On Saturday, after spending our Friday having fun creating the first edition of Touch Grass, I woke up hyped and excited to keep curating amazing content. After having three espressos,the bare minimum for any self respecting crypto native, I reached out for my phone and out of reflex, opened Instagram. Big, huge, mistake. 

There, on my suggested reels, I had several vloggers to explore, and the themes were: what I eat in a day, how to not gain weight when in Paris, and a shopping haul at Zara. Great, so according to Instagram I should start Ozempic and buy tons of fast fashion I don’t need that will end up in a landfill. Then I opened X - an even bigger mistake. X was showing me all things politics, a dash of hatred and of course, lots and lots of bots trying to phish me. 

Finally I had a moment of reckoning (or the coffee finally hit, one of those two) and realized that I have Orb, and Hey, Warpcast. So I opened Orb and saw heaps of notifications of people welcoming our newsletter, lots and lots of art and music, and a p2p sale of a BMW second hand car for 300K $BONSAI between fellow Lensoooors. 

The conclusions here are quite obvious: while web2 social media tries to radicalize us and give us dysmorphia while at the same time heavily moderating normal things like, female anatomy. Decentralized social spaces are aiming to become self-regulating and becoming a safe haven for our very connected minds.

So, let’s all do an experiment together - while some of us can’t help but reach for our phones in the morning, let’s make the conscious choice to check our web3 socials first. I’ve already started doing this, and will report back on changes on my mood and others. We’re not talking about doing a complete rehaul of our morning routines and meditating for 15 minutes before starting our days - I wake up wired just as everybody else. It’s a minimum thing. I am convinced that it will make a big difference.

You did not come here for my morning routine though. Here’re the best things that happened on the onchain world this week:

Culture: 

• Sound of Fractures’ (with whom we’re preparing a *thing* stay tuned) latest experiments.

• Art0x1: Runtime-as-art - a wonderful experiment. I had to mint it. I love art that interacts with our technology and truly believe that it will be important in the future.

• Lil Bonsai Maker by Madfi and TITLES

• Ensemble’s History of Digital Drawing Software video

• Glitch by Misha de Ridder - minting ends shortly! Run!

• Epic (sound on) Bonsai Gang.

• STTSM’s groovy techno vibes

• Silly x Maschine collab minting on Zora

• Sarah Zucker’s Strabismus launched on Highlight, obviously minted out but you can maybe find some on secondary? 

• EclecticMethod on the proliferation of AI - hilarious

Read: 

• Miragenesi on NFT art. Understanding onchain art and medium specificity. 

• A full diary of the outfits at the Venice Biennale written by artist Mitchell Chan

The winners of the week:

• Friend.tech’s social media intern, always. 

• The BONSAI car sale - just destroyed the internet. Real World Assets, literally.

• Offline Oracles built on Lens

• Christina from our team that did an NYC Croissant walking tour this past weekend - find it on Orb

⭐️HOT NEW LENS FRENS ⭐️

• Rosss experimental concept art fairy from LATAM

• Ensemble a studio specializing in NFTing artist sketches that delivers insanely good educational content

• Make NFTs weird again with Guruhyena

• Chloee - absolutely amazing artist

• Thoy Brown - Cuban artist and graphic designer

• Don’t Worry Kittens - very intriguing!

If you made it to the end of this newsletter - there’s a treat for you. We’re hosting something in Berlin on May 23rd. We’d be glad if you joined us. We’ll be sharing more details soon - join here.

Till next time - tell your frens to subscribe :)