They had principles baked in from day one. They’re selling alignment, agency, and proof.

Let me back up & talk about principles since some of you have no scruples. 

A principle is a durable commitment to something, a constraint that shapes decisions for years to come. It’s not a quick tactic; it’s the soapbox you stand on. Principles define what a product refuses to do, what it will protect, and what tradeoffs it will accept.

When people decide to choose the more difficult option on purpose, it’s often a decision that is defining their character in some way. Very often they’re choosing alignment. The friction experienced isn’t a bug; it’s the proof that the product is keeping its promise.

Adoption vs Attachment

Most product teams inherit a simple model of adoption:

Make it easier → more people try it → more people stick.

This isn’t wrong, it actually works great. But it’s missing something to really drive retention. The canonical adoption framework, Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), says adoption is driven by perceived usefulness (Does it provide some benefit?) and perceived ease of use. (Is it easy to use?) [Davis,1989]

But later meta-analyses across hundreds of TAM studies show a hierarchy: perceived usefulness does indeed consistently predict adoption; whereas ease-of-use is just one variable and should be seen as complimentary to perceived usefulness. [King & He, 2006]

People learn bizarre workflows for the same reason we begrudgingly sit through DMV lines: the outcome matters. Early bitcoin UX is a perfect example of confusing and unforgiving interfaces, but early adopters tolerated it because the outcome mattered more than the friction. Indeed early adopters are a wild bunch. So if usefulness explains why people will put up with friction, what explains why they recommend a tool, defend it online, donate money, or spend social capital convincing friends to switch?

This is where motivation and identity enter.

This is where the research on technology acceptance stops and where community psychology picks up.

Participation Creates Loyalty

Robert Putnam’s 1995 essay Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital describes social capital as networks of reciprocity where people help because they expect the relationship to persist, not because they’re paid for each action. [Putnam, 1995]

Social capital is built on a pattern of consistent human trust over time. This is why community-built systems around this can be especially resilient. When social capital is high, coordination gets cheaper: you ask a question and someone answers, you share a resource and someone improves it, you show up once and people remember you. People stay when they’re building status, relationships, and a sense of shared ownership, not just extracting usefulness.

In product terms, your features can get someone to try once, but the social capital is what makes a tool sticky. When users feel embedded in a web of mutual support, the product stops being an app and starts being a place. Once your users feel like genuine participants, they will generate their own gravity. Suddenly they stop behaving like customers, and start behaving like real stewards.

From industrial Tools to Convivial Tools

Ivan Illich offered language for the emotional side of adoption long before UX existed. In Tools for Conviviality (1973), he distinguished between “industrial tools” and “convivial tools” by asking a simple question: who gets to decide what the tool means and how it’s used? [Illich, 1973]

Industrial tools tend to create what he called “radical monopolies,” where one system becomes so dominant that it crowds out alternatives and forces compliance. In that world, people become “passengers” of the system rather than authors of their own lives. He related it to a high-speed train, where routes and stops are pre-determined, and the world goes by quickly without any input from the passenger.

Convivial tools do the opposite: they expand personal agency. They increase the user’s competence, control, and ability to shape their environment. He used the telephone as his canonical example: you can dial any number, express any emotion, share any information – no bureaucratic permission required. That’s the emotional core of the next wave of any adoption: users don’t just want functionality. They want autonomy. They don’t want to feel like they’re the product. They want to feel respected.

Technology Is Never Neutral

We know that technology today doesn't just enable behavior, it shapes it.

Langdon Winner’s classic essay “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” makes the argument cleanly: technical systems encode decisions about access and power. They decide who has options and who doesn’t, who gets to participate and on what terms. [Winner, 1980]

He laid out a clear example from midcentury tomato farmers in California.

In the 1960s & 70s, mechanical tomato harvesters looked like a straightforward efficiency upgrade. ✅Pick tomatoes faster.. ✅Reduce labor costs. ✅ Increase output.

But the machine didn’t just change how tomatoes were picked. It rewrote the entire tomato-picking ecosystem.

To work at all, the harvester required tomatoes bred for the machine: tougher skins, more uniform size, more predictable ripening. Flavor wasn’t the constraint; machinability was. On top of that, the harvester demanded large capital investment, something small farms couldn’t afford. And when the system scaled, it wiped out tens of thousands of seasonal labor jobs in California.

So the “innovation” quietly made three decisions:

• Who gets to farm (mostly large industrial operations)

• What kind of tomatoes exist (varieties optimized for machines, not people)

• What rural life looks like (fewer jobs, more consolidation, fewer viable smallholders)

That’s a political economy embedded in design. And here’s the product lesson: the constraint isn’t incidental. The constraint is the mechanism that selects winners and losers.

Once you see that, you can’t unsee it. Every default, every requirement, every “we can’t support that use case” is a values-based decision with compounding effects.

Value-Sensitive Design: values as requirements, not vibes

If technology embodies values whether you want it to or not, the real question becomes: do you choose your values deliberately, or let them emerge accidentally from a list of incentives and shortcuts?

Value-Sensitive Design (VSD) is the advanced answer.

It argues that teams should account for human values like privacy, autonomy, fairness, accountability throughout the design process, not just as an afterthought once growth creates harm. [Friedman & Hendry, 2019]

The key is operationalization, translating a value into product requirements that constrain real decisions. Privacy becomes metadata minimization. Fairness becomes published supply chains and repairable, user-replaceable parts. The commons becomes legible through institutional choices.

When Signal refuses cloud backups, the inconvenience is the proof of privacy. When Fairphone publishes the supply chain, it turns “ethical consumption” from greenwashed marketing into something open to scrutiny. When Wikipedia stays nonprofit & avoids ads, it makes the commons legible and makes a statement: knowledge isn’t just content, it’s a public resource.

This is not abstract philosophy. It’s how you build products people can feel are on their side. The point is not that users should “trust” your values. The point is that users should be able to verify them. Constraints are where principles stop being branding and start being real.

Real-world proof at scale

It’s easy to dismiss these stories as niche: privacy-focused people, sustainability advocates, etc. The real test is whether constraints can survive contact with the market. Do principles still work when millions of people show up with messy needs and zero patience?

They can. Here are examples where the constraint didn’t block adoption. It explained adoption.

Costco: low markup as a trust engine

You or one of your friends is probably a Costco maxi. Worldwide, renewal for this warehouse store is 90.5%, with North America at an impressive 92.9%, and 145 million people have paid for a Costco membership according to the latest numbers.

Costco’s core constraint is structural: you pay to enter. The membership fee is friction, and it’s deliberately non-negotiable. That friction is also the signal. Costco isn’t optimizing profit per item, it’s optimizing a long-term relationship where members believe prices are fair.

Costco reinforces that promise with another constraint: it caps gross margins on products (often cited as roughly 14% on branded goods and 15% on Kirkland). That’s not a marketing slogan; it’s an internal rule that limits the company’s ability to “get clever” on pricing.​

What users feel is unusually rare in retail: confidence. Members don’t need to wonder if they’re being A/B tested with price algorithms or nudged into higher-margin substitutions. The constraint (membership gate + low markup discipline) is the signal (we make money the boring way, and you get the benefit).

Their $1.50 hot dog deal hasn’t increased in price since 1985. The founder said if it ever goes up, that means he’s dead. Costco is known for this hot dog deal, so it’s worth it as a loss leader that drives brand love for retention, and encourages visits with longer stays. The exact same strategy as Ikea’s meatballs.

Somehow Costco turned an unsexy warehouse store into brand loyalty at scale, complete with viral Kirkland branded attire.

M-Pesa: constraint as the market unlock

M-Pesa is a Kenyan-based mobile micropayments and transfer software that provided financial inclusion to many shunned by typical financial systems. Their main principle was ruthless: financial access shouldn’t require smartphones, internet, or formal banking infrastructure.

Before M-Pesa, sending money home meant choosing between a dangerous 6-hour bus trip with cash in your pocket, or trusting informal couriers who sometimes just disappeared. They risked robbery on transport routes, lost wages, and family emergencies left unaddressed.

Their go-to-market strategy was built different. It picked a painfully real wedge (sending money home safely) and launched through telecom company Safaricom’s existing distribution & brand trust, so “mobile money” felt like an extension of their phone service. A dense agent network of local retailers, not banks, made physical access possible and created tangible trust for first-time financial users. Instead of importing a modern banking interface, it shipped the minimum viable rails for sending and receiving money in the world as it existed.

The result is one of the clearest demonstrations that constraints can drive scale: within four years, adoption reached over 70% of Kenyan households. [Mas & Morawczynski, 2009]

Users felt relief. Finally they can send money home without hours of travel or the risk of carrying cash. The SMS-only constraint wasn’t a weakness. It was proof of inclusion: this works for everyone, not just the urban, banked, smartphone-owning class.

The constraint is the signal

If your principles don't meaningfully constrain what you build, who you serve, or how you make money, what you have are taglines, not principles.

Today’s consumer is smarter than yesterday’s. They can feel when a product is quietly capturing them by nudging dependency, extracting attention, or slipping addictive incentives into the interface. What they actually want is agency: autonomy instead of lock-in, alignment instead of betraying values. And they want participation, the experience of shaping something, not merely operating it.

Illich warned about “radical monopolies” that crowd out alternatives and turn people into passengers instead of operators. Neil Postman’s critique of Technopoly lands in the same place: the danger isn’t only bad technology, it’s a society that forgets how to say no to its tools. [Postman, 1992]

The alternative is not “sleek UX” or greenwashed “ethical branding.” It’s tools that enlarge competence and facilitate connection. Knowledge spaces built for context, not virality.

Here’s the move: stop treating adoption like a UI problem and start treating it like an agency problem. The products that win long-term aren’t necessarily the ones that offer the most, they’re the ones that make a clear promise, prove it through constraints, and give users a relationship with the tool that feels sane.

Your users want to feel something.

Give it to them.

Or at the very least make it whimsy af.

We're lonelier than we've ever been, yet we've never had more "communities" through digital platforms.

You're probably part of several right now. Maybe you're in a Peloton group, crushing rides with strangers across the country. Perhaps you're active in a Discord server, exchanging memes and trading strategies with fellow degens. You might participate in Reddit threads about your favorite hobby, or belong to a professional network like Google Developers.

These groups feel meaningful. They provide connection, motivation, and shared identity. They're definitely communities... right?

Yes and no. And understanding the difference might be the most important thing you or your business learn this year.

In this article, I attempt to differentiate between communities that enhance the human existence, and brands that are gathering people, and how to get our innate social needs met with other humans. 

Capital C vs. Lowercase c

Community (capital C) is your neighbor who brings you soup when you're sick. It's the parents who rotate carpools without asking for anything in return. It's the local organizers who fight for better schools. It's messy, face-to-face, inconvenient, and built on one principle: we take care of each other, no strings attached.

community (lowercase c) is your brand communities: Subreddits, your Peloton leaderboard, the Discord server, the brand loyalty program disguised as belonging. These are specialized, non-geographically bound communities based on structured social relations among admirers of a brand. They're organized around shared interests.

Why the Difference Matters

You might be thinking: "So what? Connection is connection, right? Does it really matter where it comes from?"

It matters more than you think.

Research shows that real Community is associated with dramatically better health outcomes: 50% improved survival rates, significant reductions in cardiovascular disease, stronger immune function, and 24-63% lower rates of depression relapse.

Meanwhile, heavy engagement in brand communities can correlate with depression, anxiety, and even inflammation.

But this isn't really about health metrics. It's about what happens when we try to fill fundamental human needs with products designed for a different purpose.

The Void We're Trying to Fill

True Community has been disappearing from American life for decades. We don't know our neighbors. We don't participate in civic organizations. The structures that created Community throughout human history (geography, necessity, shared struggle) have weakened or vanished. Combine this with being more divided as a nation than ever before, it feels like Community is cooked. 

But the need doesn't disappear. We're wired for belonging and knowing someone has our back. When that's missing, there's a visceral hole.

Brand communities step into that void with a compelling offer: instant belonging (just download the app), clear identity (you're not just a runner; you're a Nike Run Club member), structured engagement (the brand provides the framework), peer validation (likes, comments, leaderboard positions), and convenience (participate on your schedule, from your couch).

It's seductive because it's partially real. The connections feel meaningful because they are meaningful. You get motivation from your Peloton crew, inspiration from fitness influencers, helpful information from professional forums.

But they still don’t fully satisfy our innate human need for real connection. You're not getting mutual aid. You're not getting someone who'll pick up your kids when you're stuck at work. You're not getting a network that shows up during a personal crisis.

Brand communities fulfill specific parts of your social needs like a shared identity or peer support within narrow domains. What they can't provide is holistic care or the safety net that Community creates.

You can be active in a dozen brand communities and still feel profoundly alone.

Why Brand Communities Can't Fill the Gap (And How AI Is Changing Them)

It's not just that brand communities fail to provide what Community does. It's that they're designed for a completely different purpose.

They're built for engagement, not care. Every feature is optimized for metrics that matter to the brand: time, attention, cost & spending. It’s not built for your actual well-being.

They're built for scale, not depth. You can have 5,000 Discord friends but not know who to call at 3am.

They're built around consumption, not contribution. Your role is primarily to engage with the brand, buy products, and create content that promotes it. Real Community is built on practices like mutual aid.

They can exploit human psychology. Dopamine manipulation through likes and notifications, parasocial relationships with influencers, social comparison that affects self-esteem, and FOMO are engineered to keep you coming back.

They fragment your attention. The constant notifications makes deep relationships harder to build and maintain.

And there's something new happening that's worth noting: AI is rapidly reshaping brand communities themselves. Organizations using AI in at least one business function jumped from 55% in early 2023 to 78% in 2025, with 64% of marketers now using AI to create personalized, real-time customer experiences.

But here's where it gets interesting for brand communities: 36.7% of marketers are concerned about the lack of authenticity in AI-powered influencers, and consumers cite AI interactions as lacking authenticity (41%) and personability (45%). Meanwhile, enterprises are setting guidelines on how and when AI can generate user contributions, as blindly allowing AI-driven posts can damage credibility.

In other words, as brand communities increasingly deploy AI to scale personalization and engagement, they're running headfirst into an authenticity problem - the very thing they already struggled with. 

None of this makes brand communities evil. I build brand communities for a living. It just makes them insufficient for the real connection you actually need.

What We Can Learn from Brand Communities

Here's where this gets interesting, though.

Brand communities have figured something out. They've invested millions in understanding human psychology, motivation, and social dynamics. Some of those insights, ethically applied, stripped of commercial purpose, could help us build better Community in our real lives. So what can we learn from brand communities?

Make Joining Easy

Brand communities excel at onboarding with clear entry points and welcoming experiences. Real Community often fails spectacularly. Newcomers feel like they're crashing a family reunion.

What to borrow: Create explicit pathways for new people. Have greeters. Explain the unspoken rules. Provide multiple entry points for different comfort levels.

Tell Better Stories

Brand communities master storytelling and emotional resonance. Community often assumes relationships speak for themselves.

What to borrow: Create spaces for members to share authentic stories. Celebrate Community successes. Help people see themselves as part of something larger. Let stories emerge from real relationships, not marketing departments.

Recognize Contributions

Brand communities leverage peer validation effectively. Community can take contributions for granted. The people who always show up rarely get acknowledged.

What to borrow: Create transparent ways to recognize contributions. Facilitate peer-to-peer appreciation. Make it visible how individual actions benefit the collective. Do it from genuine gratitude, not gamification.

Enable Co-Creation

Brand communities harness member creativity. Community can operate from top-down, with longtime members making all decisions.

What to borrow: Genuinely involve members in decision-making. Create opportunities for people to contribute their unique gifts. Democratize leadership. Make sure participation actually shapes Community direction.

Use Technology Strategically

Brand communities use digital tools brilliantly. Community often either rejects technology or uses it poorly.

What to borrow: Use apps to coordinate face-to-face gatherings. Lower barriers through good communication tools. Create shared calendars, organize meal trains and carpools digitally. Always in service of in-person connection, never as replacement.

Measure What Matters

Brand communities track everything obsessively. Community often doesn't measure anything.

What to borrow: Actually assess if your Community is working. But measure what matters: Are people's lives better? Less stressed? Do they have people they can count on? Can the group tackle shared challenges? Track actual well-being, not just attendance.

The Critical Difference

Here's the thing about all these borrowed techniques: they only work if you maintain a fundamentally different purpose than brand communities have.

Brand communities exist to serve the brand. Community exists to serve its members.

Brand communities want your engagement. Community wants your flourishing.

Brand communities measure success in metrics. Community measures success in human thriving.

You can borrow the techniques like the onboarding processes, the storytelling frameworks, the recognition systems, the digital tools, but only if you strip away the commercial purpose and center everything on mutual aid and collective well-being.

The moment you start optimizing for engagement over care, measuring success by growth over depth, or treating people as users rather than whole humans, you've crossed back into lowercase c territory.

Building Community in a community World

What does this look like in practice? It means getting uncomfortable. Community requires proximity, vulnerability, and commitment that brand communities never demand:

Showing up, even when it's inconvenient.
Building relationships with people who aren't like you. Brand communities let you self-select; Community requires bridging difference.
Making commitments you have to keep. You can't ghost like you might in a Discord server.
Being truly known. Not your curated persona: we want your actual messy self.
Giving without guaranteed return. Mutual aid isn't transactional.
Staying through conflict. You can't just leave when things get hard.

This is harder than joining a brand community. Much harder. But the difficult parts are where the real magic happens and the personal growth shines.

Where to Start

If you're realizing your life is full of lowercase c but lacking capital C, here's where to begin:

Look hyperlocal. Your neighborhood, your street, your building. Geographic proximity matters. These are the people who can actually help when you need it. I knocked on all my neighbors’ doors, introduced myself, and gave them my number when I was having a housewarming party, and we all know each other and they have my number any time they need to get in touch. 

Find existing structures. Faith communities, neighborhood associations, volunteer organizations, community gardens. Someone is already organizing. You don’t have to start from scratch. Join existing communities before creating something new.

Show up consistently. Community isn't built in a single interaction. Pick something and keep showing up.

Bring others in. Invite neighbors. Connect people. Use your brand community organizing skills to make real Community more accessible.

Start small. Host a block party. Start a meal train. Organize a clothing swap. Small acts create the foundation.

Use digital tools wisely. Create a text group, but use it to coordinate in-person gatherings, not replace them.

Be patient. Community builds slowly. You're building something real, which means it can't be rushed.

The Choice in Front of Us

We're living through an epidemic of loneliness while being more "connected" than ever. That paradox exists because we're trying to meet fundamental needs with tools designed for different purposes.

Brand communities aren't bad. They're just not built for the purposes we really crave. They can complement Community, but they can never replace it.

The question isn't whether to participate in brand communities, many are genuinely enjoyable and offer real benefits to their users. The question is whether you're confusing them with Community. Whether you're spending so much time in digital spaces that you're not investing in face-to-face relationships. Whether you're getting dopamine hits while the deeper need for belonging goes unmet.

You deserve actual Community: messy, inconvenient, face-to-face, built on mutual aid. Not as a lifestyle upgrade, but as a basic human need.

Brand communities can't give you that. But you can build it yourself. With your friends. In your neighborhood. Starting today.

It began with a broken printer, evolved into a pragmatic compromise, and is now being rewritten by artificial intelligence. The story of how we got here reveals not just the history of software, but a fundamental question that’s more relevant today than ever: Should technology prioritize freedom or effectiveness? And in the age of AI, is there a third unknown option between the two?

Act I: The Printer That Started A Revolution (1980s)

In 1980, Richard Stallman, who I wrote about in my Crypto Principles article, was working at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab when he encountered a problematic printer that would ignite a revolution.

Much to the chagrin of the entire lab, the printer kept jamming without notice. Naturally as a computer programmer, Stallman figured he could easily fix the software to notify users when paper jammed. A simple, helpful modification.

There was just one problem: the manufacturer wouldn’t give him the source code.

This wasn’t unusual for the time. Software was becoming increasingly proprietary, with companies locking down their code behind legal restrictions. But for Stallman, who had grown up in a collaborative early computing culture where sharing code was the norm, this felt fundamentally wrong. It was a moral outrage.

“What does society need?” Stallman argued. “It needs information that is truly available to its citizens - programs that people can read, fix, adapt, and improve, not just operate.”

That frustration led Stallman to launch the GNU Project in 1984 and establish the Free Software Foundation in 1985. This wasn’t just about making software available, it was a full-on social movement.

He established four fundamental freedoms:

1. The freedom to run the program for any purpose

2. The freedom to study and modify the code

3. The freedom to share copies

4. The freedom to distribute your improvements

To protect these freedoms, Stallman created the GNU General Public License (GPL), introducing the concept of “copyleft”, a clever hack that used copyright law against itself. Any software under the GPL that you modified had to also be released under the GPL. This “viral” nature (as critics called it) ensured that free software would remain free forever.

This was free software: a moral stance that viewed restricting software as restricting human freedom itself.

Act II: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” (1990s-2000s)

By the mid-1990s, free software had proven itself technically. The Linux kernel, released in 1991 under the GPL and also referred to as the “missing kernel”, worked with GNU tools to create complete operating systems. Apache web server was powering the emerging internet. The code was solid. The communities were thriving.

But there was a problem: the word “free” was confusing (“Free as in freedom, not free beer”, as Stallman likes to joke), and more importantly, Stallman’s moral rhetoric made business executives nervous. Companies wanted to use the software, but the ideological baggage was heavy with the copyleft licensing models.

Enter Eric Raymond with his 1997 essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” reframing how to think about software development. He argues the Cathedral approach is carefully crafted and held somewhat sanctimoniously. Meanwhile the Bazaar approach is open, with early and frequent releases relying on contributors of all levels. He was showing the world that the real story wasn’t about software freedom but rather about a superior development methodology that was open for scrutiny.

His famous principle, “Linus’ Law,” named after Linux creator Linus Torvalds, captures it succinctly: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” The transparency of the code meant that thousands of developers worldwide could identify and fix vulnerabilities. The collaborative nature meant faster innovation. Instant peer review meant inherently higher quality.

This wasn’t a social movement. It was purely about optimal engineering.

In 1998, the term “open source” was born, deliberately chosen to emphasize practical benefits over philosophical ideals. As I’ve noted before in the Crypto Principles article, both terms refer to essentially the same licenses, but open source is a development methodology whereas free software is more of an ideological social movement.

The shift worked spectacularly. Companies that would never embrace “free software” and the strings that came with it eagerly adopted “open source.” By 2013, more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies were using Linux. Apache powered 30% of all websites. The infrastructure of the internet is now running on open source code.

Harvard Business School research would later quantify the impact: without open source software, firms would pay an estimated 3.5 times more to build equivalent platforms. We’re talking about roughly $8.8 trillion in value.

Open source had won. Not through ideology, but through adoption and results.

Ideological Fracture: The Movement Splits

The philosophical divide between free software and open source never really healed. It erupted dramatically in 2007 when the Free Software Foundation released GPLv3.

Stallman’s new license attempted to address modern threats to software freedom: companies using GPL software in hardware that prevented users from running modified versions (called “tivoization”), and patent deals that undermined developer communities. The GPLv3 was more aggressive, more protective, more ideological.

The open source world rebelled. Foundational technologies used by millions rejected it.

Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, refused to adopt GPLv3 for the kernel. MySQL declined. VLC media player declined. Blender declined.

Apple, perhaps most tellingly, switched its compiler from the GPL-licensed GCC to Clang, which used a permissive license. When Samba upgraded to GPLv3, Apple replaced it with a closed-source alternative. The message was clear: the GPL’s “viral” nature, which Stallman saw as protecting freedom, came off more to businesses as restricting growth and development.

Statistics tell the story of the shift:

• In 2011, GPLv2 dominated with 42.5% of projects, while GPLv3 had just 6.5%

• By 2015, the MIT license had overtaken GPLv2 for first place

• GPL continued declining as developers chose permissive licenses over copyleft

The pragmatists definitively won. Free software’s moral stance was giving way to open source’s business-friendly approach.

Act III: History Repeats, But Add AI (2020s)

Just when you thought the story was settled, enter artificial intelligence and the old debates are erupting with new intensity and perspective.

In 2024, something remarkable happened: AI-related projects dominated open source development in ways that would have seemed impossible just years earlier. The most starred open source projects from startups were overwhelmingly AI-focused, with 55% focused on AI and another 25% on AI-enabled developer tools.

But here’s where it gets interesting: the AI revolution is bringing back Stallman’s questions about freedom, control, and who benefits, framed in new forms.

The New Open Source Pioneers:

Zed, a next-generation code editor designed for collaboration between humans and AI, became the most popular new open source project of 2024. OpenHands acts as an AI software engineer that can understand your instructions and write code. Cline brings autonomous coding right into your IDE.

These are all tools reshaping how software gets created.

The Democratization Argument Returns:

Just as Stallman argued for users’ right to modify software, today’s open source AI advocates argue for the right to understand and control AI systems. Projects like Exo let you run AI clusters at home using everyday devices like phones and tablets. xAI released Grok-1, a major AI model, as fully open source.

AI leaning into open source practices challenges the notion that cutting-edge technology must be locked behind closed doors.

But the Tension is Different:

The corporate world learned from the GPL wars. Most AI companies releasing “open source” models use permissive licenses, not copyleft. They want the credibility and community of open source without the ideological restrictions of free software.

Meanwhile, new questions emerge that neither Stallman nor Raymond fully anticipated:

• If an AI model is trained on GPL code, should its outputs be GPL?

• When AI generates code, who owns it?

• Is “open source AI” without the training data truly open?

• Can you have meaningful freedom with a model you can’t afford to train yourself?

Python has become the language of choice for AI projects, powering 60% of the top open source releases in 2024. The community is building the infrastructure for the AI age using the same collaborative principles that built the internet.

Why This Matters Now

The story from Stallman’s printer to today’s AI models is a preview of our immediate future.

We’re watching the same philosophical battle play out again:

• The idealists argue that AI must be truly open: not just models, but training data, methodologies, and the ability to meaningfully modify and control these systems

• The pragmatists argue that what matters is effective collaboration and innovation, even if some aspects remain proprietary

• The corporations learned from the GPL era and are carefully choosing licenses that let them benefit from community contributions without giving up control

The numbers show the pragmatists won the last round decisively. GPL usage declined as developers chose permissive licenses that companies preferred. But AI might be different. The stakes feel higher when we’re talking about systems that might write most of our code, make decisions affecting millions, or shape how information flows through society. It could be a really slippery slope that would accelerate quickly.

The Next Chapter

Free software started as one programmer’s frustration with a broken printer and grew into a moral crusade about user freedom.

It evolved into the pragmatic open source methodology that conquered the tech industry. And now, as AI reshapes technology once again, we’re asking the same fundamental questions Stallman asked in 1980:

Who should control the tools we use? What does freedom mean in a world of AI code? Can openness and commercial success coexist?

The AI revolution is happening right now, in the open, with communities sprouting up tools that rival corporate offerings. Whether this new chapter emphasizes freedom or pragmatism, ideology or results, it will shape not just how we build software, but how AI integrates into everything we do.

The story continues to unfold all around us one pull request, one commit, one model at a time.

With each wave of coffee culture, we’ve seen parallel leaps in network technology. These shifts have fueled mutual growth and transformation: coffeehouses became gathering points for both social and technological innovation, while advances in communication, from the telegraph to the internet, expanded the reach and impact of these communal spaces.

This story is ultimately about network evolution; how we use physical spaces and digital tools to build communities, share knowledge, and create connections in our daily lives. Both coffee and tech share remarkable characteristics being global in scope, addictive in nature, hardwired for productivity, and serving as platforms for social interaction and creativity.

The evolution of coffee culture and internet technology reveals a fascinating parallel journey that reflects broader social, political, and cultural movements throughout modern history. From Europe's original "penny universities" where anyone could plug in for the price of a cup of coffee, to today's free WiFi hotspots in unlikely places, coffeehouses have always been humanity's networking hubs, later mirrored by tech companies and ultimately amplified across the globe.

The Original Network: European Coffeehouses as Information Hubs

The coffeehouses of 17th and 18th century Europe weren't just places to drink coffee; they were the physical internet of their time. These establishments functioned as distributed information networks, where news, ideas, and innovations flowed freely between nodes of human connection. Edward Lloyd understood that information was the lifeblood of maritime commerce. Lloyd's of London emerged from his coffeehouse in 1688, where merchants created an informal network for sharing maritime intelligence and managing risk. Lloyd's also became famous for its "candle auctions”, high-stakes bidding where ship cargo could be sold as a lot. As you can imagine, this created an atmosphere of intense commercial activity where absolute fortunes could be made or lost in minutes.

The London Stock Exchange similarly grew from Jonathan’s Coffeehouse, which housed brokers  who had been expelled from the Royal Exchange for perceived rowdiness (how British!). Jonathan’s provided a new home where they could continue their boisterous degen trading. In 1698, John Castaing began posting prices of stocks and commodities at the cafe, creating the first evidence of systematic securities exchange in London.

In Vienna, Paris, and London, coffeehouses were coined "penny universities" and functioned as  new information networks. These spaces established the fundamental pattern: coffeehouses as physical network nodes that enable broader systems of connection and collaboration. Like today's internet, they served as platforms for social interaction where strangers could meet, ideas could cross-pollinate, and creativity could flourish through the ritual of shared consumption.

Even in these early networks, the addictive qualities were apparent: patrons would spend hours in coffeehouses, drawn by both the caffeine's energizing effects and the endless stream of conversation and information that flowed through these spaces.

The Industrial Revolution: Scaling With Technology (1880s-1950s)

Today coffee is one of the most traded commodities in the world, thanks to the Industrial Revolution, which transformed both coffee and communication into interconnected global systems, with each technology amplifying and enabling the other's expansion. Steam-powered roasting machines and vacuum packaging technology didn't just scale coffee production, they created the first truly standardized global commodity that could be distributed through the same railroad and steamship networks that were revolutionizing commerce worldwide.  The invention of instant coffee in 1901 perfectly ushered in the way we view work and productivity, marking accessibility and convenience for this new commodity.

Telegraph systems, also nicknamed “The Victorian Internet”, became the nervous system of the global coffee trade, allowing traders to coordinate prices and shipments across continents in real-time. When coffee prices fluctuated in London, telegraph operators could instantly relay that information to New York, Hamburg, and Amsterdam, creating the first globally synchronized commodity market.

The telegraph and radio networks that emerged during this period were like distributed nodes enabling information flow and coordination. Electrical power grids provided the shared infrastructure for both coffee distribution and early computing systems. Not surprisingly Silicon Valley was early to both telegraph and radio networks, an early case study for network effects.

The Second Wave: Counterculture Networks and Alt Spaces (1950s-1980s)

The period from the 1950s to the 1980s saw cafés and digital networks grow in tandem as engines of social change and innovation. Both served as platforms for resistance, creativity, and community-building, and both would ultimately shape how we understand networks, physical and virtual, as the foundation of modern life.

Cafés became hubs for political activism, artistic collaboration, and social resistance. Events like the Greensboro sit-ins and the rise of GI coffeehouses during the Vietnam War turned these spaces into practical nodes for resistance organizing and building likeminded communities.

By midcentury, both coffee culture and digital technology were quietly laying the groundwork for the networked world we know today. In 1971, Starbucks opened its first store in Seattle, introducing the idea of a standardized, scalable coffeehouse experience. This model offered a consistent environment and product, setting a new template for how physical spaces and experiences could be replicated and scaled, a concept that would later influence how technology companies approached user experience and built their brand identity.

Meanwhile, The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), founded in 1958 to create resilient military communications, had by 1971 expanded ARPANET to 15 nodes connecting universities and research centers. While ARPANET was originally intended for remote computer access, users began to use it primarily for collaboration, sharing data and exchanging information. This unexpected shift marked the early emergence of networked information sharing, foreshadowing the collaborative, social sharing nature of the internet.

At the same time in 1975, computer hobbyists would get together and ideate some of the biggest advancements in microcomputing for the time in their garage. The Homebrew Computer Club famously met in Gordon French’s garage and included members like Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and Lee Felsenstein.

The networks and coffee culture of this era set a precedent for how experiences and information could be shared as society marched forward in the path of evolving technology.

The Third Wave: Craft Coffee and Personal Computing Overhaul (1990s-2010s)

Global internet cafes of the 1990s and early 2000s represented the most literal convergence of coffeehouse and digital networks. These spaces provided public access points to the emerging internet while maintaining the social atmosphere of traditional coffeehouses. Internet cafes became crucial infrastructure for digital inclusion, serving as network access points for travelers and those without home internet connections.

The early 2000s ushered in the Third Wave coffee movement and created specialized networks of knowledge and expertise around artisanal coffee preparation. Coffee shops like Blue Bottle, Stumptown, and my alma mater Intelligentsia became nodes in networks of coffee education and appreciation, where baristas functioned as knowledge workers sharing expertise about origins, processing methods, and brewing techniques.

This movement coincided with the rise of social media and Web 2.0, creating a perfect brew for coffee networks to extend into digital spaces. Coffee enthusiasts and high-profile baristas like myself became some of the first content creators, building online followings around brewing methods, coffee origins, and showcasing café culture & aesthetic. Coffee blogs, review sites, and social media accounts created new forms of distributed coffee journalism and visual content. New platforms like Instagram needed content, and I and others were happy to provide filtered pics of latte art & pourover blooms.

The internet provided platforms for sharing and collaboration that amplified coffee culture's creative potential, while coffee shops continued to serve as physical platforms for social interaction and status. However, this period also revealed how both networks could become overwhelming and lead to information overload. Overexposure to both social media and caffeine can cause anxiety - exactly where we are now…

The Fourth Wave: Smart Tools and Distributed Systems (2010s-Present)

The Fourth Wave of coffee, as grey as the vision is, reimagines the coffeehouse as something akin to a “smart network node”, a place where the boundaries between physical and digital blur. Today’s cafés are equipped with mobile ordering apps, IoT-enabled espresso machines, and integrated payment systems, making every visit a seamless experience across multiple network layers.

This convergence mirrors the evolution of the internet, where our work, social lives, and creativity increasingly flow through interconnected digital realms. Coffee shops now use algorithm-driven subscriptions to personalize recommendations and optimize supply chains, while smart equipment ensures consistent quality from cup to cup. The result? Coffee companies continue to be as seamless to productivity as the internet itself, supporting our addictions to connectivity & caffeine consumption alike.

And of course I would be remiss if I were to omit the amazing traceability projects in blockchain such as Farmer Connect and Bext360, the latter combining a blockchain ledger with an AI-driven SaaS platform for sustainability measures, including worker pay, carbon, water, and electricity, from farm to retail.Noun Coffee, a personal favorite, launched from a proposal within the Nouns DAO, an NFT community that empowers members to propose and vote on projects, turning collective ideas into real-world impact. As a Lil Nouns NFT holder, I was happy to see this project come to life to fund a café in my hometown of Los Angeles, creating a space where builders and beverage lovers can meet & chat.As coffee and technology continue to converge, new networks such as these allude to a future not only featuring smarter cafés and equipment, but also a more participatory consumer-turned-community collective.

Hybrid physical-digital experiences are becoming more common, with coffee companies offering both in-person services and digital connectivity. I’ve taken a guided digital tour of a Guatemalan coffee farm owned by Starbucks as a part of their now-defunct Odyssey, the digital loyalty program built on Polygon.

Values As A Feature, Not A Bug

As we advance on progress on these technologies, their evolution aligned with social values takes a seat at the forefront. The relationship between coffeehouses and digital networks continues to reflect broader social values around sustainability and meaningful human connection. Coffee culture now increasingly emphasizes ethical farmer rights and environmental responsibility, while recent technology development focuses on ethical AI and sustainable energy usage practices.

Conclusion: Networks Are Everything

The intertwined evolution of coffee culture and networks reveals a powerful truth: no matter the era the central thread follows our drive to build and sustain networks of connection, knowledge, and community.

The deep historical ties between coffeehouses and networks suggest that this relationship will continue to evolve, creating new opportunities for innovation, community, and cultural expression. Looking ahead, the ongoing fusion of coffee & tech culture will likely mirror the values shaping our present times: sustainability, transparency, and meaningful human connection.

Etymology of the term ‘hacker’ aside, which can mean anything from a horse for hire, cheap labor, or a rough-cut job,  the word has since evolved significantly from its origins, now encompassing a range of activities and motivations, from benign systems explorations to malicious & intrusive attacks.

This article isn’t going to cover the different types of hats that computer hackers wear. Instead I am here to tell you about its history, and that without coding, you can become a hacker in your own expertise by adopting the original ethos and outlook to problems.

In my earlier post In Support of Creative Hackathons, I briefly went over the history of the hacker, and in this article, I’ll further define and reapply the term to help explain how we can embrace the it in its purest form, and how you can be (or already are) a hacker too.

Modern Hacker Roots

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), ‘hacker’ was coined by members of the Tech Model Railroad Club where railfans gathered to build sweet model train systems. The club consisted of sub-groups with specific tasks; a group choosing the train models, scenery designers, but of course it was the "Signals and Power Subcommittee” who were the real troublemakers in the group.

The technological siren singing them ashore was a IBM 704, which they used to program the train operation and schedule. When one of their members Jack Dennis joined the MIT faculty, accessibility to a TX-0 on loan from the Department of Defense’s Lincoln Library was available to other members & tinkerers.

The access to this multi-million dollar machine helped fundamentally shape new ways of thinking for the computer enthusiasts by learning the inner workings of these early machines, and their obsessions became even more deeply rooted in shaping this new technology. Members during this era went on to shape technology in places like Xerox, which pioneered the iconic graphical interface we’re all accustomed to,  and ARPAnet, where the concept of the internet first emerged.

Eventually this group had their own language with enough lingo to publish its own dictionary. They still use hacker’s original meaning to this day:

[A hacker is ] someone who applies ingenuity to create a clever result, called a "hack". The essence of a "hack" is that it is done quickly, and is usually inelegant. It accomplishes the desired goal without changing the design of the system it is embedded in. Despite often being at odds with the design of the larger system, a hack is generally quite clever and effective. *source

Match my Phreak

As the computing landscape evolved, the adoption also expanded. In the 1970s, the term encompassed anyone who exploited systems for curiosity or intellectual challenge.

John Draper aka Captain Crunch was an infamous phone phreaker who discovered that a toy whistle from a 1960s Cap'n Crunch cereal box could be used to manipulate the phone system by producing a 2600 Hz tone.

I won’t go into the details of how phone phreakers cracked into the telecom system, but these predominantly young, male mischief-makers found a playground once they got in.

Steves Jobs & Wozniak later started their first venture together in the early 70s when they built and sold optimized blue boxes (based on the Cap’n’s original prototype) to other students at UC Berkeley for around $150 each. 

Phreakers & hackers used bulletin board systems (BBSes) to collaborate, share knowledge, and develop their skills in a rapidly evolving technological landscape amongst themselves and each other. These local systems were  also used to tap into their network of computer & technology enthusiasts by  broadcasting locations for local meet-ups or even as a dating service. It was like the local internet.

BBSes provided access to software, tools, and other resources that were vital for both phreakers and hackers. Users could download programs, share tips on obtaining hardware, and learn about new vulnerabilities, enhancing their capabilities. The more skilled you were as a hacker, the more exclusive the BBS you were invited to.

These systems were incredibly influential in computing, particularly around ideas of portability, the development of the C programming language, and UNIX.

Hackers vs Crackers

Early hacker culture was characterized by a spirit of innovation and a desire to understand and improve technology. The word itself carried a positive connotation and emphasized curiosity in problem-solving. It distinguished hackers from average users who only learned the minimum necessary to operate systems. They were the prodigies of early computing, true wizards at play! 

Malicious hackers were known as ‘crackers’, and dismissed by the community as lazy or irresponsible scammers. They were simply people who broke things, often to exploit systems for their own benefit. Let’s put it this way: a hacker is an automotive engineer. A cracker is someone who knows how to hotwire a car.

As someone who had a library of warez and did some light cracking due to unlimited internet access as a kid, I can tell you it didn’t take a ton of technical know-how if you know where to look; just some lite code/script kidding, a web shell, time, and pure will.

Despite its roots in innovation, hackers were often portrayed as malicious figures in mainstream media, overshadowing the original meaning of the term once associated with creativity and problem-solving.

Through the 80s and 90s, the word began to acquire negative connotations as its misuse was popularized as a blanket term for anyone who breaks into computer systems, regardless of their motives. It led to the conflation of hacking with illegal activities, exacerbated by the rise of the internet, mainstream media, and the continuance of cybersecurity attacks.

While some narratives celebrate hackers as a digital Robin Hood-types who expose vulnerabilities for the greater good, others depict them as threats to national security and privacy. You can see this through two early depictions in the 1995 movies, The Net and Hackers, where The Net is solitary & sober with serious consequences, Hackers is a more youthful, playful illustration of a subculture enjoyed in a group. This duality illustrates the complex relationship society has with this new technology, and to a certain degree, the individuals who create or manipulate it.

A New Viewpoint - Everyone’s So Creative!

As rapid advancements in digital technologies paired with more accessible interfaces surged in the ‘90s, the internet experience opened to more people of diverse backgrounds & skillsets. Artists began to explore their relationship to technology in their practice with tools like Adobe Photoshop, and open-source alternatives like GIMP, which now allowed them to manipulate images, paving a way for new & emergent types of expression.

Diving deeper into hacker culture, artists became drawn to the irreverent hacker mindset of playfully and cleverly manipulating systems to operate in unintended ways. They saw parallels between the hacker approach to manipulating systems, as artists also saw themselves as infiltrating cultural systems to supplant them from the inside.

The idea of "artists as culture hackers" resonated, and the net.art movement of the 90s was born. Adopting the hacker moniker aligned with their subversive agenda of questioning and disturbing the online experience as they played with interfaces and tools to express themselves. Net.artists also further built their own online subcommunities and defined themselves through networked collaboration. They saw themselves as operating on the fringes of art and society, using the internet & technology as the medium.

The net.art movement ran parallel to the rise of "hacktivism”, a form of activism by hacking as a means of protest, targeting organizations for social change or to reveal sensitive information. Typically, they deface official websites, create Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), leak data, and dox people. While some view hacktivists as digital vigilantes fighting for justice, others see them as cybercriminals who disrupt services and invade privacy, as illustrated with the public’s complicated relationship to figures like Julian Assange or the hacktivist group Anonymous.

Hackers Outside of Computer Systems

The hacker mind-set is not confined to this software-hacker culture. There are people who apply the hacker attitude to other things, like electronics or music — actually, you can find it at the highest levels of any science or art. Software hackers recognize these kindred spirits elsewhere and may call them ‘hackers’ too — and some claim that the hacker nature is really independent of the particular medium the hacker works in. *source

Whether we realize it or not, we have already widely-reclaimed the term ‘hacking’. Through our adoption of terms and practices like life hacks, biohacking, growth hacking, social engineering, urban hacking, or even jailbreaking a phone or modding a console, there are already ways we hack everyday.

The spirit of hacking exists in jazz musicians. There’s an old joke that you have to be a really good musician to be a mediocre jazz musician, and I took that seriously. I grew up a classical musician and went to school for it, learning the systems of music making and intricacies of my instruments. So when I started exploring jazz, I hacked my classical music structure knowledge, turned it on its head, and let my deep musicality rip over new patterns and sounds.

The BTS ARMY, my favorite unknowing proto-hacktivist group,  has been involved in several instances of DDoS attacks, primarily targeting police departments or apps that aimed to surveil or intimidate protesters, particularly during the Black Lives Matter movement. You might remember them flooding racist hashtags on social media or police surveillance apps with BTS content, or reserving huge amounts of tickets to political rallies so attendance was shockingly low. This is non-technical hacking where the system gets so inundated with requests, its original function becomes obsolete.

That energy was good and we should keep channeling it.

Lasting Cultural Impact

But if you think of cultivating hacker attitudes as just a way to gain acceptance in the culture, you'll miss the point. Becoming the kind of person who believes these things is important for you — for helping you learn and keeping you motivated. As with all creative arts, the most effective way to become a master is to imitate the mind-set of masters — not just intellectually but emotionally as well. *source

Raising myself as a rebellious classical musician shaped me into the multitool hacker I am today. My thirst for substantial research on systems is a necessary precursor to f*cking said system.

Most people participating in crypto today have some hacker spirit in them. We are, in some way, hacking existing societal systems to maneuver around them with technology. While the obvious parallels to financial systems are the most prominent use case of crypto, as an artist, the hope of alternative funding, provenance, and curation are paving a way for curious minds like mine to use technology to disrupt the archaic systems of the art and entertainment industries. There are use cases in every vertical, and each one tells a story of using technology to improve existing systems.

If this resonates, I encourage anyone inquisitive to use these tools to create better systems for yourself and your communities. I regularly read up on technical topics like  EIPs, new infrastructure solutions, and possibilities in ecosystems other than Eth to piece together what I can use under the hood for my own specific needs.

If nothing else, feed your inner hacker the knowledge to work through stagnant systems.

This is your alarm call to make your own autonomous path.

There are plenty of examples of why language in crypto has to shift from technocratic dev terms to less technical or lore-based terms. It’s unapproachable and ultimately a obfuscated string of letters and to the layperson. One of my favourite examples is Reddit with their wallets turning into vaults, and NFTs suddenly transformed into digital collectibles. NBA Top Shot, Polymarket, Brave - these are examples of real consumer adoption & digestion with everyday language. Why would “DAOs” be any different?

I have to do the thing every DAO person has done a million times before me: define a DAO. The literal acronym stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. These letters, these words - wtf does this all mean?

Firstly, these entities are primarily meant to be non-profits. If your DAO is for-profit, typically it is actually categorized as a DAC (Decentralized Autonomous Company), or one of the many other sub-structures of onchain organizations. Suffice it to say, it’s a community-operated org structure aiming to keep their censorship-resistant rules agreed-upon by the people who operate it (decentralized governance). In an ideal world, voting power is distributed by level of participation in the org, with members transparently voting on proposals written & voted for onchain.

The amazing thing about these orgs being onchain is that the voting can auto-trigger an action if it were written into the protocol; an easy example of this is a treasury allocation. The programmable tools DAOs create open up a new world of human coordination. The very thought of this future was so compelling that I had to dive into this world head as a student, member, and contributor. I wanted to be a part of creating the future of what work can look like.

Why a DAO?

Community Owned, Community Governed

I have had the distinct honor to learn & converse with many great founders, thinkers, and contributors, and one thing I have always loved about the DAO contributor mindset is the flat org concept, which lacks any hierarchy. This supports a healthy community-owned-and-governed model, a key component to a (hopefully) egalitarian org structure. It supports a collective rapport building, trust among members, and its transparency allows for accountability. Paired with community voting, and there you may find your aligned group incentives.

Spin up a DAO as fast as lightning

The 0 to 1 time in a DAO vs traditional business makes this an attractive model.

A considerable factor for founders is capital, and with DAOs, this opens up the liquidity pool to the aforementioned governing members. Token sales are often used as a way for early believers to receive a governing token allocation, and other mechanisms like staking, mining, or even NFT sales which can boost the treasury of the DAO for the collective vision. Businesses or founding groups may find it easier to crowdfund with these supporters and angels rather than raise from traditional VCs out of the bat, and might even be better off as they continue to refine their broader product-market-fit.(Not to mention that what is good for a VC ROI is not always good for an end user or dApp, so tap into VC funds mindfully.)

Trust No Corporation

…or any huge entity for that matter. Consumer faith in massive entities continues to dramatically wane with hair-raising corruption and unprecedented displays of profits over people. DAOs use tools like cryptography and smart contracts to reduce friction and interjection from intermediaries. Actions are written openly on the blockchain, so there will always be a way to trace where money is moving. Not to mention the fact the community token can also be used to better control the value created instead of being beholden to the macro economies that hyperinflate their own currency.

Possibility’s Future

One of the main reasons this is an exciting new time is the possibility of a more streamlined operation to help other work like running the business or planning an event. My friend Justice, who is a brilliant DAO thinker, points out that businesses are always looking for more automation to save on labor and time.

When orgs have programmable components, brand new possibilities in automation will start to emerge. Paired with AI as it advances, and it becomes exciting to carve out custom solutions for specific needs.

A Contributor’s Work

When I was at my peak DAO contributor mode, I was working with a few different projects that had similar tasks with different contexts: community discovery/mapping/maintenance/surveying, and talking to users like myself across tech, business, and art. Keeping vibes impeccable (duh).It felt like I had some of the world’s smartest people from all their respective corners available to me as an effect of the last bull run, and I did not squander the wisdom gained in this time.

I built my foundation as a strategic thinker through talking to everyone I could in those days: devs, researchers, investors, builders/founders, newbie devs, degens, artists, community builders, writers, thinkers, analysts, scammers. Being on the ground floor will always be important to me to understand sentiment & problems at their root.

We used to joke that we were “so early” (we still are), but we were embryonic in those days. Painfully, we still don’t know how to properly resolve conflicts, voting participation is scarce, not to mention the issue with voting distribution, and in general, DAOs were soooo right of the curve that many often tried to reinvent community when we’ve known how to run communities before the internet was a thing.

We were high on our own vibe supply, with WAGMI as a warcry. Be that as it may, DAOs offered something that traditional companies could never: a sense of hope.

But, Please Don’t Call It A DAO

I’ve always had an issue with the term, “DAO” because of its misuse & oversaturation. In the (sometimes pedantic) arguments I’ve witnessed over DAOs, I often see the points ignore a very crucial component to make it all work: people.

When this piece gets ignored, the whole thing just starts to fall apart. Whether it’s to automate your business ops, pool funds together, or vote, DAOs are tools in service to people. And the trustless component is the part where machines mitigate our own human urges and downfalls with cold-coded rules. I think this piece can help us battle corruption, waste, & greed somehow in the future.

I won’t write a paper about what qualifies a DAO vs what doesn’t. That’s not the point I’m here to make. Rather, I would like to point out there are ways to restructure and reorganize businesses/orgs that help them spin up faster, with shared community ownership, that can help automate in new ways. I encourage founders to explore the mechanisms that will help their business strengthen their communities, products, and organizations with tools from DAOs. But please don’t call it that.

When talking to my non-crypto friends, I explain the DAO concept as a digital co-op where money is pooled, everyone votes on what to do with it, & those outcomes or new rules get programmed in. Oversimplified, but that’s how you talk to regular people who aren’t going to spend 100 hours reading up on the fringes of human coordination technology. Other names I have heard for a DAO-like structures include:

• Onchain Organizations

• Tokenized Communities

• Crypto/Blockchain/E- Co-Op

• Financial Flashmobs (cringe)

I have varying levels of preferences for these. Use them with discretion as you need to describe it to curious normies.

Ok, what *do* I call it?

𝚝𝚕;𝚍𝚛
𝚠/𝚎 𝚞 𝚠𝚊𝚗𝚝 𝚋𝚋

Going back to the examples above, mainstream adopted brands used their own strong branding, community goodwill, and product design/language to expand & compliment their efforts. Your community or the mainstream or whoever you're targeting should be spoken to in their language.In order to onboard the masses, don’t make it harder for yourself. You can simplify the rules or adjust the structures, mechanisms, & operations as you need to support your community, but the name should be thought of as a brand.

Friends with Benefits (FWB) has done a great job of eliminating the DAO part of the name in favor of keeping it simple. To me, this took the cringe factor that some of the DAO conversations I saw earlier out of the question, which is probably how they were able to bring in tons of creatives and visionaries to the space. I am an active member, & I know that internally we do know it’s a DAO and try to run it like one, but that’s the unspoken beauty of being on a long journey of learning together.

Some other DAOs that operate without the name are on the protocol level, like Uniswap or Aave. While these are hella crypto-native, they do omit the DAO in the title, though it’s certainly implied. This might be a trend we see as these tools & orgs become more established & standardized, and thus require a need to adapt their language & approachability.

I cofounded GENRE, but initially, we called ourselves GENREDAO, which already gave us glazed eyes from our  audience of music fans. This project started as an experiment to enhance LEAVING RECORDS, the experimental all-genre label, with blockchain elements and shared community ownership. Our people are traditional label and music fans, not necessarily technologists; they may not know what a protocol is & may never want to know. And yet, we proceeded.

Our first steps into the space as a collective caused some initial polarization from our foray into NFT experiments, especially around the environment (pre-merge) and the obviously-bad optics in mainstream media regarding he who shall not be mentioned from the three-lettered exchange. But the pushback allowed us to take the time to rethink our approach to our already-formed community in order to gently nudge them to greener grass. Our solution was to obscure the terms, take the time to educate, and ease slowly into the progressive decentralization we dream of. But we argue because we had to slow down in order to meet our fans where they are today, there are clearer pathways to make our own community-owned dreams come true.

My Personal Affinity for Onchain Orgs

In 2020 when my awareness shifted to Ethereum, DAOs were my way into the eth ecosystem which was prohibitively priced at that time. I learned quickly on the ground floor of a bustling Discord, ingesting substack articles & whitepapers, & in twitter threads/discussions/spaces. It was overwhelming but exciting. That time was truly like a self-induced intense internship.

I write all this to say that I believe in decentralized onchain orgs as a viable future for more folks to start pooling and funding what they believe in. For businesses to adopt the idea of profit sharing as a sustainable incentive, and menial work to be programmed and automated. Where communities relish in collective ownership, and control can be taken on how and what they value.

***And I know I said a lot about not calling things DAOs, but if you are a native DAO in the space and love the name or it's become part of your brand, you can think of this as a mark of an OG, like MakerDAO.

Special thanks to Lani Trock, 0xJustice & Marco Grendel and everyone sharing knowledge about human coordination & DAOS for being my north stars & co-conspirators *

…this layer-2 centric approach to culture is that it tries to balance the benefits of pluralism and cooperation, by creating a diverse set of different subcultures that still share some common values and work together on key common infrastructure to achieve those values.

Vitalik wrote an expanding piece on L2s as cultural extensions of Ethereum, with themes elaborated from How do layer 2s really differ from execution sharding?

In it, he describes the architecture of the Ethereum ecosystem surrounded by a constellation of chains, and how these layer 2’s can create their own culture through their scaling solutions. These subcultures maintain alignment and ethos of Eth while developing their own beliefs and call to action for users.

I believe in understanding the architecture of communities, building supportive culture, and establishing legitimacy through execution (in product & otherwise). With care & intention, a culture can be born from the ground up with a guiding plan, allowing for priorities to fluctuate as tech evolves. I’ll be expanding my musings here.

Components of Culture

tldr: your culture is everything.

No, really, everything. Why you exist, how you scale ethereum, what the founders say on twitter, how your community moderators handle your queries, which hackathons you show up to, how active your governance is, geographic concentrations of activity --- everything.

How then could an L2 shape the culture thoughtfully, if it’s literally everything? I think of the framework as simple variations of these core components:

Values - This dictates who’s in or out. A bonding agent that lasts after hype. What does an ideal user on your protocol care about? What kind of builders are you attracting? What makes you attractive to investors?

Rituals - This is what you do together as a group. Very often a group talk, town hall, X Space, core call, etc. Rituals help us remember how we are all contributing towards a similar goal, and the togetherness of a group is powerful, IRL or URL.

Recognition - This is what you give back to members. Your rewards, your rules. Recognition is needed so members feel their building efforts are worthwhile or seen.

Belonging - The feeling among participating members. Aligned values = sense of belonging dictated through being a part of something larger than one’s self. This is the stickiest component of all.

This structure can be modified as needed, but it is inherently a multi-component, complex system.

Building culture requires a concentrated epicenter where it’s rooted from. It’s a bat signal, a magnet, and a filter. Each community will have a different way to execute these basic components.

Other Culture Builders

This is the “everything” part. Let’s talk about the other pieces of the culture that inform people about who you are, & what your vibe is about. These components fall in and out of the above mentioned verticals.

Aesthetic - Are you a boring af website? Ugh. Please balance information and fun here. Ethereum Foundation is a delightful example. This comes down to the colors & fonts you use, so hire a good designer as soon as you can. Computers are visual machines and should be respected as such.

Communication - How you communicate is just as important as what you communicate. Do not sling mud at others (unless you wanna attract that?), be as transparent as possible, and omg plz plz plz know your audience. Nothing is worse than the best of intentions with the worst delivery. If your community can twist it, somehow, someone will. Be crystal clear.

Participation - How can culture help you attract participation? Are you thinking about participation from end users, scaling through business development & startup support, or are you focused on tech stack for now? Contributing to broader projects (such as recovering hacked funds or contributing to public goods) can also inform people about what you value.

Collaborations - Are you working with others? What’s their reputation like? How are they beneficial to the community who is aligned with your values? Are you aligned with interoperability in some way? Vitalik warned about the pitfalls of echo chambers, so it’s important to work nicely with others.

Language, symbols, support systems, your community moderators, the way you layout your repos, the users you attract, the memes you post…again, literally everything & anything can add or subtract from the culture building process.

This is an invitation to be thoughtful, detailed, and envision beyond a few milestones.

Layer 2’s are a Playing Field for Action

Ethereum is a developer-friendly blockchain, and thus it becomes a ripe playing field for action, even beyond finance.

This is an opportunity to show, not tell your audience about the ways you are aligned with Eth. Through building your solution, you can foster your own subculture that shares Eth core principles, rallying the community to collaborate on crucial infrastructure to achieve the bigger vision.

Vitalik does a great job of highlighting some of the ways culture influences a blockchain’s development and ecosystem.

A few particularly important areas that a blockchain's culture has a great impact on include:

1. The type of changes that get made to the protocol - including quantity, quality and direction

2. The protocol's ability to remain open, censorship-resistant and decentralized

3. The ecosystem's ability to attract high-quality protocol developers and researchers

4. The ecosystem's ability to attract high-quality application developers

5. The ecosystem's ability to attract users - both quantity of users, and the right kinds of users

6. The ecosystem's public legitimacy in the eyes of outside communities and actors

It’s important to understand how your ecosystem is being perceived as well as how to speak to your ideal users in a way that resonates with them.

If there were an L2 that had made huge strides in technological advancements and opened source code in the cutting-edge ZK field, yet the most prominent news pieces around the project dealt with consumer NFTs, games, and loyalty programs, the perception would be these verticals are the main area of focus. Thus the researchers and protocol developers in the community needed to build the infra alongside the core dev team might will be harder to attract.

For fun, let’s say I start a new zk L2

By choosing to be a zk rollup, alignment to Eth starts to shape up:

• zk means building for the longterm, some even say an endgame

• zk allows for transaction privacy & pseudonymous interactions

• zk scales fast, secure, & cheap, thus more accessible to real users

• zk means Eth is the settlement layer
  
  *By building on zk, I hope the interoperability possibilities start to reveal themselves as it continues to evolve.

I’m a dancer so…let’s play & say this new zk L2 dedicated to dancers, so think clients that deal with motion capture, AR, video, and other potentially large file sizes.

All the developers and contributors I hope to attract could be interested in dance or the problem that large files present to this infrastructure, the application layer & client builds should focus on developer experience, education, video optimization, motion capture data optimization, etc to help with dance & motion-based applications.

Anticipating the need for a large amount of data, this potentially triggers a collaboration, the ultimate community hack - with something like a data availability provider.

The dance-centric L2 ecosystem rewards contributions to the infrastructure, governance, and optimizations for functions, also offering rewards to adopted or helpful applications.

Apps themselves seek contributions in other forms like dance content, feedback, or daily activity.

Let’s say a former pro dancer is a social app founder who prioritizes fast transactions and data availability due to the large file sizes dancers work with, and values affordability and accessibility for global participation. Privacy is also an important function and they plan to take advantage of identity solutions using zk, and it also appeals to tech archivists by ensuring it’s built for longevity.

Looking forward to getting to a place where hyper-niche rollups spring up like this….

Culture is Part of the Incentive

If a blockchain's culture does not value curiosity and openness to new technology, then it may well fail…

I stress the importance of building intentionally because a misaligned culture can affect the long-term outcome of projects. Marketing 101 guides us to think about our target audience. What matters to them most?

Your product appeals to people who care about _______ .

Again, once perceptions of your ideal public users are made, it becomes hard to fully alter, but not to hard to guide the perception from a root. If you have the opportunity to front-run perceptions, let it be influenced by the most prominent feature you want your people to care about. Think strategically as you ponder about the evolution of this user base beyond the first few milestones.

Some specific ways in which layer 2s can, and do, end up culturally specializing include:

• More willingness to do user outreach* or "business development": intentionally making efforts to attract specific outside actors, including individuals, businesses and communities, to participate in the ecosystem.*

• Diversity of values that are emphasized*. Is your community more about "public goods", "good tech", "Ethereum neutrality", "financial inclusion", "diversity", "scaling", or something else? Different L2s give different answers.*

• Diversity of participants*: what kinds of people does the community attract? Does it particularly emphasize certain demographic groups? Personality types? Languages? Continents?*

The totality of these wildly different movable parts delights me. Ecosystems are a petri dish of pieces working towards aligned goals, together or apart. It might be why I am wildly intrigued in its growth.

Yes, you will need those core devs to be there early, and you should prioritize this. Go to university campuses & build those relationships. Get in front of academics, researchers, cryptographers, protocol zaddies, and all the big brains. Support virtual meetings, go to conferences, get folks involved in the governance process. Keep the cutting-edge alive. I also think it’s incredibly important to invite the security community in with other technical folks early, depending on the nature of the L2.

It’s equally smart to think of ecosystem building beyond the core to app developers (and those verticals [beginner/hacker/startup]), education, hackathons, and start up support offered in the network in order to boost protocol adoption. Which principles resonate with builders on the app level? Which protocol limitations are app builders aligned to solve for mass adopted, end user blockchain experiences? I think this is a very important layer of education for Ethereum overall, and thoughtful plans can build your support network.

Then we get to non-technical founders, traders, investors, institutions & enterprises, + many more here. This layer can care about aspects like business longevity & legitimacy, financialization, tech optimization, and new consumer experiences. It can be built with start up support (technical, network, & financial), case studies, marketing & storytelling, capturing & measuring value (monetary or other KPIs) + data visualization, deal flow, and early user adoption.

Lest we forget all those early adopters, tech enthusiasts, maybe even a degen or two. I think the technicals get upset that it’s totally possible to enjoy the benefits of their grueling work without understanding much of it. I understand why this layer gets minimized by them, but it’s oddly what makes this tech actually exciting to me. These L2 TPS boasts will be more impressive thru having its limitations actually tested, not theorized to work in practice.

Sure, the mass normies don’t care about decentralization, but they do care if their content goes dark (RIP Myspace). Ask any artist who has made money in their trad sector (or even heard bad deal horror stories) and how that experience directly informs us how & where to put our work.

Censorship resistance, for example, can be the main function of the protocol, which gets translated through the app, which then gets delivered as an easy-to-digest feature in a smooth app UX. The principles or technicalities of the blockchain are okay to abstract through clients built on the protocol, but their principally-driven functions (aka that censorship resistance) should still remain in tact in the product inherent as a function of the chain.

Legitimacy by Performance

Legitimacy is a pattern of higher-order acceptance, in the case of legitimacy by performance, it can be decided through the surrounding contextual social norms.

In crypto, products won’t see traction if the tech doesn’t work, the community is disconnected, product messaging is getting lost, or the founders are scoundrels. There are many markers of legitimacy among users, including collaboration, advocacy, and adoption; and quantitative & qualitative performance indicators can range by vertical. In his writing, Vitalik describes EOS’s thriving global community and how those regional chapters added to the strength of the overall community and power of their messaging. One of the best metrics of legitimacy is genuine advocacy and organizing around that action.

Localization is one of my most vocal strategies in crypto, as it helps us slowly close the gap in knowledge through local context and tangible familiarity to frame this new technology. Public legitimacy can be swayed by the performance of the crypto education they were exposed to. Given this reality, seems like a no-brainer to get the message delivered with local, familiar context.

Overall the more the community grows in fractal patterns & creates autonomous sub-sub-cultures, the more apparent it is how robust the community foundation is. This can happen in any vertical. To quantify success here, look to the subcommunities and their activities - are they organizing themselves? Do they have unique identities? Are they supporting the broader mission? How are they receiving the messaging? How are newcomers welcomed?

Every detail can matter in the early days. Practice this thoughtfulness as you build.

Pluralists riding off together in the sunset…

Maybe being fairly loyal to the Eth ecosystem is the closest I’ll ever get to joining a cult, and that’s okay with me.

For the people who are building in the ecosystem today, how you build is as important as what you build. Today’s end users are early adopters and should be valued as such. These are the folks carving out your product market fit & leaning into your differentiators. They are helping you iron out your prod before it goes to the wider market.

Carving out your own slice of culture & allowing it to be a unique patch in the Ethereum quilt is essential to building your early base. In truth, the possibilities for this technology are barely explored, and I remain hopeful for aligning infrastructure ethos to trickle down to consumer experiences.

Polynya, whose thinking & writing I have greatly admired & pondered, recently published a piece on Crypto’s Broken Moral Compass, officially announcing they’re stepping away from crypto after months of quiet on socials. Ofc due to the prevalence of depraved degens sucking all the air in the room / liquidity in the pool, and absolute frustration the way people have been continuing to behave on public blockchains. I get it.

We need more thinkers with higher intentions in our industry if we are ever to move forward. Creating more of the same system is out of the question at this point; it can continue to exist, but longterm builders must expand applications. In an attempt to mitigate more good people ragequitting, I’m starting history class with a few early tech movements, the concepts that shaped them, and how they relate to what we’re fkn building actually.

High-Tech Hayekians & Decentralized Economies

Friedrich Hayek* was a Nobel Prize-winning Austrian economist and philosopher. He had crypto-relatable theories like government interference & centralized systems are inherently inefficient, causing economic boomz & bustz. He was instead a fan of decentralization & spontaneous order.

"High-Tech Hayekians: Some Possible Research Topics in the Economics of Computation" was an influential essay published in 1990 that delves into the intersection of Hayek’s concepts and computational application. It advocated for dispersed knowledge in economic systems, the application of computerized market processes, decentralized decision-making algos, & how this intersects with economic planning & expanded access to entrepreneurship.

The piece specifically mentions agoric open systems**, or a computational framework that combines market economics with decentralized computing. It mirrors Hayek's vision of how markets efficiently allocate resources based on dispersed knowledge, coordination of individual actions, and the understanding of the effectiveness of spontaneous order.

In this system, computational agents (such as software or [now] smart contracts) interact with each other in an open market-like environment, where they buy, sell, and trade resources, services, and information autonomously. These computational systems & agents mimic the dynamics of free markets, featuring open competition & p2p exchanges. This was an important primitive for crypto’s first application.
*

*Fun fact: the term "agoric" is derived from the Greek word "agora," which refers to open market spaces in Ancient Greece where merchants, artisans, philosophers, athletes, politicians, priests, & everyone & ur mutha would assemble and exchange goods/services/information - thoughtful & smart system naming <333

*Interestingly as a social philosophy aside, Hayek also introduced the concept that legislation≠law, meaning that legislation, enforced by authorities, is distinctly different than true law. These laws, better characterized as "social norms," require no external enforcement but instead rely on a collective social consensus agreeing on what’s acceptable behavior. This concept conveys the importance of societal cohesion and shared values in shaping frameworks & governance, which I’ve heard defined by Bankless’s David Hoffman as the “layer zero” or human layer. And truthfully, this space could use more self-policing, so this concept is relevant on the heels of Polynya’s departure.

Cypherpunks: Cryptographic Privacy Activists

"We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place. People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do."

Eric Hughes 9 March 1993

Cypherpunks believe in users controlling our own data.

The principles of privacy championed in the 90s shaped the design and functionality for crypto today. In 1991, PGP encryption was published, much to the chagrin of the US government. Two years later, The Cypherpunk Manifesto was written & published by Eric Hughes while attending Berkeley, declaring the principles of this movement, advocating for the use of advanced cryptography as a means to enhance privacy & security in our new online world.

The manifesto stresses the importance of privacy to maintain individual freedom and autonomy, understanding that cryptography has the potential to protect individuals against state & corporate over-surveillance / control famously predicted in George Orwell’s 1984. It urges ongoing efforts to create tools & systems that empower individuals to reclaim their privacy and autonomy as we grow increasingly online.Other important ideas to come out of the cypherpunk era include hashcash and b-money, both born in the cypherpunk era & mentioned in the Bitcoin Whitepaper; and the p2p / digital cash ideas of David Chaum, who predicted our hyper-surveilled future, in “Security Without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete”.

Fast forward to today, and projects are leveraging these concepts alongside cutting-edge zero-knowledge technology to secure blockchains and expand our ability to privately transact.

Libre Software For the People

Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation & movement believes in the liberty of software users, rooted in the idea that software should be freely accessible, modifiable, and distributable as users see fit.

The movement advocates for privacy as a fundamental human right, decentralized p2p networks, and open source, free license code. Stallman often begins public lectures urging people to distribute the information freely, in formats that are not subject to proprietary restrictions (and to turn geolocation off, not to post on any social sites, and a long list of no-no’s that have definitely been broken :p).

This movement supports things we like to see in crypto: infrastructure resilience, censorship resistance, creating a sense of ownership among users, love of privacy, etc. By implementing these principles into what we build in emerging tech today, we can hope to activate the broader zeitgeist towards reclaiming control over our own lives, beginning with how we navigate our time online, on new terms.

At its core, the Libre Software Movement reinforces the understanding that technology should serve the people, not the other way around.

Collaboration & Security with Open Source

Unlike proprietary software where source code is guarded as intellectual property, open source invites anyone to view, fork, & distribute the code freely.

Stallman (yes, same one) was at MIT in 1983 when he first started opening his source code for the GNU operating system, in alignment with the ethos established in the Libre Software movement mentioned above. Under his own license, the Gnu Public Licenses for his idealogical principles, and in the hopes developers would deeply comprehend the inner workings by modding, later optimizing & improving security with open, collaborative contributions.

Harnessing the collective intelligence of developers globally, the idea of open source software is to democratize access to technology, support rapid iteration & optimizations, and unlock new creative coding (since devs aren’t starting at 0). Beloved operating system GNU/Linux (aka the missing kernel credited to Linus Torvalds) and web browser Mozilla Firefox are some of the most famous oss examples today.

The adoption of open source practices + blockchain tech is symbiotic and practical for decentralized infra & security. It’s often requested demanded by users for their projects to open source their codebases for scrutiny or contributions from the community. This transparency enhances trust in the projects, allows more robust security (even from wild back doors), and supports a collaborative sense of ownership.

At its essence, OSS embodies transparency, collaboration, and community-driven innovation & security.

*Libre Software & Open Source Software are often confused for one another (probably because they were both sprouted from Richard Stallman’s mind), but the main difference is that Libre Software is a idealogical movement that prioritizes access to source code, free distribution, and personal privacy; whereas I personally view Open Source Software as a function of the Libre Movement, primarily to execute transparency, distribution, decentralization, & collaboration.

build00rs, this is but a start

From protocol to dApp, the crypto projects that will remain highly-reputed cycle after cycle are the ones who are steadfast in their beliefs, and iterate for users’ shifting needs.

Part of my mission is reminding crypto ppl to give attention to what’s important in this space, while still balancing fun:) so my ask, my call, my beckon to all who build in this space is to never forget why we are here & build for the paradigm shift.

I’m not a hater, I just see the long play together is inevitable, so let’s each lay out what we want to see.

Computers are a mechanical revolution.

Inventors at every iteration of these machines understood & embraced its potential for impact on the world. The more accessible these principles are in practical applications, the better we are individually equipped to self-realize our existence online as a start.

We are not here to replicate extractive practices from the past. The zeitgeist is tired of that shit.

As a last word, I will say I came to Eth as an artist-first & always will. I believe in the tech because I DYOR’d, and I truly see this stuff as some practical way to recapture value on the creator’s terms, whatever iterations of that simple concept becomes. my crypto ppl will tell you that I get up every day to work in this industry because I can see a balance of life & work & fun in the future. where we can help re-program what’s hopeful in humans on the protocol level.

who wants to build the empathy layer of the new internet with me?

Given that this crypto renaissance movement is influenced by developers, creatives, and investors alike, it’s in the industry’s interest to experiment with hackathon formats. The tools we have today make it easier than ever to spin up a project, and we should leverage this for greater inclusion, which leads to better adoption.

I’d like to pry open the ideas about how to make these incredible interactive educational tools more effective, with hackers excited to join, learn, put in effort, and win great prizes. On the other side, I challenge sponsors to think more critically about interactions between their solutions/products and these events.

To better understand some paths forward, I'm first looking back to trace where our modern understandings come from.

‘Hack’ Background

Truthfully, ‘hacker’ as a concept has been alive long before the internet was invented…

Clever play was always ingrained, and to be identified as a ‘hacker’ was a badge of honor.

This term ‘hack’ originated on the campus of MIT in the ‘60s when programming students were blowing minds using cutting-edge computers and local networks in mischievous ways for on-campus pranks. Soon other universities and computer hobbyists adopted the term, and it grew to mean someone adept at using tools in creative new ways, and who typically retains an anti-establishment or free knowledge perspective.

OpenBSD holds the origins of the word ‘hackathon’, rooted in a no-frills, invite-only software event to collectively upgrade the IPv6 & IPSEC protocols as quickly as possible. A ChatGPT prompt provided a succinct definition of the word’s origins:

The term “hackathon” was coined in the late 1990s by Niels Provos, an OpenBSD programmer, and is a portmanteau of the words “hack” and “marathon.” Since its inception, hackathons have become popular among technology companies, universities, and other organizations as a way to bring together developers and other technology professionals to work on various projects.

Fast forward to 2005, and JotSpot, a Silicon Valley startup building a collaborative wiki tool (later acquired by Google) runs an internal exercise for all employees to spend one day tinkering on pet projects or learning a new tool during a work day. They call it a ‘hackathon’. The exercise was popularized by Yahoo the following year and subsequent years, with coding at the forefront, and later with employees contributing non-tech skills to prototypes.

And now, as ChatGPT pointed out, tech companies, universities, venture funds, and others have been using this as a way to either teach, seek creative solutions, or both. And thus far it has been doing a decent job, but they’ve become formulaic.

Hackathons Today - Tools for Collaborative Learning

Today, hackathons, game jams, and other computer programming extravaganzas get devs together to either solve a big problem, build something fast, or to try out new software or programs.

A few key functions can include a sandbox for devs to try new tools, a place to build ideas in a short amount of time, and learning tangible & intangible lessons (such as how to connect a front end to a web3 backend, or how to ship without being overly nit-picky). However much is left to luck in this structure, in terms of how the hackathon benefits the bounty-setters or even participants.

Anyone familiar with the blockchain hackathon circuit can point out a few or more flaws. Incentives and intentions are often not effectively aligning.

Bounty hunters game hackathon systems, often re-coding product concepts to suit multiple generic product bounties. Hackers without coding abilities are not given much direction on how to meaningfully contribute. And while these hackathon projects do occasionally produce unique market value with potential to continue development, they are often left abandoned without sufficient support, guidance, leadership, or entrepreneurial skills.

Sometimes that’s not the goal of the hackathon, and it’s actually to teach or expose to new tools, in which case most outcomes are generally satisfying. But to hope for something like a “unicorn”, or even a high-quality demo or MVP from these events requires more in the learning stack, and ideas can be made more viable with additional skills involved.

Building a New Structure - An Evolving Idea

I’ve participated in a few “inclusive” hackathons, notably with FWB x Rally. The hackathon centered on Creator Tools, inviting creatives, design thinkers, artists, and musicians to bring their problem-solving skills and perspectives to the table. It produced this crypto-enabled livestreaming platform used by onchain native artists.

Since that experience, I’ve been openly advocating for refreshed thinking around hackathons, with hopeful expansions around the “new internet” entrepreneurial landscape for more diverse founders. Pointing to a Metalabel x FWB exercise between oceans404.eth and myself at FEST 2023, we wrote the first piece of our experiment as an entry for the Collaboration Cookbook workshop.

Based on our hackathon experiences (Steph alone has won 7+ hackathons), the idea of identifying archetypes first entered the chat, where everyone has distinct responsibilities and concrete deliverables for the overall project.

To structure meaningful contributions to the demo, we thought about it like this:

• 1 x Designer - they are in charge of the aesthetic, the way everything looks, as well as being able to provide wireframes for devs. They use design to influence user behavior, feel, and choice.

• 1 x Storyteller - these folks will pitch, and are in charge of writing the deck and copy in the product. They are as important as the designers in setting the vibe for the app, as well as providing context + guidance for the end users

• 2 x Developers - the more traditional crowd. Builders who can commit to collaboratively coding creative visions to life, build a website, etc. These members ground the project in reality, yet find workarounds and solutions.

Ultimately this is like cooking with my grandma: nothing is set in a strict recipe, and there are more variations yet explored. These agile, creative teams help each other through blocks while exploring more comprehensive solutions through dynamic problem-solving. Most critical is the idea of executable action: turning theories into real tests.

Creative Hackathons - An Infinite Garden

Holistic inclusion, which is to say context beyond your immediate understanding, gives better clarity around product-market-fit. Based on a desire for experimentation aligned with radically new capabilities, it’s possible to create frameworks for desired outcomes, using what’s been built, adjacent to innovation.

We can learn to cut and paste from new sources. Events like Adobe’s Creative Jam are a great example of learning a product by using it, and inviting designers and creatives to participate. This event primarily targets college students in North America, and has included household names across disciplines.

Additional components could be added based on focus. Music Hack Day was started in 2009 (sponsored by 10 API providers like Last.fm and SoundCloud) to build music apps. A business component could be added for an event centered around a minimum viable product, as is the case for this Ventureathon, where they give “as much importance to the business model as to the code submitted for the project”. Interactive bounties, laser-focused bounties, or crypto-native concepts like vested rewards systems can help expand the format to suit long and short term goals. I wrote a(n unused) hack proposal where rewards were distributed via Coordinape circles, a mechanism the participating community was already familiar with.

Final Thoughts

Details like a musician collaborating on a music production app, or involving a specialized UX designer (like for VR) are critical points of intention to help address both technocratic chasms and “unaware bubbles" from the very product conception. With versatile participants, teams have a chance to expand real-time learnings & integrate them into a live project.

One of my favorite questions to ask as a judge to hackers at Eth India 2023 was, “Did you have fun?” Everyone I asked smiled or chuckled nervously as they answered a resounding “Yes!” I never want to diminish the fun aspect of hackathons, as I think it’s a critical part of the playful spirit of hacking. Equally important for me is the original ethos of open knowledge sharing. Applied, collaborative learning is the future of education.

With that, a positive outcome could look like more creative problem solving around tech, opportunities to pursue broader access to entrepreneurial toolsets, or healthier user adoption behavior informed by diverse findings.

Ultimately, I would be satisfied with any fun collaborations that stretched us into exciting, unfamiliar territory.

This tweet hit different because I recently split ways with Polygon Labs. I continue to admire their tech, and have a lot of really smart friends who work there.

Now that my plate has more room, I plan on spending time to communicate about my experience and offer some insights through growth at a big protocol, studying early internet culture & repeating social patterns, my general life perspective, and exploring our collective manifestation of a bright future for more people.

In my first post, I am offering an intro to who I am, what people like me do in crypto, & ways we can think about crypto community pros who help grow your product’s adoption & feedback loop, sculpting your tailor-made product market fit.

So, who am I & where did I come from?

Like many other folks in this renaissance, I have lived a lot of lives, and had the opportunity to do many wildly different things. I have been a professional opera singer and musician, stage manager for live events, worked in costuming and art direction for advertisements, and I’ve already helped change the world in small, innocuous ways as a specialty coffee pioneer.

Wherever I put my energy, a sprout of my community grows, and I am humbled every time likeminded individuals show care for the world and people around them. It’s the most rewarding part of what I do and who I am.

I first came to the Ethereum ecosystem as it became clear this movement was enabling a new wave of growth and value for creatives. To me it represented the change all creative industries direly need, and I wanted to be a part of that. While I was already familiar with crypto & some principles through dabblings in Bitcoin (via a few Silk Road purchases), I feel compelled to show how crypto’s value can impact lives in order to propel the adoption of tech.

I am grateful for my two years at Polygon Labs, as it was such a unique opportunity to run with a company during wild growth in extreme and pivotal directions. I brought value to big projects, worked with best-in-class talent, and learned a whole lot of information about ZK technology, which has become a fun pastime for me.

Aside from my time at Polygon Labs, I co-lead and create for GENRE, a community branch of beloved LA experimental record label Leaving Records where we reimagine what a community-driven music label can be. I also love voting, shitposting, and participating in the FWB community, and worked as a community contributor at Seed Club for several of their early seasons, sparking my curiosity for human coordination early in my Ethereum journey. Being an active participant in these orgs was the first time all my varied passions, patience and care for people, industrious nature, and obsession with the internet came into some odd culmination where I felt like home.

Ok, what do community people do?

The hardest easy question for those all working in community.In crypto we generally have two sides of a spectrum with overlap. There’s the business professional, something like a web2 community builder (think Google or Microsoft). These folks are typically effective organizers and, if they’re experienced, can create longtail strategies to reach broader business goals. Then there’s the fun crypto professional in every TG chat and Discord DM, hosting shows, posting memes, and generally in the trenches of the community. These people are the vibe aggregators who keep the community fun to be a part of, and are critical for overall maintenance. I tend to serve a combo plate of both, and it’s helpful to get you a crypto pro who can balance a bit of both.

While crypto community leadership positions are less standardized than established roles like Chief Operating Officer or Marketing VP, I have optimism for more orgs to take this position as seriously as other execs on the team. My last role’s function was very intuitive and strategic; collabing on overall goals, sussing the vibe on the ground, creating high level global strategies, then diving into the details for implementation.

One of the reasons it can be difficult to understand the impact of these positions is because they are day-in/day-out maintenance positions, and sentiment is hard to accurately track unless you’re an empath. But an effective community professional can expand an org’s organic footprint, lower operation costs, and thread people together for a balanced impact on needs and asks.

Another reason, and probably the most insidious one, is that real communities, ones that facilitate connection and care, are incredibly misunderstood in the first place. Misconceptions about what a community is, who is or should be in it, or how they affect the overall mission leads to poor decision-making, weakening the bond that brings the community together. It is critical for orgs to work with their community leaders to create a holistic plan to accomplish overall goals. Not a mandate, but rather a developmental collaboration to create the steps to get there.

Also in crypto communities, things move quickly. Building a community in the 2017 ICO days is not going to yield the same results as today’s market and landscape. The zeitgeist shifts fast and is sensitive to instability. This is why it’s important to build a resilient community which can withstand these fluctuations. Slow growth is the name of the game here. And with any luck, the community may even become stronger through turbulent events.

One of my favorite examples we can see in real time is Farcaster, with its recent explosion in daily active users after the launch of their Frames feature. The tight, early community on the platform established a vibe and rules for conduct, attracting an influx of new users searching for an alternative to to toxic circles on X. The first adopters have been able to handle this wave because the culture around the app was well-established before its virality.

Building in Public

The most important part of my wild journey is sharing what I’ve learned so that others may continue experimenting with these concepts.

Below are some insightful points drawn from my personal experiences. They aim to assist orgs in understanding how to channel their community efforts effectively, while also empowering community leaders to seek the necessary information and collaboration required for crafting and executing a successful strategy or strategic plan.

1. Organizations need a strong reason for being, a compelling ‘why’, or absolutely impeccable vibes.
   Without the reason for being, you will have a hard time retaining a long term, committed community. The people who are here now want to build a new iteration of the internet, one that very often is tied to a set of beliefs about how to correct mistakes in the first/second version. Community pros can help humanize tech and give it the context it needs to be incredibly compelling. I will add that we can attract more of the right kind of people with ethos and a hope for change rather than abstract tech capabilities. I am not the only proof of that.

2. Organizations need to plan ahead for where they want to go, and take appropriate steps to meet their community where it is to get there.
   The ability to answer future-state questions about your ideal community participants will ultimately serve the components you will need for growth. Looking for creatives? Open the convo with the value you are adding to their art practices or revenue potential. Need more zk devs? Might be a good idea to start with concepts & zk language education, or hang out (drop knowledge) in the bars where those devs hang out (online research forums & farcaster channels).

3. Organizations need to understand where and how to show up for impactful community building.
   Going back to those zk devs - you won’t typically find too many researchers on regular X Spaces overflowing with hype. Cultivating a community can be established with a set of steps, but the leader of your community identifies where and how to show up for goodwill & vibes. A good pro can spot areas of improvement and appropriate platforms, a great one can build a long term plan on projected theories, and if they’re S-Tier (like me), you get a dose of creativity added on top.

4. The nature of community work takes an emotional toll on all professionals.
   Even if the work seems effortless, trust me, it’s not. Creating a resilient community requires stability, and stability requires sustainability, and sustainability requires rest and shared labor. A carousel of replacements weakens community culture. It should come as no surprise how loyal members are to the community shepherds. Do not - I repeat - do not undervalue the work your community people are accomplishing to the point of burn out.

5. Organizations must understand that building the type of community they want takes time and sometimes has bumps in the road.
   Bull market communities are easy come, easy go. The ones who stick around carry on because the org is delivering on something they are interested in. But conflict inevitably does arise over time, and every community should prepare for it.
   
   Lesser-seen or talked-about (or remembered) parts of successful communities are events that test the boundaries, rules, or culture. In some of the most complicated examples, it also affects members’ bags or holdings. Surviving these events while staying intact is admirable, and can even attract others’ curiosity to see how the community held the line or evolved.

6. Organizations must understand and honor the emergent behavior of the community, and work with rather than against it.
   Again, anything can happen. No one predicted the Frames primitive was going to boost user acquisition on Farcaster like this. Strategies can be built to exacting degrees, but even after all this effort, the community can and will shift and swing with the current. This is precisely why I enjoy working and implementing programs in seasons as it allows you to align goals on a regular cadence. It also supports my general advocacy for solving complex human problems with biomimetics.

There’s so much more to unpack, but hopefully the image of what I am communicating is forming sharper edges, and you can begin to see some nuance in community work. Through these explorations, I invite orgs and professionals alike to rethink the quantifiably misevaluated ephemeral roles in community. Community is ultimately aligned with growth, as agents of adoption and the lubricant for the feedback loop.

In closing, I plan on writing more openly about everything currently trapped in my brain. My private crypto musings exchanged amongst close friends deserve to be shared and minted. This genesis post is a promise to stop being the iykyk crypto community darling in the shadows, and start building more in public.