30 oblique thoughts, principles, quotes, and questions for thriving in web3 - James Beck

Image Source: Midjourney prompt [a crypto conference in the style of Hieronymus Bosch]

Whenever you're creating a piece of content, stop and ask: If I didn't work here, would I watch or read this?
The Seventh Generation principle: Great Law of the Iroquois which holds appropriate to think seven generations ahead and decide whether the decisions they make today would benefit their descendants. How will the things we build today benefit people seven generations from now?
Your blog is not a publication.
Spend time in kitchens, gardens, and libraries.
Phenology is the study of the relationship between the changes that come with the seasons. What has changed between DeFi summer and the third crypto winter?
If you are feeling creatively stuck, try flipping through Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies — “Each card contains a gnomic suggestion, aphorism or remark which can be used to break a deadlock or dilemma situation.”
Every marketing employee needs to be the voice of the customer. When was the last time you submitted a ticket or submitted a PR for MetaMask?
Test dapps. Founders in web3 need more feedback loops with their users. Let’s drink our own champagne.
Find common ground with people and ideologies you disagree with, instead of categorically rejecting them.
Honor your error as a hidden intention.
Olga Tokarczuk – Nobel Lecture (in English): “How we think about the world and—perhaps even more importantly—how we narrate it have a massive significance, therefore. A thing that happens and is not told ceases to exist and perishes.”
At ConsenSys we get to ask ourselves every day: what is money? Money is never independent of social and political relations, or of culture. It is based on trust and social values.
Gardening not Architecture.
If you want to understand the vision of web3, read Steven Johnson’s Beyond the Bitcoin Bubble (2018).
Finance commodifies. One unique thing can be assigned the same worth as another. We can place a” thing” in a ledger and find it is transformed into an item that can be traded for another. Finance’s commodification necessitates ownership. Entire politics and people have been rearranged to suit the needs of ownership.
Ask your body.
Baudrillard’s, Simulacra & Simulation: Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no original or that no longer have an original. The fourth stage is pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Are NFTs pure simulacrum?
Work at a different speed.
The term “phenomenology” is often restricted to the characterization of sensory qualities of seeing, hearing, and tasting: what it is like to have sensations of various kinds. This notion can be expanded to think about the significance of objects, events, tools, the flow of time, the self, and others, as these things arise and are experienced in our “life-world.” How can we appeal to the phenomenology of Ethereum and the people we market our products to? In other words, how can we connect with the “life world” – feelings, emotions, sensory qualities, the significance of local objects, and the self?
Read about Bowie bonds and how if he lived today he might have used royalty streams from current and future album sales and live performances to collateralize tokens instead of a paper bond.
Judith Butler: “There is no ‘I’ that can stand apart from the social conditions of its emergence, no ‘I' that is not implicated in a set of conditioning moral norms, which, being norms, have a social character that exceeds a purely personal or idiosyncratic meaning.”
Criticism is love. How has Web3 fallen short of its promises? Do enough people participate in DeFi governance and should it be one coin = one vote? Is crypto the next step in the over-financialization of everything? Are governance tokens just equity for early supporters to cash out? Don’t be afraid to question our own dogma.
Be very suspicious of adjectives and adverbs. Strong writing is about verb choice. Adjective: The wind was very strong that morning. Verb: The wind howled that morning.
Listen to David Ogilvy when writing marketing copy: “On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
Think about nexus -- the connection between your last paragraph and the proceeding. The end of your thought is the beginning of your next thought.
Compare A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace with A Declaration of the Interdependence of Cyberspace.
Read, My Collectable Ass, by McKenzie Wark and ponder: “As with any other financial instrument in a portfolio, the artwork in a collection gains and loses value at the volatile edge between information and noise.”
“The crypto space is often accused by people from the art world of being commodified and hyper-flipped. People buy and immediately put the work up for auction. On the one hand, this is not the best thing for art. But on the other hand, blockchain has made transparent what has always already been at play.” - Simon Denny
Haruki Murakami: “Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work.”
Practice reciprocity in all things. A gift requires a gift.