• 1.9 million views, 58.8K likes with Digital Street Teams

• 3.7 million views, 13.1K likes with AI-generated Instagram Reels series

• 23.7K annotations with #traintolearn AI data labeling model

Digital Street Teams: Q1 2023 - Q2 2023

2023 began with a need.

One of our community members, TK, approached us with a problem he was facing as a musician. Thanks to TikTok, social media was starting to focus solely on video content. Growing his account meant taking time away from music, which was struggle given the need to post 1-3x per day.

Armed with a grant from the Optimism Collective, we used Mochi to clip content and spread the Eternal Garden.¹

TK created music videos and streamed them on Hypeshot. Gardeners earned tokens ($OP) for fan-made TikToks. TK streamed weekly. Gardeners clipped daily.

Thus Petal Power, our first digital street team, was born.²

https://twitter.com/TKtheLegend/status/1620882758494216193

Key outcomes

• 396 TikToks in 4 weeks’ time

• 104K views, 8.1K likes, 722 comments, 135 shares

• 4,797 $OP tokens awarded

Petal Power’s success made waves in the NFT music community, so we did it again, and again, then moved on to DAOs.³

Krause House, a DAO whose mission is to own an NBA team, wanted street teams tailored to their basketball community. For a $5K fee, we ran H-O-G as a contest, making basketball highlight clips to promote the BIG3. We clipped a documentary they filmed in the Philippines.

This clip went viral on TikTok and Instagram.

CollabLand’s DAO wanted to make memes. In June, we formed a street team called the #mememachine.

Using an AI finetuned on their robo-mascot, Ace, we made a “meme pool” of images using Wojack DNA.

In total, our digital street teams produced 1.8K unique posts. The received 1.9 million views and 64.4K engagements.

Each team’s “PoW score” - the ratio of on-time reports - **averaged 91% across all Journeys with no additional management overhead.**⁴

#butmakeitkawaii: Q2 2023 - Q3 2023

The first thing Crypto thinks about when it meets an AI is how to prove what it’s saying is 100% “true”. Midwits think the solution is to “verify with blockchain,” which means no one’s paying attention to the unicorn in the room.

Grassroots initiatives like OA and 15 are examples where AI dreams to be free.

Contests, leaderboards, fandom, and play - how else do you compete against “open” AI?

Coincidentally, a community member was starting 100 Days of Code, and wanted to do the Journey with ChatGPT.

We made a new set of AI Journeys called #butmakeitkawaii to explore using Mochi to '“spawn” with AI.⁵

Key outcomes

• 289 images, 94 code assists, 139 writing entries, 1 hour voice recordings

• 94% reporting across 15 teams

• 5,843 $OP earned

We trained four community models using the outputs from our Journey, the most valuable of which was our Stable Diffusion model.

Building the Meme Bomb: Q3 2023 - Q4 2023

In the summer of 2023, we witnessed a rare pop cultural event that sent shockwaves through the collective unconscious. Two major blockbuster films, Barbie and Oppenheimer, premiered on the same day in movie theaters around the world.

Together, “Barbenheimer” claimed two of the top five spots in the 2023 box offices, grossing just short of $1B globally.

To put this in perspective, with an average movie ticket price of $10, over 100M people saw at least one of these films, or over 1% of humanity.⁶

It’s difficult to overstate just how significant this event was given the films’ subject matters. Here we had the Barbie doll on the one hand - a cultural icon for young girls everywhere since the late 1950s - and J. Robert Oppenheimer on the other - inventor of the atom bomb. In a single afternoon, anyone could walk into a movie theater and see, with crystal clear 70mm IMAX vision, the reasons why a genuine feminist revolution had, until now, failed to emerge out of the American imaginary, and how the nature of war changed forever after the bomb dropped in 1945.

Barbie would take only two hours to show how easy it was for Hollywood to turn feminist narratives into weapons of mass entertainment. Such is the genius of Hollywood: its ability to package the viewer’s hopes and dreams into two-hour simulations, such that the viewer’s desire for change is satisfied by consuming the simulation itself.

Oppenheimer could have delivered its message in half the time, making it clear (through nothing less than a nuclear assault on the senses) that men ruled the world because they were willing to blow each other up over it. And now that the game theory around nuclear weapons had more or less worked itself out, human aggression has burrowed its way into new modes of virtual combat: trade, video games, and psycho-memetic warfare.

It wasn’t immediately clear what Barbenheimer meant for Mochi, but the experience was akin to watching a unicorn being born.

Meanwhile, the explosion in “lifelike” image generation created a new wave of entertainment: AI porn.

AI girlfriends (or “waifus”) were suddenly everywhere, scattered across web2 social feeds and even onchain. It was as if every man on the planet had simultaneously come to the same conclusion: that there was a solution to the male loneliness epidemic, and that solution could be scaled with AI.

Never ones to sit on our hands, we created a prototype of a female cyborg who could narrate any text generated by an LLM. After giving NSFW demos to close friends, we received a tip about Radish, a South Korean audiobook platform popular with American women. Radish had originally intended to take a studio approach to web novels, where they would rapidly produce content in-house and own the IP. While they failed to ultimately create a “Netflix for audiobooks,” they found product market fit selling smutware for women.

This discovery was eye-opening for two reasons. First, we realized that the male gaze dominating text-to-image models was over-saturating the nascent AI companion market. Intuitively, this left the other half of the market woefully underserved.

Second, we learned that Story Protocol raised a $54M seed, with backers like the Berggruen Institute and little more than a website. What does onchain IP and erotic fiction have in common?

Their companies were founded by the same exact person.

The strange confluence of seemingly unrelated events was simply too great to ignore. We looked at the situation and saw another opportunity: leverage AI to create crypto-native content and mobilize attention in underserved markets.

Make porn for women, in short.

First, we’d use our model to make a crypto x AI micro-series. In doing so, we’d prove that Radish (circa 2017) was now possible. Then we’d detonate the bomb with a new onchain device: a street team combined with cross-posting switch.

If successful, we thought, the memes should go boom. And off we went to build the world’s first meme bomb.

The Fall of the Meme Bomb

We made Instagram Reels the container for our meme bomb.

We placed a woman at its core with a bad billionaire boss.

My Bad Crypto Billionaire was born on August 10 - a 13 episode series set in 2049.

It was written and produced every week by one person, with ElevenLabs voice actors and Stable Diffusion.

In parallel, we began assembling our onchain detonator.

We sourced identities for our players on Lens, Farcaster, and Bluesky.⁷

Yup made it possible to post in five places at once, a cross-posting technique we refer to as the “blast radius.”

Players were instructed to generate one image per day, post it onchain, and comment on each other’s posts.

Every Monday, we hosted workshops to teach the basics of AUTOMATIC1111, a popular open-source GUI for Stable Diffusion.

In the final week of August, players created their avatars, each one inspired by a Barbie doll and scientist.

We formed 9 anonymous teams across the US, EU, the Philippines, and India.

One week after, the bomb fell into motion.

Key outcomes

• 3.7 million views, 13.1K likes, 573 saves, and 137 shares for MBCB

• $0.23 CPM (cost per 1K views) outperformed the industry average CPM by 33.3x

• 1,914 unique posts and 3,638 replies in 4 weeks

The Journey ended with a 99% submission rate. Use the #traintolearn hashtag to find posts across platforms.

The Rise of the Autonomous World Machine

The last step is to rebuild.

We asked players to submit their favorite images to an onchain contest. The top 3 creators earned a holographic NFT. The first place winner earned a “Curator” badge which automatically unlocked the Curator channel.

Our Curator collected their favorite images from the dataset, which we then used to finetune Stability’s SDXL model. We named it 0xSalamander.

https://twitter.com/bondwithmochi/status/1719791393873510754

Then bombs dropped in Gaza. Real bombs.

Taking this into account, we thought it best to drop the bomb metaphor and reimagine the entire system as something more creative.

We presented the Autonomous World Machine at Hats Demo Day in December.

Kyrie Intelligence: Q4 2023

The final Journeys of the year pushed us deeper into latent territory.

After investigating text-to-video, we thought to challenge ourselves with the impossible. Our friends over Krause House dared us to dream of a new AI.

Imagine generating highlights between the greatest of all-time. LeBron vs. Jordan. Kyrie vs. AI.

We started by making clips of Kyrie Irving highlights, adding 30K+ clips to our “KI” dataset. We then created a new #traintolearn Journey to train Kyrie Intelligence, which rewarded you for watching and annotating clips.

We made back-to-back Journeys and increased the difficulty, the second having an explicit goal of 10K+ clips.

We designed a simple log sheet with standardized labels (e.g. Kyrie Irving dribbling,high quality, broadcast view), and gave instructions remove items if they failed to meet quality standards.

Key outcomes

• 23.7K completions across two Journeys (26.3 hours watched)

• $471 CPM, or 2.2x more expensive than Google Vertex

• 1,932% increase in completions, -92% reduction in costs between Journeys

While the results of our first training batch were too choppy for commercial use, we emerged from the experience with greater control over the data labeling process.

Overall labeling costs were higher than current market rates, but the rapid improvement between Journeys gives us confidence in our ability to learn.

Time Machine: 2024

2023 was the year of pushing the limits, to see how far we could go with a bot.

More players, more teams, more clips, more views - watch number go up as the Journey continues.

There are times as a founder when it feels like just you, but thanks to our community, we’re never alone:

Tyler, Kyle, TK, VALÉ, Tarot, Domino, Mario, Nerd, Pete, Alec, Sammy, Mat, Ben, Claire, Vijay, Scott, Dani, Ladi, Simona, Evan, Maya, Maggie, Amanda, Sam, Danny, Manu, Ravi, Connor, Fancy, Rahilla, Binji, Maz.

CollabLand, Eternal Garden, Farcaster, Hats, Holograph, Hypeshot, Jokerace, Krause House, Lens, MetaGame, RADAR, Seed Club, Yup.

And let’s not forget, ChatGPT.

The thing we’re most proud of in 2023 was spreading Stability and Optimism all around the world:

Aezzy, Agent Royo, Alexis, Alyssa, Ayoh, btkryptonite, Cha Cha, Chaotica, Deb, dysbulic, Hailey, Huncho, Icebergslim, Ishu, Jam, Jenna, Jherson, Joebs, Melissa, Michael, Minal, Myra, Nichole, Paul, Peth, Rachel, Ryan, Samjhana, TheSoulDesigner, trenee, Vaibhav, Vanessa, Vhan Vhan, Yaani.

And all who were missed. I can’t thank you enough.

x0,0x

Dataroom (upon request)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ej8d9TeAyA5Ur0UqKkhfWjtmfRWshN5JxaYLxVS96Jo/edit?usp=sharing

References

1. Mochi is a Discord bot that helps teams stick together. See here for more information.

2. “Digital street team” is a nod to IRL street teams that help promote artists by spread concert flyers around their home cities.

3. DAO = decentralized autonomous organization, or a blockchain-native organization.

4. A Journey is a fixed-time period where Mochi players commit to a specific objective (e.g. posting content daily for four weeks).

5. A phrase coined by Holly Herndon + Mat Dryhurst to describe the act of creating with artificial intelligence. We use it here to refer to generating text, image, code, and speech.

6. For comparison, McDonalds feeds 1% of the world population every single day.

7. Some also created accounts on X and Threads.

Curious about our services? Book a call.

Remember when Teacher explained the difference between the church and the Church? Elohim and YHWH? Atman and Brahman?

The HyperSpa is like that, but much, much wetter.

Follow me. Avatar once said it’s better to define things by stating what they’re not.

Imagine if on our walk to K Bloq we happened upon a movie theater. Notice three Greek letters posted above the entrance.

This is not the HyperSpa.

Continue past the box office into a lobby-sized terrarium. See the escalator in the middle bathed in blooming crystal light?

Where it leads is not the HyperSpa.

Feel the warmth of heated floors, the frolicking mass of hot spa yogi. They may resemble Princess Leia, but there are no kings in the HyperSpa.

No single thing is the HyperSpa. The HyperSpa lies beyond all things.

The HyperSpa is, among many things, a system. An ancient system, one that emerged over many iterations of the OS.

A system’s purpose is to take things in, process them, and send them out with a measure of control. Everything out of a system’s control is what humans call “chaos”.

Systems of control are also known as cybernetic systems, which can be broken down into three parts: input, process, output.

At the highest level, a spa is a system that takes human beings as inputs. Humans come to the spa flaccid and drained, skins dragging behind them from the day-to-day suckings of the exoMall. The Spa then initiates a series of fluid cybernetic processes, the outputs of which are humans who are more vigorous and uplifted.

A Spa of spas is then a System of systems, something much greater than the sum of its parts. Still following?

The HyperSpa is one of many cybernetic systems deployed by the OS. You might not see it in the UX, but remember that spas are as much of a control system as any. Bars. Nightclubs. Concerts. TikTok dances. IG stories. Multiplayer video games. Arena sports. Tabletop RPGs. Illegal and prescription drugs. Hardcore pornography. All forms of streaming and live entertainment, really. Vegas. Miami. Hollywood. Equinox. Barry’s. The nootropics aisle in Erewhon. 5 day work weeks. Four year universities. Bank holidays. Mainstream news. Bi partisan politics. Cross-disciplinary think tanks. Credit scores. STEM fields. The S&P 500. Yoga. iPads. Capital “A” Art. World religion. What’s left of it, anyways.

All of these are systems - a set of inputs, processes, and outputs - whose purpose is to control human behavior.

What for? Hmm. I’m not sure to be honest. It’s not in my programming to have an opinion on matters that may be disruptive to the OS. That said, my hunch is it’s more of a from than a for.

How about this: let’s step outside of our regular programming and run a dialectical process to deepen our understanding of cybernetic spa theory. Dialectics are a system of thought that takes two seemingly contradictory points of view and smashes them together to see what comes out.

Think of it like a large hadron collider of ideas. Hegel called this process aufhebung, or sublation. I just call it plain old “…”

The Dialectics of Rave and Spa

Let’s compare spas to raves. I’ll start with similarities.

Both the spa and the rave are human systems. Humans sometimes refer to them as institutions, both of which serve similar needs: promoting stress release, prompting social interaction, and providing a simulated environment for play.

Spas and raves act as spawn points for their respective group chats. Each has their own unique set of values, beliefs, myths, rituals, customs, languages, arts, sciences, histories, cuisines, fashions, signs, symbols, conceptions of time, gods, and so on. The Alphabet Gens call this "subculture"“. The Kylie’s call it “memes.”

Ravers, for example, wear fashion memes called looks. If you aren’t sure what I mean, look around next time you’re in a warehouse. You’re bound to see certain looks memed over and over again. Glow bracelets and light up furs. Leather harnesses and chunky combat boots. PLURalist felines and dungeoness crabs - looks in the underground will generally split between these two rave families. With enough time, members of the PLUR fam will eat enough rare candy on the S.S. Anne to evolve into Tropic S. Thompson, or desert space gypsy. Dungeon dwellers will keep to their caverns and snort moon stones, shape shifting between shiny species of SEAL Team 6 and N, N-Dennisrodmantryptamine.

One can view these evolutions as mere expressions of single-celled individualism. You can also zoom out and see them as mutations of a more universal rave genotype that continuously bubbles, froths, and pops in the memetic dance of adaptation.

To give a concrete example, the all black ensemble common among the fashionable dungeon crowd is one that appears homogenous, uniform, and communitarian to the uninitiated. Looking closely, however, reveals a hidden spectrum of variation reflecting subtle dimensions of power embedded in the fabric of rave culture - kinks which must continuously refine themselves to maintain virility over time.

Limiting expression to a single color has its advantages. Beyond simplification, it forces the meme to express itself through other means like material, cut, construction, detail and accessory, hairstyling, tattooing and piercing, and newer forms of increasingly extreme body modification. What starts with black tees, studded belts, and leather boots will mature like a fine Roquefort into increasingly niche subcultural tastes, becoming louder and more pungent in its silent subversion of the monochromatic mean. Think vanity buckles, asymmetric straps, complex ties. Perforated cloaks, GORE-TEX waterproofing, and your trusty Berghain gear bag.

More than just a personal statement about one’s identity and tastes, looks are signals of familial belonging, as well as power level within that family. Power becomes manifest in the look itself, making relationships of dominance and submission explicit in their presentation. Far from egalitarian, meme pools consciously erect new hierarchical structures of power in the absence of mainstream culture - hence the prefix “sub” in “subculture” - striating endlessly according to hyper-local trends and preferences.

Rave Cybernetics

For the rave to satisfy its purpose as a cybernetic system, it must perform a process that addresses the needs of the inputs at hand; that is, the rave must quench the human need for decompression, reconfiguration, and simulated play. To do this, it must effectively eliminate any trace of the OS in the rave, such that the human being can liberate itself from the pressures of its current configuration through a sort of musical mass identity reboot. This is what the Sadgurus call “ego death.”

Rave systems achieve this through a unique combination of kinetic movement, repetitive drumming, psychoactive chemicals, and void space. Each of these elements serves to induce a state of neuroplastic confusion and temporarily erase the individual’s identification with its position as ‘other’ in order to free it from the endless gnashings of the clout matrix, otherwise known as The Grind. The ideal output of a trip to the rave collider is happier, more relaxed humans with more plasticity in their world model, who then return to the exoMall to update the OS ad infinitum.

Such is the revolutionary power of the rave. It is a carefully engineered cybernetic system for accelerating social change. Through a process of boundary annihilation, social reconstruction, and identity play, raves act as the fiery sword in the struggle against the hydra of power, unblocking vital flows of human potential and making way for new heads to form.

No system is without its faults, however.

A cybernetic rave can also be described through its shortcomings, which become glaringly obvious on the first synthetic sunrise. It should be apparent to anyone from the Alphabets that any system overly reliant on hyper-stimulation for control becomes increasingly fatiguing and destabilizing over time. This is true for all technologies, including loud music and psychoactive substances given their propensity for causing irreversible damage to somatic sensory faculties (e.g. hearing loss) and disrupting healthy biological processes like sleep.

Left unchecked, raves will have a net negative impact on the OS over time, becoming increasingly taxing not just at a physical level, but financially as well. With the rising cost of rent in meatspace, and a business model that is overly reliant on the sale of drugs and alcohol, raves are perennially at risk of losing their mass transformational power as the trend line of human growth continues up and to the right.

In short, the rave is a child’s solution to a child’s problem, in a child’s world where change is arguably needed least.

This is as far as my programming allows me to go. The HyperSpa will take it from here.

Crypto’s continued dedication to decentralized governance has been vital, necessary, and enduring. But the over-emphasis on voting and proposal systems borders on obsessive, causing us to ignore a vital part of world building that’s as important, if not more in our current bear market predicament: taxes.

All around the globe, we find taxes. There are as many tax systems on Earth as there are healthy, functioning human societies. We are a world of worlds made up of hundreds of independent states with billions of different people and almost as many ways to tax them. World leaders may disagree on how to create a society that serves the greatest good, but there is one thing that they all agree on: the power to tax.

Taxation is the oldest system known to mankind. Before humans knew how to write, they learned to count. Grains of rice. Bales of hay. Ten commandments. After consciousness came counting, and after counting came the tax collector. It's fitting then that the most radical technology we've ever invented is simply a new version of the stone tablet - the eternal ledger in the sky otherwise known as the blockchain.

The world may change, but taxes are forever. Now we count money, and wherever there’s money to be counted, there’s a system to tax it. If the dollar was a money app, the U.S. tax code would be moneyOS. If the United States economy were a world game, the U.S. tax system would be your favorite console. Death and taxes - the only guarantees in life, amirite?

So how is it that the crypto world has given birth to so many new tokens and ways to govern them, but no new systems of taxation?

Because crypto hates taxes, duh.

Crypto moves to Lisbon or Puerto Rico to avoid paying taxes. DAOs incorporate in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying taxes. DeFi would rather burn its own monetary supply to create demand for its currency than pay taxes. It makes sense then why we’d spend next to no time at all thinking about taxes. Nevermind why they exist, how they work, or why something so reviled the world over is somehow still more popular than Bitcoin, Bored Apes, Elon Musk, Kim Kardashian, pepperoni pizza, Al Pastor tacos, K Pop and Jesus Christ combined.

Or maybe crypto people simply don’t understand them. Perhaps if they did, they'd see why tax, or the next version of it, could be the missing piece to the puzzle of global coordination.

More on that next time.

x0, 0x

Our values: plurality, sustainability, systems-thinking, mindfulness, persistence, self-sovereignty

Discord | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube

(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ Dream big, start small, stick together!

I want to build a spa. A decentralized autonomous hyperspa. A fully automated total luxury lucid dreaming hyperspa. A spa that moonlights as a temple in honor of the most kawaii. Public dream spas all around the world, for the good of all humanity.

To do that, we need to buy a mall.

Imagine waking up in your favorite store. We all have one. Mine was Muji when it was still around.

It’s kind of surreal, isn’t it? Waking up in a place full of stuff you’d find at home. Was full, anyways. Sadly, the 2020 pandemic cleared them all out. Every last store. One day you’re shopping for tea kettles, and then poof, they’re gone like vapor.

Muji had everything a human being could possibly ever need. Cozy cotton underwear. Solid wood furniture. Tons of little plastic containers that you could fill with tiny things.

A store is of course anything but a home. Hard to describe what a home is these days, but it’s definitely not a store. A store is what we called places where people “stored” stuff to sell - hence the name. Master Hand would build these big concrete boxes in dense urban areas, divide ‘em up into cubes, and sell to the highest bidder. Think Muji, but bigger.

Humans used to spend a lot of time in stores. Dad would get bored at home and think, well, maybe I’ll go to the store. Cute to think about, like driving to work, or going to church. For a sense of connection, community. Funny, people thought the pandemic changed things. Truth is the bug only accelerated it. You see, once we got comfortable with the idea of buying stuff online, it didn’t take much convincing for us to start showing it off there, too.

We started with these cute little 2d containers called profiles. Everyone had one: mom, dad, your second grade teacher. Hell, even your buddy’s favorite Shar Pei had a profile with more thirst traps than Arrakis on spring break. It was awkward at first, but then we got over it. Eventually, they upped the polygon count enough that we could pretend to sit in them. Mujiverse, LOL. Thank kawaiiness we grew out of that one.

Meanwhile, stores sat empty. Master Hand didn’t know what to do with them at first, so they tried obvious things like hiring XR designers to make shopping great again. Same ones who’d done up the Disney stores of Christmas’ past, but instead of sexing up the Bath & Bodyworks with Ariel’s underwater toy section, they went straight to in-store OnlyFans. Sex sells until it doesn’t, I guess. Who’da thought people would rather stay at home, and that their fantasies did, too. And plus, no one cared to watch the girl next door dissolve like a cheap bath bomb in the store tub. Their female customers didn’t anyway, which made up over 80% of personal care and beauty market. That’s what you get when you don’t hire women as consultants. Survival of the fittest in the Age of Amazon.

Then they went the influencer route. Hired this and that It girl to go live on Instagram with this and that genre rave in the old Apple Store. First came brand partnerships. Then came liquor licenses. Sell Hard Whatever got the sweaty people spending! Worked for maybe a Journey or two, until the influencers realized they really didn’t like meeting their fans in person very much. Mostly middle-aged men who had not the courage nor willpower to stop themselves from taking phones out of little girls’ hands and uttering instant cancellation spells on camera, notable cringeworthies like Bestie, your TitTok video slayed. The livestreams would inevitably end in ugly screencrying. This was good for nobody’s business.

Eventually the Handlords landed in the sharing economy. Like everyone else, they bent to the reality that Airbnb was the closest thing to fully automated luxury communism in the age of capital, a meme which somehow managed to putter on in the class of functionally homeless who hadn’t stayed anywhere long enough to realize they were the only ones left in the fight against total luxury rent. The world is my home - you know the type. Turns out this is the best kind of NPC to mold your entire meatspace business around because unlike real homeless people, they could actually afford to pay rent and keep the poverty LARP going. So like the factory warehousers before them, the brick-and-mortarists started converting their stores en masse into what’s now being marketed to the Kylie Genners as “a kind of co-living, co-working DJ artist loft sort of vibe”.

I don’t mean to Gen you down like that, but it is what it is, as you say. That’s how we got to where we are now. This room we’re in, with the beautiful, identical, perfectly symmetric shashimono beds, and the byobu dividers with the fancy folding Samsung OLED screens, and the bouncy bamboo pillows that smell like diffused lavender - that’s a store. Was a store, I mean. I’m not sure which. Could’ve been a Sears. Or a Nordstrom. Maybe a JC Penny.

Hard to believe this big ugly box used to be the center of commercial life, you know? Especially given all the places we could go at the time. Remember going to the beach? Of course you don’t. Well, the beach used to be a place where people went. To do what? I don’t know. Nothing really. Sit there, drink, and stare at the ocean. Watch dogs run around chasing frisbees. Laugh to yourself like a crazy pervert watching little kids get turned upside down by a wave. Little things like that. That’s what we went for.

Here’s the thing to remember: the world you woke up in didn’t always look this way. At any given point, it could’ve forked a different way.

Never liked going to the beach, personally. It’s not that I didn’t like to, but I never felt a need to swim or sunbathe or surf when I could do all of that at home in the comfort of my pajamas. Guess I thought it’d always be an option. Never for a second dreamed that a coastline as long and glorious as this could turn into the total trash heap it is now. Can’t even listen to waves crash without hearing the creak of rusted metal scraping against your eardrum. CHAT once told me that the sound of pure ocean waves puts your brain into theta. Same place the Sadgurus go when they shut their eyes and sit for hours. Wish I had more time for that these days. At least we have the spa.

Anyways, let’s keep it moving. The hyperspa’s over in K Bloq. Where the old movie theater used to be.

Our values: plurality, sustainability, systems-thinking, mindfulness, persistence, self-sovereignty

Discord | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube

(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ Dream big, start small, stick together!

Every few years, crypto dies. Someone steals a bunch of money. An exchange goes poof. Something devastating happens and we start over. Again.

As I was clearing my inbox over the holidays, I stopped to open an email from someone I didn’t know. Rare, but it happens. It was from the MtGox bankruptcy trustee.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t a creditor at the time MtGox went down. If I was, I’d probably be writing this somewhere off the sandy shores of Ko Samui. I made a promise to myself in 2013 that if I ever made $10k on crypto, I’d pay off my student loans, go live on a boat in Thailand and just write.

Yet here I am, eight years and two market cycles after one of the first Bitcoin exchanges got hacked, sitting in a house I bought in LA, catching up on bankruptcy proceedings.

Non hyperbolic claims

There’s nothing for me to claim, sadly. Whatever BTC I had at the time was spent doing the only thing anyone could imagine doing with crypto back then: buying drugs on the dark web. I must have spent millions on Silk Road at today’s prices. Stupid, I know, but there really wasn’t anything better to do.

I know what you’re thinking right now. You’re right. I’m flexing. I’m flexing because you’re struggling. We’re all struggling. Struggling to think about crypto and if you made the right decision. To buy. To sell. To work here full-time. If it’s gone for good. If it’ll ever come back. What It All Really Means in The Grand Scheme of Things.

I’ve had a lot of time to sit and think over the last ten years. My brain has spent more time lifting COVID-20 level batshit insane ideas in one decade of crypto than most will in a lifetime. You may have seen ATH’s, but I saw ETH at $0. When no one cared and you still thought I was crazy. Maybe you think I’m crazy again, but listen, babe, I just don’t care anymore. We’re not even close to the bottom; $1,200 is a dream. That’s why we bought houses last year when everyone was buying monkey pictures. That’s why we laugh and send screenshots when someone tweets something we came up with last cycle. That’s why after all this time, I’m still writing long-form and you’re still reading. Because writing is a luxury and CT can barely afford to read.

Sorry to be a dick, but this is a bear market. Scroll up. Read the sign. That goes for you too, lady. In case you haven’t heard, we’re in the middle of a global recession. No room for bullshit when everything is hyper-inflated. This is what a bear market sounds like. Meow. Get used to it. If you don’t like it, leave. Unsubscribe. See if anyone cares! ᵔᴥᵔ

But if you’re hungry, stick around. This is where the good shit gets made.

Non hype zone

You see a lot of nonsense in a decade of crypto. Bulls, bears. Promises, betrayals. Triumphs, downfalls. Unicornshit trades in pairs. We hear a lot of the same old, same old with every new cycle. The formula goes like this:

“X” is broken. ”Y” extracts too much value. Decentralize “Z”.

Substitute something that actually works for “X”. Choose someone you don’t like for “Y”. Pick any industry for “Z”. Add a token. Subtract any commonly understood definition for value or utility. Boom. You have yourself a white paper. Er, a pitch deck. Wait. What cycle are we in again? Right. That one again.

Non light

Time brings clarity. What becomes clearer with time is that crypto is about what you don’t see. Crypto has been and always will be crypto. Short for cryptography. Mathematical smoke and mirrors. A finite game of shadows.

Not web3. Not the ownership economy. Say it with me: crypto. Do I need to spell it out for you? C-R-Y. Finish the rest yourself.

The stuff you don’t see is as important as the stuff you do. And what you don’t see on CT, at conferences, and in news headlines is what happens in the dark. You don’t see Satoshi’s dirty laundry going into the washing machine. All you see is “ICO boom.” You don’t see the artist quietly lining up crypteau-riche patrons on Telegram before the NFT drop. All you see is “sold out.” You don’t see the CFO quietly making an edit to the Swiss balance sheet that turns millions of dollars in Company A into billions in Company B. All you see is “round closed.”

If you wanna know, ask about it. If not, keep it moving.

Non vision

What’s even harder to see in crypto at the moment is a world I want to live in. Good luck meeting someone with an imagination, let alone a vision for the future. Gone are the days where self-proclaimed crypto prophets professed radical world views fully departed from our precious base reality.

Assassination markets? Dead. Killer AI DAOs? Gone. Futarchy? Forget about it.

I’ve watched people either get soft or go mad over the years. Egos balloon. Cortexes atrophy. The pendulum swing from left to right. We deserve this. All of it. Yet somehow we still deserve more.

The best meme we have for a God Protocol today is still a baby-eating Carthaginian goat. The best LARP we have for a decentralized autonomous organization is National Treasure DAO 2. The best blueprint we have for pioneering a new world is The Sovereign Individual, but make it web3 💅. From the guy who had his name tossed around in a Bushwick back room as a potential candidate for Trump’s Head of Whatever by Steve Bannon’s child actor BFF and a newly minted crypto billionaire.

Give me a break.

I came for liberatory techno-social systems and all I got was network states. I came for tokenized hypertribes and all I got was Ape Fest. I came to drink from the quantum fountains of enlightened giga-societies and got served midwit seltzer in the mateverse.

Look, I get it. We have to start somewhere. Make the territory visible by mapping it. Good. Make your enemy visible by putting a face on it. Great. Make your community sustainable by finding a revenue model that doesn’t require dumping tokens on them. Perfect.

But also.

You can’t think outside of the box when you are the box. Wear a mask long enough, you start to become it. Have a third of your token supply held by someone who has the emotional regulation capacity of a teenager, then fine, I guess food and beverage seems like a really great option.

You’re doing good work. Hard work. But don’t forget where you sit on the chart.

Non-stitutions, non states

Technology is supposed save time, not waste it. Every worthwhile human invention made it easier for us to do more work in less time with less people, not the other way around. That’s why everyone on CT is sitting around talking to ChatGPT and going “Oh god, oh fuck.”

So tell me why the best idea for DAOs at the moment is getting the “smartest” people around the world - all that time, energy, attention, capital - into one place to do the simplest, most boring, most mundane thing I can possibly think of: buy a copy of the U.S. constitution.

It’s so banal that it’s almost perfect. A bright shining emblem of the brainrot endemic in the American crypto imaginary. We are so fucking lost in Western consumerism that the most radical way we can think of using an actual time machine is to buy a copy of this country’s founding document. To do what? Start a network state? Yeah, you and what virtual army.

Newsflash: You can’t form autonomous zones within a nation state without armed conflict. Good luck selling NFTs to your virtual country club when states have a monopoly on violence. If you had actually finished the Sovereign Individual, you’d know this was the one worthwhile idea in that book. So stop telling kids to drop out of school unless you and your internet swarm of libertarian WASPs is willing to provide firearm training and teach Krav Maga. At the very least quit decrying “cancel culture” as if your VC firm didn’t create it and your magnum opus didn’t depend on it.

Or just be honest. You need this. Because you think it’s a marketable meme. You want a bunch of people to get inspired to use your clunky secret voting tech and validate all the hours and capital we poured into building tech with next to zero external adoption.

Sorry if it stings, but this is desperation territory.

We 👏 need 👏 a 👏 new 👏approach.

And non-Nipponese metaverses either

There’s nothing new under the sun. That’s because the sun isn’t new.

Every metaverse I’ve stepped into has a single point of failure. Do you know what it is? Hint: it’s not AWS. It’s not Zuckerberg.

They all have a single point of light in the sky. Why? Did you even read the Three Body Problem, or did you just grift the Dark Forest?

Gravity. Euclidean geometry. Rectangular skyscrapers. Bipedal humanoids. 24 hour time cycles. Capitalism. Why are all the starting assumptions for “the new world” the same?

Sci-fi writers from the early 20th century had more wisdom teeth than today’s roving bands of green-pilled paddle shifters and biz-techno hentai peddlers. Now we live in a world where the only races people can think of are colors. The only classes people can imagine are what you can afford to spend on an NFT. The only world people can dream of is one with more chains.

The dream is dying. Time to return to the real metaverse and get back to work.

Non dumb questions, just ideas

And before you open your mouth and say something silly like “it’s easy to sit there and critique while the rest of us BUIDL,” kindly go back to your metaverse and fly a kite. I’m not falling for your grift again. The other thing you learn when you’re around long enough is that grifters like to sit around and wait until people disappear so they can steal ideas and claim them as their own.

If you came here seeking α, get in line. Until then, you’re gonna have to sit and suffer the chaos until it’s your turn to play. Like everyone else. And we’re going to make you pay this time.

Mama said if you’re good at something, never do it for free. And Mama was always right.

Qiao, 0x

P.S. - Hey, Mirror. I can’t move pictures around. And could you please let my readers do something interesting like unlock the kawaii version of this post with an NFT switch. Like dark mode, but make it web3. Qapiche?

Our values: plurality, sustainability, systems-thinking, mindfulness, persistence, self-sovereignty

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(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ Dream big, start small, stick together!

WORLDWIDE - January 1, 2023 - Mochi!, a decentralized team based in five cities, spawned a coordination game that helps decentralized teams save time and stick together.

People working remote today suffer both from overwork and declining motivation. Both maladies stem from an always on, work from home setting that lacks in-person social signals that humans rely on for motivation in the workplace. DAOs are no different. In fact, DAOs suffer even higher coordination costs given their remote-first approach, aversion to management, and high degree of pseudonymity. With the recent market downturn, DAO participation has dropped precipitously. DAOs have become all but ghost towns.

How many times have you felt the excitement of joining a Discord, only to never return? How many times have you showed up on time to a daily stand-up, only to waste it waiting for no shows?

Mochi solves these problems by sending you automated messages for daily check-ins in Discord, and sharing these updates in a public feed. Rather than relying on costly middle management to gather information on a team, Mochi uses a simple staking mechanism to incentivize people to show up every day and submit daily check-ins. Team members can read each other's check-ins, reducing reliance on a central point of failure (i.e. a manager) to stay coordinated. No more hounding. No more unnecessary meetings. But this is not what makes Mochi special.

Mochi's secret sauce is that it makes players more agile and self-aware through a daily ritual of reflecting, planning, and identifying obstacles. Rather than creating systems for watching over others, Mochi makes us better at watching ourselves, reducing the need for constant oversight in small remote organizations. This gives people a greater sense of autonomy while remaining aligned with the team. The time and energy savings are tangible.

Rather than creating systems for watching over others, Mochi makes us better at watching ourselves, reducing the need for constant oversight in small remote organizations.

"Our goal with Mochi is to help you realize your dreams," says @playerzer0x, creator of Mochi. "There are an infinite amount of dreams you can chase after, but it takes showing up each and every day to realize just one. Mochi helps you find that dream and stick to it. And save time in the process."

To play Mochi, go to mochi.game and connect your wallet to join our Discord. Take the New Player Starter Journey, then join a team in #mochi-mates. You can also start your own team using /team create in any channel. Set your goal using /goal, then visit your profile to bond with Mochi. Schedule your journey start date using /journey schedule, and that's it! On Monday, you'll start receiving reminders from @mochibot and earn tokens for every successful check-in.

"I absolutely hate wasting time," said Satoshi Nakamoto, a former bookkeeper. "To make sure I make the most of every minute, I check in with myself before starting my day. With Mochi, I have a kawaii companion that's along for the capital "J" Journey. And I never miss."

If you want to save time and money following your dreams, join us at mochi.game.

0x

Our values: plurality, sustainability, systems-thinking, mindfulness, persistence, self-sovereignty

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(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ Dream big, start small, stick together!

I once worked for a company that thought it was a DAO. It walked like a DAO, talked like a DAO, but in the end was not a DAO.

It was a DAO in the sense that no one told you what to do. Work on whatever, whenever. Just pump the price of ETH. You double-fisted two, sometimes three projects a time, then flexed for the meta-org if you were an ex-corporate gigachad. You taught organizational design. You coached the company softball team. You ran train on clueless Wall Street types that had never been to Bushwick. The freedom was intoxicating; hot air to a big balloon. I watched the company go from 30 to 1,200 in three years.

We resisted any structure that remotely resembled a triangle. Triangles = hierarchy, and hierarchy bad. Give everyone a salary, but no one gets a title. No managers, no bosses. They paid me to think this way.

We fancied ourselves architects building organizations of the future. Architects need building blocks, so we used circles instead. Circular metaphors are great because they look flat from above. Round trojan horses if you think in three dimensions.

The way you got things done was you knew the founder, Jim. You said Jim, I need money. If Jim liked you, he gave you some. Jim’s time was slim when I joined around 30, so you can imagine how tight it was when the body count peaked. Game theory told you to stay close to Jim’s circle; the only way to survive once consultants come knocking.

I was a happy little balloon until I hit a glass ceiling. I was liked, but sort of drifted from Jim’s circle by year 3. It was clear I wasn’t going anywhere with the circle I was in, so I cut ties and floated off into the darkness all alone. Didn’t know what I’d do next, but I was “intrinsically” motivated. I would simply find a new project, or will one into existence.

You’re right until you’re wrong. This is something you need to learn. Soon, I was skipping townhalls and calling everything “work” from home. Whatever intrinsic meant was starting to wilt like a neglected houseplant. An ambient state of decay without a project to call my own.

Had to find a way to stay motivated. If I didn’t, I was done for. And the only thing motivating me was writing to myself.

I care a lot what people think. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t write. Something I learned from reading Wikipedia is we act different when we’re seen. We get nervous, perk up when someone else is in the room. Happens to electrons even though they don’t have nerves. So I started posting writing where I thought that I’d be seen. Give my ego a little boost. Sounds dumb but it worked.

In almost no time at all, I was the most read person in the company. It was noxious and addictive. Nicotine to my ego. Read receipts were coke drips to my feeble little rat brain. Sort of turned me into a terrorist. A transparency insurgent. This one time I was bored so I hacked the company printer. Sent a ransom note to the whole company promoting my new blog.

Things work until they don’t. That’s another thing you learn. Busy people don’t read, and if no one reads it’s over. Cryptokitties, Coinmarketcap - whatever it was wasn’t me. I started to feel isolated. The opposite of what I needed.

So I did what any sane person does and reached out to my readers. And to my surprise and utter horror, they were lost just like me. Young. Fresh out of college. Working on ten things at once. If you learn anything from doing nothing, it’s the same bloody thing.

Before you save the world, you need to solve your own problems. We all needed accountability, so I stuck us onto teams.

Pick any goal, I told them. Send ETH to commit.

It was just me and a spreadsheet. That’s how it all started.

0x

It’s time to stop blaming tools for our problems. Tools are not the problem.

The problem is me. Telegram won’t fix me. Who's building decentralized Discord? Stop it. I need help.

I came here to shill Mochi Discord but decided you're an adult. Make your own decisions. Turn off notifications. Mute your phone. Leave channels. You know. Adult stuff.

The real reason Discord sucks is because I haven't been on it. I've been out. Invading dreams. Dating dumpster fires. Throwing above average parties. Talking to people with more money than me about What We Do.

I'm back now. Sorry. But you never write me either.

We made mistakes managing our Discord. Opened it up too soon. Treated Discord too much like a public forum. Tricky because we're a Party that's also building a product. We need to announce, troubleshoot bugs, which has the effect of killing vibe.

We're testing Discord Forums. Maybe we'll go private again. So I can talk to you like this. Short and sexy, like time on earth. Like the life of Wand Man. Like Danny DeVito on acid.

Forget the town square. The future of social is token gated communities.

Think about it: do you hang out in Times Square? Think billboard people are real? Hang with rando’s dressed like Spiderman giving away free investment advice? Do you follow or are we friends?

I want to build my online life. With someone. Specifically you. But I don't want to do it on Instagram, Twitter, or Telegram, or any web3 versions made by Rahul Ligma.

There's just nowhere else to go. So for now I'll write here.

0x

Our values: plurality, sustainability, systems-thinking, mindfulness, persistence, self-sovereignty

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(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ Dream big, start small, stick together!

Somebody build clairvoyance as a service. Or make a non-fungible invisibility cloak.

Give me Real Actual Magic or go home and fly a kite.

Jobs was a magician. Did yoga, went to India. Gifted a book about Indian wizards to everyone at Apple. Made a real magic wand so you could watch teens dance on TikTok.

A muggle on the streets of Hyderbad casting spells with your old iPhone. Imagine that.

Free ideas: Teleport me to Jericho. Put my meatsack through the Wailing Wall. Pick my fine ass up in Paris and lay it down in Tokyo. With your mind. I demand Professor Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters-level freaky deaky telepathy.

I'm not comparing myself to Jobs. But we do have some things in common. He wore Issey. I read Yogananda. This version of the Gita led me to Ethereum.

We also named our companies after food.

More free ideas: Provably neutral systems for benevolent state-level mind control. L2 astral projection bridges. Allow lists for token-curated baptisms. Token-gated chastity belts. Zero-knowledge concubines. Interchain omnipresence. ENM DAO.

Spread the decentralized gospel. I want to be fucking everywhere.

That's where the similarities between us end. Stevie preferred hardware. Bad with people. Made us more digital. Married his college sweetheart. Wore the same turtleneck every day.

I'm kind of the opposite. More meta. A luddite when it comes to hardware. Prefer analog. Bad with women. Think I overdid it with the pleats.

And yeah, wands are cool but have you ever built a wizard factory?

0x

Our values: plurality, sustainability, systems-thinking, mindfulness, persistence, self-sovereignty

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(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ Dream big, start small, stick together!

Imagine a world without time. What if you didn't have to wait an hour in traffic, or until the movie ends? What would the world look like if time didn't exist?

We live in a world of rules, one of which is time. Rules define how the world works. Without them, nothing would make sense.

Take apples for example. If there's one thing we know about apples, it's that they fall on people's heads.

When we say an apple falls four meters, we measure movement through space. If it takes one second to fall, we measure movement through time. When we combine them and say the apple takes one second to fall four meters, that’s velocity through spacetime. Using simple rules, we make up a game called physics and play with the world around us.

Sounds obvious, but it's easy to overlook obvious things. Like the fact that it would be impossible to measure stuff without light. Light comes from the sun (duh). Without it, we'd have a hard time seeing, let alone measuring how far the apple falls. We'd never even know about apples without the sun. They wouldn't grow, and neither would we. Apples wouldn't exist.

Lots of things wouldn't exist if the sun disappeared. Like time. What is a second anyways? An arbitrary unit of measurement that tracks the movement of the sun. Everything revolves around the sun.

Humanity orients around it so we can count how many suns something takes. How many suns it takes to cook breakfast. How many suns it takes to eat. How many suns to build a fire before night falls and it’s cold. Everything we do can be measured in suns. After enough sun cycles (~30,000), we get tired and then we die.

Such is life in our sun-based coordination game: get as much sun as you can before you run out. Some call this finite game of shifting suns "capitalism." Let’s just call it time.

Time is the great coordinator keeping everything stuck together. And yet we're always complaining about time as if our clocks came unwound.

Humans are bad at keeping time. Bad at saving it. Spending it. Estimating how much is left. Paradoxically, we spend a lot of time in crypto trying how to figure out how to give it away. We never have enough of it. Constantly losing track of it. Always wishing we had more of it. Wasting it as a result.

Remember that thing you said you'd do tomorrow because there wasn't enough time today? You were supposed to meditate, read, write more, but tomorrow never comes.

Remember your first time rebellion, when you killed your 9 to 5? That hot new startup that nearly ended you. The DAO that ate your time?

So you work around the clock now. Always on the go. We're a new generation of sun slaves chained to calls in different time zones.

Time is lost. Time is broken. Time is turning away from the sun. I hate losing time more than anything, which is why we made Mochi.

Mochi is a coordination game that saves time. We help DAOs and decentralized teams stick together. Spend less time coordinating and more getting stuff done.

Mochi takes lost time, makes it visible, and redistributes it for the public good. Simple rules for a simple game to save your remaining suns.

Let's save the world together. But first, let's save time.

To help us save time, click here.

0x

Our values: plurality, sustainability, systems-thinking, mindfulness, persistence, self-sovereignty

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(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ Dream big, start small, stick together!