This is gonna be my first take really sharing my take on NFTS. So a lot has happened, as they have, seized the zeitgeist in so many ways.
I've been been pretty silent on it, just being calculated and very studious about it. So there are reasons why this is happening now, I have decided on my personal NFT strategy roadmap position posture.
A lot of research has gone into my pathway moving forward with my critiques of the various projects.
Non fungible tokens, you probably are not hearing this for the first time, digital collectibles, running on a hybrid dynamic between decentralized Blockchains and centralized services, servers and platforms.
You have this ability to monetize all manner of files and more abstract things like intellectual property rights and agreements and access and whatnot.
I'm not saying this because you should go out there and invest, or you should join the stampede before the bubble bursts.
But to know about it and to understand it, you need to know about ransomware, you need to know about NFTS.
You need to know about 2FA, you need to know about open source, a lot of things to be a responsible citizen of the Internet.
NFTs are something that I have been aware of since the very beginning of their existence going back several years as they officially were introduced into projects. It was very memorable at the time. There was quite a gap in enthusiasm for the NFT space.
Then things really took off mostly just this last year, in 2021, as mainstream, big time players, big celebrities and brands created a craze.
You could say it's just ongoing fomo-ing bubbles, period. That's crypto. That's the stock market. That's fomo, fear of missing out is what fomo stands for if you haven't heard that.
But needless to say, as a hardcore environmentalist, going back to being a teenager, fighting for the forest, I couldn't think of a more obscene trend, an abuse of the environment, even if there wasn't a huge gripe about the blockchain proof of work aspect.
Which is built on burning energy, whether you call it wasted energy or not is subjective, but the environmental footprint of proof of work blockchain technology, which comprises the majority of the value of the networks and the activity of the networks. It's totally obscene, and on top of being obscene, it's become absurd.
I have bite my lip about how disturbing and upsetting it is to me, the outrage I feel at the this fomo of bubb
It feels like rich people selling each other air.
Rich people buying air. You could say that about all collectibles, and you could say that about all art, it's all just very aristocratic.
It just parasitizes the creativity of the people, the working class, picking winners among the artists in the working class, and then trading around.
I take all of this from an ecological warfare and class warfare perspective to where it's just the bourgeois.
I am thoroughly disgusted and thoroughly disturbed and outraged about the calculus of evaluation when people are starving, people are dying, pandemic or no pandemic, the inequalities of the world, the disastrous environmental state that we're in.
Since I became ecologically radicalized, I've made some compromises of my own, of course, but I really feel like everything that I have done to use technology, it has been to sharpen my organic tools for liberating the Earth and healing the Earth.
I've been in technology for a long time, and I'm proud to say that it's been very much in the green sector, of VC startup capital, and in the open source technology, using technology to connect people in the environmental movement and to connect movements. So it’s making the best of it by any means necessary.
So when I think about the flippancy of the NFT space...if I was at a party where people were celebrating these massive gains of NFTS I would not be having a good time I would be.
Very sullen I wouldn’t be looking people in the eye because I would be thinking about all the healing that could be done with that capital. So unless that party was, not necessarily a nonprofit organization, but I will be attending the NFT parties where the celebration is in the way that capital is both reinvested and distributed, however leftist or socialist you wanna be or capitalist.
If that capital is not being deployed in some manner to empower people, liberate the Earth, liberate people, heal the Earth, heal people. I'm I'm not a fan.
Will I dismiss the whole thing? Of course not because, crypto is paying for this phone call right now, to tell you the truth.
I figured out what I wanted to invest in, when I wanted to divest and when I wanted to pivot to more ecologically sustainable options as they have emerged.
I'm appalled by the ecologically incorrect and the bourgeois hype of the NFT space and yet simultaneously I am of course invigorated by what I see as a very powerful tool to do the good works that I wanna continue doing and always have.
So now it gets to the fun part where, rather than just dismissing it and, and instead of actually having cathartic rage about it, I'm actually constructively improving it.
Be the change you wanna see in the world, etc.
Be part of the solution, not the problem. So I'm not pouting and I'm not bit bashing my head against a brick wall that this stuff exists.
Speculators gonna speculate, manipulators gonna manipulate, people are gonna be trendy.
There are so many things to me that just remind me of my early days of getting into punk and being like, F the mainstream.
I don't wanna keep up with this, I'm not impressed.
So I'm gonna go DIY and I'm gonna do my own thing and find people who share that mindset.
So anybody who's aware of the fact that the crypto punks, every punk rocker that ever lived and was true to the cause, is rolling in their graves at the idea, but again, everything's a paradox.
You wouldn't have a punk rock movement if it wasn't exploited by the marketers in the days of the Sex Pistols.
Everything is just a grand paradox. It doesn't really get you far, there's not a lot of momentum in trying to just be hateful of everything.
The good news is you have more options now than ever before to do the right thing by the earth as much as possible and, and take a greener approach into this.
I have been advising. coaching and counseling some people in this journey as well. I have sort of built up my personal strategy and vocabulary and whatnot.
There are a lot of decisions to make about just what strategy to take.
From a public relations perspective, on top of the personal ethical perspective, there's hell to pay, the the court of public opinion, if you make the wrong partnership decisions.
If you profiteer and exploit things in a way that will reflect poorly on your judgment.
If you wanna call it ethical investing, then I'm very serious about all of that.
This is the fun part, I'm going to redirect the dystopian narrative.
It's a very taoist, a very martial artist sort of approach to think of my enemy is this monstrosity of dystopian cyber surveillance technology that's destroying the planet. Well, how do you infiltrate it? And how do you then hack it? How do you hack the Matrix? Or how do you hack the metaverse. If it is your enemy, you can run away from it and hide.
If you feel as I do that I'm here to defend the people and defend the Earth, and I’m willing to infiltrate my enemies, as a means to those ends.
So there you have it. That's why I'm in crypto. That's why I got into web design and open source.
A lot of people are also on that mission.
They infiltrated the cryptography that was all about state craft, they infiltrated that. They exfiltrated it. There's so much interplay between those forces who want to enslave people and enslave the Earth and those who want liberation.
The absurdity that I feel really is this direction of a virtual reality. I was intrigued when I was, like, ten years old, and I have not spent a lot of time in those headsets.
I'm more optimistic about NFTS, and less optimistic about immersive digital environments.
The metaverse induces a kind of sea sickness, the nausea that's produced for a lot of people, especially females, as it turns out, the headset VR experience seems to have a disproportionate sea sick inducing experience for females.
Beyond that the universal effect that may take a few years to really prove out is just a massive epidemic of myopia, near sightedness.
It reminds me of The Jerk with Steve Martin.
You're gonna have people coming off of those headsets with their eyes crossed, and they won't be able to see 2 ft in front of them, not to mention what's gonna be done to turn their mind into hamburger meat from all of the stimulation and just being being sucked that.
I'm very unenthusiastic about a world in which people are seduced by dopamine addiction and manipulation into the seduction of something that's gonna destroy their vision, physically destroy their vision, if they can get past the nausea and the sea sickness induced by it.
I'm not even talking about the privacy invasion and the ability to totally brainwash and program people, surrender even more of their humanity into this cybernetic dystopia.
You could say, but, why not design environmental education experiences? Okay, sure, I'm for that. But here's where everything changes for me.
In order to not destroy the muscles that control the what gives us the ability to have near sight, to be able to change the focal point from a near object and an object in the distance.
There is this jelly sack in the eyeball, that gets either tightened like a drum or loosened like a drum, so that the light beams basically bend, or are straightened relative to the distance of the object on the horizon.
So, long story short, you need to have very fit and very nimble, very agile dexterity of that musculature in order that there's different interacting muscles that allow for the that sack of gel to either be taught or be loose, resulting in different experiences of the light hitting the cones and rods, and your perception of the outer world.
So if that muscle is strained to a point where it spasms and gets stuck, to my understanding, the cause of a lot of screen induced myopia, from phones and desktops now...
I remember there would be timers, little apps on the desktop, look up, give your eyes a rest.
Change the plane of your focal point so that you exercise near and far sighted vision.
You exercise those muscles so that you don't get stuck there.
That's, nowhere near as as devastating as what these headsets are gonna be.
The idea that people are gonna have any sensitivity to that or moderate that behavior? No, there are people who have been found dead in their video game chairs because they followed no cues of their body to hydrate and to nourish themselves, or to, I guess, even use the restroom.
So bless their souls. That's a real tragedy. So I'm sure we're gonna find people, shriveled up like prunes dead in their virtual reality headsets.
It'll be a shame. But if they do survive that experience, they are gonna come out blind, if not totally blinded, it's gonna be absurd that's why I think of the jerk.
So I don't myself want to impose an experience of a virtual world that involves a screen that is literally like 1 " or something from your eyeballs.
Maybe they will figure out some clever way to trick the muscles of the eye within that headset.
I wouldn't put it past them. I think anything's possible, but what I think is a more hopeful possible experience of an immersive environment would be something more like the Holo-Deck in Star Trek.
I don't believe we're getting close to a point with the interface where you would basically have basically enter a dream.
You don't get near sighted or far sighted from from dreaming, but that's a far cry from a virtual reality headset.
If the immersive, like hallucination, dream space is, what the Holo-Deck achieved, I think there's gonna be a lot of people whose eyes are gonna be martyred in VR headsets for however many generations of technology.
Until some way to program the dream space is figured out.
I can't imagine how perverse and invasive technology would be if able to enter your inner space, the mind's eye as it were, maybe through some sort of microwave technology, or possibly some sort of chemical interface.
But I think that is still quite a bit down the horizon. Probably. Who knows. It's not the bridge we're crossing now.
The bridge we're crossing now is like, do we put on headsets?
Do we allow children to live in headset land? And what is the alternative?
To me, the alternative, in lieu of that, holo-deck experience, is something akin to what they have in these tactical simulators, where you have walls of screens so at the very least, if you were in a giant warehouse, and the virtual environment was basically either projected or was displayed on screens, and you were interacting with an immersive environment your visual field would span hundreds of yards.
At least it would be more a theme park experience. It's an immersive experience, but it's like a visual theme park of screens. I'm not thrilled about that, but to save people from extreme, nausea and near sightedness resulting from being in the headset…
Obviously it doesn't scale the same way as a product.
I think it'd be easier to get venture funding for a for a device that people can own and you can sell billions of versus a model of franchising some sort of location like where people would go.
This could be done also, I guess, within your own home. Maybe a device is just like some sort of wall mount, or if you hang a projector on the ceiling, maybe there is an elegant way to take a room in your house and buy a device that basically turns the walls of the room into projected environments to where that's dynamic with the way that you are are walking across.
It's just harm reduction, as far as I'm concerned.
No one's asking me to consult on the environmental friendliness or the health and safety of virtual reality and the metaverse.
But I will say that I am forward thinking, and I am an artist and whatnot.
My hope would be that, because NFTS and the meta verse are so intertwined, and it's important to acknowledge the way that things are going.
If the NFT technology allows creators like myself to produce digital content that then is interacted with, displayed at the very least and interacted with in various ways immeasurable, infinite, unpredictable ways.
Then it very much behooves me to have an awareness, have a position on it.
My mission statement regarding NFTS would be that my creative works that are formatted and sold and licensed and contracted in the form of non fungible tokens, that they would be minted on the most environmentally friendly block chain option available at the time.
I would hope that they would be enjoyed and interacted with and displayed in immersive environments that are very conscious and aware of human health and environmental health and that there could be ever greener computer technologies.
Ever greener screen and projection technologies, so that, if people are going to escape their duty to really be present for what's going on in the movement to heal the Earth, and they're gonna escape from that, into digital realms that they do so in a way that feeds back positively, towards making the technology greener.
We should be working towards greening the technology, and the technology should be working towards greening the user.
I would love for it to all go away. Honestly, to me, the technology is the wetware that we already have that we're running away from, in these perverse dimensions.
To me, a perfect world is a world where we don't rely on mediation through synthetic environments, and that we enjoy the gift of consciousness that we have. And we are more experimental with psychedelic so that we really realize what we're trading and, and what to compare this to.
If you could somehow quarantine the destructive tendencies of the human imagination, instead of having people burning all the fossil fuels to travel to all the museums, you could put them in a VR environment where they would be able to experience that and stay put.
There could be some sort of elegant balance. And that's something I tend to also feel on the sort of utopian side of this metaverse phenomenon.
I'm not thrilled about it but if there is something to be said for reducing the environmental footprint of tourism...if a lot of the commuting and traffic could be neutralized by people working in the metaverse.
You move towards the matrix pod experience. But look at what's happening, what's been happening in Tokyo for a long time, highly dense populations and small living spaces.
I'm not trying to play favorites on any style of dealing with this. There's something different about Japanese culture, if I can say that there is such a thing at large, but there's definitely an ecological awareness. That battle between nature and technology is front and center in the consciousness and the subconscious, art and creativity that you could access through anime or video games.
There's a visceral eco-warriorship alive and well there.
Though we are warp speed into this momentum towards more time in immersive environments.
And we'll look back at the old interfaces of apps and social media feeds and zoom calls. We'll look back at that at some point, probably in the near future, and just think of it as more absurd than rotary phones and typewriters and the pencil, and even the keyboard.
I mean that that is gonna be an interesting world to live in, where people don't even know what a keyboard is or was because of whatever the immersive space is.
I'm not thrilled about it. I would be more thrilled about it if if there was a way to make these environments be using ecologically conscious block chain platforms and NFT minting platforms that are very ecologically conscious.
The idea of Steal this NFT, I hope you are of a generational sensibility that you would appreciate the sweet giggle that comes from the idea of invoking the spirit of Abby Hoffman into this time, and the idea of stealing this NFT so that's in the title for for kicks and giggles. Then the other play on words or the play on words I came up with as I was kicking and giggling with this concept was ...
The vegeverse because I'm really only interested myself in a metaverse that is going to help us be financially incentivized and be educated in a way that's going to help us replant the forest garden eally, reforest the planet be good agro ecologists.
Get our beautiful living out of a balanced relationship with nature, growing forest gardens and so if there is gonna be a metaverse let it be in harmony, with the vegeverse.
If you're gonna have people playing, let's say, all of the shoot them up war games that are gonna be already sort of in the metaverse.
But imagine all of that physical activity, if it was acted out in a more like real life, environment than all those players, they would be staying fit, getting fit, and it would be more like actual, real combat training.
Then in the process, taking all of the military training and putting it into a permaculture design site where all of the behavior benefits the Earth, all of the trampling.
All of the rolling around, all of the shooting of simunitions, all the shooting of air soft.
If you're gonna practice blowing things up, you could be blowing up using nontoxic artillery to create craters that you could then fill or dust with bentonite.
Then you have ponds.
Everything needs to be, at the end of the day, building soil, everything needs to be more than just carbon neutral or carbon negative in people's behavior.
It’s got to be building the soil and scattering seeds and actually net beneficial to the region that they're inhabiting, by extension, the global climate and everything else.
That's what I'm here to do as a permaculture designer, is to study human behavior, and try to, as I would make the inputs and outputs of chickens and compost worms and mycelium and tree roots and, duck ponds, and fertigation through the sludge of it, connecting all of these parts so that there is no waste and there is no pollution.
All of the behavior and activity is appropriate and is beneficial to the health and resilience of a dynamic, ever more resistant to shock, and more diverse, rich ecosystem.
So if people's behavior in the metaverse has zero benefit to the environment that they're in there, basically antithetical to human ecology, they're just becoming more and more toxic in their behavior.
And then the environment that they're acting with in the meta verse is just creating this exhaust of landfills, this exhaust of burnt fuel, burnt energy.
I am going to act alone and with others in ways to ensure that the forces that are driving people into the madness of this hall of mirrors, of synthetic, just ecosidal mania...that they're redirected towards being a beneficial element in a designer ecosystem.
If they're just gonna trample the Earth with their headset on, maybe I can get them to do that barefoot, in a way that they're gonna be mixing, natural building ingredients.
Actually creating a side effect that's beneficial to an act to an actual human ecological equation.
I will not be alone in this and it's not just about let's create an environmental education virtual reality, PDC.
I'm sure it'll be done. I will applaud that effort. In fact, that's what this is all about.
So no one's gonna say you're violating the spirit of permaculture by using the Internet to put people in front of screens and they should only be out there, hands on, in that real classroom.
No, I mean, we know we need every tool in the tool box.
And the online permaculture design course experience has probably been the most powerful accelerant to the PDC mission, or the permaculture mission period.
I don't know all the numbers, it's growing every day, and the rate of accessing this educational material through the Internet is immeasurably infinitely more far reaching and more efficient.
Given the fact that these machines exist so you can't just will them away, the best you can do is to turn them on themselves by using these rails of the information super highway to actually contain a ecologically benevolent payload, which would be pdc's.
So I think it's very interesting to think about what it would look like to incentivize people through NFT experiences, NFT opportunities.
That your ecologically beneficial behavior is more highly rewarded with crypto currency tokens than inane mind numbing absurdity in virtual gaming environments that absolutely do nothing to make you more intelligent make you more fit or make you fit better into the landscape that you inhabit.
I'm very optimistic in the sense that, so long as there can be a balance struck between the sacrifice of people's eyes and the environmental footprint of the technology itself.
If every smartphone was a crypto smartphone that has the potential to be a platform to venture fund every person to go out there and start a compost pile, pick up trash, plant trees, scatter seeds, guerrilla garden, and get paid for it on immutable Blockchains that themselves are green.
So the gamification of being an eco warrior on the physical plane, that is something that I've always been interested in.
It goes all the way back over 15 years ago, when I was working with developers to try to create a map of LA county. There was something called fallen fruit dot org or something. It was basically a way to crowd source mapping of publicly accessible fruit trees all throughout, LA and even other cities throughout the world I believe, and I'm not sure exactly where that project is now but the thing is to create a virtual environment where people could gamify and have a screen experience of learning the physical landscape.
I know geocaching has evolved and whatnot. There's so much potential. I am very thrilled about it. And I do believe that it is the blockchain and the crypto and NFT evolutions that are going to facilitate some of the most profound permacultural behavior ever imagined. I'm really excited about it.
I wanna create an NFT marketplace where if you take a photo of yourself planting a tree, and you mint that NFT then I will guarantee to buy it for a flat rate or something. If you take that picture and with the right licensing agreement in place, you either mint it yourself, you prove that photo exists, or you make the video, could be a video photo, whatever.
You can evolve a factor of there's the fund to buy the tree. So you go to the nursery that we gave a grant to, you take that tree, and if you didn't sell it, if you didn't trade it for some nefarious purpose, and rip off the spirit of the project...
You take that gift from the nursery, a sponsored, gifted nursery tree, and you do the right thing, and you film yourself planting it, and you submit that footage with an account, then that guarantees you that you were gonna be sponsored to mint that as an NFT and then you can either set the price of it or you can set whatever the parameters can be but essentially that would be the vege verse you Know a very simple to imagine proposition.
There are already projects like giveth that is very much developed a lot of the mechanics of this sort of interaction with people throughout the world, and the pipelining of charitable giving so that these funds can exist.
Tech bros are gonna tech bro with this space all day long. Projects like Giveth and Bit Give all these other sort of philanthropic, sensible, projects.
What I'm describing is very elementary.
This is just really what would you call a minimum viable product, sort of proof of concept, brainstorming session.
The sad irony is, all of the video game adventures, who are just neglecting their own backyard, they're neglecting their neighborhoods.
They're neglecting their watershed and all of that energy...they could be getting fit in the real world. but actually be living in and transforming the urban landscape they're finding themselves in.
They could be transforming it into a epic Lord of the Rings jungle, of a permaculture project.
It just takes connecting these dots.
For me, this goes back to very, very early days of the Internet and being involved in nonprofits and, andjust trying to myself with my own nonprofit projects, working with the energy of many eco warriors that were participating in my projects.
In the early days of the Internet, trying to figure out, how do we gamify this more?
Not only just gamify it for a high score, you could be gamifying it for an income.
If you're looking for the soulful, ecologically correct, and I'm really tactically permaculture minded, future of this technology, then I will hopefully be one of many people really curating that experience and making it profitable for myself, profitable for others.
At the end of the day, my reality is shaped more by my relationship with the coyotes and with the worms and with the bees.
My reality is the vegeverse, but it was my slaying dragons in the meta verse that gave me the financial abundance to manifest the vegeverse that I live in.
I will continue to devote a healthy percentage of my life energy to the screen time it takes to build this stuff out.
Other than that, I will be dancing with coyotes in the moonlight and having beautiful dreams and beautiful, transcendental experiences using my own inner headset, my third eye.