#MemeForTaiwan #NFTCharity
How to value a Flag?
memes, copyrights, community, blockchain and NPO
Hi, I’m mashbean, I’m going to tell the story of “The Flag”, a tactical mission that involved memes, copyrights, online community, blockchain and NPO.
This is a story of an icon developed from the 2020 Tokyo Olympics of which copyrights were breached after it lit up national enthusiasm. Instead of pursuing the common pathway of claiming copyrights through lawsuits, I transformed the icon into an NFT and subsequently created, validated a new model of Perpetual Charity in a trial run. This marks the new era of NPO/NGO funding and donation, in which we believe only digital solutions can address and respond to issues that the digital world has created.
Chapter 1 and 2 addresses the background of our initiation and the intricacies between The Flag, The Olympics and Taiwanese nationalism. For readers that are only interested in how an NFT can mobilise a Perpetual Charity campaign, please jump directly to Chapter 3 and 4.
Chap 1 The Flag
I’m a physician. 31st of July, 2021 was my last day in post-graduate year training in the Veteran’s Hospital and my predestined leaving of the clinical world. The television was broadcasting the men’s doubles badminton final of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Millions of Taiwanese witnessed the epic moment when the hawk eye announced “Court-In”, which means challenge unsuccessful: the shuttle landed right on the line, Lee and Wang claimed the championship with a landslide victory.
“Taiwan, China, IN!, Challenge, Challenge unsuccessful, Victory, Woooooow”
It was that eureka moment when I rushed back to my laptop, flashed up Illustrator, and sketched the 1st version “The Flag of the New Era”, or “The Flag”. I was even worried if I could make it before Lee/Wang stood on the podium. In hindsight, perception of time was slow to the extreme that I remember my actions in each second. 14 minutes later, 21:09 pm, I posted The Flag on Facebook, right before the ceremony. Minutes later, it went viral.
Perhaps the confrontation between Taiwan (ROC) and China (PRC) across the Taiwan Strait for over 70 years has rendered us supremely eager for Lee and Wang’s victory. Everything rolled out immediately after my post, by 21:37 an alpha variant of my design had already appeared below my post. It showcased to the wider population in the online community that they themselves can also be part of the creation process. In the next few hours, beta gamma delta variants of The Flag sprung up million times faster than the COVID virus strains had evolved.
Among the thousands of shares of my post, ex-PM Lin Ching Yi’s post created a second wave of viral spread and even more variants. Suddenly all social media platforms were flooded with green flags, the colour that was transplanted (yes, I’m a physician) from the badminton court onto The Flag, later identified to be Pantone #198964. For the first time in history, Taiwanese people were having an online liu-shui-xi (an afterparty that typically takes place by blocking the alleys and roads in town centers in rural Taiwan villages). It has been such a long time since Taiwanese people, albeit living on the same island sharing a common language, have owned a common icon that spans the spectrums of political symbolisms and ideologies.
Herein unfolds the second chapter of the story: the death knell of copyrights, and their collateral damages.
Chap 2 Death Knell of Copyrights
As far as I know, Hong Da was the first designer to post souvenir mock-ups online based on The Flag. Even I had that adrenaline rush to buy one of them outright: they were simply spectacular. Hong Da’s design, again, went viral, with numerous fans anticipating day and night their official release. Hong Da even drafted a non-for-profit crowdfunding project that elevated The Flag’s value to an utmost level.
Unfortunately, as things unraveled, he soon found himself unexpectedly stuck in a huge shitstorm.
It all came to a sudden halt when Hong Da tagged Lee and Wang in his post asking them to advise a proper way of donating the income generated from the crowdfunding programme, only to receive a message from the player’s official account saying that they have no intention to take part in this plan. The programme ended abruptly when mocking and ridicules flooded in from copyright trolls and sham accounts.
Hong Da wasn’t the only one in the game, apparel companies who constantly sniff around for ideas also exploited it, yet they played even more ferociously, skirting the rules of copyrights. They cashed in squarely from the publicity of headlines. In the game of capital they seem to have become the ones that reaped the larger benefits. Ads were placed directly under my original post. I even witnessed copyright trolls trying to register a variant of The Flag, (fortunately it was an ugly one lol) as a trademark. Public discourse had started to be directed towards who owns the copyright of the icon. The players? The Hawkeye system? The Olympic Committee? Even AI was listed as a candidate.
A number of friends asked if I wanted to sue them, but I honestly didn’t care that much.
I would have added digital watermarks in the first place if I did, but what was the purpose of doing so? Tricks as such wouldn’t protect it from people with bad intentions, especially when we’re talking about such concise icons.
During my interview with The Liberty Times, I said “The common icon is shared by Taiwanese people of common time”.
On this island filled with anxiety, even a spark of national enthusiasm can ignite big fires. In The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore posited mankind as being the hosts of memes. We cannot control the direction memes flow. In the national celebration party held by President Tsai on Sep. 1st, she even asked Lee and Wang if they liked the iPass smart card with a variant of The Flag as its skin. #TaiwanIN. As the Death of the Author in contemporary times, I have enjoyed a lot more meme dividends than I had expected.
In fact, I was quite happy companies made profit from The Flag. Think about how many families the icon supported, how much trickle-down effect it had on the economy. I was also truly grateful to those who cared to touch the copyright issues. Taiwan is still quite a …. developed country, isn’t it?
By the end of Chapter 2 you might have thought how come we got to a dead end of this supposedly “good marriage”? Fortunately, some others further developed Hong Da’s idea and fulfilled it eventually. Howie Young’s Taiwan-IN Polo project and Wang Yzu Wan’s Badge Project are both lively examples that demonstrate warmth and act of skillfulness.
Nonetheless, the cherry pick of the quest, and the purpose of drafting this post, was my being triggered by the profit making activities. I thought: if private companies can successfully create and benefit from the liquidity The Flag conjured, why couldn’t I?
Chap 3 A Non-Profit Perpetual Motion Machinery on Blockchain
I was a doctor, I’m not Max Goodwin, but, “How can I help?”
As the original creator of The Flag, my pocket’s full of meme dividends, but there certainly will come a day when they expire. The haste of cashing in from these dividends (e.g. copyright lawsuits) will definitely make waste, not really an act of elegance. What if I seize the chance and funnel the attention from the online community to somewhere else that’s much more worthwhile?
Digital problems require digital prescriptions. My digital prescription is NFTs.
NFTs, non-fungible tokens, are being used in the blockchain world to mint digital art collections. To keep it simple, you can think of NFTs as certified digital art pieces.
An NFT is Forever.
2021 in the blockchain world was the Year of NFT where we saw exponential growth of digital art creations and record breaking auction revenues. By exploiting the characteristics of NFT, arts that were difficult to exist in the real world found their places on blockchain.
An NFT is thus More Than Forever.
I minted The Flag into an NFT, the only and limited edition, never to be reissued.
The Flag fervour could have been merely a historical contingency placed within the intertwined fate of Taiwan being an independent country and who represents the real “China” , yet my minting the original NFT engraved eternally this moment of history in Taiwanese symbols.
In the meantime, I came up with the idea of exploiting the traceability that blockchain technology endowed with NFTs. What if I can build in a mechanism to charge the “royalty, a.k.a copyright fee” each time the NFT is traded? What if I then donate the royalty collected each time? Do I thus create a Non-Profit Perpetual Motion Machinery? What a tantalising idea!
On my right hand is an abundance of meme dividends, rather than being kept as static objects, transformed into NFTs that guarantees future cash flow; on my left hand are NPOs whose operations had relied on notoriously unstable fund inflow. The breakthrough of this trial was to bring together these two seemingly irrelevant entities, whose inherent characteristics happen to complement each other perfectly, a match made in heaven.
I coined (a play of words obviously) this idea as Perpetual Charity. A bold experiment was then unfolded. We ran a trial to prove that every 10% of the transaction value can be directed to a designated crypto wallet. These funds funneled in the name of royalties can then be donated to NPOs.
Right after I minted the NFT of The Flag and put it onto Akaswap, an NFT marketplace that serves predominantly the APAC region, I asked 5 different supporters to trade it among themselves. Within 6 trades, The Flag crept up to 200 XTZ market value (22,000 TWD, or 780 USD), while the crypto wallet collected 7,556 TWD (265 USD) from these transactions, which was subsequently donated to Digital Humanitarian (DH), an NGO dedicated to telemedicine. Finally, I bought The Flag back using 22,000 TWD of my own.
I named the whole operation MemeForTaiwan, and I pay tribute to all my friends who were part of the operation.
p.s. XTZ is a cryptocurrency unit from Tezos, at this point of time 1 XTZ roughly equals to 150 TWD.
Chap 4 Digital Showers Bring Digital Flowers
After donating the seven thousand TWD to the DH, I received a friendly response from them. Though it was only a seven thousand donation, not seven figures, they were still over the moon. The idea of The Flag originated from the digital world, and it paid back reciprocally. Isn’t it a sexy idea to donate earnings from “digital art” to “Digital Humanitarian”? After all, the DH has expanded to over 100 branches in Taiwan, they truly are making a difference. To my surprise, United Daily News (UDN) discovered my experiment and published this whole story both electronically and in their newspaper hardcopy.
My last NFT creation marked the end of this trial. I asked DH to print MemeForTaiwan on their receipt of donation, and minted another NFT from it, naming it MemeForTaiwan #000.
Hereafter, every transaction of the NFT will generate 10% revenue in the name of copyright that will be donated. To Perpetual Charity. I will keep minting series of MemeForTaiwan #.
Besides the seven thousand donation and propping up the twenty two thousand market value of the NFT, this campaign has brought about unforeseen gifts as well. The warmth I received from DH, discussions about telemedicine, extensive press coverage, and happy teammates in this mission. Perhaps this is the unrivalled power of Social Capital and its liquidity.
To wrap it up, throughout the whole campaign I used the meme dividends that were about to expire, transcribed it into an NFT, and through cryptocurrencies channeled the wealth to non-profit donations. The mighty social capital and its compound interests, countless of which generated and circulated. Let’s call it Social Capital Monopoly. Special thanks to Dr. dAAAb’s podcast that introduced me to the world of cryptos and blockchain.
Final Chap
1st auction, perpetual charity.
The story of The Flag ends here. Starting from now, you can be part of the genesis of The Flag.
From the trial run we validated and confirmed how the invisible hand could keep the perpetual motion machinery running, generating endless donations to NPOs through these new rules of play.
Now, starting from 2nd of September 2021, I will officially launch the public auction of The Flag NFT. This time not 10%, but 100% full revenue will be donated to Digital Humanitarian.
For auction details please see below:
Auction period will be 10 days, till 12th of September 2021.
To make The Flag NFT a game in which all people can participate, I will forfeit the 200 XTZ market value as it is now, and start the auction from 1 XTZ (150 NTD). This allows every individual a chance to own The Flag. The receipt of this series of donation will become MemeForTaiwan #001. I have no clue how much the ultimate value will be, but in any case The Flag that was born by random chance of the universe will be flying in the metaverse eternally.
You might want to ask, what is the point of buying the NFT if The Flag can be downloaded directly from my Facebook account?
True, but download it as many times as you wish. The more the people use it the better. Why? Because the more it’s being used, the more stable the meaning of this icon will be, and the more capable of it to cross the boundaries of ideologies and flow of time. This is what Taiwan, a fragile island nation that easily throws tantrums, needs the most at this moment.
Therefore, you can swap this warm and grateful token into your collection.
This unique token, I endow with you, an endowment certified by blockchain forever.
Your collection is an eternal memory of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics held in 2021, scorching heat, badminton court, sitting avidly in front of the television, on social media, souvenir masks, the should be water under the bridge carved into history/eternity.
Don’t forget the Perpetual Charity that blossomed from these tokens.
Someday one of them might even become our flag. That’s where the value lies.
Digital nation/virtual community/The Flag, we are constructing the meaning of our own culture that should be scribed and circulated. I am fortunate to be one of them to create history. Now it’s your turn.
Translated by Wang Yu-Ren. Big thanks to him.
How to Join
Share this article if you like this story. Your action will generate a positive impact on Digital Humanitarian directly. If you’d like to bid in the auction, link to auction for The Flag https://akaswap.com/auction/38 Or click here to see how the NFT looks like https://pse.is/MemeForTaiwan.
