At last, my final DAO Punks Cohort_4 weekly update. Alot has happened since I was awarded the grant. I think the funds have gone to good use and have helped me to stretch out my time with bills to be able to focus on DAO and web3 oriented projects. I think I can safely say I will not be going back into the corp rat world after almost a full year of detaching myself completely from it. The process has shown me that I can live without some kind of constant safety net. Community always seems to come through when it is needed the most.  Speaking of community, I had the opportunity to meet a fellow DAO Punk Cohort_4 Grant recipient Saswat.lens. The video portion of this week will be a recording of us having a meal together at Rudy’s BBQ here in Austin, TX.

While being in the same digital community is great, meeting someone in real life is always better and helps you to understand them on a deeper level. This applies to meeting Saswat as well. In this video interview, Saswat has some great insights about how IRL meetups can strengthen digital communities and should never be lost. He specifically speaks about his activity with Cabin.city and how they are bringing this philosophy to (IRL) life. I loved hearing about his journey into the DAO space and how being a part of the DAO Punks Cohort_4 has helped his journey in this space.

As I have stated in my previous blog posts, when you fully stand for something, and it’s the right thing, support will come at the right time. I grew up with my parents who were serial entrepreneurs. If you watch the linked short video of the week 4 post, you will see that my parents had a philosophy that money would come and go and taking risks was always worth it. You will never be on your deathbed saying you wish you had been more fiscally responsible. Given that mentality I am now experimenting with lots of different protocols and trying to keep bread and butter work to a minimum. 

One example of some experimental work was from a bountycaster.xyz post I was sent by my friend Crystal Street. This post was by Rileybeans seeking production help for live streaming. I am gettiong alot of these types of gig opportunities, but I need to be a little bit picky so I don't end up in a miserable situation where the deliverables are set too high in proportion to the compensation. This opportunity with Rileybeans seems different. They are seeking to creatively combine lots of opensource and web3 tools to do a live stream channel called The State of People to be dropped to the Hypersub channel subscribers. The premise of this show is a stream hosted by the /community channel on Farcaster, curated for discussions at the forefront of marketing, community building, and decentralized identity. While I love the premise of the content as a whole, what really intrigues me is that it will be using a combination of vdo.ninja, OBS, Unlonely.app, and Hypersub to make an entirely opensource and web3 based show. Rileybeans has understood the big picture and how all these composable pieces fit together. I am also now beginning to understand.

I know individually how to use all these apps and programs, but I did not see, until now, how they could all be intertwined into one large tapestry of web3 media. Jumping into this project is also now reigniting the fire to return to my own experimentation. So I fired back up my old channel and made a new epsiode. The last episode I made was Episode 509 on February 2, 2024 where I did an interview using traditional apps like Streamyard and YouTube. This time, I made the shift to completely open source and onchain content. I originally started my podcast on Theta Network way back in 2020. I started having issues with Theta and then switched to YouTube and Odyssey. I began having issues with Odyssey, so YouTube won out. It was not yet time to go fully onchain for me I guess. But now, with the discovery of how all these new pieces fit together, and with my corp rat job not being a hindrance, I am free to go fully onchain! Here is the episode I made this morning minted on Zora.

Collect NFT

So here is a little rundown on how all this works. Vdo.ninja and OBS are both free open source tools while Unlonely.app and Hypersub are web3 based. Everything is free to use. Vdo.ninja allows multiple people to join in an OBS screen layout. You can bring your streaming keys from Unlonely into OBS to stream.  In Unlonely you can take out 30 second “NFC Clips” as you go along in the broadcast and publish them. Afterwards, you can take the recording and upload it to Zora to mint an NFT of the show.  And of course I shout all of this out on my Warpcast profile built on the Farcaster Protocol. All this creates a comprehensive web3 content publishing package. If you want, you can add in aspects of Unlock protocol, Pods.media, and a blogging engine like this one here in Paragraph.  In JournoDAO we are working on a project called PermaPress to help journalists not lose their portfolio of work just because some former publisher or employer has been bought out, censored, or whatever. Their work will be stored on the Arweave platform. The tool is in beta right now and Keith Axline and team is working really hard on it. But this is another example of how content creation onchain as mainstream is getting closer and closer. There are so many possibilities.  

For use as a DAO channel, I think something these tools could even be connected to a multisig community wallet.  However, I can see how a multisig wallet could be kind of a pain in the ass and a bottleneck for publishing.  So yeah, would be interesting to hear other people's perspectives on this.

There are tons of Producers, Video Editors, Social Media Marketers, and Content Creators out there. It is a dog eat dog world in the content creation industry. But what will make a person stand out now is how you can piece all the available web3, open source, and even AI tools together to create human-centric content. It is a constant game of endurance to keep pace. The only way to keep pace is through community. 

Quick little story. Yesterday I was hanging out in my front yard while my kids played. My Mother-In-Law rolled up in her car and got out with some documents for me to scan and digitize so I could e-mail them to the VA on her behalf.  My Father-In-Law has ALS disease and can’t speak, so lots of Power of Attorney docs and other stuff needs to get done and signed.  What was previously done in-office is now all done online. This is what I mean when I am constantly repeating that “the digital world is descending upon us”. It is this. Everything we do is becoming digital. We are all creating digital data everyday.

The concept of this digital data as a real asset is a brand new concept. It makes me think of how Native Americans thought that the colonizers were crazy thinking that a human could “own” land. It also seems crazy to a boomer that you can “own” digital data. The digital world is not familiar to them. So as a good Son-In-Law, I scanned the docs and sent them over to the VA. I was the bridge between two generations.  We all think we will never end up like our parents or grandparents being left behind in technology. But  then I think about how Gen X and even millennials will not understand wallets, L1 and L2’s, DAOs, NFTs, Onchain media and especially the concept of data ownership and how to navigate it. If you want to see a good interview with the Founder of Millu.ai go to this video here on Crypto Sapiens and listen to Melissa Turner speak about how to bridge this gap and create a "tech fit" generation.

I know we have all seen the WEF ad with the voice of Klaus Scwab saying “You will own nothing and be happy”. Of course the first thing that comes to mind is Soviet Russia.  I am absolutely against a CBDC and any centralized form of asset management. However, I think what it can also mean is that protocols will run everything. We will own the tokens to operate the protocols, our data that we create, and the digital shares of physical assets. The entire financial and property system can be tokenized on decentralized protocols. We can all be paid for the data we generate digitally everyday. AI needs that data to function. Our data is the food for AI. If AI is to run on fully decentralized crypto economies buying and selling data back and forth between autonomous AI agents connected to iOT devices and your Digital IDs. Every time our data is used for an AI query/transaction, then that AI agent has to compensate you for using that data. So there we have a UBI just from participating in the digital society. If this is truly decentralized, this can be great for everyone. If it is centralized, then it becomes a slave society. This is a concept many people in our current generation will not fully grasp, like the boomers are having a hard time grasping everything being done digitally online as a legitimate transaction.  Also like the Native Americans had a hard time grasping land ownership.  

It is our responsibility as web3 and DAO natives/punks to help those who are being left behind to maintain their sovereignty and independence. So, in the past six weeks of pondering what it means to be a DAO Punk, I am coming to realize that being a punk takes an enormous amount of courage and responsibility in the face of an ever-changing technological landscape. Once again, thank you to DAO Punks for allowing me to have this time to build myself up to thrive in this web3 and DAO space.

A protocol according to wikipedia is “a system of rules that allows two or more entities of a communications system to transmit information via any variation of a physical quantity. The protocol defines the rules, syntax, semantics, and synchronization of communication and possible error recovery methods. Protocols may be implemented by hardware, software, or a combination of both.” 

Last week was all personal and fed into my individual being and soul.  I need that time to reflect and think about my unique place in this world. This week is also getting deep for me, but in a different way. So let’s continue here and see if this makes any sense outside of my head. 

Every time I have brainstormed on what to write for my DAO Punk Cohort_4 blog entry this week, I keep coming back to the word protocol. It almost seems like there is a paradox happening with DAOs and specifically with DAO Punks. A protocol is a system of rules, but at the same time a DAO Punk does not find themselves able to work well within the system of rules that govern a corporation. I suppose the key word here is “decentralized”.

In a short I made for this week’s Crypto Sapiens Onchain Alpha episode with Carl Cervone of OpenSource.Observer, Carl speaks about the counter-intuitive nature of protocols. They need a leader with a CEO mindset with a big vision to build the protocol. Powerful and effective leaders, however, oftentimes have the ego and the drive for recognition that goes along with it. In last week’s news, Bloomberg also announced that Merkle, “A developer of software for decentralized social-media networks founded by two former Coinbase Global Inc. executives is close to completing a funding round valuing it at about $1 billion”. This news and the episode on Crypto Sapiens has really driven me to reflect on the definition of a decentralized protocol and the mechanisms behind it. 

In my last blog entry I expounded on the virtues of remembrance and preserving stories. Yet here in the very same blog just a week later, I am speaking about builders of protocols who desire nothing more than to be forgotten so that a system may thrive on. It seems like a delicate and nuanced paradox. At what point does a need for a story to be told cross over to becoming ego-driven and the root of an ineffective protocol? I suppose it is when there becomes a reliance on one particular person to execute a process for it to function as a whole. For a true protocol, one should not be able to remember who the protocol leaders are. The story is no longer them. They have vanished from history and are no longer critical to sustain the protocol. 

My first thought when I heard Carl speaking was the destruction of the ego. The destruction of the ego is pervasive in many religions and philosophies. Our ego seems to be the only thing holding us back from freeing our souls. In order for our souls to live forever we have to live in gratitude and in a state of trust outside of ourselves. When we trust in one person, or only ourselves, we will always be disappointed at some point. 

Blockchains are built to be trustless.  On pg 63 of Chris Dixon’s book Read Write Own, he says in a blockchain there is no need for a“…higher authority — no intermediary, no central corporation — to oversee transactions. Through their consensus process, blockchains can securely verify the senders of transactions all by themselves, and no one computer has the power to alter the rules.” A system (protocol) keeps everyone honest. We tend to trust what we perceive as honest. A protocol is built on and creates consensus. Consensus comes from communication between two or more entities. That intangible relationship is where trust and honesty are born. It is a spark of creation. It is reality. Consensus is a mechanism with which to form reality. Consensus is by definition a noun in the dictionary, but to consent is a verb. This word is very blurry to me as it seems to be an action, a state of being, and an idea. A system with true consensus and transparency is called trustless. With consensus those who are consenting have transparency and as Dixon also says “transparency begets trust”.

So there’s the paradox, a trustless protocol built by consensus creates trust. Consensus by definition needs more than one person and a relationship requires a sharing of energy. A healthy sharing of energy is the first step to dissolving your ego. (Even in an unhealthy relationship one person can take/steal another person’s ego causing an imbalance). Every time a relationship is formed more of the individual ego dissipates. When a person joins a community of relationships, those multiple relationships dissolve into mechanisms of living that benefit the community as a whole. Each of those relationships are the individual units of a protocol. As people are born and die, the relationships as actions that sustain a community, ideally are passed to the new individual  to keep the action in place and preserve the health of the community. As time passes and external circumstances changes, those relationships that form consensus need modification to adapt to new factors. This is where in each generation the ego plays its part. The ego is not good or bad, it is the disrupter. The receptor of change that tells the individual to change something.

I am thinking about what it means to work in a DAO. On top of that, what does it mean to be a punk? Being is a DAO is being in a decentralized community with an autonomous structure that is not dependent on a hierarchy, a leader, or any single executive decision. A punk on the other hand is hyper individualistic and rebellious. But that does not mean a punk shuns community. As I said in my previous week 2 blog post “...does it mean that you have a certain type of stubborn faith that what you need to survive will be given to you by those around you? Not because you don’t want to work and are looking for handouts, but because you believe so strongly in standing up for what’s right and rejecting our mainstream comforts that you will proudly be derisively called a punk by the normie. As a result you have faith that those in your community that see the value in your stance, will see to it that you have what you need.“

So my reflection for this week is that trust and trustlessness are like yin and yang ever cycling off of each other like a constant feedback loop. DAOs are based on decentralized individual networks of relationships, which build consensus, which, in turn, build reality and trust. Anytime a new external input is brought to the community, it sends a ripple of consensus requests to each individual relationship adjusting the nature, or state of being, of the DAO in a dynamic manner. The moment any individual node (ego) breaks that consensus, then the DAO is no longer decentralized and dissolves, or needs to be forked into a new DAO/community to restore the balance.

This brings me back to the linked Bloomberg article at the beginning of this blog entry about Merkle receiving a $1 billion funding round. What does an external influence like this do to the fabric of an organization? Does this influx of external money erode the consensus or “faith that those in your community will see the value in your stance”? Or will it help to fortify the organization as a protocol. Farcaster is not a DAO, but I think the question still applies. Either way, I love Farcaster and if money is going to flow into a protocol, I am happy it is flowing there.

Again, I don’t have the answers to any of these questions, but I think that is the point.

This week has been a difficult week but a super busy one. I published two episodes of my Crypto Sapiens AI <> web3 series from the Unrestricted Intelligence Summit with an episode of Gary Sheng and another one with Melissa Turner. I published a new episode 05 of the podcast Many Such Cases and kicked off a new spin off from that called Connecting the Dots. I also edited and published an episode of Humpty’s show called Onchain Alpha. This week he had Swaroop from Powerloom on. Then, I also edited and published two workshop podcast episodes with the University of Ethereum. All of this work is paid in some way. All of it is in the web3 space. None of it is corporate. Receiving this DAO Punks grant has allowed me to focus on this type of work and build up my work portfolio in this space. My time has become scarce and the week has flown by. I have honestly been under alot of stress with my bandwidth at its limit and I have left my keys in the ignition of my car three times this week causing my battery to die.  This is a sign of stress for sure.

 However, now I have a bit of a writer's block as to what to write about this week. But now, thank to this DAO Punks grant I can actually sit still for a moment and not work on other projects. One of the best ways to overcome writer's block is to start processing the personal thoughts. So, I will focus on something personal for me, which I have not allowed myself time to think about and process yet. I have been semi-consciously procrastinating this as it has been difficult for me to find the time alone to properly process it all.

To begin this week, I received a package from UPS that I had to sign for. The package contained some vinyl records that I had made. On March 23, 2022 I recorded my Mom and Dad in a personal family podcast episode. I asked them some basic questions about their life, their interests, their favorite moments, and some other stuff.

By that time my Dad had already been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Previously, when I thought of Parkinson’s, I thought of Michael J. Fox and how, as sad as it is, he has been living with Parkinson’s Disease for a very long time. So I thought that’s how the disease went. However, in my Dad’s case, he degenerated very quickly and died a year and a half later on October 19, 2023.  As a result, this podcast recording had become like gold (or Bitcoin) to me. I put it up on YouTube so family and friends could listen.  My Dad didn't want a big expensive funeral and a bunch of boohoo-ing and fanfare about him. But, he did want his memory to be preserved and for his voice to carry on.  At that time I was recording my daily Eureka Street morning episodes and he would watch every single day on YouTube. As a Iatchkey kid due to him and my Mom always working and having their own relationship issues, I think he realized how much he had missed later in life and was really pouring his attention into what his kids were doing as adults. think he saw my video-blogging and realized how important it is that his story is told as well. So I came up with the idea of recording him and putting it on a record to pass down for generations and he loved it. 

After he died, I got the records on order and made a version of it for YouTube so more people could listen without having to order more of those expensive records.

But who knows what would/could happen with YouTube. They are, after all, a centralized corporation and could at any moment decide to sell, dissolve, get hacked, or censor anything at any time. As a pleb, an entity like YouTube seems too big for anything like that to happen, but if you really think about it, large companies and organizations shift constantly like the sands on a beach.

Think about Kodak, or Compaq, or the 8-track player and of course Blockbuster (which even has a DAO dedicated to it). Have you ever tried converting or transferring files stored on or made with any of these old products? It’s a real pain in the ass, even if you own the footage/data stored.  Imagine if Kodak or Compaq had the ability to owned that footage or data at the time. Companies that we took for granted as gigantic mainstays, seemed to dissolve almost overnight. So if Kodak owned your photos, you’d be screwed. 

Unless you have the gold, cash, a vinyl record, a book, or papyrus document in your hand, or locked in a safe in your house, if it is online, for the most part nowadays, unless it is on a blockchain, it is stored in a server owned by a centralized and hierarchical organization. In the past, digital items did not even seem real to people. Digital = fairydust. Not real. A digital asset is a new concept. As a result, we have not placed the same vigilance toward ownership and preservation of them like we have for IRL assets. We are now using digital assets everyday. We log in to websites for our bills, insurance, social life, government docs, etc... We are held liable for things we say and do in the digital realm. If you look at many people’s Facebook profiles, you will find a lifetime of thoughts, images, and interaction with other people. Those lives are effectively owned by Facebook.

The version I made of the podcast I made with my parents is pretty much owned by YouTube. I do have a copy of it on my computer, but if my computer gets damaged and I have not preserved the file, then it is gone to the dissipating sands of time. Our most valued possessions and memories, of those we love need to be owned by us, if those items are digital, then aside from converting those to the physical realm by printing, minting, pressing, painting, or etching them there has been no way to own them. That is why I pressed the vinyl record.

Everything, even the records I made,  eventually gets overcome by the power of time and we all get forgotten about right? So it doesn’t matter, right? This nihilistic view may be right, but it’s depressing, and I don't want to live like that. Even if we are only temporary and not real or permanent, I at least want to be hopeful and happy. We never know the potential resilience a memory or story will play into someone else’s life down the road. 

So yes, I have this vinyl record I made. How long will it stand the test of time? Will the next generations even listen, or care? I guess I can't control that, but I can at least give the option and free will. Another thing I could do it put it on something like Pods.Media or another decentralized podcast platform. Will onchain media be a solution for digital permanence?  Will my Dad’s podcast last longer onchain than on vinyl?  Would my Dad’s podcast last longer in the custody of an entity like a DAO than in my sole possession?

I don’t have the answers to these questions, but these are things I am finally being allowed to think about now that I have had the time to sit down and think and process. We are always trying to find new and better ways to preserve our memories, because in the end, that’s all we really have. Now that our memories fully exist in a digital form, we need to preserve those too. Do we even exist without them? Thanks again to the DAO Punks for allowing me this platform and the financial space to move beyond just coping and be able to ponder these questions and process these emotions when I need to the most.

Have You Seen Him?

Innovation is never static. It always moves and is like The Search for Animal Chin. Johnny Rad says in the movie, “If you look too hard for Animal Chin, you’re never going to find him. You just gotta relax, and have fun.” The ramp where Animal Chin was supposed to reside was located “In between two junkyards just south of a town called Guadalupe”. “Everything will come together, If you find your ramp.” 

When I was growing up, being punk meant taking a huge risk and standing up against the conservative mainstream establishment Right. It meant ripping your khaki pants, putting safety pins in your ears, coloring your hair crazy colors, spray painting anarchy symbols everywhere, and giving the middle finger to the corporations and the conservative church at the time. It meant making yourself ugly to the establishment.

In an ironic twist of fate all those things that made someone punk in the 80’s is exactly what that mainstream media and culture tells you is cool and the right thing to be and do. So many Gen X’ers have not been able to accept that and still continue to push their 80s punk ideals on a society that is no longer rejecting them, but has in a sense co-opted their culture for the purpose of profit and power. So our language changes. What was once used to describe innovation and change becomes the establishment. Much of the philosophical moral high ground that made it rebelliously fun moves on becomes lost to those who choose to hold on. What has not changed, however, is a yearning for those who do not have power or feel at home in the current power structure to create a force that goes against the hierarchical power structure. I described in the previous two weeks the term anarchy, the DIY skate community, the idea of there being no financial guarantees in the punk lifestyle, and how we bring skeumorphic language (using old language to describe the new) into innovation to describe the next phase of change as we move from one power paradigm to the next. 

So one of the new words we like to toss around as a way to express our disdain for current hierarchy is “DAO”. However, DAO is an infrastructure. That’s just it. To be in a DAO is to be attached, associated, or have an identity to that infrastructure. To be a DAO is to be an organization that uses that infrastructure. Many people are trying to find ways to make a DAO recognized as an LLC. A DAO is recognized in Wyoming and a few other states. People are setting up DAOs in the Marshall Islands as legal entities. I questioned last week if a DAO can even operate in the same language models as traditional organizations. Are people trying to use old 80’s punk language on a new model for a new era? 

On another note, Is Vita DAO, heavily funded by large corporation Pfizer, (not that I have anything against them) the same as DAO Punks (liberating us from the corp-rat lifestyle) just because they both use the word DAO to describe themselves? In a podcast called Many Such Cases I did video production work on this week, one of the hosts, Ted (not lasso) described the idea that in this next

wave of crypto we need to get more specific about the language that we’re using and we need to move beyond describing everything that uses a certain infrastructure, as that (the word “DAO” for example). She also illustrated that the same idea can apply to NFTs. Using an NFT for a subscription is not that same as owning a 1 of 1 art piece NFT.  They are very different from each other, yet they are both called NFTs because they use the same infrastructure. She goes on to talk about referring to all clothes as “cloth”. Are we talking about a shirt, pants, socks, etc…  All very different, but using the same base fabric. 

But back to DAOs. You can slap a multisig on anything and call it a DAO. But you can also use tools such as party.app and Jokerace to handle decisions, build out activities and events with chats, create memberships, set up funding, make polls, etc…  In the same podcast episode, Ted (not lasso) and Jonny Mack talked about Farcaster channels such as Cryptoart Channel having wallets and becoming their own mini-DAOs using the tools I listed among many others. There are so many ways you can use the word DAO. With regulators breathing down everyone’s necks and the uncertainty harshing everyone’s mellow, I agree 100% with Ted (not lasso) that we need to get more specific about the language we’re using.

It seems to me, that the DAOs that the regulators are getting all squawky about are not the same DAOs artists and innovators are calling their home communities. DAO is just a word.  An acronym describing a concept. There is no company, or corporation, or mission to maximize profit in many of these new DAOs. These DAOs just ARE. They are there for community. They are Community.

They are dandelion flowers that have grown up in the cracks of the concrete in the form of our isolation of our home lockdowns. They are humanity persevering and doing what we do when the power structure chokes too tight. They are fun. They are punk. 

You can’t regulate a DAO, because regulation is supposed to be about preventing an entity from becoming too powerful, and taking advantage of others, right? If DAOs are punk, and punk is that sweet spot of innovation constantly moving in the trough of the sine wave between two power peaks, then there is no regulation. And if you are constantly on top of the peak of the sine wave, you will always miss the trough. And if you reside in the trough, you can only look up. You can’t take advantage of anyone and therefore should not be regulated. 

Back to Johnny Rad speaking about how to find Animal Chin. “If you look too hard for Animal Chin, you’re never going to find him. You just gotta relax, and have fun. The ramp where Animal Chin was supposed to reside was located “In between two junkyards just south of a town called Guadalupe”. In one of the least desirable places. “Everything will come together, If you find your ramp.” If you are actively searching, you have already found him.

Where do Punks Work?

Where do punks tend to work? From my experience, I have generally seen punks work at pizza places, sandwich shops, at the door of shitty clubs, and tattoo parlors.

It is now week 2 into this DAO Punk blogging journey. It is leading me to reflect what working as a DAO Punk in the web3 world truly is.  Is it working in a glamourous web3 biz-dev job traveling the world attending conferences with exclusive side events and resort meditation retreats? “Sticking it to the man” from the inside? Is it just about working online in a DAO, attending endless community calls in your room behind a computer in your underwear with a bag of old Doritos on the desk and your cat sitting on the arm of your chair while you chat endlessly about hypothetical governance protocols? Is being in a DAO hardcore anti-establishment? Or, and I have seen this firsthand, is it leaving the corporate life to only LARP corporate models into DAO life? So many times I have seen people bringing language like “KPIs” and “metrics” into DAO conversations. I am not dogging the corp life or traditional work experience if that is where you feel comfortable and good. But deep inside me, it is something I have found that I am not cut out for. 

The places I used to work before forming my own business did not really use the technical corp language because they were mostly rednecks, but they still said “we are a family” and gave us the standard pizza party instead of raises when the company succeeded as a whole. In reality, no one gave a shit. Everyone hated their job and for the most part they didn’t like each other. But as long as their coworker did their part in the hell-hole they were at, they tolerated each other and even laughed with each other occasionally. 

But back to the corporate jargon being brought into DAOs, do we tend to create the only thing we

are familiar with? Are we being skeumorphic? (C. Dixon p. 27) Being skeumorphic is creating something new with the language or model of the old because that is the only thing we know. The first iteration of the web was basically pdfs online. A repository of one-way information is all we could conceive the web to be at the time?  Are we currently doing this with DAOs? Are we doing this with jobs in web3? What possibilities does a decentralized community with a code-based flat hierarchy have? Can it even operate with the same language models?

So back to my starting sentences about where punks work. Punks either hate their job or they only work in a place that will accept them for the dirty shit bag they are. They only work in places where they can be themselves. For punks, their lifestyle is their mission. The J-O-B is only a way to eat and sleep without being on the street, (and in the case of crust punks, they will even willingly live in the street). That’s why punks work their shitty jobs.  They see life is more than their job. Their mission is about expressing disdain and dissent with a machine and moloch style of a corporate society. 

Can someone dance with the devil and be a chameleon? In JournoDAO we consistently have super candid conversations where we are either talking about Moloch or farts, or Moloch’s farts. Today I had a conversation with Crystal Street on the topic of being a punk in a corporate setting. Being a chameleon takes more skill than I have.  But she is more than capable of walking that tight rope. I’m too bull headed, literal, and obvious with very little nuance to be able to pull that off. I admit that I can also be pretty cringey at times too. I either fully submit, or I fully rebel. In this stage of life I am currently fully rebelling. I rejected the notion of having a proper full-time job I hate for the sake of benefits and a consistent paycheck. My relatives and family see me as a bit weird and natural to act this way, but in all honesty, it’s terrifying.

Does being punk mean that you acknowledge that there are no guarantees in life? Does it mean that you have a worldview that it’s you against the structured world? At the same time, does it mean that you have a certain type of stubborn faith that what you need to survive will be given to you by those around you? Not because you don’t want to work and are looking for handouts, but because you believe so strongly in standing up for what’s right and rejecting our mainstream comforts that you will proudly be derisively called a punk by the normie. As a result you have faith that those in your community that see the value in your stance, will see to it that you have what you need. 

On Monday morning after ETH Denver expenses I had $23 in my bank account. All my savings had been drained in a recent hack of my crypto wallets. I naively believed a Twitter anon about a job opportunity and was supposed to get on an interview call with them and “the team”. I desperately needed the work and let my basic security principles bend. I also had too much crypto in my hot wallet because I was about to cash out for a business I am trying to start. So when I clicked the link to get in the call, the malware was installed instead, and before I knew what happened everything was drained. 

This is what it’s like living in the streets. You have to be on your feet and aware at all times. In this crypto space, we are living in the digital streets. We have to be a punk to survive. We have to live in a trustless state, but again, have an ironic faith in community and humanity. The DAO is our gang.

The DAO Punks have taken me in and have come in clutch with their governance votes to help with the Cohort_4 grant. I am in the process of using the 1 ETH given to me to pay my mortgage, utilities, car, groceries and other basic needs. It has been a godsend to not have to worry about the next couple of months. It has also allowed me to mental room to not have to spend all my time working some lame gigs I would normally have to take to survive, and instead I went to downtown Austin to attend and participate in the Unrestricted Intelligence Summit. I went with the intention to cover it in the name of Crypto Sapiens and interview some presenters there on the intersection of AI and web3.  The summit was organized by Gary Sheng at Edge City, ATX DAO, Morpheus AI, and Uncommon Entrepreneurs. It was an amazing educational opportunity in which I learned tons about AI.  I learned about why we should it fear it, but also the importance of  AI being open and decentralized. I learned how Morpheus protocol works as the open source rails on which open ai models can be built and sustained. I set up my lights, camera, and mics in the back room and I got to interview some extremely smart people in the space and have them walk me step-by-step in how alot the moving parts fit together. Here is the first interview with David Johnston of MorpheusAI out of five that I made. There weres no scripts. It was just me asking thick-headed questions that they patiently answered.  I learned so much.  On top of that, the organizer was so moved by my efforts that even though it was not supposed to be a paying job, I was sent some healthy compensation for my efforts.  That meant the world to me and further reinforced my punk belief that if you stand solidly for what you believe in, you will be taken care of. This is an extremely difficult position to take when others depend on your income to live. It is not just me dumpster diving my way through life.  I have a family with kids. So the relief of pressure that these occasions have are incredibly joyous. So thank you. It is humbling, but empowering at the same time. This, to me, is part of what being a DAO Punk is about.

Origins

Wassup! I’m Eureka John.  First of all, thank you to all the DAO Punks for allowing me to participate in the Cohort_4. It is an honor to be included.

In order to understand my crypto journey I will start out with some of my seemingly chaotic and multi-faceted background. I grew up in a chaotic household. My well-meaning parents adopted 6 kids they saw on an evening local news program when I was 9 years old.  The program was called Waiting Child and the premise was to give adopted children forever homes.  There were six kids that were going to be split up into different homes if they were not adopted together. My well-meaning parents saw this and applied to the program. A few months later, they were accepted and we suddenly had nine kids in our family. This was in addition to our already three boy family. As a result, my parents were not prepared and became pretty unavailable. Our house was extremely chaotic and I was basically just coping during my childhood years.

My older brother rebelled and became a punk rocker in the 80’s. He had the mohawk, the combat boots, the studded jacket, the attitude, and the consistent gang of punk friends that came seeking shelter from the streets around our house because we had a halfpipe.

This had a huge influence on me. I fell in love with the anti-establishment skateboarding lifestyle and dove into the skatepunk scene in my neighborhood. I spent as much time in the street and as little time at my house as possible unless it was to skate the ramp. I had a negative view of authority and I found my cause in anti-censorship.  Anything that seemed to stand against censorship and central authority was immediately appealing to me.  In middle school it was the skaters vs the preps.  In high school, I created an underground newspaper called The Blunt Bureau to poke fun at the authorities in charge of the school, make fun of the jocks, and tell dirty jokes. I was given long-term suspension but managed to graduate somehow. In my early 20’s I became obsessed with religion (ironically enough), and specifically the rebellious early Church persecuted by the Romans. This led me to study Religion in college and landed me at Union Theological Seminary in NYC afterwards for graduate studies where I learned Greek and Hebrew. This is also where my name Eureka John came from. Eureka is derived from the Greek word Eurekos, which means to discover something. Again, the Early Church was censored and persecuted for expressing any source of authority over that of the Roman Empire. In Seminary and afterwards, into my 30’s, I created and ran a pirate radio station called brandnameradio using an FM transmitter I built and the internet radio technology through the open source rss protocol at the time.  This was mainly a technical experiment for me, but also focused on artists who did not have the clout or funding to get on a large label. I aspired to give them airtime, but eventually was unable to sustain the radio station due to paying expensive licensing and royalty fees that never went to the artists I played on my show. To remain on the air, I was paying for the privilege of playing bands like Madonna and Metallica even though I was not playing any of those mainstream bands on my station.  The Austin Chronicle did a little article with me in it about this issue in 2007. Afterwards, I created some skateboarding zines and formed an electro-punk band called Laserz (which was terrible, but I had fun).

So in sum, finding outlets for my creative energy has always been a priority.  However, I also had to pay bills, so I found a job in the manufacturing industry on a sales desk. My family had a small manufacturing business and I worked for them for a while, and then quit to find work elsewhere due to economic downturn and family politics. I ended up at a propane hose plant and before I knew it, 16 years working in that industry and had flown by and I found myself devoid of creativity.  I had lost myself for the monotony of making money to pay bills, and most of my days had become wearing khaki pants and golf shirts, small-talking in trade show booths, and getting obliterated at night.  It was completely soul-sucking.

2018 was the first time I heard about crypto. At first it was scrounging around trying to find a way to support my by then full-blown alcoholism by using crypto trading as a way to score extra beer money. Due to medical issues and depression, in 2019 I decided I really needed to quit drinking and do something to change my life trajectory. I channeled all my anxious energy into researching crypto and riding my skateboard. I started to understand that crypto and blockchain was about way more than number go up so you can cash out. I found my way into alternative finance systems though Aave and Compound and finally began to understand the meaning of a decentralized operating system and decentralized finance built on Ethereum.

So I decided to take the full plunge into the lifestyle on October 24, 2020 when I flipped on the YouTube switch to my own channel I called Eureka Street Crypto Hub at the time. There was no “Hub” about it.  It was just me. Alone. In my awkward thoughts and curiosity about something that no one else around me gave two shits about. I had a Bankless newsletter subscription at the time so I received the BANK airdrop, which led me to go into the Discord server. There, I finally met some like-minded people and my real community-focused crypto journey began and where many of you met me.

What is DAO Punks?

I own a DAO Punk NFT, and I love it.  However, I think being a DAO Punk is much more than being a holder of an NFT.  When you go to daopunks.io, the first thing you see on the landing page is “We blaze trails.  We build bridges. A better world awaits. DAOPunks lead the way”  Below that in big red letters is says “Corporate Punk to DAOPunk” and the mission statement below of:

DAOpunks’s mission is to enable humans to liberate themselves from the soul-sucking drudgery of default world work and lead them to the rewarding, expansive freedom found in meaningful DAO work.

DAOpunks blaze new trails, leading others to fertile promised lands, where they find opportunity, meaningful work, community, and untold abundance. We build the bridges. We blaze the trails. With openness, we invite others to join us. Together we go further. A better world awaits. DAOpunks lead the way.

Part of the mission statement that really resounds with me is “enable humans to liberate themselves”.  A huge part of web3 and crypto is decentralization and personal sovereignty.  Neither of these is achieved through a centralized authority or power structure.  Liberty is achieved through both individual drive and community support.  Going back to my origin story above, I grew up around punk rockers. Being punk was ingrained in my upbringing.  I literally had no choice but to become familiar with being punk.

A huge part of punk rock is the anarchy symbol. The Sex Pistols wrote the popular song “Anarchy in the UK” and toured all the unpopular cities in middle America bringing punk rock to a latchkey kid youth culture. Bands all throughout the 80’s punk scene like Exploited, Black Flag, Fear, Dead Kennedys, Circle Jerks, Bad Brains, JFA, and many others freely used the anarchy symbol. Every city with a skatepunk scene and skateable drainage ditches had anarchy symbols spray painted on them.

What did all this mean? There was no central authority that declared a punk movement.   The very meaning of the word mean “without ruler”.  In Greek, the word anarkhia is broken down into “an” (no/not) "archia" (ruler). So literally the word means without ruler. If you want to stretch that to decentralized, well, I am personally ok with that. Lol. However, many people see the anarchy symbol and see it as chaos or social disorder.  Some philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes see anarchy as without government, so as a result it must assume that there is no governance.  I do not personally share this view.  In nature, we have seen that there is an underlying force that all natural beings fall into such as the Fibonacci sequence, for example. In native tribes, we have seen communities thrive without a specific central authority figure at the helm.

As a personal experience, I have seen DIY skateboarding communities build amazing concrete structures in ditches that many have enjoyed. They are a constant work in progress and reveal a story of mistakes and successes by building out in the open.  (We see this in our open source developer communities) In many cases, some of the best concrete skatepark builders had their start making DIY spots.
New types of tricks are born out the blemishes of the imperfect.  Most of the DIY builders are anon and prefer to stay that way.  You can visit the spot, and most of the time, you are welcome, but you need to respect the spot and the builders. There are rules, but no rulers. Don't leave trash. Don't move stuff around. Don't wax stuff that's not yours. If you begin to come on a regular basis, get to know the other locals and help build. Over the years the DIY spots come and go. The transitory nature of DIY spots is both the beauty and the curse of them. You fall in love with them, and then once you feel at home, they get bulldozed. You just have to love DIY spots for the imperfect creative mess that they are.  DIY spots are a community.  DIY culture is one of the reasons I still skate.  DIY is punk.

Bringing this back to DAOs, We are now experimenting with decentralized communities built with code at the center that we call decentralized autonomous organizations.  Working in a DAO is working in a community. As illustrated above with the DIY skate spots, working in a community also means there are rules to follow to be a part of that community. Part of the DAOPunk ethos is blazing trails. Get out of the established structure. Liberate yourself from the drudgery of soul sucking work.  Join the community.  Build something meaningful with others that everyone will enjoy. Use that experience to become a better person and a stronger community.

Becoming a DAO Punk

I think I have come to the conclusion that I am unemployable. I have been making the transition to becoming a DAOPunk for a couple of years now. Starting in the BanklessDAO, in the AV Guild and Podcast Hatchery, I found my way into making DAO contributions. I am not the best team player, but I forced myself into working as a team to create content. In Crypto Sapiens, I became the primary audio/video editor and now Co-Founder.  All of this was happening while I was working in the propane hose plant. The more work I did in the DAO, the more I could not stand working at the hose plant. That job was meaningless.  It was solely to pay bills, and my wife and family could see the draining effect it had on me vs the glow I had when completing podcasts and videos for bDAO and Crypto Sapiens. Then, I found my way into JournoDAO and that’s when I found my calling to become a web3 journalist. I may not have the traditional journalist writing investigation skills, but nothing about working in web3 is traditional. Looking back at my origin story though, my dysfunctional upbringing, my underground newspaper, my radio station, my skate zines, and my band, it was all starting to make sense. There is no better way to fulfill my calling than to become a DAOpunk web3 journalist in a decentralized community.

I have volunteered for tons of projects and cut my teeth on lots of free work to build my skills.  I finally started getting some paying non-web3 podcast producing gigs.  This has allowed me to take the brave step to quit my propane hose plant job. I formed an LLC for contract work called Eureka Street Creative, LLC. Between the non-web3 gigs and my web3 work, I am barely able to squeak by and pay my bills. I would like to focus completely on web3 contributions as my sole source of income, but I am not there yet.  This grant is giving me a couple more months to be able to solidify some web3 work. 

Week 1 as a DAO Punk Cohort_4 Member

I received the news of receiving the DAO Punk grant on my way home from ETH Denver. Currently, my sources of web3 work are Crypto Sapiens and De University of Ethereum.  Crypto Sapiens received a grant from Optimism, but we have not yet received any money. However, soon that will allow us to pay our contributors in something besides a paltry amount of BANK tokens and will increase my web3 income some. De University of Ethereum has thankfully been some consistent work in the web3 world, but it is far from enough to sustain my family and bills, much less save or invest.

ETH Denver allowed me to really flex some of my newfound on-the-scene gonzo journalism skills and showcase the footage I got on the Crypto Sapiens audio and video platforms. I got to interview some really cool people and projects including two that have already published. with Unlock Protocol and Aavegotchi. I am already receiving some inquiries into other web3 journalism gig opportunities including an Edge City event at SXSW here in Austin called the Unrestricted Intelligence Summit. I will let you all know how that goes. Hopefully all of this will culminate into something sustainable for me and my family and allow me to do work that I love, and that contributes to the web3 ecosystem as a whole. I will keep you update on the progress of this next Saturday, March 16, 2024.