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title: 'A Guide to the Gitcoin Metaverse: Script'

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# A Guide to the Gitcoin Metaverse: Script

I’m Colton Orr, artist and metaverse art lead at GitcoinDAO. 

Gitcoin’s metaverse projects have proven to be successful ventures for greenpilling crypto natives and raising funds for public goods ($3mm from Moonshot Bots, $500k from the Greatest LARP). During the Greatest LARP campaign, creators, including myself, joined the initiative to build lore around public goods and slaying Moloch. 

We will continue the quarterly release of new Gitcoin Comics and NFT fundraisers, but those initiatives only need a small team. Many other creators have been drawn to our mission, and until now there hasn't been a outlet for their talents. 

In October, Kevin Owocki wrote a post titled Calling all GitcoinDAO Metaverse Coordinators! That call inspired us to take action. 

I will now be reading from a letter written by an unnamed friend I have had the great honor of working with. They are an authentic artist that is so dedicated to their craft that presenting this on stage would have been a distraction from their mission. 

The essay title is A Guide to the Gitcoin Metaverse.

We are making a guide to the universe. It is an interface between fanciful and purposeful labors. It keeps two worlds in balance: the integral vision of regenerative cryptoeconomics espoused by Gitcoin and the integral lore visualized by a whole community of sci-fi-fantasy-MMORPG-crypto-governerds.

The tenacity for lore building in this group boggles the mind, but we face a familiar problem. Our fantasies provoke us to grind, to hoard, to level up. They are competitive and rivalrous, privileging customizability over standards that allow us to align and collaborate more effectively.

We aren’t the first ones to consider this topic. Our work is loosely based on the Cellarius Universe Guide commissioned by ConsenSys. We interpret this project as an invitation: to dream wildly together, to meld the dystopian vision with our utopian ambitions, to meld the hopeful with the realistic, and take accountability of how our current focus on automated money might secure an intentional and optimistic future. Although Cellarius has fallen to the wayside, we wish to continue elaborating the solarpunk vision with enough fidelity to allow a new audience of regen creatives to actualize these principles through their contributions.

This is an excellent use case for Gitcoin and Ethereum to elaborate how our blockchain technologies can support fledging and speculative community development. This community is dedicated to considering difficult social problems, meditating upon the tragedy of the commons and securing support for public goods. Ethereum is heralded as the first digital public good, a global scale infrastructure that will eventually transmogrify into a support network for preserving our physical public goods. We interpret this proposition as an invitation to investigate the metaverse as the interface between the digital and physical realms.

The topic is gaining momentum these days and we need to support each other to collectively peer beyond the apocalyptic veil. We must cross the threshold and manifest our cryptoeconomic theories to affect positive change in the world. The end game to the greatest LARP is learning to resist profiting off of our shared resources, to restrain ourselves from racing to the bottom, to rethink our Now-Me motivations in order to preserve our Future-We abundance.

In my own words:

The Celerius Universe Guide created a template. Our Gitcoin Universe Guide will use a similar template to tell a story of human coordination. This guide will provide a framework for community contributors to propose projects, campaigns, and lore for future comics. We can diversify our audience and enrich the stories by inviting the community to help us elaborate our solarpunk vision. We will explore new governance structures for world building that keep creators and regen economics at the center. 

Returning to the essay.

We have all heard the lore by this point. Moloch is a meme derived from the Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander’s now rather famous essay Meditation on Moloch and Ginsberg’s epic poem Howl that the essay often quotes. The image of Moloch has plagued humanity as a representation of our propensity to sacrifice our future potential for immediate, shortsighted gains. In this community, Moloch is said to be the god of coordination failure, but really he’s an idol illuminating the selfish degenercy that lives within humanity. Moloch lives within us and cannot be defeated as long as the degen incentive mechanism remains so potent. 

In considering how to invite open-source contributions to the comic series we glimpse the difficulty in tracking changes to canonical content. As new ideas are introduced they must maintain the tether to the core principles and align with the content that came before. Making the lore open-source amounts to taking collective accountability of the lore we are generating, just like we must practice collective responsibility for the memes that we are disseminating. We are all collectively articulating the living mythology of Moloch, so it seems only right that we should collectively elaborate the repository that integrates contributions and tracks the changes to this shared foundation.

Shared intellectual property is the keystone for reconfiguring our relation to our own ideas as perhaps not completely our own. We no longer need to obscure and protect our achievements from each other, in fact quite the contrary. We are moving towards a culture of nurturing profound and often unruly inspirations, which requires that we take individual and collective accountability for the mimetic ideas that we birth and distribute to each other and ensure that they radiate a hopeful, regenerative, sustainable, conscientious, and humble ethos. Memes defy accountability; they are dangerous because they are autonomous and are difficult to source back to any individual.

The Universe Guide will invite contributors to exercise collective governance over the content as an experiment in collective responsibility over the memes that we put out in the world. We are all collectively building upon a shared ground, articulating a shared vision, acting as stewards to a shared canonical lore.
It’s essential that we continue to identify entry points for non-technical folks to enter the space. The Universe Guide is an invitation for many different kinds of thinkers to coalesce their vision and work in a dispersed, autonomous, and even anonymous manner, incentivized to participate beyond their self-occupied interests while recalibrating our shared imagination technology. How do we incentivize these contributors?

Creatives have been used and abused so much that it has become a tragic-comic archetype, a living cliche of the disadvantaged visionary, the starving artist, starving for cultural approval as well as a stable living wage. These figures are important for the collective. We need figures to continue asking the difficult questions and crack us out of our collective neurotic, paranoiac, schizo capitalist delusions and dedicate themselves to imagining ways of moving beyond pure economic incentivization. We need artists to diminish the civilization’s obsession with heroic Now-Me identities and illustrate a clear (and realistic) Future-We tomorrow without enslaving humans to the protocols of abundant distribution.

As non-technical crypto-DAO governerds, we are not savvy enough to figure this out on our own. Our contribution is to courageously focus on the bigger vision while actively diminishing hubris, to get sticky in the adhesive that binds the legos together so that others might elaborate this vision. The vision is itself a public good, a cerebral commons that we must protect. 

In my own words:

As an artist, I seek a place I can go to help build meaningful stories. I seek a place to connect with other creators and collaborate on projects and new forms of storytelling. As an artist I need to be paid fairly for my contributions. 

The Universe guide is a creative network that makes all of this possible. Crypto has given us new tools for funding and coordinating, and where DeFi created financial composability; the Universe Guide gives us creative composability. 

This culture of sharing could lead to exponential creative growth as thousands of artists build, mix, and match on each other’s creations. Wouldn’t it be great to focus that creative energy on solarpunk values? Imagine the cultural impact these projects will have 5 years, 10 years from now. 

In addition to composability, the UG is a space for non-technical folks like myself. When I learned about crypto, I thought all I could do was buy Bitcoin and wait for it to go up. Most of the world still thinks that, but talented creatives are falling down the rabbit hole every day and we want them to join our mission. The UG offers community and funding in exchange for high value, mission-aligned contributions. 

Returning to the essay.

We recognize the metaverse metaphor itself to be a non-zero sum game-of-games where the only winners are likely those that are able to mobilize ontological cheat codes for transcending the manifest destiny of the simulacra rigmarole. The metaverse is a game about reflexivity, about unlearning how to play all previous games, a game that celebrates the shared agony of the players. It’s not an infinite game, but one that serves a single unified purpose: to figure out how to stop playing against ourselves and each other and even the game itself in order to change our own minds.

We are dedicated to articulating the value of imagining differently so that we can stop perpetuating the traumas of Web2, of CeFi, trad political structures, top-down governance. To begin, let’s be weary of some of the terminology, like “power” and “money.” I’m often told to revisit the history of money in order to understand how these new AMMs will cure all of our human woes, or to remember the centuries-old evolution towards horizontal organizations to better understand how DAOs will transform how we live almost overnight. I am optimistic and I am hopeful, which is why I am here, why I am aligned with the Ethereum community generally and Gitcoin’s regenerative economics very specifically. But I am also a realist and I know that nothing is going to change if we are not explicitly focused on changing ourselves.

We need to recode the archetypal operating system. This means unlearning self-destructive and rivalrous behaviors and allowing each other to dream differently, to imagine freely, and not simply in service to a KPI or economic metric. This is not a blindly optimistic TED-talk marketing scheme, but a sincere call to very deliberately and intentionally meme ourselves differently to each other.

This is where Moloch and the Universe Guide comes back in. We need to nurture and support an open and safe testing ground for radically divergent ideas where we can practice thinking and feeling collectively. We need to learn how to change the canonical lore of our own imagination, to shift the narrative of the stories that we tell ourselves. It’s so much more complex than good vs evil, than infinite reiterations of a Marvel universe of superficial quasi-heros. We must take responsibility for the propaganda that we weave on the collective cerebral loom, or else we will get Disney delusions again and again and again. 

Let’s be careful and clear with our words. Moloch is no longer the Canaanite god of child sacrifice or the technophilic god of human coordination failure, always already manifest outside of our own limits of accountability. Moloch is soylent green! Moloch is people! Moloch should not be objectified or dissociated from quintessentially human habits of mind. We are Moloch. Our collective coordination failures are Moloch. There is no “out there” out there. But we must also be careful not to blame ourselves. Blame is Moloch; shame is Moloch. 

Moloch emerges from miscommunication, is miscommunication. Moloch thrives in language, is language. Moloch is the virus of the mind, corrupting the reflexive code base. Moloch happens in instances like this, when someone on stage uses words like “money” or “power” or “agile imagination software” and we all nod our heads in agreement before returning to our existential echo chambers to iterate upon the understanding in a myriad of idiosyncratic styles.

We hope the Universe Guide and the Gitcoin Comic series become potent enough to facilitate collective and active unlearning on a community-wide scale. We hope that such tools will support our collective imagination and allow us to remain focused on optimizing for human values, not perpetuating paperclip machines all the way down. We hope to play our part in this ontological game by strategizing to wield our memes with tact, subtlety, and profound nuance, to break the illusion of phantasmagoric shadow play that Moloch - which is to say ourselves - have cast upon our speculative future for far too long. We hope to nurture this community's propensity to imagine differently and confront the Moloch meme inside all of us. This network of creatives will illuminate our path toward a solarpunk future. It will align, support, and promote the core principles of Gitcoin and public goods funding. 

In my own words:

There are many things going wrong in the world--war, climate change, increasing political unrest--but one thing keeps me inspired. Many of us could be making more money in other sectors of crypto, yet we all find ourselves here, because we believe this is critical to building the world that we want to live in. 
This is a Schelling Point for the hopeful. A Schelling Point for people who choose to coordinate rather than defect. A Schelling Point for those who choose public goods over increased personal wealth. 

The Universe Guild is a Schelling Point for creatives. A place for artists of all kinds to work together toward our shared vision of a solarpunk world.

Cheers to a bright future!

Thank you for your valuable attention.
