

How many have tried and failed to improve how we communicate, pleaded “devs do something!”, or worse, been so intimidated by the possibility of failure that they avoid the challenge of trying at all?

That’s why Inari, while a lightweight and simple creative integration of Stable Diffusion and Lens, also has a more intentional edge. It’s about doing something better than what social media has become, even when we start small. In our own way, integrated with the work of so many other interfaces, protocols, and open source devs, we begin to have a more concrete path to “decentralize it yourself”. Inari Synth is a usable blueprint for enhanced decentralized social media interfaces with image synthesis built in. It removes barriers so you can decentralize content creation and protocol operation yourself. Where each post builds incrementally towards greater ownership of your self-expression and ability to run your own nodes.

It’s not easy, bringing a new project into reality. But a condensed burst of development can help us dig deep into these common obstacles we all face, as an industry, in markets, and even just as people trying to find our own way.

Breaking the stranglehold that any one company, platform, or overzealous institution can have on money, power, self expression is an obvious good.

As much as power and free expression matter, follow the money a bit more. Social media makes plenty of it, but it all goes to the few platforms that won the ad wars of the earlier web. As users of centralized social networks and centralized AI tools, we are the content generating, ad targeted product, not the producer, customer, or stakeholder in any real sense.

We’ll never see more than a fraction of a dime from the old platforms for the value we’ve created.

None of this is news.

How you feel when you synth and post and collect without all the old limits on creativity is.

Head here to give it a spin: www.inarisynth.xyz

This is the strategy used by today's top brands, corporations, and big tech founders to maintain control of as much of the market as they can carve out for themselves. It's also what the entire neo-corporate-service-simp-apologist industry loves to post excuses for with pleas for peace and endless both-sidesisms while Corporate Copyright Control Protocol regimes continue their abuses unchallenged.

In the old world they live in, they have to do this.

When the entirety of their market share is based in marketing and hype they can't afford for new upstarts operating on near zero costs and the long tails of decentralized community memetic networks to rise up any further and show there are real self sustaining alternatives to their illusory power.

When any physical good they manufacture has already been commoditized to the point where all of their traditional competitors make the same goods in the same factories, they can't afford for true web3 native brands to gain attention and mindshare away from their carefully controlled media conduits.

But as long as web3 protocols, DAOs, brand networks, and every new configuration yet to come pools enough capital to withstand the buy, copy, kill & flood the zone marketing assault, we will always win.

Because––and this is very important––when the free exchange of value and free association around self-sovereign culture have been decentralized, anyone with enough capital to nourish ourselves, provide shelter for ourselves, band together in token governed coops for mutual skill and signal sharing, and access or purchase sufficiently capable creative production equipment can always create the next great brand or innovation seemingly from nothing, overnight.

Who needs NIKE anymore when we can just own it ourselves and be ourselves creating it?

What about the new self-sovereign, fully authentic web3 economy?

Just make it. ✔️

Are we really that naive to think that NIKE acquiring RTFKT is a good thing for anyone but them?

Turns out, most of us are.

Hard to say it better than this:

Cryptopunks vs CC0. RTFKT with the “hold my beer”.

For months prominent fence sitters, who would never admit to being that, have been toying back and forth between blatant web2 corporate simping (probably for paid promotion 🤪) and fair weather web3 posturing for the “vibes” and “hype”.

Now the biggest brands in the old world are in the game and it's not a game.

It's a war.

These brands might come in and pretend to be nice. That’s what they do when their money is on the line.

But if you don’t own the keys and they do. They own you.

They can say they believe in DAOs and NFTs and Web3 and gm and wgmi all they want, but if you really think they are going to look out for you so much and you’re willing to hand them your keys, you’re the definition of ngmi.

Why are you scared there isn’t more money and culture to be made than what they can offer in exchange for your soul?

No matter how much you simp NIKE or hope to be acquired by them, you’ll never become them.

Be yourself instead.

Any new brand can launch and create a truly web3 ecosystem today.

The technology, capital and governance tooling needed to do this is already live.

If you aren’t ready to create, but do want to support the next 1000 NIKEs and beyond you can buy in right now to the most authentic indie web3 fashion brands and labels.

The staggering scale up of the open web3 metaverse has begun.

Instead of hoping for the leftover crumbs falling from giant corporate tables, just do it yourself with internet frens.

Are big brands, capital, and attention automatically bad?

No.

The metaverse will have far more and much larger brands, capital and attention. But they won’t come from web2 methods or look anything like what we are used to.

Because we are not captives to centralised systems anymore.

The hardest change in mindset for all of us to overcome and process is really understanding and believing that far more money is made by free people operating according to our own skills and interests, in low friction, mutually beneficial, freely associative massive multiplayer networks. It is the root of the vast majority of wealth ever created, even with the awful limitations that we have all had to endure.

Web3 enables us to engage in the creation of wealth, individually and in groups at scales we could never imagine before.

Big corporations of yesterday want to profit from that, good for them. They will have to transform into free and open networks themselves. Or be left in the dustbin of history as we zoom ahead.

Where does the money really come from in web3?

Well, what are the primary sources of wealth, anyway?

• A tool or thing that reduces the amount of work needed to do something or protects you from something

• Anything that gives you status (because it gets other people to reduce the amount of work needed to do something or protect you from something)

• Anything that someone else values more than you do (for their own reasons)

Web3 makes all of these far simpler, safer, lower friction, and more reliable while putting the possibility of ownership and governance over how they work in your hands.

And by doing that, it helps you make a lot more wealth than you could have in a state dominated by scarcity, debt obligations, and fear.

If web3 is so great, why are all these memelords chasing that web2 money?

Honestly, who cares? If you’re in it for the quick cash grab and the early exits, good for you, get it while it lasts.

For the rest of us, there’s far better to be made the real web3 way.

Follow me on Twitter here:

https://twitter.com/emmajane1313

“I read once, passingly, about a man named Shakespeare. I only read about him passingly, but I remember one thing he wrote that kind of moved me. He put it in the mouth of Hamlet, I think it was, who said “to be or not to be”. He was in doubt about something. Whether it was nobler, in the mind of man, to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune— moderation—or to take up arms against the sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them. And I go for that; if you take up arms you’ll end it, but if you sit around and wait for the one who is in power to make up his mind that he should end it, you’ll be waiting a long time. And in my opinion… you’re living at a time of extremism, a time of revolution, a time when there’s got to be a change, people in power have misused it, and now there has to be a change. And a better world has to be built and the only way it’s going to be built is with extreme methods. And I, for one, will join in with anyone—don’t care what color you are—as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth. Thank you.”

-Malcolm X

The above is a closing excerpt from Malcom X’s Oxford Union Debate, December 3, 1964. It is one of many of the revolutionary speeches that he made as a global voice against racism and a symbol of Black liberation up until his assassination in February the following year.

In today’s climate, his message remains true more than ever— we all live in a time of extremism and revolution. A massive subtle war goes on around us, with pervasively amplified attempts to suffocate those that speak out against the old crumbled systems, and no sector of our lives remains free from it, despite what most play dress up to pretend otherwise.

“...to take up arms against the sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them..”

In a centralized tech and media dystopia, where our every thought and data metric is calibrated to work against us in favor of a mediocrity of convenience and inertia, culture becomes the currency and arms that we take up to break free.

edition://0xDF5b5ee15CC96ba7d0CB6BD9b2c0fc4417ab6445?editionId=509

In this corner of the nascent web3 metaverse, we trash the myths that hold us back, to create a new fashion movement.

Web3 is our one true shot at transforming the foundation and every aspect of the landscape surrounding us. To get the next evolution of the internet right. To co-create the open web3 metaverse, where not just communication infrastructure is decentralised as in web1, or semi decentralised as in web2, but, is fully decentralised end-to-end across everything of value. Accelerating the timeline to when we get there has become critically urgent as the old legacy players from web2 and many decades before, continue to give us the twin illusions of freedom and choice. Weaving systems that work actively against us to the short term benefit of the very few, these cartels continue to exert accelerating control of our data, finances, health, social mobility, beliefs, thoughts, relationships with each other, and more, through shocking levels of fraud and abuse.

These illusions are made worse by those who wear the glitter of web3 in #CT public, but simp web2 Meta behind their masks.

Pumping NFTs and VC social clubs deployed on chain isn’t enough to actually be web3. If that’s all it took, all we’d be doing is petitioning for slightly better conditions from those in old power in the hope that we might become the new priesthood. We can do better than become replacement gatekeepers as the previous generations retire on the data riches they’ve extracted from us.

edition://0xDF5b5ee15CC96ba7d0CB6BD9b2c0fc4417ab6445?editionId=510

So what’s so revolutionary about fashion?

It makes us into anyone we dare to be.

It gives us superpowers.

In a traditional sense, that’s limited to an impression and what our pockets or bags carry for us. With web3, the metastory, programmable utility, and interoperability enabled by transformative redefinitions of fashion extend to our senses, and the tangible exercise, of luxury and power.

It is an Arthur C. Clarke kind of magic when we can reframe how and where we wear fashion, the materials we use to design it, and what it ultimately is.

It is finally the full set of all the tools that we wear.

If we hope to build the better world we all know is within reach, the only fashion that matters is that which empowers us as designers, wearers, and buyers with enhanced ownership, self-determination, prospects for wealth, and creative freedom. Beyond simply artisanal images, 3d models, and glitzy videos secured by NFTs and DAO vaults, web3 fashion actively advances the interconnectivity between us and our strengths from edge to edge. From lace to seam.

Within this broader vision fast becoming more real by the day, Trash Fashion, is an anti-establishment form of digital design that takes what many might see as old, worn out, used pieces and recycles them into an entirely novel interpretation as part of a much larger message. It’s a bottom up composable approach to directly imprint mod culture into the very fabric of the source materials.

It is not for the faint of heart or the risk averse. But then, again, when is anything good and revolutionary afraid of getting trashy for change?

For far too long traditional fashion has been among the most unsustainable industries, with the most exploitative, destructive, dehumanizing, and extractive practices. As these legacy brands catch up to the supposedly easy new money enabled by web3, it is no surprise that many are now in a rush to spin up blockchain x fashion initiatives and are experimenting with minting all too ordinary fashion NFTs— as direct transplants from old ideas of luxury and appeal, without any of the industry fundamentals actually changing. At the crossroads of a radically new socio-economic medium, it’s obvious we need to define the difference between old famous throwaway fashion NFTs vs real web3 fashion, and with our actions, choose to build and scale the latter. It’s just far too comfortable and safe not to.

The safest thing that we can do in a time like this is supply fashion, digital or physical, that is cozy within what those before us defined as the constraints of what we could be. It’s not to say that high fidelity 3D is something that I don’t enjoy immensely, or that it can’t be revolutionary, but, to take a radical stance we must strike at the heart of the abusive system.

edition://0xDF5b5ee15CC96ba7d0CB6BD9b2c0fc4417ab6445?editionId=511

Trash fashion breaks the illusion.

It is the ultimate form of expression that you can wear and take off without permission.

All interpretations are welcome.

🗑🗑🗑🗑🗑🗑🗑🗑🗑🗑🗑🗑🗑🗑🗑🗑🗑🗑🗑

To commemorate Robness’s epic sales this week & Max Capacity’s awesome Dos Punks, I’ve designed 4 Dos Trash Fashion NFTs. Three minted within this article and one listed on the DIGITALAX digital indie web3 fashion marketplace here (DOS #5).

All sales profits will go directly towards continuing to seed and make the market for web3 fashion. ❤️

http://twitter.com/emmajane1313