Ambition’s Mission for 2022
How we’re thinking about Ethereum as a creative medium
Ambition is a team of friends who build cool shit.
I spent a lot of time in 2021 trying to come up with a “good” way to describe who we are and what we do — the usual mix of buzzwords and big ideas. But after a year at Ambition, away from the whiteboard-walled offices and the judging eyes of VC investors where I spent my previous life, I think I may have finally gotten that stink out of my clothes.
Ambition is a team of friends who build cool shit. That shit is almost always digital but not always and I’m not sure that distinction matters anymore. Sometimes we make a 10-foot Worm stuffed with the guts of a beanbag I bought on Facebook. Sometimes we make a revolutionary SVG NFT that you can morph on-chain. Same diff.
We built a lot of cool shit last year (our next post will be a review of it) and we’re excited to build even more cool shit this year.
Wanna see what it might be? Well here’s the deck we came up with. It’s not really a presentation even though it looks like one. It’s a tool for thinking. It’s likely that the thinking described here will change and we’ll write more in the future when it does.
But for now here’s what we’re thinking high-level for the Ambition team and community in 2022:
Our Long-Term Objective
The first common thread across the cool shit we build is that it is always an attempt to expand the Ethereum environment as a creative medium. Even when we make things like Golos or Artsee which are less ostensibly “about” the blockchain we’re thinking about how they will interact with the blockchain in the future or extend blockchain first-principles like immutable transactions.
The second common thread is that we only make magical experiences and we absolutely require that making them is fun. If what we make doesn’t put a smile on your face, make you laugh or make you wonder how we did it then it’s boring and we’re not going to make it. If making it gives us trauma flashbacks to our previous lives in SaaS startups then we’re *definitely* not going to make it. We love working hard to make magic.
Animancy
You know what’s fun? Wizards. DnD, dragons, and magic and shit. If Elon Musk can be the Techno King then god dammit we’re going to be Technomancers – people who both use magic on and conjure magic from technology.
When we use our Technomancy, we call the process “animancy”— the crafting of magical experiences using:
• First Principles Thinking
• Spirited Collaboration
• Advanced Technology
You’ll notice things like “a paycheck” didn’t make the list. We’re not trying to make the top of the trending list with our projects, we’re trying to make the history books. There’s about to be a whole world of businesses and decentralized organizations out there desperately looking for “the magic sauce” for Web 3 and when they do we’ll have the magic.
2021 Recap
A full review of what we did last year will be available in our upcoming 2021 recap article. But TL;DR: We focused on learning about the Ethereum blockchain and its possibilities, developing repeatable processes for identifying and delivering on possibilities, building our skill in developing magical experiences, and connecting with a community of others who are doing the same.
What you see on the front end of that work is our NFT projects and our browser extension for viewing NFTs. Our key projects were:
1. Hexis
An NFT collection released every Friday Jan. 1- Dec. 31, 2021 on Rarible. It helped us learn about the NFT ecosystem, creating NFT art, and working with Smart Contracts. hexis.wtf.
2. CryptoJunks
An NFT collection of SVG Junks released April 1, 2021. The best CryptoPunks homage ever and the project that taught us how to write custom Smart Contracts and manage a collection. cryptojunks.wtf.
3. The Worm
A fully on-chain share-to-mint NFT on a mission to visit every wallet on the Ethereum blockchain. Released July 12, 2021. Our first foray into participatory storytelling, cult-building, soulbound NFTs, and autonomous agents. theworm.wtf.
4. Artsee
A Chrome browser extension that displays an NFT from your collection every time you open a new tab. artsee.wtf.
5. lil fks
Our Magnum Opus in shitposting. Released July 14, 2021. A collection of fully on-chain, generative NFTs that you can morph directly on chain. No trading traits, no burning trait cards or swapping NFTs, just an NFT that you can design and redesign on-chain whenever you want cause fuck it why not. lilfks.wtf.
2022 Areas of Magical Inquiry
We made it through our first year — good for us we bought ourselves Girl Scout cookies! We expect this coming year to be the one that really solidifies our place in the world as Technomancers. We need to both build out our existing magical experiences and dig deeper into the creative possibilities of the Ethereum blockchain.
These are the areas where we believe magic is possible and we’d like to experiment with making it:
1. Transactions made visible
Links are the mana of Webs 1 and 2. Google built its empire on associative indexing of web content that deeply learns the social context of that content via user behavior with and between content.
Social media platforms like Twitter gave people ways to publish their own content to the web and contextualize it with their real-life social relationships.
In Web 3 transactions are the basic building block of the web. As navigation they orient users toward content, users, and their interaction. Like links and the content hosted at them they are the basic building blocks of data that can be contextualized into knowledge.
We’re interested in the many ways transactions can be contextualized but in the short term we’re most interested in starting with how transactional history can be made visible in NFT imagery.
2. Authorship and collaboration
Authorial context still lives almost exclusively on Web 2. Are the DoodlePunks an official derivative of the CryptoPunks and Doodles, or not? Do they need to be official (i.e. , does the Doodle license permit permissionless collaboration or not)?
With current practices the blockchain itself cannot provide the answer. Instead this context will need to be discovered on Web 2 services like Twitter, Discord servers, or in the ToS and legal documentation on websites.
Why? If transactions are the mana of Web 3, surely providing on-chain context for the authorship of these transactions can provide a wealth of information.
This might be especially helpful in the case of permissionless collaboration, the cross pollination of ideas that CC0 makes possible.
3. Soulbound NFT Use Cases
When we created The Worm in June/July 2021 we made the Holograms it leaves behind permanent because we knew a permanent NFT could do things all others could not. NFT enthusiasts tend to focus on ownership, but permanent ownership unlocks all kinds of new use cases. We called them “perma-nifties.”
Six months later Vitalik Buterin wrote about the concept of Soulbound NFTs, which is the same thing. We’ve always believed in the power of this kind of NFT and been interested in demonstrating it. We will continue demonstrating it for both autonomous agency of beings like The Worm and what we call “dumb” reputation management.
4. Reaching & Onboarding People
Like authorship, reaching people in Web 3 is still very much a Web 2 game. Much of the NFT audience is oriented toward influencers and the easily repeatable memes and phrases they post on Web 2 platforms. If this is the entrée the general public receives into the world of NFTs I’m afraid we might be losing the culture war.
But upcoming projects like Paper Cats offer hope. Paper Cats has a ton of potential to onboard the public to NFTs in a friendly and educational way. How might we do the same? Our projects serve as fun examples of advanced NFT mechanics. We’re in a position to serve as Secondary Ed.
We need in 2022 to not only reach people with our projects but help people understand why they’re so special. If they can understand what is so great about a lil fk they’ll be well-prepared for so many things that are to come to the Ethereum environment.
We’re also interested in threshold objects for The Metaverse — displays, toys, and other objects that exist in the physical world that bring audiences into the digital world. Artsee is our first attempt at a screen-based threshold object. It’s a browser extension that displays an NFT from your collection every time you open a new tab on your monitor. Big Worm, our 10-foot Worm stuffed animal is another kind of threshold object. It represents a digital animal which you can also interact with in the digital world.
Threshold objects by their very nature help people cross the threshold from the physical world into the digital one and therefore are an interesting area of exploration for teams like ours that seek to onboard people to The Metaverse.
Most of the cool shit we come up with never makes it to the build stage. Our desktops, Google Docs, and sketchbooks are littered with the ideas that never made it. We stack their corpses up and climb to the top where the view is better.
The “how might we” questions above are the ones that get our little monkey brains moving behind our sexy technomancer faces. That may change but after a year of working in this space they’re still gnawing at us. So, don’t expect too far a departure. Or do? The landscape here is … well, you know.
A few things we really, really want to do
We have learned not to publish detailed roadmaps. We do our best work when we can iterate and feel free to change something because it makes it better. If we make promises to you we might end up making promises to deliver something that could have been better had we been able to change it.
At the same time there are things that we really, really want to try to accomplish this year. They are:
- Collaborate with at least 13 creators
We need to expand our network, build our community, and experiment with authorship magic in real use cases. - Make The Worm fully autonomous
We need to set The Worm up to live and travel on for eternity without us. We can do this by turning its contract over to the community. - Build lil fks functionality for transactions made visible, permissionless collaboration, and “dumb” reputation management
The lil fks are truly amazing! There’s so much they are capable of that hasn’t been explored yet. We need to experiment with their on-chain morphing for permissionless collaboration and “dumb” reputation management capabilities. - Enhance the Ambition ecosystem
We think of the blockchain as an ecosystem and we need to make our projects and brand one, too. We need to continue building out all of our projects AND finding ways for them to work together under the Ambition umbrella. Your Worm Hologram can see that Junk you’ve got in your hidden folder … what is it gonna do about it? ;)
Stay Tuned…
There it is: Our plan for 2022 subject to change of course. We’ll be making updates throughout the year and posting about our progress here on Medium.
The best way to follow all of our projects is to subscribe to our publication, Ambition.wtf, follow us on Twitter at ambition_wtf, or join our Discord.
We’d love your thoughts and feedback — drop a comment or join the discussion in Discord.
