Networked

An awesome work by Chris Martz, found on his Orb club, /entrylevel

We hope the week has been good to you. It’s been a huge one here at Lens. As you might know, we announced the Lens Network, a new approach towards decentralized social spaces. You can read more about it here.

These past weeks planning the big reveal made me reflect further on the importance of interconnectedness and interdependence, specifically for creators and builders. Applications, protocols, and platforms are only successful through network effects. Communities, either IRL or URL, make people thrive. Competition is about connection and interdependence as well: my business might succeed when catering needs that others don't. Being hyper aware of your network and its dependencies makes sense, no matter who you are or what you are creating.

This might sound based of Don Draper, but it's actually not.

We are parts of many ecosystems, and those ecosystems are connected with each other. Sometimes events can destabilize those ecosystems. Being aware of each other becomes more important.

NFTs are digital cultural and networked objects. They connect us with each other, by affinity but also through transactions. They create communities and millions of connections between people.

I am constantly reminded of this thanks to Burak Arikan’s Social Contracts project I helped with through my former company JPG, last year. Here’s an example, where you can see my ETH address (mariapaula.eth) connected to others, through the NFTs we collected.

This week, Jgc, who of course, I met on the Internet, and share many discords with, shared their new art project with me, Memento Mori. Again, the importance of the network as a vehicle to remind me of one of my favorite online communities pops up in my mind.

Anyways, all this is to say that networks can be explored from many different angles, but first and foremost, no matter how deeply abstracted and technical the network, it’s always about humans.

Before this week’s onchain digest, an announcement: next week we’ll be at Berlin Blockchain Week. The Lens Network will be introduced at our event afk on May 23rd. Stani will be in conversation with Alex G. from zySync, and joined by many more amazing speakers. All event details are here. And if that’s not enough for you, our friends at RefractionDAO and Livepeer are hosting a party right after. Here’s their invitation.

Lens will also be taking over the coziest room at the ETHBerlin hackathon, the Library, where you will be able to enjoy some moments spent with the Lens team, Family style ;). Grab some matcha and ask Stani questions about the Lens Network, join us for live screen printing special Lens t-shirts or simply hanging out away from the hustle and bustle of the hackathon.

Now, to this week’s Digest: