Techno Viking was the meme that really started it all in some ways, for DAOs, tokenized collectives, and web3 culture at large. For me, already deep in the USA rave scene at the time, or perhaps a little past it, this dance-walk was the meme that seemingly launched a thousand ships, mine just one of them, as we left the promise of web1 internet vision and buckled up for new directionality and challenges in online participatory cultures.
I think of Techno Viking as a response to earlier notions of digital autonomy. In Hakim Bey's T.A.Z., we glimpse a basic picture of spacial rupture for disincarnate action, where potentially "anything" can happen, apart from constraints of the cathedral, concreted laws, power structures, etc. It is a plea for anarchistic, ecstatic action, which felt for a while like what was most needed, but as it turns out was not enough.
In spaces of rupture and freedom , we see the need for moral agency and emergent patterns of attunement. Our current, web3-centric, novelty culture of trustless activity and economies are founded on this, and we now have the technological structure to actually perform it. Techno Viking's 4 minute opera presents some of the humanistic articulations of this beautifully, presciently, in addition to the general hilarity of a very-tough-looking-character showing emotion, moral poise and extremely fluid dance moves.
Techno Viking, in a plot synopsis, enacts several episodes in a fairly complete dramatic arc while navigating the July 2000 Love Parade in Berlin. His appearance from stage right, to forcibly remove an aggressive raver violating the personal space of another raver, starts a stare-down where we see the viable strength and moral character of Techno Viking blooming. His pointing finger shows confidence, without violence, as he asserts a willful stance toward community management and boundaries. Techno Viking is soon offered a water bottle (the raver symbol of empathy and community), and this allows him to recapture his feelings of integrity with the Love Parade. Refreshed and brought back into the safety of his people, he catches a groove and proceeds to march in lockstep with his brothers and sisters, in a encapsulation of PLUR values and rhythm, time advancing on the parade's collective waves of agency and hope.
As we move through web3 digital culture building, in what sometimes seems like a chaotic, extractive, zero-sum game, we are in fact experiencing this movement, and within it many of the plot elements Techno Viking enacted. We are creating boundaries for action (digital micro-communities), ways to see each other's beauty and value (airdrops, incentives, reputation, alignments), and the rhythmic, unstoppable momentum of a splinter economy that is multi-agentic and as vibrant and nurturing as any dance.
In Alex Galloway's "Protocol", an observation of web2, we are reminded of the dangers of digital structures that carry within them centralized control mechanisms, such as algorithms curried by centralized social media, state based data trackers, etc. Techno Viking reminds us that our digital spaces can instead be intrinsically managed by human agent actors, given the right space and tools to do so, and that within this a particularly rich personal experience and civic shape can develop. That's where we are today, and the Love Parade moves on, with tens of thousands of Techno Vikings, rabbits, anime characters, and others, marching onward globally, in a beautiful dance that is autonomous and radically collective.
