Serious Philosophy Goes On-Chain
Hey everyone, Dylan here. Life has gotten extraordinarily weird since last I wrote an article for this magazine. Amazingly, others have picked up on the dream and written for this largely inactive magazine over the past few years. But people must be wondering: do I still even like philosophy? The answer, probably unsurprisingly, is “YES!”
I’ve been off in the world doing some applied philosophy. That is, wondering what if and then networking with remarkable creatives from around the world to make things happen. New things.
My most recent contribution to truly philosophical literature can be found here, in the PizzaDAO Medium. That’s right: history happened to me. I was the writer in the room during the original call and I couldn’t wrap my head around what was going on at first, but the minute I realized what was up, I knew I had to write about it. Six months later that essay came out in one session and was positively reviewed by the Partially Examined Life community over on Facebook. I haven’t spent much time there lately, though.
With the Rare Pizzas crew, I learned a lot about blockchains and NFTs. I’d already decided to try to bring books on-chain, but I didn’t have any idea how to do it and Rare Pizzas gave me a method to apply to my madness. The resulting organization became known as PageDAO.
PageDAO has built some amazing things, not least of which is the viewer which works directly with OpenSea and should at least in theory be a piece of code that can be plugged directly into websites to allow for the decentralized content we’re creating to begin to make its way around the internet. Tweets still work best, however, so I’ll continue to embed them for the more significant developments here. Above: the Mask of Ganymede, a book by myself and a dozen other creators from all different backgrounds. We retell the story of the abduction of Ganymede with a few modern twists, such as the unique format the book was released in: it is an NFTBook which contains audio, text, and soon the ability to print on demand.
Next, we released a minter which allows a relatively simple NFTBook asset to be minted by anyone holding a PageDAO Member Card NFT. Permissionless systems often use unique markers to decide access, so we gave the tokens away to people whose book ideas appealed the most to us and allowed non-writers to buy them for .05ETH.
All of this has led up to the present moment: your author, T. Dylan Daniel, has a PageDAO Member Card NFT. That’s right! I can now mint as freely as I please, and I intend to use this to grow every publication I’m involved with. Rare Pizzas has already shown interest in minting the Medium articles they’ve produced to the blockchain to boost engagement; why not Serious Philosophy?
This is my reasoning as I make plans and prepare to move my work on-chain from Medium.com. I get more control over the presentation of my work, as well as more revenue should I choose to sell it. If you’ve written for Serious Philosophy, or would like to, please reach out to me on Twitter (@thomasdylandan2) and we’ll work out how to put your essay on-chain.
Alright everyone! See you next year!
