Techno Viking was the meme that really started it all in some ways, for DAOs, tokenized collectives, and web3 culture at large. For me, already deep in the USA rave scene at the time, or perhaps a little past it, this dance-walk was the meme that seemingly launched a thousand ships, mine just one of them, as we left the promise of web1 internet vision and buckled up for new directionality and challenges in online participatory cultures.

I think of Techno Viking as a response to earlier notions of digital autonomy. In Hakim Bey's T.A.Z., we glimpse a basic picture of spacial rupture for disincarnate action, where potentially "anything" can happen, apart from constraints of the cathedral, concreted laws, power structures, etc. It is a plea for anarchistic, ecstatic action, which felt for a while like what was most needed, but as it turns out was not enough.

In spaces of rupture and freedom , we see the need for moral agency and emergent patterns of attunement. Our current, web3-centric, novelty culture of trustless activity and economies are founded on this, and we now have the technological structure to actually perform it. Techno Viking's 4 minute opera presents some of the humanistic articulations of this beautifully, presciently, in addition to the general hilarity of a very-tough-looking-character showing emotion, moral poise and extremely fluid dance moves.

Techno Viking, in a plot synopsis, enacts several episodes in a fairly complete dramatic arc while navigating the July 2000 Love Parade in Berlin. His appearance from stage right, to forcibly remove an aggressive raver violating the personal space of another raver, starts a stare-down where we see the viable strength and moral character of Techno Viking blooming. His pointing finger shows confidence, without violence, as he asserts a willful stance toward community management and boundaries. Techno Viking is soon offered a water bottle (the raver symbol of empathy and community), and this allows him to recapture his feelings of integrity with the Love Parade. Refreshed and brought back into the safety of his people, he catches a groove and proceeds to march in lockstep with his brothers and sisters, in a encapsulation of PLUR values and rhythm, time advancing on the parade's collective waves of agency and hope.

As we move through web3 digital culture building, in what sometimes seems like a chaotic, extractive, zero-sum game, we are in fact experiencing this movement, and within it many of the plot elements Techno Viking enacted. We are creating boundaries for action (digital micro-communities), ways to see each other's beauty and value (airdrops, incentives, reputation, alignments), and the rhythmic, unstoppable momentum of a splinter economy that is multi-agentic and as vibrant and nurturing as any dance.

In Alex Galloway's "Protocol", an observation of web2, we are reminded of the dangers of digital structures that carry within them centralized control mechanisms, such as algorithms curried by centralized social media, state based data trackers, etc. Techno Viking reminds us that our digital spaces can instead be intrinsically managed by human agent actors, given the right space and tools to do so, and that within this a particularly rich personal experience and civic shape can develop. That's where we are today, and the Love Parade moves on, with tens of thousands of Techno Vikings, rabbits, anime characters, and others, marching onward globally, in a beautiful dance that is autonomous and radically collective.

Coordinape has been in the oracle game for some time already. In a way, we’ve been dabbling in both of these things at once, as human intuition meets trustless computation.  We are in the business of helping people collaborate, consider each other’s value and generate context for onchain actions.  Historically, this has been through a simple social tool: the Gift Circle, which allows a collective truth to be authored for DAOs and working teams.  The Gift Circle has been used for internal decisions such as distributions of credentials, governance or payment tokens, in some ways not unlike like any other oracle (i.e. Chainlink or AMMs to help process complex DeFi transactions).

Now, we’re building something more generally available. Recently, we’ve brought GIVE, the same medium of exchange in Gift Circles, way out into the open. Anyone can send it on Farcaster or in CoLinks, to assign value to someone else’s skills  As of just this month, GIVE histories are being rolled up onchain for general use and consumption in an EAS (Ethereum Attestation Service) data layer that any contract on Base, or any app with the ability to read onchain data, can use. What’s more: anyone can add to it.  The Social Oracle (Base schema #261) is open for any and all data providers that want to become a trusted source.

We’re calling it the Social Oracle, because it sounds cool. But, it makes sense: the schema takes in social data from a broad range of web3 actors and peer-to-peer actions, and provides a reliable format and data source for the consumption and assessment of collective knowledge. The Social Oracle is a general repository for the context and reputation of any wallet that participates in GIVE, and soon even more than that (we have plans). Every time a GIVE is sent, we bring that GIVE onchain along with its associated natural language context and some other useful data, creating an attestation trace connecting one wallet to another.

We think this becomes useful for many onchain user stories, such as value accrual and distribution, discovery and connection, research and attribution. And, we think this kind of pattern, using collective trusted intentions to help qualify user experience and ownership, is going to help define how the next phase of the internet works. Onchain and online will become more and more related, and we’re here for it.

Want to get involved?  Find us in our discord. We are working on incentivizing the first round of Social Oracle builders.  The Social Oracle is an open tool and Schelling point for anyone to add to and use, because we really are all gonna make it together.

At Coordinape, we've been working on a multifaceted application for GIVE. What started as a way to collectively sense a group's value produced in Gift Circles (which have been used by tens of thousands of DAO contributors since 2021) has been morphing. Now, GIVE is available in public arenas like Farcaster and CoLinks, where it is used to help people attest to each other's skills and the value of ideas.

One day, a few weeks ago, 8% of total Farcaster DAUs sent a GIVE to someone else, via our proof-of-concept GIVE Party. Growing GIVE's social applications doesn't end there. Get ready for new Frames features very soon. But, we're also working on imagining what makes the GIVE data we already have as valuable as possible to web3 builders, token sendooors, data aggregators and org coordinators by bringing it onchain.

A database (where it lives now) is not where we think GIVE should live. There are a lot of GIVE. Forty one million GIVE have been sent in our apps and using a hybrid model of offchain points has helped that happen. But, GIVE data should be publicly owned and fully interoperable. Soon, we plan to explore the most based places it can land on public ledgers, to allow the connections it represents to become a utility to the web3 community. We're researching how this data should propagate, how it should be structured and where it should live, but suffice to say it will be one of the better public archives of web3 contextual social data yet created when it goes online.

The graph of peer-to-peer GIVE connections is centered on collaborative value transmitted and created, and the combo plate of scarcity, context richness and atomic history in GIVE is like nothing that has been created before, in web2 or web3. As a public good, it will allow us to collaborate and find each other better, see each other better, and build legos on its trustless data. We're thrilled to get it into a more useful state onchain.

But getting this data onchain is really only half the project. We also have lots of work to better understand the data, too. When one wallet sends GIVE to another wallet, there is a lot of context that can help us unpack how we should interpret the transaction. Included in this are Persona attributes, like who are the wallets, what is their transaction history and token / NFT holdings, their likelihood of humanity, reputation in various contexts, interests and location in the social graph at large. These markers can help us determine the value and meaning of a GIVE attribution, and lots of these qualifiers can be sensed via wallet history and page-rank style closeness assessments. There are protocols, AI projects and algorithms out there working on being great at this already, and we want to collab with them too.

Just as important is the Location of the transaction. What was the social or organizational context of a GIVE send? Some GIVE are sent in the context of DAOs, some in the context of Channels. The fabric of organization is radically open and porous in Web3, but also maintains identifiable gates and boundaries. Recognizing the situational quality of a GIVE transaction is vital to understanding what any given GIVE really means.

GIVE has been designed to carry its own context, too, which is produced at the time of transaction via user actions and Coordinape interfaces. Really, that's its secret sauce. We capture qualitative data associated with each GIVE sent. In Gift Circles, that includes the organization and epoch in which it was sent, such as we present on CoSouls.

And, Skill Tags are super exciting here. They were piloted on CoLinks and are now available on Warpcast too. Through these tags, GIVE is used to create catalogs of endorsement style attributions of talent between internet frens in an infinite number of groupings and lists. You can be endorsed as great at Marketing, DAO Leadership, GIF Art, Ghouls and of course "Based" via GIVE, among hundreds of other tags users have created since we launched this feature a few months ago. The more context onchain the better, and we expect this skill archive will be valuable to aggregators, social media users, autonomous agents, A.I.s and future of work participants, among others, once available.

The new internet isn't just a protocol, its a web of collectively owned social relationships, and GIVE is working to become a primary monad as this structure emerges, in myriad onchain locations, to become the defacto way we relate online.

come find me in CoLinks -- colinks.xyz