Real Talk: Digital Objects & Ephemeral Selves

Web3 has been heralded as the future of how we engage with people and businesses. However, while the tech underlying Web3 is new, there are many behavioural parallels to be found in a 20-year-old medium: massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) like Fortnite, Second Life, and Runescape. Within these virtual worlds, hundreds of thousands of people—... See more

We are entering the age of living online. An increasing number of people have employment that exists only online. We have meaningful relationships that are primarily or even only online. It should not be surprising that a growing number of us -- especially we who are most intensely online -- are embracing the concept of ‘owning’ online things. A be... See more

Web3 space has made its mark in the financial spectrum and is now set to capture the entire gaming market. It has been heralded as the future of engaging with people and businesses. However, the tech we use in Web3 is newly built and requires us to find behavioral parallels in massively multiplayer online games (MMOs). These virtual worlds are plac... See more

instead of creating temporary profiles like we do in web2, web3 promotes long-term thinking. If people were empowered to build and maintain permanent identities online, we believe that on-chain systems could encourage people to more carefully curate the reputation markers that they carry with them into the future. In this case, curating a permanent... See more

as humans, we take all of the big challenges of real life and the complex social structures of the physical world and they get re-created in weird ways in a digital, social space.

Let’s consider that formula: community knowledge + solidarity networks + folklore. The web3 communities I’m in have powerful ideologies; these are spaces with shared perspectives and rituals that have emerged over a compressed period of time. This manner of collective world-building in and around projects (in the best possible way, I wouldn’t use t... See more