Shakespearean avatars, crypto remittance, and matching with gamers
A crowdsources program from our participants
Last week’s format was a mystery to us, the organizers of this 20-week long asynchronous conference, as we asked our participants, members of the Discord community, to run the program for a week and share their wisdom with us. And so they did, via a series of beautiful talks and presentations. We couldn’t feel more grateful for their unique contributions to our program!
We started by getting our creative juices flowing, and played the analogy game with Meredith Lewis, writer and facilitator. Could you compare yourself to a place? And if Web3 were a place, what would it be? What if it were a film or a TV show? One participant saw it “as a fascinating blend of creative non-fiction and drama,” the other as horror. Meredith quoted Leo Tolstoy who had said, “With great literature, it boils down to one or two stories: either a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town.” So which narrative is it for you, regarding Web3? Of whose stories do you find yourself a part? “I’m looking to be a part of someone’s story being told,” one participants resumed beautifully.
And speaking of analogies and literary devices, storyteller Megan Davis brought a fascinating one, to focus on the stories we tell that end up making up our culture. If today we can play around with our representations, we owe it to Shakespeare, Megan said, and how he’d revolutionized the ways we identify with personalities and characters. Before Shakespeare there was fate (i.e. a path laid out for everyone), and characters had to behave in accordance to their role and path, without deviation (i.e. King and Queen). But Shakespeare had said: “No, people are messy, contradictory; they’ll say one thing and do another; they’ll change what they believe, their goals, and what motivates them.” And it’s thanks to him that today we value flaws and see them as representations of personality.
So Megan prompted us to think: when moving into a community, what sides of yourself can you show? Rather than showing what is perfect, maybe you can highlight what’s not so perfect? What makes you memorable? How can we expand our 2D into 3D thinking? In Web3, what will your avatar be?
“In order to get to the truth, a lot of people have to be antagonistic,” one participant said, “The truth doesn’t just present itself on a silver platter”.
And what are some of the best ways we can create social impact in the Web3 space? We heard from Craig Schuster, the founder of RemittDAO.
RemittDAO focuses on international remittance payments from people groups in developing nations or from unbanked and undocumented migrant workers in host cities that are sending remittances on a daily basis back home to their families. Sure, there is WesternUnion, and it is deeply engrained into the societies in these developing countries—but it’s quite archaic (170 years old!), still dependent on the physical offices, closed during holidays and national disasters (significant in places like the Philippines). And there are other remittance services, predatory towards migrant workers. And Craig thinks that the new technological possibilities we have today can really change the picture.
During the Ethereal Conference in 2017 Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and CEO of ConsenSys, said: “An excess of two billion people don’t have banking relationships, and similar numbers don’t have a state issued ID. Though while they may be able to transact in their local context, this renders them non-citizens in the larger regional and global economies.”
So why does the Web3 not address this problem? Because the Web3 world got caught up in what’s “cutting edge,” Craig thinks. “It’s all about: let’s invent the next tool, the community around something new. As if everyone’s forgotten about this use case scenario.” In Craig’s opinion, the bigger picture here is: to change the societal attitude towards migrant workers who keep the economy rolling. The way to do that is through education—and the tools are already there. RemittDAO’s mission is to educate migrant worker families and refugees about the benefit, safety and logistics of digital remittance tools. Craig and his team want to host classes in Hong Kong, Singapore, and other host cities, where migrant workers could learn about the digital remittance tools they can use to build wealth in their families. To make it sustainable, they will be taught how to teach these workshops themselves, and help the ecosystem grow.
Futurist, founder and CEO of Redding Futures, Neil Redding spoke about the ecosystem paradigm of the metaverse and the aspects of decentralization, connectedness, and presence as the key tools for building a beautiful metaverse.
The world is made up of ecosystems nested inside each other (i.e. a person, an apple, a business, a society). Take mushrooms, and mycelium networks, that, in turn, resemble the internet. The more we study ways of mycelium and the ways it connects through the forest ecosystem, the more we will discover patterns that will help us consciously evolve collective behaviors that create ever greater health and capabilities, Neil claims. And in the Web3 world, we can practice building these patterns into the smart contracts in DAOs.
“What if we saw the world as connected instead of seeing it as a bunch of separated things?” Neil asks, “Connectedness is what’s left when our programming in the paradigm of distinction is stripped away.” Our ego takes years to become formed, and the constant, mostly automatic reinforcement requires of us to feel and think of ourselves as distinct — but through various experience, a profound sense of connectedness seems to be the default. “The tipping point is our awakening into intentional active participation in the ecosystems that we already inhabit,” Neil says, “And this is what will make the metaverse work.”
As we’ve seen over the last 15 years or so, the very nature of engagement via maximized socialization, of everything digital, is to disrupt our experience of connectedness with each other, and even with ourselves. But Web3 is a promise of a different kind of communication. “The guiding principles of distributed ownership and participation are our best hope for creating an immersive world that’s aligned with the things that ultimately matter most to us, humans: self-determination, connection with each other, and the freedom to pursue what fulfils us,” Neil says.
Using these tools as guiding principles can provide powerful lenses for unlocking opportunities of evolving our business models for greater resilience and greater resistance to disruption. And more broadly, these principles are essential for greater alignment with the greater ecosystem of the planet. As the physical and the digital converge, becoming expert in discovering and activating potential connections across all domaines is ever more important.
For Lily Snyder, Journey’s head of metaverse research, “One of the foundations of the metaverse is gaming, and the other is community,” and with her talk she looked to give tools to analalyze the Web3 experience and being empowered to make a good decision. Videogames contribute to creating the virtual world that is often thought of as the metaverse. And what makes a game a game? Each game has goals, rules, and feedback loops; and there’s an instant sense of gratification when we figure one of them out. A game is a problem to be solved, and gamers are volunteers who want to solve it. That means, a game can create visible results, and can be used for that purpose in the Web3 community.
And what about community? There’s a saying: “metaverse is the people’s movement.” A community comes together around a common belief or cause. Similarly to a game, through feedback loops, data and tools, it refines its goal. Using the minds and the collective power, it is unleashed, and is able to come up with the community owned solution. Whether through your contribution to building the metaverse, or NFTs, think whether your experience meets the standards we’re all aiming for: decentralization, possibilities of co-creation and collaboration, a sense of authorship and ownership.
Elyssa Goldberg, head of growth at Powder, also spoke about Web3 and gaming, in particular blockchain gaming. Its emerging popularity has to do with the mechanics of gaming that permit people to have some ownership over assets they have been collecting, Elyssa claims, including the interoperable avatars. Additionally, there is economic utility, meaning that it’s possible to resell the items accrued during a prolonged period of gaming. But at this point, most gamers are intimidated by Web3 gaming, including setting up a wallet, learning about exchange rates, and so on. And most studios believe that Web3 games marketing is labor intensive — one has to spend hours on Twitter and Discord — and impractical compared to Web3 practices.
At the same time a lot of games have to rethink their marketing stack, taking the community aspect in. There are adjustments, and Elyssa has taken us through the various examples of these, describing Powder’s first-hand experience in making Web3 games they work with approachable and fun.
Thank you to all our wonderful contributors. And to all our readers: join us, it’s never too late!
Want to learn more and join our 20-week-long learning journey?
Katia Zoritch, writer at the House of Beautiful Business
Beautiful Business in Web3 is the first community-run, asynchronous conference on the future of humanity, technology, and business in a decentralized world. It is run by the House of Beautiful Business in partnership with Hotwire, a global PR and communications consultancy.
