Blockchain + DAOs

I think it’s both. 

I mean, it depends how you define the cultural world, I guess, but–

Of course.

Anyone dancing on TikTok or creating video games kind of fits under that umbrella for me.

I think that the way that culture developed in Canada was quite settler centric. 

Let’s put it that way. 

I think that the culture is expanding beyond that narrow definition of what culture is. 

I think culture is doing this, but I think the state-funded kind of settler centric culture in Canada is not doing this. 

–because it’s an incredibly hard culture to kind of distribute resources in 

–because there is such a scarcity of resources already. 

There is already such a fear and such a lack of support for people that they don’t know how to get along anymore.

And that’s like, ever since I’ve entered the sector in Canada. 

That’s the reality that I’ve known. 

It’s just kind of got less and less and less since, you know, the early 2000’s. 

With that in mind, I think the professionalized culture is having a real challenge. They need to figure out what their legitimacy is in the world at this point. 

I think 221A is pretty confident about what its legitimacy is, because it’s not beholden to just that settler centric culture. 

I think we talk to it. 

I think we learn from it. 

I think we debate it and criticize it, but we’re working in many different strands as well. 

So I think, yeah. There’s tons of people using this technology for cultural perspectives. 

There’s an artist based here in British Columbia called Rhea Myers. She’s an incredible early proponent of blockchain cultural practices, and you know, I think what she’s been saying is like, “It’s interesting because art lets you kind of experiment with this technology. You know, it is not the food chain. It is not the supply chain. It is not the medicine chain, so if something goes wrong it’s not immediately gonna be a catastrophe.”

No one is gonna die necessarily.

Well, not yet, but you know. I think we can say that, but we can also see how culture can shift the digital space. 

We saw that over the past five years in the Web2.0 space. 

That long tail or that heavy impact of that kind of cultural forking that happened over the past five years–so that, you know, we live on different planets basically now than some people who believe certain things–that’s a very dangerous side too.

And I wonder about some of that role of experimentation and imagination that you were describing, and we certainly see that with, you know, artists and arts organizations that engage with technology. 

For us, we’ve always felt like we’re at the sort of tumbling, breaking edge of things in a way that makes it sometimes difficult to make the organization and its vision completely transparent to people, because we’re trying to always “fall” as things are changing. 

You see artists do that a lot, but organizations are not oriented towards that kind of change. 

And I think there’s this interesting moment where technology, even if it’s not actually enabling genuine innovation in organizational form, there’s something about the way it’s transforming the imagination for certain people and allowing this space of play.

Well, it’s like a continual unbreaking of the modern fallacy of there being a sort of human control over things, right. It’s almost like when you speak to people who do their PhD and that the deeper they get into their PhD, they realize how little and littler they know, like every step is to learn how much you do not know about the world, and that has always been a kind of reality of life. And so to figure out how to exist within that. 

I wonder if you could also talk about, in the report, you mentioned the exploration of value, so talking about this financialization in terms of the blockchain that seems like it’s so solidified in our minds. But I think there’s, you know, something interesting to be said about the different ways we think about value and how to like connect these to the digital, which is I think something, again to your point, of art being a great place to push an experiment in the blockchain, because we can think about how these different ideas connect to this digital technology.

It’s an incredible technology that recognizes the value of the social, and it recognizes the value of the labor that we do together that might not have been quantified previously that provided so much in our lives. 

But yet people like us, who worked in the cultural industries, who really kind of lived off of relationships and the strength and the validity of those relationships, now in 2021, you know, we’re struggling to find places to live because our incomes are pretty stable, but yet our cultural value has kind of risen to such a point that we’re able to kind of use it kind of within this blockchain space. 

And so just as an example for that, the social token community is really interesting, I think, because that’s a space where you can start to build community and like the earlier you are in that community and the more that you put into that community. 

Then you’re able to kind of ride that updraft in that community as the value of what that community’s doing and your place in it starts to rise.

And, you know, you might not see a difference in terms of what you’re doing day to day for that community over year-one to year-five, but yet the value of what you’re doing for that community can increase because that community grows out. 

There’s more people who are bringing value to that community. 

You’re kind of closer to the centre. 

I think it’s also just kind of remembering that, you know, not everything is gonna be given to you like at a bar, like you can’t just go up and order your culture. 

You can’t just go up and order your relationships. 

It’s not Tinder; you know, you don’t have this for artists in the art world. 

So it’s kind of like, you gotta work at it and you’ve gotta create these bonds and you have to build trust and you have to build legitimacy.

I think that’s what we lost over the past ten years and why things have broken down so much. There’s a big shift too; that anonymity that kind of came out in the early blockchain is kind of going away now. I mean, there’s still some communities who really like their anonymity, but there’s some other communities who really prize presenting yourself: 

What do you bring to the world? 

Who are you? 

What relationships do you hold? 

And so I think, you know, this is gonna encourage younger and younger generations to think through that very carefully. And I think it’s a real big remedy to “shit posting” and the vitriolic behaviour on Web2 the past couple years. Yeah.

Yeah. That’s also why we’re doing it. 

We think long-term at 221A, so we’re also working on a land trust at 221A, which is gonna assemble–it’s not gonna be owned by 221A, but we’re gonna kind of give birth to this land trust. We’re looking at how we’re going to assemble properties in different parts of the city, essentially. So we’re pursuing that with traditional finance right now and kind of traditional means, setting it up as a separate nonprofit. 

But, you know, as this technology will allow for, we’re gonna start to connect the dots between what this model could be and then how this model can evolve into something that can be common, or how the governance of something like this could be broadly distributed.

So the surface area of governance–of all the people involved in those properties–could be better captured, rather than just having a board of directors that’s representative of certain aspects of that organization. Actually, your governance is distributed to hundreds of people and they’re involved in making key decisions about the organization and how it allocates resources, so that’s an interesting side of it. 

I don’t think it’s about doing away with the physical at all. 

Again, it’s about making the physical more secure and more stable and allowing it to link up with digital communities in more organic and productive ways. 

And so, you know, these plans for collective ownership of physical assets, this is totally gonna be managed through Distributed Autonomous Organizations (DAO). 

It’s already beginning. 

There was CityDAO, which is its own thing.

They just purchased their first plot of land in Wyoming, where Wyoming has made a law available so that DAOs can exist as legal entities. 

Basically you could have a LLC or a Limited Liability Corporation that’s controlled by a distributed autonomous organization for the first time in the world, and that’s in Wyoming. And now they’ve bought a land preserve and they’re gonna start developing that as what they could see as the future, so all eyes are on that. 

We’re working with a group coming out of Kyiv called DOMA, which is a cooperative housing platform as well, for this sort of thing. 

It’d be a way to kind of manage equitable and affordable housing at city scale, but it could also exist in different cities. Those more expensive cities could lend equity to kind of less expensive cities and vice versa to kind of even out the conditions between a certain community, as well. 

There’s all kinds of potential there. 

There’s thousands of people building this future. 

They’re some of the brightest, most creative and curious people that I’ve met, so I’m excited about it.