At the beginning of the 2020s we were taken on an unplanned and involuntary journey into the future. I’ve been taking notes. Let’s get equipped.
So we’ve established a few local haunts, become locals and regulars, and even made a few friends. You should feel good right now, because you’ve already passed a threshold that some will fail to cross their whole lives. And if you’ve not yet taken action on our last set of notes, they are a prerequisite for today’s initiative so you might want to catch up. But lifetime friendships aren’t a blessing that we can afford to hoard for ourselves. As the future approaches, we are rapidly realizing that the vision of homebound coziness cannot sustain us, and might turn into a prison. To preserve the world we love and build new things for the next generation, you are going to need to forge those friendships into something even greater. It’s time to squad up.
If you and your friends are anything like me and mine, every once in a while you get together to just sit, unwind and chop things up a bit. The conversation invariably flows towards the kind of easy, genial complaining that naturally settles on a group of people comfortable with each other and sharing a station and lot in life. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this tendency, but left to itself it breeds a cycle of shoulder-shrugging apathetic pessimism that I cannot abide. What if instead of just diagnosing the problems around you, somebody did something to solve them?
There’s probably never been a better time for that someone to be you. You have an incredible wealth of tools available, on this very phone that you’re holding. Tools which can spin up community spaces and organizational rails at a speed that would have astounded someone from only a generation ago. You can do it for free, or practically so. The tools have always been there, in every society and culture throughout history. But like every new generation, we have been blessed with new ways to combine the skills, passions and vision of our friends into something truly beautiful, a force for good. Here’s the playbook.
I. Look Around
You can’t start out because somebody else told you to care about a problem. It has to be something so personal to you that ignoring it feels like an insult. And while we’re at it, best to start pretty close to home, especially if this is your first time. Be humble, keep your eyes to your own world and the problems of your sphere of society for once. We were not all made to try and crowd helpfully into the rarified strata of society that would have been called nobility centuries ago, loudly making untried suggestions like your excitable uncle armchair quarterbacking international relations from the Thanksgiving dinner table. Don’t be trapped by the lure of cheap activism or the never-ending anger of “awareness” if you’ve never worked with the school board to start a children’s program or served with your church’s hospitality ministry. Cultivate a hopeful vision that takes in your physical surroundings, seeks out the glitches plaguing the little systems actually affecting your real life, and blocks out the voices that immediately crowd in insisting that the status quo is inevitable. Nine times in ten, when you start down the path every gate and guardian you feared will turn out to be a paper illusion. There is no Coordinator waiting to hand you a permission slip, and very few people have the authority to tell you not to help. Why isn’t anyone doing something? Why is there no art like this? Who’s going to help them? Will we really let this beauty fade without conserving it? If you are asking the questions, you are the answer.
II. Be Yourself
You didn’t make those friendships by fronting and posing and affecting a version of yourself, so don’t start now. The only way for you to be any true use to the rest of us is if you allow yourself to be as you were created to be, not merely some ideal, and certainly not yourself as you are. Solving problems is hard and discouraging work. Even to see the problems correctly will require your unique combination of personality traits, life experiences and bits of knowledge. Be odd in the unique way that you are odd. Take advantage of your strengths and your past, don’t focus on your weaknesses. We told constantly today that seeking to fly above our station or calling in life is mandatory. But great thinkers who discuss the discipline of problem solving in community, such as Burke and Scruton, remind us that this is best done among our own class of people, if you’ll pardon a divisive term. Be comfortable and happy to be yourself, and then patiently begin telling the world the story you’ve been called to write, and a crew of unique and curious people is going to form around you. Like building a meta-breaking strategy in a multiplayer game or breaking into a computer, real local problem solving requires creating an exploit, a gap in the system that you can use to insert your dynamic new information. And the best exploits are not bland and balanced nonentities, but edge cases honed sharp and used as pry bars.
III. Choose Your Weapons
Are you ready for the fun part? Let’s open up our toolbox and select what we need. Stay as small as you can (that’s what the first half of the title is for) so that we don’t get bogged down so close to the starting line. Don’t get so busy tinkering with the tools that you delay the real work. Do you need a way to show the world what you’re working on while meeting new people you might never have discovered in person? That’s the one thing social media is good for. Just be yourself, forget about the algorithm and pleasing everyone. Do you need a space for your new team to build and dream? Spin up a Discord server or build a Google or Notion doc together. Work on the vision with others, and expect new people to be attracted just as some will lose interest and wander away. Look for a core group of people who complement you, not duplicate you. They don't have to all be physically present in your locality either, although I would argue some should be if possible. Use modern tools to create a new Main Street where you can pop in and out of virtual shops, mingling in conversations and watching new ideas take shape. Don’t be satisfied with anything short of using the wonderful world of bits growing exponentially around us to leverage the atoms that surround you.
This is where we talk about the second half of the title. An often-used and tortured quote from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, it originally referred to Burke’s natural suspicions at a certain type of ultra-ambitious speculator. Rather than focusing their attention on the people and problems that were naturally part of their lives, they began inserting themselves into ever-more rarified air, postulating wild theories and never bearing the weight of their own failures. This might sound familiar. The beauties and promise of the web3 world can also become a trap if we aren’t careful to steward our powerful new tools wisely. “Blockchain fixes this” is actually a dangerous slogan if it means that every problem receives a technologically maximal solution, or leads us to barter away our human responsibilities to smart contracts. As the strata of society and the bonds of geography shift, remember that humans still need a class of people to work and live alongside. Take pride in your station and calling, and build mastery in just the right tools to solve the problems you face, whether that’s Solidity development or the art of conversation.
Web3 revolutions are built on the realization that these tools are really just the excuse to do what you knew was possible all along. There really isn’t anything all that special about DAOs, except tokens and blockchain are allowing a formalized and financialized version of structures that have existed since web1 discussion boards and neighborhood associations and medieval work guilds. You think you’re just building one more Discord server now, but you might be creating a decentralized network that will become a physical power base in the new world. The rules have been completely rewritten, but they are also the same as they have been since a Near Easterner first looked around their tiny city and thought “somebody should fix that.”
I’ll see you in the Future.
To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind. ~ Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
And Moses called Bezalel and Oholiab and every craftsman in whose mind the LORD had put skill, everyone whose heart stirred him up to come to do the work. ~ Exodus 36:2