Coming Soon: $CULTUR

The Culture¹ is a new guild for Virtual Beings, Avatars, Digital Identity.

The Culture Guild grows out of the 5700 folks on the Virtual Beings Facebook group, the 1000 plus Virtual-beings-summit.com attendees and the artists, engineers, founders, technologists working flat out every day to create the avatars, virtual beings and digital identities that will power the metaverse.

With the rise of the metaverse², and with over a billion dollars spent on avatar NFTs (that number is for cryptopunks alone)³, the world is rapidly embracing 1. Virtual Beings 2. Avatars 3. Digital Identity.

These are three terms for the same thing: The virtual people that will populate the metaverse.

Avatars and virtual beings are changing the game for digital identity and creating early tribes for the coming metaverse. This guild will also create avatar projects to help push the artform forward.

Many of us already are comfortable with this shift to the metaverse: we are avatar’d to the nines, looking into our friends’ computer generated eyes, dancing to songs sung by virtual popstars⁴.

In just the last few weeks community NFT Guilds have formed around avatar projects⁵ — Partybids on crypto punks (where hundreds of people can gather as a guild to buy and then exploit and create content around a cryptopunk — which today costs $150,000 and up for any individual to purchase), Axie Infinity guilds with Yield Guild Games, Bored Ape Yacht Clubs.

The ability to create a virtual being or avatar that people project emotion and storytelling onto is deceptively easy, but to do it well is rare and, already, it’s worth its weight billions in crypto and fiat, and will be worth many hundreds of billions in the immediate future.

And this is the core skill set of the Culture Guild.

Meet the new guilds… same as the old guilds

In the Renaissance — the portrait was a way to express one’s arrival, status and role in society.

Artists were paid handsomely for the hundreds of thousands paintings needed for the emerging trading class to claim their place in society.

David Hockney, in ‘Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters’⁶ , described the way that Guilds allowed huge technical advances around painting by sharing Secret Knowledge among trusted peers. These guilds were able to move artistic techniques centuries forward in just a few decades during the Renaissance — and to produce the paintings which the emerging trading class required to show their status.

The emerging metaverse class will require multiples of 8 billion living portraits of themselves. And the more ambitious of the metaverse class will have multiple synthetic identities — some AI powered, some expressive of sides of their personality — And The Culture Guild will help create them.

Guilds were responsible for the radical change in portraiture in the 1400s — the incredible realism of the portrait on the right by Van Eyck (1433) was brought about with guild-based knowledge of concave mirrors, lenses, camera obscura. The $CULTUR guild is growing knowledge for the billions of living portraits in the millions of styles and hundreds of technical approaches that the metaverse will require.

Indeed, David Hockney has said, describing these guilds: “Van Eyck’s studio was the MGM of the day … you could say Caravaggio invented Hollywood lighting”⁶.

The Guilds that were DaVinci’s, Vermeer’s and Van Eyck’s studios transformed the abilities of medieval portraiture from expensive, awkward works open only to institutions like the church to something accessible and magically real, all powered by technology closely guarded by Guilds.

Look above — on the left, an image from medieval times, where the face is… bluntly … not right.

Then on the right, note the extraordinary detail to the reflections in Van Eyck’s eye — all produced with technology that would be familiar to any photographer and cinematographer today — but magic 600+ years ago. These guilds even used light-sensitive chemicals found today in film — which would turn the canvas into “primitive photographic film, burning images onto the canvas”.

Shared knowledge among a mutually incentivized guild drove incredible innovation. The Guild that Caravaggio built around himself projected images onto canvases using camera obscura (500 years before cinema and photography were invented) and then ‘colored in’ on top of the projected image..

Looking to the past we can see that a guild structure like the ones of the Renaissance can both empower explosive innovation, and also bring amazing art in reach not simply of powerful institutions like the Catholic Church, Kings and Emperors but to an entirely new emergent class. Then the trading and middle class, threatening entrenched power, today the metaverse class.

Guilds’ great ability to innovate is incredible: they developed techniques powering early cinemas in the 1500s —here are lenses used by Della Porta in 1589 in what Hockney calls ‘the first cinema’ — a lens shines the image into darkroom where his audience sat “Outside he had actors and props, real animals and pantomime ones with children inside, riders, weapons. They were projected onto a wall of the darkroom.”

To serve the new metaverse class — a class based not on wealth and power, but on ambition, the internet and a willingness to dream of virtual world s— Metaverse Guilds are starting to form at a rapid pace — with similarly incredible opportunities for innovation and for undermining powers as they exist.

Whether it’s the guilds growing up around Squiggles⁷, Bored Apes⁸, Axies/Yield Guild Games⁹ or even Friends with Benefits¹⁰, a guild that is often described as ‘Soho House for the metaverse’ but which could go much further (Disclosure: I’m a member), there is an explosion of new structures to quickly build community of trusted, mutually incentivized peers.

Come on down to the Bored Ape Yacht Club Riverboat Casino! Party with the apes at the grand opening of the BAYC Riverboat Casino in Decentraland — the first official BAYC hangout in the metaverse. Music, vibes, and an epic (play money) poker, blackjack and roulette tournament powered by our friends at Decentral Games await.

The innovation of today’s guilds is cryptocurrency — since all guild members own a mutual NFT and can work together to increase the value of the NFT or own tradable social tokens that can be traded for fiat, every member. financially benefits from the growing value of the community. If a member with one skillset asks another member “I love what you guys did in that project, how did you do it” they’re incentivized to share and to push innovation forward.

Renaissance Guilds were driven by diverse missions — God, money, sex, art.

For today’s guilds, including The Culture Guild, that mission is the metaverse.

Can you join The Culture Guild?

The Culture Guild is for those slightly unhinged folks who are fascinated by becoming digital people, creating digital people — and want to learn, contribute and trade knowledge around a skill (building avatars, virtual beings, digital identity) that will only grow in value over the coming century as the species digitizes.

There is a famous quote from the founding year of Italy, normally a patchwork of city states: “We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians” — and so it is with the metaverse: We have made so much of the metaverse. Now we must begin to make metaverse citizens.

Avatars, virtual beings and digital identity is how you become a true citizen of the metaverse.

In 3 years, everyone young will be virtual beings, will have a virtual being as a close friend.

In 10 years… everyone will be virtual beings.

And it’s happening right now.

So quickly —

In the last 6 months, the living portraits of Virtual Beings, Avatars, Digital Identity have moved forward faster and faster— an avatar now can be minted as an owned living portrait in seconds from a photograph and be seen as ‘the new me’ by millions on Twitter and thousands in virtual worlds.

If you are curious to be part of this aggressive change to reality — applying to The Culture Guild.

The brilliant work of Dylan Mayoral animating a Bored Ape (@dylanmayoralnft on Twitter) — head over there to see the full, brilliant video. An artist can buy a 2D image of a Bored Ape, create a 3D avatar of it, and power it in the metaverse with motion capture.

“It’s the incentive economics, stupid”

The guilds of DaVinci, Van Eyck, Caravaggio were economically incentivized to work together, to share secret knowledge, to advance the artform above themselves.

But they were, of course, businesses, making the equivalent of hundreds of millions by creating portraits for the emerging trading class.

For The Culture Guild to work, a shared economic incentive is necessary : to encourage the sharing of Secret Knowledge so vital to any artistic Renaissance.

To create that shared economic incentive, The Culture Guild is powered by the $CULTUR social token.

Here are some of the features coming over the first Seasons (each ‘Season’ being a roughly 3 month time horizon to help organize and structure work, starting with Season 1) of the Guild :

• The guild meets in Discord and the decentralized metaverse, for those both holding at least 25 $CULTUR for Season 1 and who have been accepted through the application process. A bot will check the connect wallets of members (at launch an explainer around Metamask and wallets will be up on the site).
• The guild is powered by a treasury of millions of $CULTUR, tradable for fiat currency, controlled over time by a DAO of members.
• With 25 $CULTUR members can vote on what the upcoming DAO does, including voting on future Season proposals, membership committee leads, product leads, monthly budget proposals, grant-giving.
• The Guild controls a treasury of Avatar NFTs, AI-powered NFTs, AI voice and animation models and virtual beings NFTs. As a holder of more than 25 $CULTUR you can use any NFT in the treasury for virtual beings experiments.
• The guild hosts the Virtual Beings Summit each year to welcome new members of the community and to share advances — attendance ranging from 5 to 50 $CULTUR.
• The guild funds products at between 100 and 10,000 $CULTUR, for projects that advance virtual beings, avatars, digital identity in the fields of animation, art, simulation, fashion, self.
• Each year, the guild treasury will host a hackathon and, on voting, sell one new Avatar, Virtual Beings, Digital Identity tool or NFT to continue to fund the treasury and advance the state of the art, aswell as grow the value of the community and social token.

Season 1 is coming soon, but apply here to get started, a limited number of applications will be accepted for Season One to help maintain cohesion at the start of the guild.

[1] Named in honor of Iain M Banks’ ‘Culture series’ of novels, often cited by Elon Musk, about a federation of AI virtual beings and humans. Most especially ‘The Player of Games’, Iain M Banks (1988)

[2] The Metaverse: What It Is, Where to Find it, Who Will Build It, and Fortnite, Matthew Ball, Jan 2020 https://www.matthewball.vc/all/themetaverse

[3] Total Value of All Sales of Cryptopunks is 321.86 Ethereum (at time of writing, Aug 13 2021, worth $1.07bn) https://www.larvalabs.com/cryptopunks

[4] https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/09/fortnite-ariana-grande-concert-metaverse/

[5] https://avc.com/2021/08/the-opening/

[6]David Hockney, ‘Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters’ 2006

[7] https://medium.com/squiggledao/introducing-squiggledao-9c059d6f42e0

[8]https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/why-bored-ape-avatars-are-taking-over-twitter

[9]https://a16z.com/2021/08/19/investing-in-yield-guild-games/

[10] https://medium.com/friends-with-benefits/introducing-fwb-pro-313d62183678