“NFTs are changing behavior by allowing pseudonymous individuals on the web to create a culture out of thin air in a matter of months”
-Decentralised.co newsletter (July 2021)
Time really feels like it is flying these days. Did anyone have Mike Tyson becoming a top NFT evangelist in their 2021 tea leaves? I sure didn’t (and to be clear, it’s awesome!). The pace of life is frenetic today. Why did things feel slower when we were kids? Perhaps it’s a function of recency bias or because life gets more complex as we age. It’s also a function of how our lives have been completely digitalized in recent years. While we were locked down during the pandemic, a sea-change in how we consume entertainment also occurred. Not being able to enjoy people’s company live helped us acquiesce as a species to living our lives online 24/7. This, I believe especially helped fuel the emergence of NFTs + DAOs.
We are still likely in the first inning of what will become a generational shift in how people consume entertainment, approach collecting, organize their identities, and construct culture. In this piece, I would like to especially unpack the implications of the last phrase, “construct culture”. What has it meant to create + disseminate culture across society historically? How will the deluge of NFTs + DAOs in our lives potentially change this in the not too distant future? My hypothesis is that we will see a mass acceleration of culture, one that will lead to a renaissance of creativity but also could introduce an extreme amount of ephemerality in our lives, which has all sorts of interesting consequences.
Let’s now define culture and what we mean by the acceleration of culture. In simple terms, culture can be thought of as the things we do because we want other humans to know we are doing them. Typically, a group of people agree on a shared set of things that they should be doing, and those are called values. There are all sorts of cultural values, from social-based to religious-based, etc. Accelerating culture means the things we want other humans to know we are doing are changing ever more quickly.
Why do we want other humans to know we are doing things? I contend that showcasing points of commonality helps humans easily decipher whether they want to connect with others. Why would people would want to connect with other people? There are infinite reasons that range from a shared curiosity in a subject matter to the unnerving observation that much of culture is self-referential. Self-referential means that the culture is X because the culture is X, and the fact that the culture is X strengthens the ability of the culture to be X. I am half kidding here, but how else could you explain otherwise why we all wore JNCO Jeans as kids? :)
While culture helps reduce the cognitive load that comes with deciphering who to build connections with, there is very much still a maintenance aspect to it. That is, culture is constantly changing as we take in all available stimuli across society and decide whether culture Y is better than culture X. Prior to the 21st century, culture tended to move more slower, because we were much less connected on a global scale before the internet emerged. One consequence is that it has taken decades or generations to see major cultural shifts occur throughout society (i.e. erosion in the belief of the American Dream). Moreover, fewer distribution lanes for connecting with others meant that culture tended to water down and revert to the mean. An example of this is looking at the number of television stations available historically in the US. There are more than 2x the number of stations available today than in the 1970s. Fewer ideas, memes, and trends were able to bubble up and gain main mass appeal back then. Pre-21st century, the eccentricities of culture (i.e., the wings/long-tail of the distribution) had a much tougher climb to become relevant to the mainstream.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/189655/number-of-commercial-television-stations-in-the-us-since-1950/
However, in the 2010’s, the explosion of smartphones + high-speed internet helped usher in the first great cultural acceleration. Memes proliferated on Twitter at a frenetic pace, Tik-Tokers popularized a new dance challenge every month, and structural generational shifts in how we value ourselves + society came about as the ashes from the Global Financial Crisis poured down and younger generations entered the labor forces en masse. For proof, see this 2019 Pew Center article — the change in major American preferences have changed in a whirlwind. Who would ever have thought that nearly 70% of Americans would support legalizing marijuana today?
The extreme digitalization, economic change, and demographic shift have all led to massive, iterative, and quick bundling and unbundling of cultural units across society in the last few years. Put bluntly, the world is evolving at lightspeed. I think this cultural acceleration is about shift into hyperdrive with the proliferation of NFTs + DAOs in the mass consumer market.
In the 2020’s culture will experience the next big acceleration because [1] NFTs easily link identity to units of value that can be consumed on a global level instantly; [2] DAOs let people easily tie the value of their identity to pseudonymous or anonymous personas; [3] pseudonymity/anonymity reduce the cognitive + reputational cost to create connections with others. The combination of these 3 accelerants will lead to massive cultural experimentation the likes of which we’ve never seen.
We’re seeing breakneck cultural experimentation play out in real-time with NFTs, which have risen to broad societal relevance in just a few months. While CryptoPunks + NBA Top Shots + Bored Apes were invariably the first to gain mainstream adoption (i.e. peep Jay-Z’s recent pfp), it seems like a new NFT craze has swept over us every day the last few months.
Why’d this happen? One factor is how crypto enables digitally-native communities centered around these NFTs to permissionlessly sprout like wildfire. So is the combination of digital scarcity, access rights, composibility, and pseudonymity that crypto provides out of the box. No one is barred from becoming a cultural influencer anymore — so long as you have access to a web3 wallet, you can participate in cultural creation without geographic, age, gender, or religious restrictions. To prove this point, it’s absolutely insane that Christie’s, which I view as a key cultural tastemaker for the mainstream, has already launched an auction of Bored Apes and Meebits, two projects that just launched in 2021.
Psuedonymity is a particularly fascinating can of kerosene for cultural acceleration. For all of human history, a person’s physical identity was undoubtedly (for better or worse) a key ingredient to culture. When we remove the need for a person to know someone’s name, nationality, creed, gender, etc. all of the flashpoints for how we have constructed society sort of go out the window. In my opinion, this has caused pseudonymous communities to rally with increasing ferocity instead around Ideas — and have relied on the best vehicles for expressing these ideas, namely hyper memetic NFTs. Psuedonymity lets us align around an idea rather than be distracted by peripheral influences (i.e. national politics, religion, etc.). This provides the ideal fertile breeding ground for ideas/memes/communities to move from niche to mainstream literally overnight.
I recommend you check out various Discords of various NFT projects to see pseudonymity in action. Very few folks use their real identity anymore. Instead, people use a fake name with an NFT avatar as their profile pic. This struck home recently when Olympus DAO launched their super cool Ohmie Cards (see below), which allowed community members to have their picture pasted on a Olympus DAO poster. Literally not one person uploaded a real picture. In the metaverse, no one cares anymore what you look like in real life.
Pic of someone’s dope Ohmie Card
Cultural memes like Hashmasks or MoonCats can also permeate like wildfire throughout our lives because there is no reputational blowback/cost to participating in these communities. Let’s say you don’t think Hashmasks are cool anymore for whatever reason. Go change your profile picture to something else. Go sell your JPEG on OpenSea. It takes 2 minutes to exit a community now.
Off-ramping your commitment to a culture is much tougher to pull off when it involves physical goods or real-world identity. I think the consequence of this reality is that culture will be increasingly ephemeral, with only a vaunted few memes able to maintain societal relevance in the long-run. For example, it feels like CryptoPunks will still be relevant in 10 years given its standing as one of the first NFTs. But Pudgy Penguins or Bored Apes? I’m not so sure.
It begs the interesting question of what will make cultural memes more likely to maintain standing in the long-term. Will society value a cultural cosign from the rich elite or mainstream media? Or will society value the particular Creator of a meme? My hunch is it will be the latter, especially for memes where the Creator actively cultivates an ecosystem of products and community centered around their creations.
Come for the monsters, stay for the frens: 0xmons is probably the most intriguing NFT ecosystem I’ve encountered, in large part because the main dev has built new composable products that reinforce the value of the actual 0xmons, and tirelessly curates an authetntic, impassioned community. I see 0xmons as a model for how memes will persist over the long-run in a society increasingly based in the metaverse.
So how will we see cultural acceleration playing out? I imagine in the not too distant future, new NFTs will regularly bring together communities of millions of people at a blink of an eye. DAOs will spin up and spin down in the most seamless manner as the replacement for Facebook groups. These spur of the moment melting pots sharing ideas and building together in public will likely set off a combinatorial explosion in cultural ideas that are shared across society and set off a stream of new beliefs, styles, and values. It’s also sort of wild to consider that we can for the first time measure the vitality of a crypto-native community because crypto lets us financialize everything. We’ll see cultural acceleration play out through increasing boom/bust cycles of DAO/NFT token prices, as believers turn into non-believers and vice-versa.
The inevitability of the metaverse is another tailwind for NFTs + DAOs to accelerate culture. The metaverse in its early days will inject a heavy dose of ephemerality into culture, because it’ll just so freaking different than the analog world. I think the metaverse will destroy the main friction point for change, which is the aforementioned self-referentialism that has entrenched cultural norms. In the metaverse, everyone will be starting from carte blanche, and so I predict the notion of what is cool, what is valued, and what is espoused will change at a pace like never seen before.
Again, the reason humans would buy into this handshake deal is because with crypto, we always have a way out via pseudonymity.
The acceleration of culture have huge implications for corporations as well (y’all are not getting off easy!). It likely will become increasingly difficult to run growth orgs as customer preferences will likely shift even more dramatically and unpredictably in the 2020s and beyond. Figuring out how to treat a company’s cultural identity (i.e. their brand) as a modular API platform might be a good analogy here. Specifically, perhaps brands will still have flagship values and messages they continue to espouse publicly, but the icons, representatives, and vehicles for distributing these messages will likely shift more quickly than ever to keep up with how culture is morphing like wildfire. Edit: After I first wrote this paragraph in July 2021, we saw this come to fruition as both Visa, Arizona Ice Tea, Budweiser and several other corporations began to market their brands by participating in crypto culture through purchases of Crypto Punks, Bored Apes, Tom Sachs Rocket Factory, and other NFTs.
Now, we can debate whether the acceleration of culture through NFTs and DAOs are net positive for society, and I think there are fair debates on both side. So often we as a society assume the next big shiny new toy is good for humanity and that is a misguided statement IMO. At the end of the day, however, I do believe an acceleration of culture by way of NFTs and DAOs are net positive because they democratize the opportunity for access to everyone. Knowing your gender, race, creed, or socioeconomic upbringing literally doesn’t matter anymore before being allowed to join a community and connect with other people. I would also posit that an acceleration of culture also fuels an acceleration of innovation, as both concepts are deeply rooted in what I consider the most noble of human ideals, progress. The next couple years are going to be fascinating for sure.