Decentralised Autonomous Organisations / Collective Intelligences

“I didn’t think the leopards would eat my face” - person who bought $LEPF (Leopards Eating People’s Faces) token in the ICO

general reflections

This was an engaging and interesting seminar. Unlike most of my classmates, I had been exposed to much of the general concepts of web3/crypto before taking part in it. So those parts were less interesting to me. The NFT space, however, is one which I have very little experience with, so I gained knowledge of the makeup and functioning of that particular sub-scene.

I was a bit surprised that Amanda and me were the only ones who already had a crypto wallet. A number of my less techy (and non-artsy) friends got somewhat into it during one of the various ‘bull markets’, so I would have expected more people to have some direct experience with DLTs. Perhaps it’s partly a gendered thing (web3 being quite male in general).

It was also amusing to see that we were using Tezos, a network I had bought into when it first launched (and then initially regretted my decision). It’s interesting to see how this world has evolved and continues to evolve.

Also, I learned more about IPFS, which I had not read much about previously.

the assignment: thinking of a web3 idea - NOUVEAU FISH TOKENS

As the name - a play on words (of questionable quality) around the elitist narrative of ‘nouveaux riches’ and NFTs - suggests, perhaps, this project is half-joke half-implementable project.

For reference, here is the presentation as a pdf.

The basic idea is to create a pattern for ‘progressive’ differential pricing based on self-selection. More concretely, the aim is to get rich people to ‘freely’ (as participants in a market) choose to pay more for a (distributed design) product of identical quality to one that is much cheaper (and can be bought or built by poorer people).

The mechanism for this is the following.

1) create a 3D model, 2D drawing and/or set of instructions that people (either individuals or existing organisations) can make (themselves) - i.e. following a distributed form of production.

2) create NFTs (represented with decorative QR codes that are stuck/made visible on the products) as a kind of branding or ‘certificate of authenticity

3) these NFTs represent (verifiably) that you ‘own’ not just an artefact that follows certain specifications set in the design, but that it is also a ‘real’ one. This is similar to adding a Nike logo onto a sweater or of Picasso signing a print of his work.

4) use and reinforce social pressures ‘rich people’ (people of a certain level of income and who feel the pressure to justify it or show it) feel to create incentives for them to buy these (in practical terms useless) certificates of authenticity (in the form of NFTs).

Examples of such pressure are scenarios include conspicuously consuming people (and their peers judging them for not having a ‘real’ product) as well as ‘hippie/hipster rich’ that like to show how much impact their money has (since it’s distributed design that these NFTs are funding, as well as the cheap prices for poorer people, there is a ‘positive impact’)

5) This can be obfuscated or enhanced by adding the service of quality control (replicating the - partly imagined - original model of trademarks), as well as speculative incentives (if you sell your artefact with the certificate, you may make more money).

6) make sure poorer people do not replicate this irrational behaviour (historically a danger).

7) ????

8) PROFIT (and fund distributed design for the commons)