Recession Nostalgia
Recession Nostalgia
We are now reaching that point in the hypercycle where you look back, see the signs covering the glass, and think…
Is this what the Summer of ’77 felt like, now with attention addiction machines in every pocket?
It seemed easy. Decentralize all of it. Every platform, app, and device we’ve learned to depend on in the mobile web era. Do it quick. Build on the narrative arc given crisp poetic-mathematical voice by Satoshi, to pick up the pieces post-GFC… before the next one comes along. Do it for everything. Don’t just stop and spectate at open source money.
What connects SBF to Musk to the rest of the recent rogues gallery, and a reminder of why we’re here, isn’t so clear. But, should it be?
Maybe it’s too obvious that ads + algorithms run the internet.
It hides in its glare the why and the how of chaos ladder climbers buying humanity’s “town square”, only to tear it all down before anyone in web3 has had the chance to replace it entirely.
Information quality, discoverability, the human connection, how algorithms drive and limit reach, confidence your archives will be available after the next downtime adventure — it all gets noticeably worse by the day. Meanwhile those not yet laid off struggle to remember which microservice keeps the closet lights on.
It leads directly to how SBF can perpetuate the largest false flag banking fraud in history, while we’re all too busy chasing distractions.
And the future promises more beatings until morale improves. Gating off free expression with implicit threats of deranking and political violence at the point of identification. Currencies that can be turned off when you offend or parody the sensibilities that be, wear your hair without a hijab, express solidarity for ZC crackdown protestors, or just plain stumble through the invisible cracks.
Where’s all the wagmi gone?
Let’s return to the principles that got us here so far.
How fast is creative AI moving? Can you really tell how much of this line I wrote? What about how much more is still to come?
We have forgotton too often what we fight for. The entire purpose for decentralization and rights to what’s worth so much that it can’t ever be rescinded.
The thing about the mix of web3 and AI is how it allows each of us to make ideas and desires we’ve held onto into something shareable and real. What we never thought we’d have the time to do, is now faster to make, while we save money, build skills, and create at high quality what would have taken so long to make by hand that we would have instead lost interest over time.
With text to text, text to image, text to video, text to music, text to marketing, text to textiles, and more, we grab hold of the narrative arc, of our timlines and public memory, instead of continuing as passengers.
It’s the narrative to production method to storefront to sales funnel pipeline that replaces the malaise of blaming crypto for the attention-addiction & CeFi machines.
Here’s how this is playing out now and over the coming weeks in the DIGITALAX ecosystem:
• DIGIFIZZY vol 2 to be released this month as a 24/7 live stream with a new publication method and a first issue focus on AI &/or Art.
• Continued deep integrations of Lens into every corner of the ecosystem, with a redoubled focus on how arweave helps us build memory in public.
• A drop management system has been built for IRL web3 fashion realms (Started as a submission to the Chainlink Hackathon and will be released December 2nd).
• Today marks the release of the first male web3 fashion synth collections within the ecosystem.
Remember, remember why so many of us got into this to begin with. Empty or full, too often, we don’t have pockets. If that’s too crypto-poetic, remember instead why Vitalik got into building Ethereum. He didn’t have a way to save, in a decentralized public memory permastorage, the assets he earned in latent, virtual, and IRL spaces, or to trade them permissionlessly with who he wanted, when he wanted, for however much he wanted. So he started the ball rolling to build on the Nakamoto consensus blueprint, as a way to carry what we value with us.
Be like Vitalik. Build your own pockets, in fabric and code.
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