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.
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.
