I’ll admit, Farcaster was never perfect; every platform has its flaws, but for the first time in what felt like forever, I finally found a place on the internet that I could properly call home. Farcaster for me was a small cozy corner where I could converse with those who had the same hopes, dreams, and frustrations as I did: artists, philosophers, writers, thinkers, tinkerers, and those who just wanted to have fun. It was a breath of fresh air compared to the toxic and divisive internet that I had grown so accustomed to. It was… nice.

The last time I was part of a community like this was back in the olden days when I hung out on old internet forums. Like most youth during the early 2010’s, I typically joined forum communities centered around specific interests of mine such as Lego's or video games. To me, these spaces felt cozy because they were sequestered from the rest of the web, untouched by the public squares of the time. They were places where everybody knew your name and you knew everyone else. It felt like a place the community could genuinely own together without any big platforms interfering. These type of corners eventually became less and less common as big tech companies created platforms that siphoned off the users and mind-share that these smaller spaces needed to thrive. These powerful players gradually took that ownership away from us and forced us to be serfs in a gated internet we no longer wanted to be a part of but didn’t have a choice.

That’s where I found myself before joining Farcaster. I was essentially a digital nomad in the dark and unfriendly forest of the internet, a traveler without any real homestead. I was looking for something to be a part of. Farcaster provided that for me. The first few months on the platform reminded me of the laid back atmosphere of the internet forums of my childhood. It felt much slower than Twitter but far more lively than Mastodon. I didn’t feel like I constantly had to post all the time just to remain relevant. As the community was more insular, I was able to make friends more easily. Discussions and conversations were more intimate and meaningful. It’s a place where I felt I belonged. If Twitter was the mighty Roman capital with its bustling crowds, then Farcaster was the little Gaulic village tucked away in the Carpathian woods. There weren’t a lot of us, still aren’t, but I honestly didn’t mind. It was a little village but it was my village, and I was proud to call it home.

A lot has changed on the network over the past 2-3 years, for better or worse. I think most of us can collectively agree that the direction Merkle was taking the platform wasn’t working out. It can also be argued that Base’s influence was more of a net negative than net positive. Farcaster was originally built as a place for valuable discussions and relationships. It was built with the long term in mind, and that’s what sets it apart from most other web3 socials. However, unrealistic growth standards set by Merkle’s investors and Coinbase’s strategic fumbles degraded that experience and harmed Farcaster’s ability to act as a cozy corner for many users. We’ve seen a good number of them either become inactive or leave the platform altogether because of this.

This past week on Farcaster has been… eventful to say the least. It’s apparent that Farcaster is currently going through something of an identity crisis as the old leadership steps away, and it’s easy to understand why: people are tired and frustrated with the status quo. They want Farcaster to be friendly and chill again. They want their cozy corners back. Most importantly, they want to actually own those cozy corners and not have it devolve into yet another walled garden. Regardless of where you stand on certain issues, I think we can all agree that it’s time to re-prioritize what drew users to Farcaster in the first place: community, culture, belonging, and most importantly, ownership. To accomplish this, we need to build real decentralization where no single entity can gatekeep who gets to build and what gets built. We also need economic structures that reward quality over speculation and favor long-term games over short-term ones. The most important aspects however are community and ownership. If we want the protocol to ultimately succeed, we need to return to these roots and build things that will reinforce and preserve them.

We are at a critical point in the Internet's history where these online spaces are needed now more than ever, and they will only become more important as incumbent platforms continue to exploit and control their users. Just recently, it was revealed that Discord will soon be implementing mandatory age verification, forcing millions of people to give up even more sensitive personal information. This also comes at a time where the Department of Homeland Security in the United States is demanding that social media platforms hand over user data so they can persecute anyone critical of Trump’s cruel and senseless war on immigrants. Soon, millions of users will be fleeing for other places on the internet to seek refuge, leaving behind the cozy corners they love. We as Casters have the opportunity of a lifetime to provide a digital homestead for these users that they can own for themselves, free from the surveillance and control of outside actors; We cannot afford to mess this up. We can not only give these people cozy corners to share with us, but cozy corners that belongs to no one but them. It can become a village that is truly decentralized and free.

If you want to help shape what these spaces look like and the future trajectory of the platform, I'm conducting user research to make sure we build around what actually matters to people, not what investors or platforms tell us should matter. My past research was mainly focused on building a platform specifically for DAOs, but for this study I want to focus on the more intrinsic reasons why people continue to stick around: I want to focus on what they are looking for in an online community, how they interact with others in those communities, and any tools or features that make it easier to maintain, moderate, and grow these digital cultures. As with my past research, I will be posting my findings publicly on my Paragraph. If you are interested in participating in this research please DM me and we can set up a time to meet. All participants will be credited for their contributions.

Let’s make Farcaster cozy again.

Last year, I designed a DAO platform to help contributors better organize and communicate. This was mainly to solve the issue of many DAOs using Discord as their primary communications platform, a platform that was mostly owned and maintained by a centralized corporation and did not respect data privacy. From that project, I learned that many contributors needed more than just a place to communicate and converse; they needed a tool that helped them access pertinent information that was essential to their respective roles. I therefore designed an online platform that fulfilled these user needs while also cutting down on noise and information overload, a common pain point for DAO contributors.

I originally designed the platform to operate on its own standalone website. However, for the second iteration, I've decided to build the platform as a web app on the decentralized social protocol Farcaster.

What is Farcaster?

Farcaster is a decentralized social protocol built atop the Ethereum blockchain. Unlike other social media platforms which are largely owned and maintained by large companies, Farcaster is a sufficiently decentralized social graph where each user owns their own ID and follower information. That way, if one app on the network is too restrictive or imposes too much censorship, users can migrate to other apps on the network without having to lose their data and follower count. Many different apps can be built on the Farcaster network, and over the past year, the developer team behind the protocol recently implemented the inclusion of "mini-apps", web apps that can be used and accessed directly from any client.

Due to Farcaster's already decentralized nature, I decided to design my DAO platform as a mini-app that can be accessed directly from Farcaster. Farcaster also has a thriving and innovative culture of DAO contributors and builders from which I recruited participants for user interviews to conduct my research and guide the design of my product.

User Research

Research Methods:

I conducted 7 in-depth user interviews with DAO contributors, each lasting 30-45 minutes. Participants were recruited from the Farcaster network and represented diverse DAO experiences.

Participant Demographics:

Similar to the last research cohort, my user demographic was primarily technologists and developers aged 20-30 who either had active experience in a DAO or who had participated in DAOs in the past. Roles included community managers, graphic designers/artists, and operational leads across various DAO types (art collectives, DeFi protocols, public goods funding).

Research Objectives:

With this second cohort, I wanted to focus less on designing an alternative to Discord and focus more on building a tool that directly addressed the user needs of DAO contributors. Therefore, I geared my interview questions more toward their intrinsic experiences with working in DAOs rather than their experience using Discord as a DAO platform.

Key Findings

Many of the findings I gathered from my research were very similar to my original research: the UI on Discord was too noisy and did not provide the information needed for a contributor's role. There was also a greater emphasis on the need for rich social connections and meaningful conversations with other people. Another major theme that was repeated in this study was the need for customization, particularly in regards to channels and notifications.

Critical Insight:

A few needs that emerged that weren't as pronounced in my original project was the need for greater verification, better gating tools for certain channels, and more privacy features to create better alignment within the DAO. Fulfilling these needs would also serve to cut down on noise and to keep bad actors at bay. Multiple participants shared stories of their DAOs being compromised by bad actors or struggling with spam and trolls due to insufficient verification systems.

Personas

I used this information to craft three distinct personas based on the different contributor roles my interviewees engaged in. I used these personas to guide the design of my product and determine what features needed to be included in the platform's architecture.

Design Process

Based on this data, I sketched out ideas for the design of the app. It included many features from the original project: a customizable dashboard where users can add and organize different widgets that give them needed information such as notifications, tasks, and contributor stats, and a dedicated forum for each DAO. The widgets within the dashboard would be primarily powered by AI, which would grab data from each necessary DAO and create a summary for the user to view.

New Features & Design Rationale

For this iteration, I added several new features based on the needs of my personas:

I greatly expanded the design of the forums and channels to include greater customization in the way of individual channel settings, including gating capabilities, verification settings, and permissions to allow greater control over which users were allowed to access certain channels based on specified credentials. These would in part be powered by Zero-Knowledge proofs to verify a contributor's credentials while also maintaining their privacy. This directly addresses the verification and privacy concerns raised by my user group.

I included easy creation and implementation of channel bots that would carry out certain tasks, such as governance notifications, vote tracking, and engagement monitoring. Multiple participants specifically praised bot functionality as essential for DAO operations.

I added a crypto wallet to facilitate payment between contributors and to manage different DAO tokens, with transparent payment history and pending claims tracking. This addressed the user need for payment integration and supports the compensation transparency that contributors valued.

I also included a DAO exploration page, similar to the exploration feature on Discord, which would allow contributors to explore and join other DAOs within the Farcaster network. The design prioritizes discovery through categories, personalized recommendations, and trending DAOs rather than overwhelming users with options. This supports cross-DAO networking that my user group valued while managing information overload through smart filtering.

Wireframing & Testing

After sketching out the app data flow and architecture, I then translated this into a rudimentary, interactive wireframe to get feedback on the structure and flow of the app. I primarily designed for mobile, as mini-apps within Farcaster were developed solely for mobile devices and the majority of users accessed the network from mobile. A mobile layout was also easier to work with compared to desktop.

Figma

Created with Figma

https://figma.com

Usability Testing

After allowing users to test the wireframe and getting feedback on usability, I made necessary changes and converted the wireframe into a final prototype. I conducted moderated usability tests with 5 participants who matched our persona profiles. Tasks included navigating between DAOs, finding specific information, adjusting notification settings, and exploring new DAOs.

• Moved the DAO Dashboard button to center position in bottom nav after observing users struggled to reach it in original left position

• Changed "Manage DAOs" icon from gear (confused with settings) to hamburger menu for clarity

• Added "peek" visual indicators on carousels to show more content is available

• Changed the global dashboard to better reflect information for all collective DAOs that the user participated in.

• Simplified channel settings to focus on most-requested features first (notifications, access, info)

Figma

Created with Figma

https://figma.com

I'm personally very pleased with this secondary prototype. The layout and UI are generally cleaner and simpler than my last iteration. It also more greatly expands on the communication needs of contributors and concerns surrounding verification and privacy within communities, whereas my first iteration mainly focused on productivity tools. Throughout this second cohort, I realized that while clean and simple access to necessary information was indeed important, DAOs needed a way to better moderate and verify their members to create a more helpful working environment where users were far more aligned. While modern DAOs often aim for decentralization, they ultimately need greater control over who gets to participate in order to drive better alignment. This is a user need that was constant throughout my research.

Conclusion

This case study focused on improving and iterating upon my ongoing efforts to design and build a proper productivity and communications platform for DAOs. I learned that while contributors did need access to information with as little noise as possible and the ability to customize their experience, they more specifically needed the ability to customize their own communities to create better coordination within these collectives. This was a user need that was not apparent in my original research.

I do plan to convert this design into a fully functional application one day. While I mainly want to build the app within Farcaster due to its adequate network effects, I've also considered building the app through another protocol, Quilibrium. Built by ex-Farcaster developer Cassie Heart, Quilibrium is similar to Farcaster in that it's a decentralized social protocol, but unlike Farcaster, has a far greater emphasis on privacy. As this is a main user need for my user group, I will be exploring the possibility of building on the Q network while also porting the interface of the app through Farcaster clients.

1. I believe that there are forces and intelligences beyond what we can perceive or comprehend with our limited faculties. I also believe that the nature of reality is far stranger than we can possibly begin to imagine. Our finite minds can only catch a glimmer of the true nature of our universe, and this shall be revealed unto us when we are ready to receive such knowledge.

2. I believe in the existence of a Supreme Being. While I do not yet know Their exact nature or form, I believe that there is a Divine Alchemist that created our universe, and intently watches over it.

3. I believe that we, the human race, are children of this Supreme Being. I do not believe this in the metaphorical sense but the literal. We are not simply Their arbitrary creations; we are Their offspring. Their Divine blood courses through our veins, and as such we have the potential of becoming like Them. We are gods and goddesses in embryo, and our species is slowly waking up to this revelation.

4. I believe that the Divine Alchemist placed us on this material plane to develop, grow, and become our True Selves. This Earth is the crucible in which we will uncover our Philosopher’s Stone. Omnipotent powers and capabilities alone do not a god make. To truly attain our divine potential, we must also cultivate the virtues and attributes of our Divine Parent.

5. I believe that the true purpose of any civilization on Earth should be the transmutation and individuation of the soul. The sole purpose of our existence is claiming our Divine birthright, and this is done through the alchemy of the spirit. Any civilization that does not adopt this purpose as its primary foundation, or forgets it, is doomed to destroy itself.

6. While I follow the dictates of the Christian, I also subscribe to the philosophy of the Hermetic alchemists. I believe that since the dawn of our species, they of old were given Divine revelation and knowledge from otherworldly messengers. While much of this knowledge may have been lost over millennia, it is now being restored and revealed to inspired men and women in recent centuries and will continued to be revealed as we approach the times foretold.

7. I believe that we live in the times spoken of by sages and prophets when the modern world, Babylon, the whore that sits upon many waters, shall perish. Indeed, the Apostle John saw our day when he received his visions on the island of Patmos. We are witnessing this shift now with the decline and collapse of Western society. Oh great is her sins, and great and terrible shall be her fall!

8. I believe this fall must come to pass so that a better world may exist. This new world cannot be born until the old world has passed away. Just as a young sapling cannot grow and mature until the elder tree first perishes that the sapling may receive sunlight, so too must the old kingdoms and principalities fall so that God’s Holy Kingdom may reign eternal.

9. This shall not only be a temporal shift but also a spiritual one. The word apocalypse originates from the Greek word apokalyptein which means to “reveal” or “uncover”. As our technology continues to evolve at a rapid pace, we will be shown unconscious aspects of ourselves that we have long denied or ignored, both collectively as a society and as individuals. With these revelations, the world that we have built through our collective conscious shall disintegrate. Our shadows and daemons will be fully revealed unto us, our secret works spoken upon the housetops. When that time comes, we will have no other choice but to face our inner darkness and integrate it.

10. I believe that I have been sent here, in this era upon the Earth, to help facilitate this Holy work. The nature and alchemy of the soul is of great importance to me and I desire to build tools and technologies that will aid others in uncovering, facing, and accepting their True Selves. This is above all else my work and my glory.

11. I believe that technology alone cannot save humanity. While technology is a useful tool for us reach our Divine Potential, it is just that: a tool. A tool is neither good nor evil, but only takes upon it the intentions of it’s user. Therefore, for this technology to benefit us, we must use it with wisdom and with the intent to attain wisdom.

12. I believe that when we collectively transform and refine our inner selves, the external world that we build will likewise reflect our inner qualities. As such, this spiritual transformation is the single most important work that we can pursue. It is through this process that we shall attain paradise and eventually claim our throne among the stars. As below so above, and as above so below.

That’s when I heard about NFTs.

NFTs were all the rage at the time; thousands of people making fortunes from simple pieces of pixel art and ugly looking monkeys. I being a naturally talented artist myself though “Hey, if these guys could make a fortune off of stupid looking jpegs, I can easily do it!” I started doing my research, creating multiple NFTs on popular marketplaces at the time, mostly minting on Binance’s blockchain as I was concerned about Ethereum’s energy consumption and it’s impact on the climate. I ultimately didn’t make any sizable fortune from this. Of course I later learned that the majority of successful NFT projects were due to wash trading and the numbers that people earned were greatly exaggerated. Nevertheless, NFTs were my initiation into the world of the blockchain and the many capabilities the technology offered. While I had heard about Bitcoin before in passing, it was never something I gave much thought to. However, after learning about how cryptocurrency and tokens worked, and most importantly why Satoshi invented blockchain in the first place, I was enthralled with the technology.

Like many others, I grew up in a time of upheaval, turmoil and societal dysfunction. I was but a child when our elementary school teachers showed us old black and white footage of Holocaust prisoners being burned alive in ovens. Every year on the 11th of September, they showed us footage of the hijacked planes crashing into the twin towers and the ensuing chaos and confusion. I’m sure the school board thought they had good intentions, showing their youth the horrors and evils of humanity to ensure such atrocities were never repeated. Instead it only engendered fear, pessimism, xenophobia, and a general loathing for society, the results of these apparent in the rise of political extremism across the globe and our now psychotic governmental system here in the United States. When the Capitol building was raided by angry protesters at the beginning of that year, I had given up on our species, willing to accept that humanity would forever be in a state of collective madness from which it could not escape due to it’s own God given nature.

But the blockchain offered another way.

The crypto revolution came to me, and other displaced idealistic youth, with a solution: that we could used this tech to not only decentralize the control of money, to not only wrench power away from the powerful who would seek to control and harm others, but to ensure that such evils could never rise up again to haunt humanity. I remember reading the Slate Star Codex’s “Meditations on Moloch” and learning of the dark god of coordination failure, the demonic adversary of humanity that kept us from moving forward, putting a face to the darkness of the world I despised. I was further fascinated with the idea of decentralized autonomous organizations and came to the belief that if we could get these organizations working, it could lead to another bright golden age for humanity, unshackling ourselves from the grasp of Moloch and slaying the horrid leviathan once and for all. The future was no longer hopeless; it was bright, very bright.

Some years passed and I eventually joined Farcaster via invitation. I’ve loved my time here in the community, meeting like-minded people who had the same dreams and ideals as I, people who weren’t in the tech just for the money but for raising humanity to a higher station. It became a place where I felt like I belonged, a place of ideas, optimism, and a desire to bring down Moloch for good.

Four years later, where are we now?

As of writing this, Trump, the lunatic we elected again to run our country, is busy ramming it straight into the ground while he allows angry man children like Elon Musk to burn down what’s left of American society. Bitcoin, once a beacon of liberation from the state, is now being endorsed and hoarded by the very oligarchs it originally swore to oppose. Instead of being used to build a better future, blockchain is now being used my millions to create useless shitcoins to rip off other people and spread the degeneracy that the sector has been so infamous for.

And where does that leave all the smart people? All of the philosophers and idealists who wanted to drive humankind towards utopia? Are they actively building things that will genuinely benefit the world? Not really. If anything like that is being built, it either isn’t ready yet or was built with no particular user in mind to the point of being entirely useless to anyone. For the most part, all of the smart people have locked themselves away in their ivory towers, snidely frowning upon the degenerates who would dare smear their sacred chains with their filth, and even worse on all of the ignorant unwashed masses who can’t bring themselves to understand the enlightened intricacies of the technology.

Yet, even within these ivory towers, the malaise is beginning to spread. The community’s reactions to the memecoin frenzy and the massive wipeout that followed has been sad to say the least. Some have started bullying certain members of the Ethereum Foundation, not because they aren’t living up to the principles that the original cypherpunks championed, but because ETH is down and their bags aren’t being pumped. In recent days, I’ve seen prolific members of the community turn against each other and some of them outright leave in exasperation of the dishonesty and bad faith within the space. And yet, we keep convincing ourselves that we’re “so early” and that all of this will somehow get better when it clearly isn’t.

In short, the blockchain revolution was an abysmal failure.

Listen: I still very much enjoy being a part of Farcaster and I love it’s community, but the more and more I stay here, the more and more I realize that any meaningful growth or progress has essentially stagnated. Perhaps this may turn itself around in the near future, but it’s clear to me that many people involved in this space have lost the plot. The problem is that all people here ever talk about is the technology and how great it is and how it’s going to save everyone and on and on and on. It’s become tiresome.

The technology isn’t the point. The technology was never the point. Bitcoin came to pass as a protest against the corrupt systems of power that caused the 2008 financial crisis and ruined countless lives. The cypherpunk movement of the 80’s and 90’s vouched for personal privacy and individual freedom in an age where such human rights were actively being smothered. The crypto movement of today has seemed to have forgotten these principles for either 1) the fulfillment of greed and avarice or 2) endlessly praising the technology and worshiping whoever advocates for it, regardless of their true intentions.

I see this present moment as an opportunity for us to reflect on what brought us here in the first place and why we decided to stay. I may have originally joined with the hopes of greater financial security, but I stayed for the promise of a better future. If we want to revive the revolution and continue the fight against Moloch, we must learn to turn our focus from the technology itself and towards the principles and values that birthed those technologies. This requires practicing an agnostic view of these tools, not seeing them as the end itself but as a means to an end.

There are a few main reasons why focusing so much on technology itself is not only unwise, but can actively hinder our progress towards the world we want to build.

Technology by nature is an ouroboros: it is constantly rendering itself obsolete. Existing inventions are constantly being replaced by newer ones in a never ending, and accelerating, cycle. Steel swords were replaced with muskets and cannons as the primary tool or warfare which are now being replaced with tactical missiles and drones. Manual labor was enhanced with steam powered and electrical machines which are gradually being automated by robotics. Barbaric and harmful psychiatric procedures such as electroshock therapy and the lobotomy were left behind for anti-psychotic medications and psychotherapies. Innovation is constantly replacing itself. As such, it is not wise to attach oneself to a certain piece of technology as that technology is temporal at best.

As revolutionary as blockchain may be, the only task it is uniquely good at is strict global consensus. Aside from that, it’s clunky, slow, expensive, and not as decentralized as we like to make it out to be. I’m willing to bet that in the next 20-30 years, current blockchain solutions will be replaced with something far superior and entirely different. With the exponential rate by which tech is evolving, many of us will live to see blockchain become a relic of the past. People from even a century ago could not imagine that such a thing as artificial intelligence could actually come to pass, let alone even comprehend the idea of the internet, smart devices, or the strange and alien quantum computer. We will likely see technologies within our life times that we cannot possibly imagine.

A true and effective technologist has the ability to navigate and flow with this cycle, able to quickly adapt to any upcoming innovation that comes their way. They are also able to do this while keeping the principles and values that drove them to their work at the forefront of their minds, regardless of what shiny new thing is currently being hyped. They are able to balance and consider a multitude of different technologies to reach their ultimate goals, being careful not to fall into the tribal mindset of many chain ecosystems we see today. In short, a true technologist is like water, able to fluidly change and shift with the landscape they find themselves in.

I do not consider myself a Luddite, though I would sympathize with those who do. The technological movements of the recent era have not exactly earned the trust of the general public, especially since it’s been hijacked by oligarchs who would bend the technology to their own selfish agendas. The original internet was meant to liberate and spread information which would lead to a more enlightened society, instead becoming a series of walled off gardens controlled by the rich and powerful. Social media was meant to unite humanity but has only divided it and has stolen everybody’s personal data to boot. Cryptocurrency was meant to be a tool to free us from the corrupt financial system and by extension the state, and has instead become a playground for criminals, scammers, and grifters. These movements have done little to inspire confidence, and has only given credence to the Unabomber’s claim that technology is a force of evil that must be utterly wiped from the face of the earth.

With all of that said, I do not believe technology to be evil, nor do I believe it to be good. I see it as a tool, and a tool is only as good, or bad, as the person who uses it. A man can go to a hardware store to buy a hammer. He can either use said hammer to build something of practical use, whether it be a dog house, a piece of furniture, or just use it to fix his roof, or he can use it to break into his neighbor’s house at night and rob them. Or he could use it to simply bash someone’s head in for sleeping with his wife and throw them in a nearby lake. When the man is eventually arrested and stands trial, should the judge punish the hardware store owner for selling the hammer to the man? Of course not! Why would it be his fault when the store owner did not know his customer’s intentions? Should all hammers be banned from society wholesale as a result? Would that be at all fair? At the end of the day, the hammer is just that: a hammer. A hunk of metal with a handle at one end. We only attach good or evil intentions to it when someone uses the tool to those ends. A sword is only as virtuous as the warrior who wields it.

Now of course in the process of writing this, I acknowledge that the same people who are using modern technology for nefarious ends are also typically the same people who have a monopoly over it and have the resources to continue developing it. But even in that case, should we ban all technological progress because it could possibly harm humanity? For practical reasons, I’m not going to bother dignifying that question with a response because it simply won’t happen. Whatever war Mr. Kaczynski was attempting to wage by blowing up mailboxes, he ultimately failed. Artificial intelligence now exists and is out in the wild. We have crossed the point of no return. Even if there was a chance to turn around, our society and economies are too invested in furthering innovation to even consider such a thing. There will be no Butlerian Jihad. The ensuing singularity is here to stay whether we like it or not, and we must learn to make the best of it.

So that leaves us with the question: how do we best guide the development of this technology so that it results in the most amount of good for humanity while minimizing its downsides? I admit I do not have a clear answer to this. We can continue to try and decentralize its control and development, but decentralization is extraordinarily difficult. Humans are not decentralized creatures by nature like bees or fungi. We are egotistical, individualistic animals who often trend towards centralized structures of power, only seeking to dismantle those structures when things don’t go our way. The failed crypto movement is proof that any technological advancement will ultimately be tainted by human avarice to some degree, if not outright hijacked. Technology may be able to fix many things but it ultimately cannot change basic human nature, no matter how advanced it becomes; it will only amplify those base tendencies.

I propose that the solution to our societal ills are not purely technological but in fact spiritual. When a society has a healthy spirit, it often has a strong moral fiber as a result, and is therefore better able to make decisions from which it will benefit in the long run. Despite the many virtues that came of the age of enlightenment and the rationalist movement, it has also resulted in our generations abandoning spirituality wholesale. I’m not just referring to religion and man’s connection with the Divine, but also to the tender health of the soul via mindfulness and introspection. Such things are now increasingly considered silly and superstitious, instead replaced with the doctrines of cold hard logic and reason, and further supplanted by the many distractions and appetites born from consumerism. This abandonment of the spirit has cost us dearly, leading to widespread psychological malaise and a general unwellness that is palpable everywhere.

We forget that humans are not naturally creatures of logic or reason, but we are instead primarily creatures of emotion. That is how evolution built us. We are not Vulcans. While yes, we may be capable of logic to a degree, even our best efforts are affected by our emotional and biased nature. For our species to progress any further, we must learn to recognize and accept this about ourselves.

What we need are tools and protocols that aid people in developing their spiritual aspects, developing their souls through peaceful introspection, meditation, and inner work. We also need to design these tools to cultivate and engender a sense of community and belonging. Indeed, humans are social creatures and one of the reasons many religions such as Christianity have reigned triumphant is because they cater to that tribal sense of belonging, the need to be a part of something greater. We can now see these tendencies manifesting themselves in multiple online communities, from the cult like behavior of the crypto movement to the passion of pop culture fandoms. Humans often find higher purpose and meaning through intimate connections with others. “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” - Matthew 18:20.

Now I recognize that many readers will prickle at the mention of religion and spirituality. Indeed the same ills that have befallen the technological revolutions of our time have long plagued religious and spiritual institutions as well. Medieval history is rife with the barbarism, violence, and vile decadence that hierarchic organized religion has wrought, and the recent spiritual movements of the 60’s have often led to predatory cults that have actively harmed, and even killed, its adherents. I also acknowledge that while I currently practice religion in my personal life and am generally more favorable towards it, others who read this will have more negative experiences with religion in their own lives, carrying sensitive feelings on the matter due to mistreatment or possibly even trauma.

Whatever we build in this regard to the spiritual should be as decentralized as feasibly possible, free from the control of any one person or groups of people. Not only that, but it must also be divorced from the idea of money in any way possible. Therefore, there should be no cryptocurrency whatsoever underlying these tools and blockchain, if used at all, should be used very sparsely. If there are costs for computing or running nodes, the means of payment should be externalized to the extent by which it can. It’s likely however that technology will only play a small part in fostering this spiritual movement, for as mentioned before, technology cannot fix everything. It will also require basic community building, fostering cultures locally, and making knowledge and educational material openly accessible to all, “without money and without price”.

There are many products that have been built in web3 that simply never got off the ground or completely failed. Whenever I come across these projects, they either 1) are straight up scams or grifts, or 2) have some extremely vague value proposition sprinkled with a bunch of complicated tech jargon. With my interest in DAOs, I did some research into the more popular DAOs in the ecosystem to see what they actually did. From what I could find, most current DAOs mainly exist to fund other web3 related projects. There are some exceptions to this, but those that stand out haven't gained any considerable clout or influence. In other words, most web3 projects are only designed for one user group: crypto people. Meanwhile, no one outside of our bubble have any need to use these products and even if they do, the UX is so abysmal that no sane person would want to.

What the builders of these projects don’t understand is that most people either don’t have the time or patience to understand what crypto or blockchain or “web3” is or they are so repulsed by it that they wouldn’t touch it with a 25 foot pole. The builders therefore misunderstand one very important truth: no one gives a crap about the tech. They only care about the product and if it meets their needs and desires, regardless of what’s underneath the hood. Most people aren’t as idealistic as we are, daydreaming about all these fancy new toys and how we’ll use them to save humanity from itself. We are the outliers, and I don’t necessarily mean that in a good way.

Take tools like pump.fun on Solana for example. For all of Solana’s flaws, they actually listened to the needs of it’s users and made a tool so easy to use, a Mennonite could figure out how to spin up a shitcoin. The truth is, these users don’t care about what crypto is or how it works. They just care about making money, regardless of what morals they throw away to earn it. Solana won the market by not worrying about inspiring ideals and instead went hard and fast. That’s why people like to use the chain. It’s also why Solana is eating Ethereum’s lunch right now.

Another good example, although unrelated to web3, is Bluesky. Bluesky keeps priding itself for being decentralized, and their users will say the same, but for the most part it’s all decentralization theater. The AT protocol underlying Bluesky, at least currently, is largely controlled by the company. Most of their users are either blind to this fact, or are aware of it and continue to use it anyway in the hopes that Jay Graber keeps her word. In reality, these users don’t really care about decentralization. They don’t care about how the AT Protocol works or how it’s managed. They just care that Bluesky isn’t managed by Elon Musk. That’s why the culture of Bluesky is essentially a large left-leaning echo chamber; the majority of it’s users are Xitter refugees and they’re looking for another digital home. Graber and her team understood this and provided them one, along with the tenuous promise that the platform will remain free from the hands of anyone on the political far right.

I remember a recent conversation I had with a group of fellow casters. There was a debate regarding the future direction of web3 and why we should continue to build. I cannot remember what was specifically said but I recall someone claiming that catering to the needs of other users will only serve to further transform web3 into a digital casino and that it was instead the burden of the user to understand why we were building these technologies and how they function. In response, someone else replied “but who f*ckin’ cares?”. And that’s a very good point; why should they care? We are so busy daydreaming about our castles in the sky, our own utopia, but who the hell are we building that utopia for? If we’re just building it for ourselves, then it’s an awfully small tomorrow. We want to keep our panaceas clean from the unlearned dirty masses, but without them we are only building an empty palace: pristine and pure from the outside but no one within.

When I imagine what these technologies can do for mankind, I envision digital democratic organizations decentralized enough that no one person can have direct control or monopoly, very similar to today’s cooperatives. These organizations would be the entire backbone of Earth’s future society (and possibly beyond), catering to the needs of the people instead of the few, ultimately benefiting all of humanity. Whether such a future is possible or realistic is a debate for another time, but I don’t see this potential society inhabited by only a few chosen souls. If we want to build such a future for humanity, we need to make it so people will not just understand how to use it but will want to use it. To do that, we need to step outside of ourselves and ask: what do these people need? What are their wants? Their goals? Dreams? Fears? It’s possible that what the solution they’re looking for doesn’t involve blockchain at all. If it does involve blockchain or some other cryptographic tech, it should be abstracted to the point where the users don’t even need to think about it. They don’t need to understand how it works; the tech just needs to work for them.

I don’t want to build products for crypto people. I want to build products for regular people, with regular problems, regardless of what makes those products function. It’s said that blockchain is a solution looking for a problem to solve, but maybe instead of looking for the problem, we need to look for people with problems to solve. If we really truly want web3 to thrive, we need to build it with the needs of the user in mind. We just need to decide which users we are catering to: the lonely few crypto idealists, or the normies who have actual real world problems.

To anyone from Farcaster reading this, I invite you to consider thinking less about “blockchain”, “web3”, or “crypto” and sincerely ask yourself: what brought you to this space in the first place? Was it the promise of individual freedom from the state? The hope of a brighter tomorrow? Personal ambition? Or simply to find greater financial freedom? I encourage you to go back to the basics, read the screeds of the original cypherpunks and what they actually vouched for. Even better, read the classical literature of the enlightenment era, such as “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen”, the original Declaration of Independence, and “Republic of Letters”. Much of what the cypherpunks valued really started with the revolutions of that time. Also challenge yourself to step outside of web3 communities like Farcaster and talk to people on other platforms if you haven’t already. I need to do better at this myself. Explore technologies outside of web3, even the lesser known and more niche ones. There are many developers who don’t work with blockchain who are experimenting with all types of decentralizing technology. I think you’ll be surprised with what you find.

Don’t focus on the technology. Instead, question why the technology was built to begin with.

What is a DAO?

DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) are blockchain-powered organizations governed collectively without central control. They utilize smart contracts to establish rules, ensuring transparency and democratic decision-making. While promising increased efficiency and reduced bureaucracy, DAOs remain in early stages of development.

Currently, many DAOs rely on traditional platforms like Discord for communication. However, Discord's private corporate ownership contradicts DAO principles of decentralization. This dependency creates risks, as changes to Discord could potentially compromise DAO operations, highlighting the need for truly decentralized communication tools.

Through this project, I aimed to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of Discord and other legacy tools to design an alternative blockchain-distributed communications platform.

My user group consisted of individuals from Farcaster, a decentralized social protocol. Participants were primarily developers and technologists aged 20-30 years old who were either actively involved in DAOs or had previous DAO experience.

Users appreciated Discord's channel customization features and the ability to configure channel bots for information organization. However, they expressed frustration with the difficulty of accessing and organizing important information efficiently. Many reported experiencing "Discord burnout" due to information overload, highlighting the need for clear communication and easily accessible task-related information.

Based on collected data, I created a persona summarizing user needs, goals, and requirements. This led to the identification of five key user requirements that guided my project design. These requirements evolved significantly through ongoing user collaboration and feedback, ultimately reshaping the project's direction.

Initially, my design concepts drew heavy inspiration from Discord's UI, while incorporating additional features to meet user needs. However, user feedback revealed that organizing and accessing information (tasks, roles, DAOs, and notifications) was a more pressing need than basic communication functionality. Addressing this would enable contributors to coordinate more effectively and dedicate more energy to meaningful DAO governance discussions.

In light of this, I pivoted my product from a communications platform to a productivity dashboard. I designed tools for displaying and checking notifications, completing tasks, and organizing the DAOs that contributors were a part of. I also included in my design a widget that would allow users to plug custom built tools, introducing composability to accommodate the diverse needs of different organizations. However for this study, I did not expound on this feature and instead focused on essential functions required for effective DAO contribution.

The DAO tooling landscape is notably fragmented, with numerous platforms and applications scattered across different spaces. My design aimed to address this by providing centralized access to critical tools.

After establishing the task hierarchy and creating storyboards, I refined my design for prototype development.

I developed an initial prototype in Balsamiq before creating the final version in Figma. While the prototype was sufficient for usability testing, the interface needs refinement - specifically, the oversized text and UI elements create an unwieldy experience, and the color scheme requires improvement. These issues will be addressed in future iterations.

Figma

Created with Figma

https://figma.com

The usability testing was designed to measure how quickly and easily users could locate specific information and how well they can learn the interface layout, addressing the primary user need for efficient information access.

I recruited a participant from the initial user research phase, streamlining the recruitment process and making scheduling easier.

The prototype performed well in efficiency and learnability metrics, with task completion times under 15 seconds. While all tasks were completed successfully on the first attempt, the notification page's "read all" function caused some confusion due to unclear iconography. I resolved this by adding explanatory text beside the icon.

During the interview, the user suggested implementing AI automation for notification management and task creation. This led to my decision to incorporate an automated AI feed in the next iteration, further reducing user friction.

This project began as an investigation into DAOs' reliance on Discord and an attempt to create a decentralized alternative. However, user research revealed that the community's needs extended beyond basic communication. Users primarily sought quick, efficient access to relevant information, using Discord mainly due to a lack of alternatives. For DAOs to succeed, they require an integrated platform combining productivity and communication tools that minimizes cognitive load and delivers targeted information.

The research also highlighted the crucial role of artificial intelligence in DAO interfaces. AI integration will be essential for achieving true autonomy, both in task automation and independent organizational operation. These insights will guide my future research with designing DAO products.

Currently, I am conducting user research for Farcastle, a project focused on developing DAO tools within the Farcaster protocol. This include the development and use of “frames”, an innovative and groundbreaking feature that enables users to build and utilize apps within their posts. I will use the insights gained from this study to help inform Farcastle's tool design and strategic direction.

It’s been a long long while since I’ve written in this blog. I did a post on my old Substack last New Years reviewing 2023 and what I had planned for 2024. I thought I would continue that tradition and evaluate how this past year has went for me and what my goals and aspirations are moving into 2025.

Overall, This has been a very eventful year for me: I graduated from college, met my new baby nephew, and I finally saved up enough money to move out on my own! This is the first time I’ve ever lived away from family and while it’s been challenging, it’s nice to finally have a place all to myself. As much as I love my parents, it was clearly time to move on.

As for employment, I’m still working in customer service and itching to get a better job. I’ve learned the hard way that simply getting a bachelor’s degree does not guarantee better work; it requires effective interviewing skills, networking, and a sturdy portfolio and/or resume. I’ve considered returning to my alma mater and finishing the bachelor of science in user experience design that I never completed; unfortunately most of the required courses in that program can only be attended face-to-face which is something I am unable to do. However, I was able to find a fully online master’s program from another university which I will apply to later this year. To be accepted, I need a portfolio of at least 3-5 pieces, so that’s something I will be working on for the next several months.

I’ve been stuck in customer service for close to two years now, and quite frankly I’m sick to death of it. It also doesn’t pay near enough to meet my long term financial goals. It’s time to move up. A master’s degree still doesn’t guarantee work, but it would increase my opportunities significantly.

Reading my last New Year’s post, I had quite a few projects and hobbies planned that I ultimately never followed through with. One of my resolutions was to blog on a regular basis. That obviously didn’t go as I hoped, although I’ve made a couple new posts since the beginning of the year. I also wanted to pursue more creative hobbies but that didn’t pan out either.

Despite this, there are a couple activities I engaged in this year that I hadn’t planned. For instance, I got the opportunity to work as a scare actor at the local haunted house in my new neighborhood. I loved Halloween when I was a kid and was obsessed with the idea of either working at or owning a haunted attraction, but my family lived in am underdeveloped rural area so I never really got the chance. Now that I live in a new town with a haunted house just across the street, I figured I would give it a go. Scare acting was a lot more challenging than I expected, but I really enjoyed it. I learned quite a bit about the business and became good friends with some fellow coworkers. I haven’t yet decided whether or not I want to act again next year though I probably will.

Another project I got involved with that I originally didn’t plan was the Farcastle project on Farcaster. Farcastle (not to be confused with Farcastles) is a project spearheaded by @earth2travis and is focused on turning Farcaster channels into DAOs. The idea for the project came about after chatting with Travis and other fellow casters about the potential channels possess to becoming fully fledged DAOs. For the most part, I’ve been assisting with user experience research, interviewing channel owners to determine what their goals and needs are. The feedback we’ve received has been very insightful and I plan to write more about our findings sometime in the near future.

In that vein, one resolution I have for this coming year is to expand my knowledge and record what I find. I’ve been involved in the web3 space for some time now, yet there’s still so much I don’t know about the technology itself and how it works. I know the fundamentals of how blockchain and cryptocurrency works, but beyond that, I know little regarding the inner workings of cryptology, artificial intelligence, ZK proofs or even traditional web technology. If I really want to work in DAOs, even if I decide not to become a developer, it would only benefit me to become more intimate with the technology that I’m actually going to work with. Knowledge is power, and the more knowledge I possess, the better I’ll be able to contribute.

To help facilitate my learning and to record what I learn, I plan to use the note taking application Obsidian. It was recommended to me by some fellow casters, primarily @thecurioushermit. Although I’ve used Notion for a while, Obsidian has better functionality, a wider selection of features and community plugins, and it’s completely private. It also has a cool graph feature that shows the connections between different notes and how they relate to each other. I’ve spent the Holidays creating an Obsidian theme in CSS and I’m quite pleased with how it looks. Getting into the habit of note taking will also help me stick with my goal of blogging regularly.

That’s about everything I have planned for the new year. This last year has been full of big changes and new experiences. If 2023 felt like a liminal space, 2024 suplexed me into the friggin backrooms. My hope for 2025 is to channel this momentum into further personal growth and improvement.

As always, If you haven’t, please consider subscribing to my Paragraph and follow me on Farcaster. Happy 2025!

First, it’s important to note that Farcaster is somewhat different from Mastodon in that it’s not actually a platform but a social protocol built on the Ethereum blockchain. This allows users to preserve their content and identity on the protocol layer without being restricted to one instance or platform. This also allows them to choose from a variety of different front-end clients. The one I use most often, and the most popular, is Warpcast. There are other clients out there, but I have yet to try them, so for this post, I will mainly focus on the UX of Warpcast.

So, how does it hold up?

By and large, the community is pretty great. Over the past year, I’ve made meaningful connections with some brilliant builders and thinkers in the web3 space. At the time of writing this, I have accrued 457 users on the platform. Not bad for year one. In my evaluation post for Mastodon, I expressed the desire to be part of a strong community centered around web3. I can confidently say I have found my tribe and feel right at home. I also mentioned that, at the time, most web3/crypto OGs were still using Twitter to communicate with each other. Interestingly enough, as Elon Musk steadily drove users and advertisers away from the platform with his antics and terrible decision-making, most of the smart people in the web3 ecosystem have migrated elsewhere, mainly here on Farcaster or Lens (Lens has recently gone permissionless. I’m seriously considering giving it a try and sharing my thoughts). Whatever is left of the web3 community on Twitter is either bots, crypto shillers, or degens. Oh, how the turn tables.

One main criticism I have of the Farcaster community is that it feels a bit too homogeneous. With Mastodon, I felt like there was more diversity of thought and culture. As much as I love web3, on Farcaster, sometimes it’s all people talk about. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and with the balkanization of social media networks, it’s inevitable that places like Farcaster will have a bit of an echo chamber effect. Still, it would be nice to get new community members who aren’t web3 OGs or Vitalik simps. I do feel this has improved somewhat with the introduction of channels (a feature I will get to in a minute), and you do see a variety of different subjects being discussed. Maybe I just need to adjust the feed for my timeline.

Another aspect that I like, and dislike, about Farcaster is just how nice the community is. Almost too nice. While there are often debates and in-depth discussions about complex topics, I’ve hardly ever seen any real toxicity, unless it’s purely for jest. It’s become a running joke in the community that Farcaster is a lot like a church youth group, and this feels extremely accurate. Everyone here is just so… nice. Heck, even the bots are friendly! The community is so nice in fact that they had to make a channel just so people can be mean to each other.

After the hell hole formerly known as Twitter, I honestly shouldn’t complain. Having a friendly community with genuine, civil discussions is a fresh breath of air. Maybe I’ve just grown so accustomed to a toxic and adversarial internet that I’ve forgotten that a warm and welcoming internet community is actually possible. That’s a sad, yet hopeful, thing to realize.

I should take a moment to briefly mention the bots. In recent months, bot accounts have become fairly common on the protocol. These accounts often pump out repetitive and generic content regularly just to get views and tips. For the most part, the bot accounts don’t bother me, and they’re not especially a nuisance. What does bug me, however, is when I make a cast in hopes of getting genuine community feedback, and all I get are bot replies. There has been some discussion in the community about a potential fix to the bot issue. The main feedback expressed by Dan and other big developers is that there isn’t any real way to regulate the bots short of enforcing censorship on the protocol. Due to the decentralized nature of FC, I generally agree, although it would be helpful to have more bot regulation tools, such as “bot-or-not”, to filter out and reduce the amount of bot spam.

Overall, the user experience is pretty great, and there’s very little for me to complain about, at least as far as Warpcast goes. The client is designed very similarly to Twitter, so it’s fairly intuitive for someone familiar with social media platforms. There are several features of Warpcast that I particularly enjoy, one of which is the onboarding process. When I first signed up for Mastodon, I remember the lengthy and tedious process of reaching out to a certain instance and getting permission to join that instance. With Warpcast, it was a simple matter of initiating my FID on the chain and saving a recovery phrase, email verification, and then setting up my user profile. It takes no more than a minute to sign up.

Now that the app is permissionless, you are required to pay $5 a year to use it, though I see this as a small price to pay. I usually don’t like paying for apps and software, but for Farcaster I will make an exception. It is not cheap to build and maintain a product on-chain. Also, I am ensured that in return, I still own my data and identity. The original sin of the internet was free content, and it led to the dystopian enshittified internet that we are subjected to now. In the end, the Farcaster community is so engaging and the clients are so well designed that paying $5 a year is well worth the price. Either you pay for and own the product, or you are the product.

Aside from the onboarding process, there have been some fantastic features built on Warpcast in the past year that have greatly enhanced the user experience. One of my favorites, which I mentioned prior, are channels. You can essentially think of channels as subreddits, with each channel designed for a specific topic. There are hundreds of channels to choose from, and casting in a channel boosts the visibility of your casts. Users can also start their own channels, although you are required to make payments for maintenance. I feel like the addition of channels has helped diversify content on Farcaster, and it allows users to easily find certain topics and interests that pertain to them.

Another recent feature that I love are frames. Frames are basically small widgets that perform certain actions which can be embedded within a cast. For example, you could create a photo gallery, polls, payments, NFT listings, mini-games, and more. One user, Cassie Heart, figured out how to get Doom working in a frame! The creativity and flexibility of frames highlights the potential of a decentralized social network like Farcaster. I look forward to seeing more innovative tools like this in the future.

The only frustration I really have with the Warpcast client is the inability to edit casts. I’m not a highly technical person, so I’m unsure if this is a feature or a bug of building atop a blockchain, but it can be rather irritating to cast something and then have to delete and recast it if there’s something I want to change. Honestly, it’s not a big deal breaker for me, but it’s odd to me that a feature so basic has never been implemented on the client.

Overall, my experience with Farcaster has been quite positive, and I will likely continue to be a long-term member. Although its DAU is nowhere near Twitter’s yet and the community is still quite small, this protocol has massive potential, and I look forward to the protocol’s future growth.

I do plan to try out other platforms and protocols, such as Lens, and writing about my user experience. As an aspiring UX designer, I’d like to take opportunities like this to expand my knowledge of good user experience design and guide the direction of my own projects.

For the past couple of years now, due to the lack of good web3 products, I began to believe that web3 simply didn’t exist yet and that there weren’t enough well designed applications of the technology to make it solid. Now, I can honestly say that the next iteration of the internet is finally starting to take shape. In my eyes, Farcaster is the very first legitimate web3 product to have been deployed, and the proper beginning of the decentralized web: great UX, strong network effects, and most importantly, sufficiently decentralized.

Maybe we’re not so early after all…

In my conversations with other people in the space, they favor Discord for the useful features that it offers, mainly personalized notifications and the ability to create sub-channels. However, Discord is hardly decentralized and is currently owned by a private company, and it is less than ideal for large organizations with hundreds, or potentially thousands, of participants. As of yet, there hasn’t been any alternative platform that have managed to replace Discord as a competitor.

I ultimately want DAOs to succeed, but for this to happen, we need better tools for productivity and communication that don’t have the limits and restrictions that Discord currently has. On the other hand, I recognize that many DAOists find Discord a very useful tool in their work. I want to gain a better understanding of how Discord enables DAO participants to work together and contribute, as well as what other needs remain unmet. I’m currently taking a certificate course on User Experience Design through eCornell. For my final capstone project, I will be designing the concept for a sufficiently decentralized communication and coordination tool for DAO participants. As part of this capstone project, I am collecting contextual data by conducting one-on-one interviews with users to determine their needs.

I am looking for three volunteers who currently work in the DAO space in some capacity and regularly use Discord to work with their fellow DAO participants. I prefer that the participant has been involved in a DAO for at least 6 months. I will be conducting 15-30 minute interviews online via Zoom. I do plan to record the sessions. If you prefer not to be recorded, you can still participate; I’ll just need to get written consent before we schedule and begin the interview. As for the date of the interview, the best day for me will be this coming Saturday the 1st. If this date doesn’t work for you, we can work together to schedule an appropriate time. Those who choose to participate will receive .02 ETH. I will need this data by the 3rd of June before the submission deadline, so applications are on a first come first served basis.

If you are interested in participating in this study, shoot me a PM on Farcaster and we can schedule an interview together. I look forward to hearing from you!

Hello!

A month and a half ago at the strike of New Year’s Eve, I locked all of my personal devices in a fire safe, with the exception of my phone as I needed it for work, and detoxed for (almost) the entire month. This is the first time in probably my entire life that I’ve gone this long without my electronics. In this post, I’m going to summarize my experience with the detox and what I learned about myself in the process.

First off before I proceed, I do have a confession to make; while the majority of my devices were inaccessible for most of the detox, I admit that I was a little bit liberal when it came to my smartphone. As a customer service rep, I am required to use my phone in order to work remotely. While I did buy a time-locked kitchen safe for when I didn’t use the phone for work, I didn’t use the safe as often as I probably should. I also had an app/website blocker installed on my phone as well, but it wasn’t foolproof as the battery optimization feature on Android phones constantly breaks certain apps that use background processing (screw you Google!). As a result, I was able to access certain apps from time to time. While I wasn’t as diligent as I could’ve been throughout the detox, and I did relapse a couple times, I still learned a great deal from the experience and did benefit from it.

For the most part, I wouldn’t say that the detox was particularly life changing. For the first couple of weeks, I was fairly bored and had to find ways to fill my schedule with other activities, especially on my days off. However, surprisingly, I didn’t miss my electronics as much as I thought I would. For so many years I had been a chronic YouTube addict and didn’t like the feelings of guilt and misery after going down a video-binge spiral, so detoxing from YouTube was frankly liberating. While I somewhat enjoy video games, It’s hard for me to really enjoy them like I used to, so abstaining from gaming wasn’t all that bad. I’ve never particularly enjoyed using social media and while I love interacting with my tribe on Farcaster (a subject of which I plan to explore in a future post), it felt nice to have some digital solitude for a while. The one thing I dearly missed however was listening to my music. I didn’t realize how much music benefited my mental and emotional health until I could no longer listen to it. I’m listening to my favorite dark ambiance playlist as I write this and man oh man it’s nice to have my music back! Still, even without my music, I found value in sitting with silence for a while as it allowed me to be more attentive to my thoughts and emotions.

The boredom of not having my electronics with me subsided after the first couple of weeks. One thing I noticed that improved considerably was my sleep schedule. The quality of my sleep has been declining of late and it’s something that I’ve resolved to fix, so it was very revealing to me just how much electronics affected my sleeping patterns. Without my gadgets, I also had more time in my day to do some self reflection via meditation and journal writing, habits that I want to continue fostering in my daily life.

I think the most important revelation that I received throughout that 30 day period was the notion that achieving change in my life does not happen overnight, or even after a month. Remember how I mentioned earlier that I relapsed when it came to my phone? One of the main reasons I wanted to pursue this detox was to change my relationship with my electronics and break bad habits. Still, even after a few weeks of the detox, I went right back to my old patterns of behavior. I was rather disappointed with myself at first, but after some introspection, I began to realize that making lasting change is not a sprint; it’s a marathon, one that may take my entire life to complete.

One foot in front of the other

“...behold I say unto you, that by small and simple things are great things brought to pass; and small means in many instances doth confound the wise.”

- Alma 37: 6

I recently finished college with my Bachelor of Science in psychology, and while I don’t consider myself a neuroscientist, I’ve learned enough about neurology to know that the brain does not change overnight; it can take days, months, and sometimes even years for the brain to create and reinforce new pathways and prune out old ones. The brain is most certainly capable of change, that is what neuroplasticity is all about, but it takes time, patience, and most importantly, consistency. In most cases, this change doesn’t come about due to some monumental task or sweeping change, but rather tiny little changes over a period of time, piece by piece, here a little and there a little.

As someone who is on the autism spectrum, I’ve always had a tendency to think with an all-or-nothing mindset: I either find one big solution to my struggles that will solve them once and for all, or that solution doesn’t work and I need to find another one. This is one of the reasons I went into this detox, because I thought it would be the one silver bullet that will finally help me gain momentum in my life and move on from the bad habits that have held me back for so long. I’ve recently come to accept however that there is no silver bullet. There is no one solution or magic pill that will fix everything in one fell swoop. That’s just not how the nervous system works. Instead, it takes a multitude of different solutions, changes, and habits that are built up over time. You start with one good habit to implement, take some time to make sure it is cemented, and then move on to the next one. It’s not one giant leap; it’s putting one foot in front of the other

I can see clearly now that the all-or-nothing mindset that I’ve operated with for so many years is likely the main reason I’ve been going in circles when it comes to self improvement and making positive change. While I didn’t entirely stick with my detox as I originally planned, the experience allowed me to finally see through that unproductive mode of thinking, and it’s helped me tremendously when it comes to self improvement. For example, I’ve recently started to implement small changes to my bedroom and night-time routine in order to improve my sleep. Once I’ve established good sleep patterns, I plan to gradually add specific activities to my daily schedule, such as reading or digital art, hobbies that will enrich both my mind and spirit. It’s the little changes you make that count.

In Conclusion

I personally would like to try a 30 day digital detox again in the near future, and I do plan to designate Sunday as my “detox day” so I can reset myself at the beginning of the week. If you’ve never done a digital detox, it is something I would recommend trying at least once. For now however, it is good to be back with my fellow netizens in cyberspace, and I’m excited for what is to come in this new year.

Forward

As this is my very first post on Paragraph, I feel like I should introduce myself. I've been involved in the web3 space and the Farcaster community for a while now. I originally started posting on Substack last year, but thanks to the introduction of Frames (a subject that I certainly plan on writing about at a later date) and the persuasion of a fellow caster (thanks @danicaswanson!), I recently decided to migrate here. You can see all of my older posts on my Substack here:

https://alditrus.substack.com

The Alditrus Manuscript | Substack

My thoughts about DAOs and Cryptocurrency. Click to read The Alditrus Manuscript, a Substack publication. Launched 2 years ago.

Thank you so much for reading and see you in the next post!

I’ve been active on Farcaster for about half a year now. The great thing about the FC community is that it’s exposed me to certain philosophies and viewpoints that I would not have considered otherwise. One specific philosophy that has become rather popular on the protocol is what’s called “effective accelerationism” or “e/acc”. When I first heard this term, I was a little confused as to what it meant. I was familiar with effective altruism, the popular yet controversial philosophy championed by the now disgraced Sam Bankman Fried. I was also rather familiar with Nick Land’s accelerationism thanks to Slate Star Codex’s Meditations on Moloch.

I later gathered that the philosophy is more or less what it says on the tin: accelerating technological development to ultimately better humanity and lead us to a brighter future. It’s a philosophy which posits that technology can only benefit our species and we need to develop it as fast as we possibly can in order to create what is, essentially, Utopia. e/acc appears to be the most popular among AI proponents and enthusiasts but it has, naturally, bled into other technological sectors such as blockchain and by extension, defi and web3.

When I first started learning about e/acc, I was at first skeptical. Accelerationism is more or less the axiom of “move fast and break things”, a motto devised by Zuckerberg, aka the guy who poisoned our society with the world’s most toxic and divisive social media platform. The whole reason I wanted to join web3 and be a proponent of decentralization was to stick it to oligarchs like Zuckerberg and make sure no one would have such centralized control over the web again. Why would web3 builders want to embrace a philosophy that is responsible for making the internet the corporatized, enshittified, ad-ridden mess it is now? The whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth.

Be it known that I’m by no means anti-technology or a “decel” if you will. I know there are many people who cling onto the notion that modern technology is evil and that it either must be tightly regulated or banned altogether. While I can understand their frustration and disillusionment, this view is not only naïve but also fruitless. Technology only progresses in one direction, not backward, and it has become decentralized enough that someone will continue to develop it, regardless of any attempts at regulation.

I firmly believe that technology, of all types, can and ultimately will benefit humanity and will enable our species to reach it’s divine and cosmic destiny. However, I am also cognizant of the fact that the same technology can also be used for malicious purposes. In this discussion on techno-ethics, I like to take a balanced approach; at the end of the day, technology is simply a tool. You can go to the hardware store and buy a hammer. You can either use said hammer to build a house, repair a leak in the roof, build a coffee table, etc. or you could use the hammer to bash someone’s head in, or break into their house and steal their stuff. Just because you used the hammer for evil doesn’t necessarily means it’s evil. It’s just a hammer. It all comes down to intent. A sword is only as virtuous as the warrior who wields it.

I believe for technology to benefit us, it must be developed and distributed democratically and with wisdom. “With great power comes great responsibility”. Our modern technology has given us unimaginable power, but so far we have failed to wield it responsibly. So the question is, how do we ensure the ethical and responsible development and deployment of technology while also encouraging innovation? I don’t believe the answer to be government regulation. Our governments are growing increasingly geriatric and our politicians do not adequately understand modern technology enough to draft effective legislation. Not to mention that our governments move far too slow to catch up with technology that is evolving at an exponential rate. Also not to mention that many of our governments have become so bitterly divided and gridlocked that they’re unable to do anything useful anyway.

So no, government regulation is not the answer. But without the intervention of government institutions, how on earth do we enforce the ethical use of technology? While there is no perfect solution, I believe that the best solution lies at the heart of what blockchain and web3 is all about: decentralization.

During my exploration of e/acc, I came across Vitalik Buterin’s post regarding the subject. I won’t go into too much detail about the article, and I encourage you to read his post yourself, but he essentially proposed another variant of e/acc called d/acc. The “d” in this case can stand for a number of things: defense, decentralization, or democracy, but the main idea is accelerating technology while also taking precautions to make sure the technology is well aligned. One way this can be done, and the definition of d/acc that I resonate with the most, is using decentralized systems and coordination mechanisms to reach consensus of how the technology should be developed. Decentralizing control of the technology also ensures that it’s not developed by only a small handful of powerful entities, further ensuring that acceleration is decided upon in a democratic fashion.

Obviously he goes into far more nuance than I did and my summary is super simplified, but I personally like this interpretation of effective acceleration. It encourages increased innovation while also providing possible solutions to safe and responsible development. I want to help our world break out of the rut of stagnation it’s currently stuck in, and I also want us to break free of the crumbling and sclerotic institutions that are holding us back. I want to push the gas down just as badly as anyone. However, I also want to make sure we aren’t speeding directly into a dystopia worse than the one we have now. If we’re going to accelerate, we should have at least some control of the wheel.

My favorite part of Vitalik’s post is his optimism for the future and his positive view of humanity, that as flawed as we are, we are inherently good. That is an attitude I greatly admire. Nick Land, the originator of accelerationism, sees humanity in a far more cynical light, even an adversarial one. Yes, we are part animal and we often act like one, but there’s also a part of us that make us better than most animals on earth. I can’t put a finger on exactly what that part is, call it morality, or soul, or the indomitable human spirit. It’s the part of us that constantly wants to improve, to be better, not just for ourselves but for those we love. It’s that part of us that dreams of one day leaving earth and living among the stars. It’s the part that seeks for the spiritual and divine, to find a higher purpose than simply existing. It’s the part that takes pity on our fellow men and acts selflessly for their benefit. It’s that part of ourselves that makes us plucky, adaptable, resourceful, and resilient. I can’t think of another animal on earth who has that type of spirit.

At the end of this learning journey, I find myself aligned with decentralized acceleration. With this explosion of technology we are experiencing, humanity is now transitioning through a crucial inflection point. It’s time for us to take full advantage of this opportunity.

Yes we should accelerate, but first make sure to defend and decentralize as best we can. Then, grip the steering wheel and push that gas pedal down. All the frigging way.

A C C E L E R A T E

Happy Holidays! It’s been quite a busy year for me and I haven’t had much time or energy to write a Substack post. Thought I’d catch you up to speed with what I’ve been up to and what I have planned for the coming New Year. I have a lot of projects and hobbies planned and although I may not get around to all of them, jotting everything down will give you something of an idea of what I want to experiment with in 2024.

First announcement I want to make is that I am now officially done with college! Halle-frigging-lujah. Just finished my last two classes a couple weeks ago and I’ll be attending the graduation ceremonies this coming May. I’ll be walking away with a bachelor’s in psychology, an associates in behavioral science, and a minor in digital media. After five years of higher education, I can say with a certainty that our educational system as it currently stands is a failing institution and either needs to be extensively restructured or simply replaced by a better alternative. That’s not to say I didn’t have some great experiences in college and I am greatly privileged to have access to higher education, but with that said, our education system is clearly outdated and needs to be fixed. This isn’t even mentioning all of the ludicrous politics and repugnant progressive virtue signaling going on. All of this is a topic for a future post that I plan to write somewhere down the line. Needless to say, continuing to maintain the status quo within our universities is doing our future generations a great disservice.

As I mentioned in my previous posts, I’ve also been extraordinarily busy with a new job as a customer service representative at an unnamed brokerage firm. The job pays incredibly well and the hours are good, but doing customer service has been extremely draining for me. I can honestly say that this job has been the hardest, longest slog of my career thus far and, between work and finishing school, it’s left me very little energy to pursue other activities I’ve been wanting to take part in, such as keeping up on this Substack. Fortunately, I just recently applied for a back office position where I would transcribe life insurance documents, basically a clerk job. It sounds tremendously boring, but I prefer boring over stressful at this point. My hope is that a less stressful job will give back some psychic energy so I can engage in other pursuits on my spare time. Here’s to hoping that I’ll get picked up for an interview; fingers crossed.

With everything from the past year squared away, I want to touch on what I want to accomplish heading into the new year, both in web3 and in my personal life. First and foremost, and one of the primary reasons I wanted to write this post, I plan to partake in a 30 day digital detox starting right after New Year’s Eve. I will be taking all of my personal devices, with the exception of my phone, and locking them away for an entire month. I went to the effort of buying a Honeywell key-locked fire safe for my devices, and I also bought a time-locked kitchen safe for my phone when I’m not using it for work. I’ll be giving the key for the safe to a loved one until the detox is over.

There are a few reasons why I want to pursue this detox. The primary reason is to break certain habits that have been detrimental to my psychological and emotional health for years. Growing up during the advent of the internet, I’ve always been hooked to some type of digital device with internet access. Within the past few years since I started college, there has rarely been a moment where I haven’t been chronically online, and I feel like so much of my time, energy, and happiness has been robbed by my unhealthy addiction to the internet. I want to change my relationship with technology and fix the behaviors that I’ve struggled with for so long. As a psychology student, I know the best way to break a bad habit is to replace it with a healthy habit and abstain from that bad habit long enough that those pathways in the brain eventually fade away. In other words, use it or lose it. Even after I’m done with my initial detox, I plan to detox regularly to continue fostering that healthy relationship. I’ve dedicated Sundays as my detox days, but I may detox on other occasions whenever I feel it’s needed.

The secondary reason I’m doing this detox is to give myself time to meditate and reflect on where I’m going from here and what I plan to do with myself. I’m at a very pivotal time in my life where I’m finally finishing my education and transitioning into the world of work. It’s a strange liminal space to find myself in, and one where my decisions will have a significant impact on my future. Now that I no longer have to juggle both work and school, I need to figure out what I want out of life and what impact I want to make on the world. Despite the embarrassment of the FTX scandal over the past year and the many failings and flaws within web3, I still passionately believe that this technology can and will bless humanity in ways we cannot imagine. I want to make the world a better place and use this technology to help fix the many crises that our society is struggling with. I don’t want to miss out on the revolution. With that said, there are other options and opportunities to make a net positive impact that don’t necessarily involve web3. I want to consider these options carefully and come to a decision. There is also some personal mental health stuff that I need to work through as well, especially after such a stressful year of work.

Once I’m done with my detox however, I plan to get to work. My current plan is to resume learning code and web development for web3. I tried learning web dev a little this past year, but my life became so busy I had to put my coding lessons on hold. I want to continue my web development journey once January ends. I’ll at least learn the four basic languages: html, css, javascript, and python. I may branch out and learn other languages depending on what type of development I want to pursue and what language I vibe with the most, but at least those four. I also plan to find a good web development course online and start building up a portfolio.

In addition to web development, I also plan to start participating in DAOs again. Although I am fascinated with DAOs, my participation and contribution to them thus far has been minimal. As I am already an active member of Farcaster, I’ve been thinking of starting with Purple DAO. I’m mostly interested DAO governance and participating in proposals, although it would also be an excellent opportunity to do web development work for the DAO and expand my dev skills. The last time I was active in a DAO, I got nervous and backed out. I think the reason for this anxiety is because I felt some ambiguity of how exactly I should contribute and got overwhelmed. I don’t yet know how to grapple with this feeling of anxiety, but regardless, I want to return to the DAO space and learn everything I can about how these organizations currently work, how they are structured, and what can be done to improve them.

There are also some creative pursuits that I would like to try. I’ve been thinking of doing crypto art again. I was very involved in the NFT market during the boom of ‘21, but pulled out after the market collapsed. I would like to resume this hobby as it would allow me to express myself creatively while also earning a little crypto on the side. Also, Warpcast now allows its users to sell NFTs for warps. Since channels have went permission-less, it would be nice to save up some warps to open my very own channel one day. Another creative hobby I want to try is making dark ambient music. I’ve become something of a dark ambiance aficionado recently and would like to conduct some pieces of my own. I know nothing about creating music, but figuring out how would be a lot of fun.

I of course will continue to write more Substack articles. There’s one article in particular I want to write and publish before year’s end so you can expect to see that one some time by the end of the week. I personally like writing as a way to express my ideas. It feels natural to me. Maintaining a Substack is also an excellent way to synthesize and apply what I’m learning. I aim to write at least one article a month following my detox, possibly more if I can find the time.

That’s the long and short of what I have planned for 2024. Again, I may not be able to do everything on my list, but I feel like this is a good start. I feel like this new year will be a big turning point for me and I’m very excited for what’s in store.

If you haven’t, please consider subscribing to my Substack and follow me on Farcaster if you’re on there. I wish you a Happy New Year and see you in the next post!

This is a mushroom.

More precisely, a mushroom is a general descriptor for a species of fleshy organisms known as fungi. The mushroom you see above is just a fruit body of a fungus, a small appendage of a much larger organism with complex underlying structures that grow deep underneath the soil. Most people take for granted just how immense fungi really are, only seeing the small toadstools that peep out above the ground. In reality, fungi are comprised of vast decentralized networks that can span entire forests, using enzymes and chemical processes to communicate like a massive brain right under our feet. Not only do they break down and recycle dead matter, but they also act as an ecosystem's internet, connecting different species and organisms with one another in a way that we humans usually don’t fully appreciate or understand.

But first, let's start with the basics.

Fungi are one of the four main eukaryotic kingdoms. Originally classified as plants, they were eventually re-categorized into their own kingdom due to their unique characteristics and morphology. Fungi are a vastly diverse species, comprising 9 main clades, each containing a range of different groups within the fungi family tree. For brevity's sake, I won't go into detail about these lineages but suffice it to say that the fungi kingdom embraces a wide range of organisms, from lichen to bread mold to the familiar toadstool. Some fungi are microscopic, while others come in a brilliant spectrum of colors and sizes. Some work symbiotically with other species, while others are parasites that destroy and feed off their hosts.

Despite their hyper diversity, most fungi share the same structure and characteristics. Unlike other organisms, fungi contain chitin within their cell walls. Almost all fungi exhibit a filamentous structure, consisting of thread-like material known as hyphae. These hyphae weave together to form a mesh called mycelium. Fungi primarily use spores to reproduce and create new fruiting bodies on the surface. However, the mycelium is the real powerhouse of the fungi, its "true form," so to speak.1

It is the mycelium, a network of branching tubular structures, that makes fungi especially resilient. When you wake up one morning after a rainy night and see mushrooms sprouting across your lawn, as I have on occasion, you are only seeing a small part of the fungus, its "loins" as it were. Even if you pluck all of these mushrooms and throw them away, you won't destroy the fungus itself. The true fungus lies deep beneath your feet, a vast array of hyphae waiting to create new fruiting bodies when the time is right. Even if you painstakingly uproot a large part of your yard to rid yourself of this mycelium network, the remaining part of the network will simply grow back.

This is the true strength of a fungus and what makes it remarkably hardy: it's decentralized. There is no single central point of failure that could destroy it unless the entire network is attacked at once. As the network grows larger, however, the more difficult it is to eliminate, and the stronger it becomes…

Deep within the Blue Mountains of Oregon, underneath the junipers and pines of Malheur National Forest, there is a behemoth lurking. This leviathan takes the form of a rather benign-looking mushroom with a mustard-yellow hue, colloquially known as the Honey Mushroom. It not only grows from the forest soil but also clings to the trunks of trees, sometimes gushing out from underneath the bark. This mushroom, if cooked properly, is considered a local delicacy. It is also one of the largest organisms ever known to man, even dwarfing the great blue whale. Known to scientists as Armillaria ostoyae, this massive mycelium network spans 2,385 acres, earning its nickname the "Humongous Fungus.”2

This massive fungus is not only the largest living thing on the planet, but it is also a massive pest. As previously mentioned, fungi can form symbiotic relationships with other organisms or act as parasites. This is because fungi are heterotrophic and unable to produce their own food. While most fungi derive their nutrients from dead matter, recycling its components for other plants to use, the Armillaria goes a step further. It uses a unique mycelial cord, a thick black root-like growth called a rhizomorph, to invade trees from underground. The rhizomorph parasitizes the tree by killing its root system and creating a mycelium mat underneath the bark, leading to the tree's slow and tedious death. Once the tree has perished, the fungus continues to feed on its rotted remains.

Not only is Armillaria deadly, but it is also incredibly durable. Its rhizomorphs are extremely strong, capable of penetrating a tree's thick trunk and outer bark. They can resist the strongest of fungicides and can even withstand acid. Even if no trees are available to infest, the fungus can remain dormant underground for years. It's possible that if some apocalyptic event, such as a nuclear holocaust or climate change, utterly destroys our planet and drives humanity into oblivion, the Humongous Fungus will still survive. It is virtually invincible.3

This may paint a rather insidious image of fungi as a cruel harbinger of death, but not all fungi are as hostile. In fact, most fungal networks help a forest endure and thrive. These more holistic types of fungi can form mycorrhizal networks, or "wood wide webs," that work symbiotically with plants to maintain the ecosystem's health and integrity. In these networks, mycelium and rhizomorphs communicate with plant roots by passing different substances from one end of the forest to the other, similar to a pipeline of public goods. These substances can include nutrients, electrical currents, water, nitrogen, or even carbon. Plants can interact with the fungi directly, exchanging products of photosynthesis for nourishment, or they can use fungi to communicate with a wide variety of other plants. This way, trees with plentiful resources or needed nutrients can give to those in need. It also enables trees to warn their peers from one end of the forest to the other about impending threats, such as an aphid infestation. Without Fungi and these cooperative networks, forests and other ecosystems may never have existed.4

Fungi are not the only organisms that can communicate in a decentralized manner. Slime molds, another type of organism, not only demonstrate efficient communication but can also mimic almost human-like intelligence. While they’re not fungi, slime molds share many similarities with fungi. They are capable of breaking down and feeding on dead material and come in a diverse palette of different colors. What sets them apart from fungi, besides their differing morphology, is their ability to make intelligent decisions and even solve complex puzzles, all without the help of a centralized nervous system.

While mushrooms consist of a vast network of filamentous fibers with chitin-reinforced cells, slime molds are actually single-celled microorganisms that can join together to become multicellular organisms. This makes the slime mold not only more flexible than a fungus but also more modular, enabling it to perform tasks fungi generally are incapable of.5 For example, when placed inside a maze with a food reward at the end, the slime will attempt all possible routes until it reaches the prize. It is even able to remember the maze solution and replicate it at will. Even if the mold is separated into multiple pieces, it can relocate its separated parts to become whole again. It can also perform complex tasks beyond just mazes. One researcher, Toshiyuki Nakagaki, and his team trained a slime mold using oats to replicate the Tokyo rail system! 67

Organisms such as fungi and slime molds are complex and agile lifeforms that can sustain entire ecosystems and navigate complex tasks. But why on Earth did I write an entire essay about fungus for a writing contest about web3? I imagine most people interested in blockchain technology and its applications have already made the connection.

When Satoshi Nakamoto invented Bitcoin, the first blockchain network, in 2008, they likely envisioned a world where wealth and the financial system weren't under the complete control of a corrupt central authority that protected bad actors while thousands of innocent people were forced onto the streets. They probably envisioned a global economy without borders or barriers of entry, limited only by the imagination. Bitcoin, a standard of value belonging to no one, is the result of that vision. Since then, the vision of a decentralized future has only grown and evolved. Vitalik Buterin and his colleagues took it a step further when they created Ethereum, a global operating system owned and managed by everyone that could do things Bitcoin wasn't originally built for.

The world has also evolved since the Financial Crisis of ‘08, but arguably for the worse. I don't need to list the ills and calamities that have plagued our society over the past decade; to put it frankly, we're not in a good place. We need a more efficient way to communicate with each other to solve the challenges of our day, one that hasn't and cannot be hijacked by a small group of extremely powerful oligarchs. While blockchain has provided a potential solution, we still have a long way to go. Networks like Ethereum haven't yet reached the scaling power required to onboard a civilization of 7 billion people. These networks and their applications are also clunky and fall short when it comes to collective communication. For example, despite the many promises of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, most DAOs end up falling apart because their members are unable to reach a workable consensus. And I don’t think I have to remind my audience of what happened with FTX and the broader crypto ecosystem this past year.

However, I wouldn't say that this is the beginning. I would say this is the beginning before the beginning. We haven't even scratched the surface of what blockchain could potentially be capable of. Writing this essay took me down a rabbit hole I thought I would never jump down, and it's changed my view of how we can harness this technology to communicate and coordinate in ways never before possible. If a mushroom and a slime can coordinate in a decentralized manner, why can't we? The practice of biomimicry is used in many disciplines and web3 should be no exception. I can imagine, for example, a blockchain network that is structured to imitate the function of a mycorrhizal network, using digital assets and other public goods to communicate with different institutions and create a beneficial equilibrium between them. What if we could structure a DAO or a social network to act as a slime mold would? What would be the implications of such a collective intelligence? Just like heterotrophs, these dapps and networks could also break down dysfunctional or ossified institutions, recycling their resources and giving them to other institutions that need them most. As we continue to build and experiment, I believe we can learn a thing or two from Mother Nature about creating a world that is not only more fair and equitable but also resilient enough to stand the test of time.

1

https://byjus.com/biology/kingdom-fungi/

2

https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/humongous-fungus-armillaria-ostoyae/

3

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/08/humongous-fungus-climate-change-biggest-organism/671109/

4

https://www.sciencefocus.com/nature/mycorrhizal-networks-wood-wide-web/

5

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/slime-mould

6

https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/what-is-slime-mold

7

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/slime-mold-smart-brainless-cognition/

I’ve been using Mastodon for over a year now and since the platform has grown considerably over the past couple of years, I thought it best to describe my feelings regarding the platform and whether I plan to stay.

I left Twitter a while ago, well before Elon Musk acquired it. I’ve already expressed my thoughts about the acquisition in another post so I won’t be elaborating here. The main reason I left is because I felt like the platform wasn’t giving me enough in return for my time and energy. Musk waltzing in and trashing the place only cemented my decision. As such, I set out to find another platform that met my needs. Because Mastodon was becoming popular at the time, I decided to start there.

So, how does it measure up?

The community is alright. What I like about Mastodon is that the discourse is more friendly and less fast-paced than Twitter. On Mastodon, the interactions I’ve had with other people feel more genuine and authentic. I’ve always felt that the quantity of my relationships isn’t as important as their quality. On Twitter, I felt like I had to post non-stop just to please the arbitrary demands of the algorithm just so my posts would be visible. I never felt like the relationships I had on there were authentic and gaining enough engagement felt like a never-ending contest. It was exhausting. On Mastodon, I could disappear for weeks at a time and always pick up where I started. This experience was far more pleasant compared to the unrelenting rat race that Twitter promoted.

With that said, while I’ve met some pretty cool people on the platform, I still feel… out of place. The particular instance I’m on, cryptodon.lol, is mostly a handful of actual people who only post occasionally and the rest are crypto news/market accounts. It honestly feels pretty lonely. Most interactions I have are from Federated and while those interactions are pretty nice, most people I engage with either aren’t involved in web3 or oppose it entirely. On Twitter, I was able to participate in some engaging and interesting discussions about web3 with some pretty bright people. It’s become difficult to find that type of discourse on Mastodon.

Another problem I see with the Mastodon community at large is a rising sense of elitism and gatekeeping. There’s this prevailing atmosphere of tone-policing on the platform and you constantly see posts criticizing the “birdsite” and talking about how they’re so much better than Elon Musk, etc, etc. It can get a little annoying. I also see community members harshly criticizing other people for using Twitter instead of going elsewhere which I feel is a bit unfair.

So overall, the community is okay, although I would prefer a community that is a bit more web3-centric. I just don’t feel like I’ve found a digital tribe that I can truly resonate with yet.

The UX design for Mastodon is… not very good. For starters, the sign-up process can be tricky. Unlike Twitter, where you can just spin up an account and start interacting with people right from the get-go, Mastodon requires you to find an “instance” for a particular community and then request access to that instance. You then have to wait for the admins to give you permission to join their instance (and in some cases, that’s a big if).

It took me a while to figure out how to even join Mastodon and it was a little confusing. For a sign-up process, it’s not very user-friendly and it’s enough to keep many people away from the platform. I wouldn’t be surprised if this lack of good UX is the cause behind Mastodon’s recent slump in user growth*.

The UI on the main site itself is pretty janky and there are a few design choices that honestly make me scratch my head. One feature that doesn’t make any sense to me is the “favorite” button. At first, I thought it was some type of like button, and in a way, it is as you can (kind of) see it on people’s posts. On the toolbar to the right, there’s a favorites tab where you can see all the posts that you have favorited before. However, at the same time, you have a “bookmark” feature that does exactly the same thing. What is the purpose of this? Why would I want to see all of the posts I’ve favorited when bookmark already does that? It’s unnecessarily redundant. I also noticed that, instead of showing how many replies your post got, any post with more than one reply instead shows a “1+”. That’s not super helpful. Why can’t it just say how many replies there are?

So yeah, the UX needs a lot of work. Perhaps as the platform evolves these UX issues will be ironed out, but as it stands, the current design is likely stunting Mastodon’s potential growth.

I’m going to be honest, I’ve never been a social media type of guy. I just never enjoyed using it. Maybe that’s due to me being a massive introvert but I’ve never found a social media platform that I genuinely enjoyed. So why do I use it? There are a few reasons.

The main reason is that I want to network with like-minded people. Before creating an account, I knew the hellhole that Twitter was and I swore, up and down, that I would never use the platform. However, after diving down the web3 rabbit hole, I wanted to integrate myself into the larger community, and the only place web3 people congregated was, well… Twitter. What’s a crying shame is that this still holds true.

For all of Twitter’s faults, it’s a place where I’ve met the most interesting, intelligent, and brightest minds currently working to build the decentralized web. With this in mind, I really have to ask: Why on earth are they still using Twitter? There are other decentralized alternatives available (some of which I’ll discuss in a minute) and while it’s true that they still aren’t on the same level as Twitter, they are steadily growing and have a lot of potential. If these people care so much about building a truly decentralized internet that’s free from the power of elites and corporate interests, why do they continue to use a platform under the complete control of a frivolous billionaire who doesn’t care about its users? Why do they continue to enable someone like Musk and the people who follow him?

I’ve already made the decision that I’m not going back to Twitter. I cannot, in my own good conscience, continue to use a site that actively promotes toxic behavior and divides people for the benefit of an elitist pig like Musk. The downside of this decision is that it effectively severed me from the one online community that I’ve always felt I was a part of. Although I’ve met some pretty great people on Mastodon, the discourse there just isn’t the same as what I could find on Twitter.

That’s the second reason I often use social media: I want to find “my tribe”, a digital homestead where I feel I belong. Human beings are social creatures and need a group of people they can identify with. Since I left, this has become increasingly difficult to find. In a way, I feel like a displaced nomad. While I still don’t regret my decision of leaving Twitter behind for good, I wish there was somewhere else online where I felt at home.

I’ll continue to use Mastodon for the time being. Was planning to discuss other decentralized platforms out there but that will have to be a post for another time. I think Mastodon still has a lot of potential and if the dev team makes the right decisions, it could eventually grow to be a suitable replacement for Twitter. With that said, it still has a long way to go.

*While writing this article, I found out that the devs are actually working to fix the sign-up process and make it more user-friendly. We’ll see if that helps the platform’s growth.

Hey yall. Been a while.

I suspect hardly anyone reads this substack as I’ve only made a handful of articles, but I felt it best to write up an update as to what’s been going on and why I’ve been gone for a while. Granted a few months isn’t that long as far as a blog goes, but regardless, I thought I’d throw out an update anyway. This article is mostly about getting my thoughts out on paper and trying to make sense of how I’m feeling about life.

To keep a long story short, I’ve been juggling finishing off college and holding down a brand new job as a customer service rep for a financial company (due to company policy, I can’t say the exact name of my employer without sacrificing my anonymity. Needless to say however, the company I work for now has a particular interest in digital assets). All in all, things have been a bit busy, especially with tax season. I was hoping to finish off my last four college classes this semester, however, due to how challenging my new job has been, I decided to cut this last semester down to two classes instead of four. I thought it was best not to burn myself out. I’ll be finishing my last two classes this coming fall, after which I’ll be officially done with college; no more pencils, no more books, no more teacher’s dirty looks.

Another reason for the temporary sabbatical was to allow me to rethink my relationship with blockchain stuff. After the FTX blowup earlier this year, things have been pretty rough. I think it’s appropriate to say that we’re officially passing through the ‘trough of disillusionment’. What happened with SBF was particularly demoralizing because Sam tricked us all into thinking that we could trust him. For a while, it felt like he was the only liaison between us and policymakers amidst the chaos and opportunism going on within the sector. I really believed he could dole out some reasonable policy and help legitimize the sector in the eyes of regulators.

Then it was all revealed to be a sham. Ever since Sam was exposed as the filthy rat that he is, the government has done everything in its power to strangle the sector to death. The Biden Administration more or less declared itself an enemy of crypto and allowed Gensler to screw over the industry in any way he could. It now feels like we’re lightyears away from any type of decent regulation while every other nation zips ahead. Oh yeah, and Sam got bailed out by some friends in high places and is now walking free while awaiting his trial, all while other people far better than him are rotting in jail.

So yeah, I’m pretty pissed. I’m also pretty discouraged. Originally, I went down the crypto rabbit hole as some starry-eyed believer, thinking that blockchain technology would fundamentally fix everything that is wrong with our broken society. FTX showed me that although this technology can solve some problems, it will never be able to solve basic human nature. I’ve come to accept this, but there’s still some part of me that believes the tech can allow humanity to coordinate so that we can fix the problems our world is facing. On the other hand, the more realistic cynical side of me says that blockchain isn’t able to fix our current system or even replace it.

I’m not ragequitting crypto in any way, I’m just conflicted. I want to believe that the tech can point humanity in the right direction and will allow us to move forward as a society. It’s just hard to see that now with the sorry state crypto is in. I’ve begun to wonder if I should even stick around. If the tech doesn’t accomplish what I want it to accomplish, why bother? On the other hand, what if I’m wrong and the tech actually does accomplish what it sets out to do? For me, it’s something of a faith crisis and not one I’ve been able to fully reconcile myself with.

I know I want to fix our current system or replace it entirely if need be. I’m sick and tired of watching the government flounder about while everything from the environment to infrastructure gets worse and worse. People are suffering and the system seems unable to do anything about it. I’m also sick of people telling me to accept the things I can’t change. Words cannot describe how much I loathe that statement. No, I’m not going to sit around while everything burns around me. I’m going to do my damndest to find a fire extinguisher and actually do something about it. To me, “it is what it is” is a poor excuse to not take action.

So yeah, I want to change the world. I want to disrupt the system so we can finally make progress. The problem is, I’m unsure exactly of how to do that. I’ve tried messing around with learning code so I could be a developer; however, I haven’t made much leeway in that area. I’d like to keep trying to learn code, but I think I have to admit to myself that I’m not much of a dev. If anything I’m a creative; I started off in the crypto-sphere doing NFTs, and while I didn’t earn much, it’s something I enjoyed. I also have some experience with UX as it was my first college major before I switched over to psychology as my bachelor’s. As a result, I’ve been thinking of shifting toward UI/UX design for web3 and DAOs rather than dev. I know web3 apps have a major UX problem right now and the one effective way to drive adoption is to have better UX. If I can contribute to the sector in a way that will help it succeed, it will have been worth it.

Last year, before FTX occurred, I actually was doing a bit of graphic design work for a few choice DAOs. This was mostly during a period while I was exploring different DAOs and trying to contribute as best as I could. However, after a while, I got cold feet and backed off. I’m still not sure why I became so nervous. Maybe it was because I felt inadequate and that my skills weren’t up to snuff. Maybe it’s because I’m afraid of long-term commitment. Perhaps it’s the uncertainty of whether web3 is really the right career path for me. I’m honestly not sure why. What I do know is that the path to web3 is not a straightforward one and isn’t easy to tread.

This is still a very young sector and there are many unknowns. There’s also much skepticism regarding the technology’s potential. One sacrifice crypto and web3 require of you is your own sense of perfectionism. I’ve always been a person of habit and routine. I’ve become accustomed to people telling me what to do and how to do it. Web3 takes those tendencies and orders you to chuck them out the window. It requires you to experiment and become comfortable with interfaces and experiences that are often clunky and difficult to use. It encourages you to explore and pave your own path rather than follow a sequence of checkpoints. That’s the most exciting part of web3 but for me, it’s also the most intimidating.

Web3 also requires you to take a leap of faith. I’m not sure how this sector is going to turn out, whether it fails or succeeds in its objectives. If I’m going to get involved, I must be willing to bite the bullet and take a plunge into the dark. That’s usually how faith often works; it sounds irrational and maybe even insane, but the great achievers of history didn’t find success by playing it safe. They knew what risks they needed to take and went all in.

Not exactly sure what I want my path to be moving forward. I still feel like there’s a lot for me to learn and experiment with before I find a vocation that sticks. One resolution I want to stick to is finishing projects once I start them. There are too many endeavors and projects that I say I’ll finish and then never get around to completing. I’ve always had that problem. I want to be known as someone who goes the distance and commits to completing something, even after I’ve lost interest. No more flaking out.

Although I’m not that good of a dev, I still want to give coding a go. I think I might focus next on creating and designing dapps to get a better idea of how they work and to give me more practice with UI/UX design. I know I was trying to code a pinball machine game in Rust before I went on hiatus, so I might pick up there. Whatever I decide to do, I’ll continue to Substack. The most important thing about this journey is that I keep learning all that I can. Knowledge is power after all.

That’s pretty much everything I wanted to cover in this article. It’s a bit rambly but I needed someplace where I could condense my thoughts. Despite feeling some uncertainty, I want to commit to going all in on web3, damned be the consequences. Now that school’s out and I have more time on my hands, you can expect more blog posts for the next few months. Might need to take another break come fall semester but aside from that, I’m committed to taking this journey.

Oh yeah, and I also changed my name! I picked Blockmage a while back and while playing that persona was fun, the name felt a bit too generic. I decided to revert back to my old web3 name that I used back in my NFT heydays (Alditrus is actually the name of an old D&D oc of mine, a half-elf bard). It sounds more catchy and is more recognizable. I’m aware that changing my substack URL broke all of my links so I’ll make sure to shoot an email out to my followers so they’re in the know.

That’s it from me. Expect to see more articles here in the near future. Also, follow me on Mastodon if you’re on there. Cheers!

Back in the days of ancient Rome, whenever there was a major military victory, it was a tradition to parade the general and his soldiers through the streets to celebrate their accomplishments. Throughout the procession, a servant was seated directly behind the general who would continuously repeat the phrase “Memento Mori” over and over. It was a reminder to him that although people were placing him on a pedestal and giving him accolades, he was but a man and was subjected to the limitations of mankind. The purpose of this custom was not only to keep the general humble but also to remind him of his mortality. Death waits for no man, not even the bold.

This past Thanksgiving, I decided on a whim to take a walk through the cemetery of my hometown. I took the time to read the names on the tombstones, the dates on which they died, and the epitaphs they left for the living. Some tombstones were decorated by loving family members, covered in flowers, memorabilia, and occasionally food and drink as a form of libation. Some of the dead were regular everyday people. Others were military men and women who died in either a World War or a more recent conflict such as Vietnam or Afghanistan. Some grew to a ripe old age, others died relatively early, and yet others didn't even make it to childhood or had died as stillborns.

Some of the people buried there I know personally. A very kind and sweet neighbor of mine that I’ve known for years was interred there with her infant daughter, both of their lives claimed by lung cancer. Another guy I knew went to the same high school I attended. He was tragically killed in a civil altercation with another man. I saw a tombstone for a guy I didn't know who passed away back in 2020. He was almost as old as I was!

These past few months, I've been making a concerted effort to clean up my life and find my purpose in this world. Part of that personal development includes discarding things that no longer serve me. As of now, I'm a pretty young dude; about mid-20s, and in fairly good health. If an online "death clock" is to be believed, I have about 60 or so years left before I kick the bucket. I might get 70, maybe even 80 years if I get lucky and stay healthy. However, there’s always a chance I could pass away much sooner. Who's to say I won't die in a car crash? Get diagnosed with terminal cancer? Covid? Food poisoning? Heart attack? Mass shooting? Heck, I could croak right after I publish this article for all I know!

As humans, we have a remarkably short lifespan. 60 years may not sound too bad, but time can pass rather quickly. Also, it's nothing compared to the incredible lifespan of our mother Earth, let alone the universe. 

Do I really want to spend that brief 60 years wasting my time on frivolous pursuits? Worse yet, do I want to spend that remaining time beating myself over the head about mistakes I've made in the past? Holding grudges when I could simply forgive?

It honestly astounds me how much time and energy people waste on activities that ultimately have no intrinsic value. I’ve seen people on social media endlessly argue with others whom they will never meet. All for what? Just to feed their superiority complex? To feel like they're fighting some holy war for the greater good? To what end? It's comical to think of someone on their deathbed thinking "man, I wish that I could’ve ratioed @MAGAfan446 so I could prove to him that he’s wrong. If only my Twitter account had reached 5M followers."

I also think of people who spend all of their time and effort amassing as much wealth and material possessions as they can, either through clambering up the corporate ladder, striking it big as an online personality, or getting involved in NFTs and crypto. Of course, there's nothing wrong with making a good living for yourself and I admire that type of ambition, but it all comes down to intent. Some of these people donate their money to worthwhile causes while others use it to buy lambos, lavish penthouses, and closets choc full of yeezys and Jordans, all while surrounding themselves with people who only care about their net worth. In the end, you can't take those material possessions with you to the grave. When you meet the Reaper face to face, all you have left to show is the type of person you've become and the impact you've left on the world and on other people.

In my own life, I've accrued many habits and hobbies that I now realize have no return of value. I used to play video games excessively, watch endless hours of garbage on YouTube, and mindlessly browse social media. As I've begun to reevaluate and prioritize the time I still have, many of those pastimes simply lost their luster. I hardly ever play video games anymore. I've recently given up YouTube and streaming to spend more time pursuing my passions (such as writing this blog!). As for quitting social media, that's quite another story. 

I've done more than just give up certain activities. I've also learned to forgive myself for the screwups I've made in the past and move on. I realize now that I'll get nowhere dwelling on the past when I can start living in the present. Every day I can wake up with joy, knowing that I can be a better person than I was the day before.

Cutting out all the BS in my life has genuinely been a liberating and refreshing experience. That's the power of Memento Mori: it helps you see the bigger picture and put your life into perspective. With that mindset, everything in your life either falls into place or falls away.

Reflecting on death and your own impermanence can be a very enlightening and instructive practice and is something I highly recommend. Indeed, many philosophers and saints, from Democritus to Moses, have often pondered on the inevitability of death and how it gives meaning to life. Many civilizations throughout history from the Egyptians to the Victorians have embedded the remembrance of death into their respective cultures.

In a day and age of deadly pandemics, rampant gun violence, and international warfare, ours is a generation that has become well acquainted with death. What's funny to me however is that death still remains a taboo subject in Western society, even after years of art, music, poetry, and literature regarding the subject. Perhaps it's simply human nature to shy away from the idea of dying. Maybe we suppose we're immune to the effects of death in an age of modern medicine, advanced technology, and widespread security. Perhaps once and a while we just need to take a leisurely stroll through a graveyard and remind ourselves as the ancient Romans once did:

Death waits for no man. Not even the bold.

Okay so,

This is probably the fifth draft of this article that I've written so far.

The reason being is that ever since Musk bought Twitter, there is some fresh new hullabaloo going on as he vigorously attempts to burn the company down to the ground in almost every conceivable way.

I was going to make this article about exactly why I quit Twitter but I feel that is irrelevant at this point. Instead, I'm mostly going to focus on why crypto folk are fooling themselves by believing that Musk is going to be the harbinger of the decentralized web.

Because trust me: he sure as hell isn't.

...

Okay okay, so I may as well give a brief explanation as to why I ditched.

I created my Twitter account sometime earlier last year. I was introduced to the wild and wonderful world of blockchain and cryptocurrencies and I wanted to be a part of the revolution. In the midst of the 2021 bull market, the place to mingle with the wider defi community was none other than crypto Twitter (or "CT" if you will). The crypto community was practically born and raised on Twitter and to this day, it remains the central hub for all things blockchain.

Zip forward a few months later and the entire market is having a complete nuclear meltdown thanks to Do Kwon and his buddies (although that wouldn't be the worst of it). As exciting as blockchain tech was back in 2021, that's all it was: excitement. In reality, the tech was still nowhere near where it needed to be. Around this time, Elon Musk, the world's richest manchild and the dude who sent a car into space for the hell of it was having a ridiculous lover's spat with Twitter in a game of "will they, won't they" that felt like it came right out of a cheesy soap opera from the 90’s.

Let me be clear: I didn't leave Twitter because of Musk. I didn't leave Twitter because of the crypto house of cards finally tumbling to the ground. I mostly left it for two reasons: 1) I was never really good at social media and only had about 70 followers tops, and 2) Twitter is not the future of the decentralized web, no matter how much Musk says it will be.

Here's the thing: I honestly don't care who owns Twitter at this point. I don't care if the Buddha himself bought Twitter. The truth is that the platform is a lost cause. Before it went private, the company behind Twitter was in a bad way financially, sorely underperforming compared to its competitors. Twitter's nasty reputation as a toxic cesspit certainly didn't help matters either. I could go into a whole discussion as to why it's so toxic, but that's a whole article in and of itself.

There are many, many different suggestions as to how Twitter can be fixed, but I am highly skeptical that any of them would work. The problem is that Twitter’s flaws are baked into its very design. The platform is difficult enough to moderate as it is due to its massive size. Throw in an algorithm that curates content based solely on engagement (read: how divisive it is) and it’s not hard to see why toxicity has become an issue. To fix Twitter in a way that would be more conducive to both productive and civilized discussion would require a massive overhaul of the platform's structure, something that simply isn't feasible at this point. Even if the platform were to completely rebuild itself from the ground up, it would still have to deal with its terrible reputation as well as up-and-coming competitors like TikTok. It's an uphill battle that Twitter cannot win.

Ultimately, none of this really matters now, because now you have to deal with the biggest obstacle of them all: Elon Musk.

There is something that the crypto community needs to accept about somebody like Musk: He doesn't care about decentralization. The only reason crypto bros adopted him as a figurehead is because of his association with Dogecoin, a satirical shitcoin that Musk loves to pump and dump just so he can screw with all the rubes. To him, crypto and blockchain are only playthings for him to cause more trouble and make more money. Anything positive he says about the technology is lip service at best.

Elon Musk is not some genius innovator or disrupter. He's not a revolutionary technobro who wants to upend the established order. He's a chauvinist and elitist prick of the worse caliber, aka, the sort of people we are trying to take power from in the first place. Musk's takeover of Twitter and the ensuing chaos is a prime example of why we need to decentralize capital and power: people with too much power and too much influence often make terrible decisions that actively harm everybody else. Despite this, I've seen quite a few people in the crypto space not only congratulate Musk on his successful takeover but even support the notion that he will somehow make the platform into some pinnacle of web3 and decentralized finance.

To me, this attitude is absolutely baffling. Just a few months ago, a supposed "effective altruist" who was once treated as the messiah of the industry went and threw everybody under the bus when his company collapsed. That man is now lounging in the Bahamas doing interviews with fawning journalists (at least for now) while we all have to suffer the wrath of regulators. Sam at least tried to hide the fact that he was a conniving weasel. Musk doesn't even bother! How are we falling for this already?!

The crypto community is fooling itself if it thinks Musk is going to usher in the future of web3. I'm not even going to touch on Musk's vague and ridiculous "Everything App" that he wants to turn Twitter into. Whatever he decides to build, it will only be controlled by one person: himself. Anything he says about "decentralization" is simply window dressing.

As for the platform's longevity, I would give it about a few years, and that's being generous. The fact that Musk went and sacked most of his developers is a very bad sign and the bugs and glitches we're seeing on the platform now will only worsen. Unless something massive breaks all of a sudden and renders Twitter unusable forever, its death will likely be very slow and very painful, much like terminal cancer. It's clear to me that Musk is purposefully burning down the old Twitter so he can build something else from its ashes. But whatever he intends with "Twitter 2.0", I'm not buying it.

And neither should you.

(Afternote: Sorry I haven't posted anything on this blog in a while. I recently got a new job last summer which threw my schedule for a loop and it's hard to find the time between work and finishing college. This next semester is gonna be a doozie but I'm going to try and write when I can. Once I finally graduate this summer, I plan to blog on a regular basis.

I was planning for this article to be more in-depth but it's hard to get all my thoughts down on paper and not have it be a friggin novel. As a result, I decided to be a bit more off-the-cuff with this one. May or may not write a follow-up about alternate social medias currently gaining steam. I'll have to think about it.

Also, I now have a Mastodon! If you want to follow up, you can stalk me at https://cryptodon.lol/@BlockMage .)

I'll be making short posts like this occasionally to let my readers know what I've been up to and fill them in on some of the projects I'm working on. These will likely be short free-form rambles so don't expect anything too fancy.

These past few weeks have been quiet for me. I’ve been preoccupied with my new day job so I haven't been very active in web3 aside from posting on Twitter a lot. Now that I'm settled into my new job, I want to get back into the swing of things.

Been trying to find some time to learn Rust. After learning about the Celestia blockchain, I want to build my own Celestia rollup just for the experience of creating my own blockchain network. I think I could learn a lot about the technology I'm so passionate about by actually building stuff with it and getting my hands dirty. I'm starting from ground zero as I have no prior dev experience and only know the bare-bones basics of coding. Regardless, I love the feeling of jumping headfirst into something without having any clue of what I'm doing. It's exciting and I feel like I learn better that way, especially when I'm genuinely interested in the subject matter. The learning curve may be a bit steep, but it's the journey that counts, not the destination.

I plan to eventually design and build my own web3 social media platform specifically for DAOs. I find it ironic that crypto Twitter keeps geeking out about "web3" yet everyone still relies on web2 platforms like Twitter or Discord. I think it's time for the web3 movement to head for new frontiers and start settling elsewhere. That's what pioneers do right?

I'll be writing an article about my deSoc plans at a later date and cover this topic in more detail. There are a lot of things I have planned that I want to share with you guys.

Speaking of social media, Elon Musk is playing some serious 4D chess with Twitter. He decided to drop the Twitter deal over his "concern" about how many scam bots are on their platform. As a result, their company shares plummeted and now they're suing him so they can force him to complete the merger, which I find absolutely hilarious. Not only are they taking him to court, but by doing so, they will likely have to reveal their bot data to prove that they're telling the truth. Musk just shanked them with a knife and is now preparing to pour a heaping bucket of lemon juice and salt water all over the wound.

It will be interesting to see where this goes. If it's revealed that they really were dishonest about their bot numbers, then it will definitely sting. On the other hand, if they are telling the truth, Musk will finally get what he wants and will have Twitter all to himself. Either way, Twitter loses. After years of watching this platform degrade into toxic bickering and vitriol, I get a strange feeling of schadenfreude watching a frivolous playboy like Musk humiliating Twitter for all to see.

Say what you want about Musk, but the guy knows what he's doing. I'm actually quite impressed. Guess we'll have to stock up on popcorn and wait for the next act in Musk's grand Twitter comedy.

In other news, it seems like our society is ever slowly breaking down. Putin's horrible war in Ukraine continues to grind on with no end in sight. Sri Lanka has collapsed entirely and its president turned tail and ran. Not sure what will happen with their government, but from what I know about past revolutions, it will likely not end well. Farmer protests are popping up across the EU due to their nonsensical agricultural laws regarding pesticides. Some property developers in China have been defaulting on their debt obligations leading to a few protests in some provinces. And lest we forget, the crypto market is continuing to have a nuclear meltdown.

I know I'm going into doomer mode here, but it does feel as if the cracks in industrial society are growing ever wider. As disheartening as it is, it's a constant reminder to me that we need to work even harder to build a new model of decentralized society that will allow us to move past these growing pains and progress as a species. At the risk of waxing poetic, it reminds me of the death and rebirth of a phoenix: fiery and violent but leading to new life. Perhaps we should rename our era the "Age of the Phoenix"?

Nah, that sounds dumb. I'll let you decide though.

Ultimately, I feel like a healthy dose of existentialism often gets me through these trying times. The knowledge that the universe we live in is far grander than we realize and that our existence is an ever-turning wheel of life, death, and rebirth gives me a bit of comfort, even when the chaos of entropy is taking its toll.

Anyway, I'm starting to ramble a bit too much. I have a new article in the oven as we speak, a short think piece about the benefits of modularity. Follow me on Twitter if you want to know when I'll be publishing it. I would much appreciate it if you did.

Or don't. It's up to you.

Till next time.

Marcus Aurelius was the Emperor of Rome from 161 to 180 AD. He was also known as the last of the emperors who reigned during the Pax Romana, a relative golden age for Rome. However, by the time Aurelius was in charge, the cracks in the empire were beginning to spread; strife and contention both within and without the walls of the empire were common during Aurelius's rule, including civil unrest and barbarian violence. His personal life was also marked by hardship including the death of his wife and a troubled relationship with his son.1

Amid these challenging times, Aurelius adopted the ancient Greek philosophy of stoicism. This philosophy claims that the best way to deal with challenges in life is with a calm and rational mind rather than emotional reactivity. It requires one to become mindful of their thoughts and feelings and navigate them accordingly. It was this stoicism that allowed Aurelius to guide and direct his empire with a steady hand.

Fast forward 200 years and those cracks had grown far worse. Rome's leaders were either corrupt bureaucrats or incompetent children, its currency was thoroughly devalued (you can thank Augustus2 for that), its economy was in shambles, its once-mighty military a shadow of its former self, its institutions were crumbling, and its provinces were mercilessly curb-stomped by violent barbarian hordes. Throw plagues, food shortages, and climate change into the mix and you get a pretty bleak picture of Roman life at the time.

It was around this time that a Christian archbishop by the name of St. Augustine of Hippo wrote his autobiography titled Confessions. St. Augustine, like Aurelius, lived in very trying times, but he had a very different way of dealing with challenges in life: Complete devotion to divinity. Augustine's philosophy included a rather strict regime of denying oneself of all worldly pleasures to receive the grace of God and build an intimate relationship with him. 3

Augustine's philosophy wasn't just blind religious faith. Sociologically, religion serves the essential function of social cohesion. Indeed, Augustine's "Conception of Peace" stated that God created all of humanity to live in a "bond of peace". This is one of the reasons why religion has been so successful; when people as a collective share a belief in something bigger than themselves, whether that's a religion, ideology, or political movement, it creates a sense of unity and trust that can make a society more resilient. Augustine's philosophy has had a tremendous influence on Western political theory and has inspired the creation of many democratic societies.

A few decades after St. Augustine's death, the Western Roman Empire collapsed entirely. The Eastern Empire survived and would exist for several more centuries under the banner of Byzantium, but would continue to grow smaller and smaller, eventually reduced to a single city named Constantinople. That city would finally meet its end at the hands of the Ottomans in 1453 AD.4 5

The dream was over. Rome was no more.

I write of Rome not because I'm a massive history geek (which I totally am), but because I'm beginning to see many parallels between the late Roman Empire and our modern world. I grew up in a society marked by turbulence, contention, strife, and confusion. Crises such as climate change, mass shootings, economic inequality, political turmoil, and cultural degradation have only seemed to grow worse and our governmental institutions seem incapable of facing these problems head-on. Many in my generation have become hopeless and nihilistic as a result, doubting that anything in our world will ever get better. Our Rome is falling and there's little else we can do but watch.

I firmly believe that the society in which we live now will cease to exist by the end of this century. Our technology is evolving and progressing far too quickly for the old industrial system to catch up, placing it in a state of paralysis that it can't seem to recover from. Of course, there's every chance that I'm wrong. Perhaps our society will be able to pull itself through this era of turbulence just as it did before. However, I find this outcome unlikely.

Here's the thing about societies that humanity fails to understand: they never last forever. In a way, societies aren't just artificial constructs but also organic ones. Like any biological creature, they have a lifespan: They're born, they grow up, peak during their "prime", become settled and experienced, grow old and feeble, and finally, they die. Of course, this lifespan varies from case to case but generally, all civilizations exhibit the same pattern. Frankly, we are foolish, vain, and arrogant to believe that whatever we build will forever stand the test of time. History teaches us time and time again that this is never the case.

The problem is that humans don't respond well to change and will go to great lengths to put our societies on life support. Instead of accepting the inevitability of societal collapse and diverting our energy toward building a new system, we desperately cling to an outdated system that doesn't work anymore. This refusal to change course is unnecessarily more painful for everyone involved and often results in violent revolutions, civil wars, and economic depressions.

But what if we could build a society that isn't subjected to constant reincarnation? What if we could invent a civilization that is constantly adapting and fluctuating with the times and doesn't have to undergo the messy lifecycle that traditional civilizations are known for? Imagine a world where catastrophic black swan events are no longer required to push humanity forward. Is such a world even possible?

I first jumped down the crypto rabbit hole around the beginning of 2021. In the beginning, I wanted to cash in on the big NFT craze that was going on at the time. Ultimately, this didn't pan out as I planned as no one wanted to buy my artwork. However, by this point, I had become enamored with blockchain technology and the potential it had to give power back to the people. One thing led to another and I started dipping my toes into decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). When I learned what a DAO was, how it operated, and how it could reshape the way people interact and work with one another, I was hooked. Granted, this is only the beginning of my DAO journey and there's so much I have left to learn, but even now, the opportunity I have to work in such an exciting space is too good to pass up.

DAOs are different from traditional organizations in a few key ways; First, it's decentralized which means that not one person or group of people are in charge of the entire structure. While centralized structures are very efficient, they suffer from central points of failure that can disrupt the entire system if something goes wrong. Centralized power can also foster corruption. Humans can't handle power very well without making terrible decisions or harming other people. If built correctly, DAOs buck this trend altogether by denying anyone absolute control. This enables the DAO to be democratic and representative of all the DAO's members and makes it more resilient to disruptive events.

One of the greatest benefits of this decentralization is that it gives its members a voice and allows for open and fair discussion. Decisions in DAOs are no longer made at the very top but are evenly distributed across all members of the organization. This means it doesn't suffer from the bottleneck effect often found in hierarchal structures. Obstacles such as special interests, polarization, and gridlock can therefore be prevented and allow the DAO to thrive.

The transparency inherent in DAOs also serves to cull corruption and dishonesty by holding all parties accountable for their actions. This of course will have to be balanced with the civil right to data privacy, a dilemma that I do not know the answer to, but this environment of honesty and openness could help foster greater trust between members. The automation offered by smart contracts can streamline some of the more mundane and repetitive tasks within the DAO, freeing it from the trappings of bureaucracy and increasing efficiency.

With that said, DAOs are not yet at the stage where they can adequately replace traditional institutions in terms of scale. As a system becomes more complex, the more difficult it is to manage, and DAOs in their current form are not well equipped to deal with this growth. Many talented developers are working to fix this issue. One project I've had my eye on for a while, Orca Protocol, aims to fix this scalability issue by breaking DAOs down into smaller mini-DAOs called "pods". It's a very promising project and I highly recommend checking them out. DAOs also need a better alternative to Discord as it's not the most ideal way of communicating in large collectives. I know there are several projects in the works attempting to build such a platform.

At the time of writing this article, the crypto market is experiencing a brutal sell-off as the global economy falters. To make matters worse, we are still dealing with the fallout of the failed Luna stablecoin which has created a devastating ripple effect (thanks a lot Do Kwon). Even the NFT market is showing some turbulence. The attitude in the DAO space is generally more positive compared to the rest of the blockchain community, but even there the atmosphere is noticeably more muted. Of course, crypto opponents and skeptics have used the bear market as an opportunity to rail on a technology they do not like, let alone adequately understand. For any decentralization advocate, this hostile sentiment is not encouraging.

In this time of downturn and discouragement, I think we can learn a thing or two from philosophers like Marcus Aurelius and develop a bit of grit to get us through the winter. Bear markets never last and hard times build character. For anyone involved in the blockchain scene, it's more important now than ever to put our nose to the grindstone, filter out all the noise, and push forward. This bear market should also motivate the industry to take a closer look at itself in the mirror and be more honest about the direction it's heading. I admit that the crypto sector hasn't been very responsible and it's hurt a lot of people and eroded public trust in the sector. This is our chance to steer this boat in the right direction. Let's make it count.

Stoicism alone however isn't going to be enough. It's also going to take the faith and hope that we can build a better world with this technology. What initially attracted me to the DAO space was the spring of enthusiasm and friendliness that it fosters. I know many brilliant people within the space who are passionate about blockchain technology and who are willing to band together for a common good. Much like the optimism that St. Augustine enjoyed through his relationship with divinity, it's that same passion and comradery that should motivate us to move forward together.

It's that mix of philosophies, the objective resilience of stoicism, and the enthusiasm of faith, that will see us through. The days ahead are going to be tough and there will be many mountains to climb, but it's the hardest of times that often produced the greatest of achievers.

The world we live in now is not the world I want to keep living in. It is not the world I want our future generations to inherit. They deserve better. Every time I become excited about the potential of DAOs, the applications of sociology, or the advances in cryptography and blockchain technology, I'm reminded of why I decided to remain in crypto wonderland. It isn't just to save the world from an impending dystopia, although it often feels like that. It isn't to save humanity when society inevitably buckles in on itself either. It's to live in a world that is far better than it's ever been before.

I must note that I'm not talking about a utopia. I'm not that naive. Humans will never build a utopia because utopia implies a perfect world. Humans are not perfect and will never be perfect. I don't expect the world to be perfect; I just expect it to be better, much better. And despite all of humanity's imperfections, I think we can do it. Who knows? Maybe one day, we'll figure out how to achieve interstellar space travel and live amongst the stars, not just coexisting with nature but living in unity with the natural world.

Rome was a dream, but the future we hope for doesn't have to be. With these new tools at our disposal, we can help make it a reality, a reality that maybe, just maybe, will last forever.

1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Aurelius

2

https://www.newswars.com/it-didnt-begin-with-fdr-currency-devaluation-in-the-roman-empire/

3

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Augustine/Life-retold

4

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empire

5

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Constantinople

Orca Protocol is a DAO implementation tool and scaling solution that aims to change the way DAOs are created and managed. It accomplishes this by dividing a larger DAO into smaller modular working groups called "pods". Each pod has its own Gnosis Safe multi-signature wallet and utilizes membership NFTs to verify the identities of its members. Each pod that is created through Orca Protocol is registered with the ENS and is designated its own .xyz page where users can view the structure of the pod and the members it contains.

Each pod is designed to host a working group that focuses on a specific purpose. This purpose could be a committee working towards a shared goal, a project, or a more generalized subgroup of members. Each pod has a designated number of admins that manage the pod and the members within the pod. These admins can either be actual users, smart contracts, or even other pods. The admin has the ability to add or remove members directly, whereas the members can submit a proposal to add or remove a member. The protocol has a basic UI that allows members and admins to create simple proposals and vote on them with the voting platform of their choosing (eg. Tally).

The Orca Protocol team is currently working on a feature that would allow members and admins to set membership requirements for a pod.

Nation3 aims to build a digital nation-state on the blockchain by organizing an ecosystem of different DAOs and services that would accommodate the various functions of a nation-state. Its main DAO is managed by different guilds each with a specialized purpose (graphic design, research, community organization, etc). It also makes use of membership NFTs to verify the "citizenship" of a member. Orca Protocol could easily accommodate this structure and serve to make the DAO more modular and flexible.

Another benefit of the Orca Protocol is that it eliminates the need for token voting mechanisms that are often common in DAOs today. Because voting and decision-making happen on the pod level instead of the overall DAO level, it allows the DAO to govern itself and grow in scale without compromising decentralization. This in turn reduces the risks of both governance attacks and voter inequality. It also lowers the cost of entry for prospective citizens who may not be able to afford the token.

Orca Protocol is currently in closed Beta and its public Alpha is to be determined.

To learn more about Orca Protocol, you can read their documentation or follow the developers on Twitter.

Hello there! This is my very first substack article. By way of introduction, I am Block Mage (@BlockMageDAO on Twitter) and I am an avid blockchain and cryptocurrency enthusiast. I am especially passionate about DAOs and the potential they have to create a more fair and egalitarian society. I’m currently learning more about the web3/defi/DAO ecosystem and teaching myself how to code smart contracts in Solidity. I don’t necessarily aim to become a developer, but I feel Solidity is a good skill to have under my belt regardless.

Before signing up for substack, I helped summarize articles about defi for ScribeDAO, a DAO focused on propagating information across social media. Check them out here if you’re interested. I’ve decided that I want to write more personalized content and expand my skills as a writer. It’s difficult to adequately express myself when I’m limited to 280 characters. Also, writing threads on Twitter is a pain in the arse.

I’ll mostly be using this substack as a blog, writing thought pieces regarding the defi ecosystem, giving occasional updates, discussing information regarding projects and research I’m involved in, and sometimes just rambling to get my ideas out on paper. I did buy a web domain earlier this year and I plan to set up a website with a more personalized blog, but for now, substack should suffice.

Make sure to follow my Twitter at @BlockMageDAO for more content and updates about new articles. Toodles!