web3 is sketchy and stupid but also it's not
In late August of 2021, I started getting involved in what is colloquially referred to as “web3”.
To the average person, this means “a bunch of NFT crypto Ponzi bullshit scams” and to be super fair, they’re about 70% correct. Maybe even 80%, depending on the day. It’s unregulated, totally speculative, and can be highly profitable based on nothing more than some chucklehead’s whims or hype machine that day. It’s often little more than high-speed day trading but the assets are low-effort jpegs commissioned off Fiverr by bottom-tier predators who treat each other as exit liquidity and pat themselves on the back for skimming a $5 profit off something they botted and ruined to get in the first place.
Encouraging, I know.
But as with all things in this world, there are two sides to it. If you can hold your nose long enough get past the stench of bullshit, there are legitimately good people doing good things, there are really wonderful DIY communities, there are a metric fuckton of talented artists trying to support themselves, and there are very smart people using the technology to do legitimately interesting stuff.
What started for me as supporting a dear friend who wanted to investigate this new medium for his art turned into helping out my friend Harper’s brother Dylan with a project and then led, inevitably, to me becoming co-founder of a startup. For anyone who knows me, this turn of events is the absolute least shocking thing imaginable. Of fucking course I ended up with a new company out of this. Of course.
And, because I’m a fairly lucky guy, Dylan turned out to be an absolutely wonderful human being who is now one of my dearest friends and Nervous, the company we run together, does really neat stuff for really neat people. We did a huge token launch for 20-year old clothing brand The Hundreds that has become one of the flagships in the web3 space for “this is what a really good tokenized community built around a brand looks like”; we did a deeply cool art project with David Choe, who is one of my favorite contemporary artists, where you bought your token and then answered a questionnaire about yourself that determined the final form of the artwork; we helped some friends release a serialized novel where the character who’s token you hold is the narrator for each episode, and we helped some more friends release a collection of characters where each one comes with a unique set of audio stems that are AI generated, and the holder has full commercial rights both to the character image and the audio which is spawning a whole cottage industry of folks creating music using these pieces and parts.
We’ve done more than a few small, weird art projects with artists that we like, we even helped my friends in the band Less Than Jake create a small tokenized fan club that they’ve been having fun with. We’ve managed to avoid all the weird, sketchy, cash grab bullshit in the space and use the technology to do fun stuff with good people in a way that we can all feel good about. We’ve turned down more projects than we’ve launched, in a healthy and responsible way. I’m deeply lucky to have a partner who’s morals and values line directly up with mine and while neither of us is getting rich off this, once in a while we make a good chunk of money that is gonna help me put my four kids through college, which is pretty fucking rad.
The thing I’ve found is that once you bypass all the bullshit, the bottom layer of all this feels very much like the punk rock DIY zine scene in the 90s. Hell, there’s even a digital zine called Sloth that I love that comes out monthly as an NFT for like $2. And there are few things I love more than the idea of taking a technology layer that is primarily being used by shitty people to grift money and instead using it to make art and build communities and help small businesses and artists and just generally do neat, interesting stuff. From stealing copies at Kinkos to pirating Adobe software to using free smart contract building tools and infrastructure to do token drops for your friends and fans, punk rock kids have always found a way to bend technology to their will and in doing so have made it infinitely more interesting.
Nothing that I’m doing in web3 is gonna stop people from spending $115,000 on a single NFT just for the status of owning it (goddamn I wish I was making that up), but at least I know that what I’m doing is using the technology in a good and constructive way that actually adds value to the world instead of extracting it. And if there’s a way for me to use rich people stuff to do punk kid stuff instead, fuck it: that’s a win.
Special shoutout to Non-Fungible Social Club for being exactly the kind of community that, on the daily, helps me keep the faith that all this dumb shit can be used for good.
If anyone ever wants to chat about the smaller, cooler, better side of web3 (a name I really don’t like but I don’t get to name things, I’m not that important) feel free to hit me up. I’m not out to hard-sell anyone or win over hearts and minds, but I do think there is good work to be done here and a lot of good people already working on it.