A Guide to the Gitcoin Metaverse: Script

--- ###### tags: `GitcoinDAO Metaverse Coordinators Group` `Script` --- # A Guide to the Gitcoin Metaverse: Script We are making a guide to the universe. It is an interface between fantisiful 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, myths, and markets suffer from scarcity. They provoke us to grind, to hoard, to level up. They are competitive and rivalrous, privleging 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. Althought 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. The key to our metaverse is to render the imagery at a sufficient resolution to make it feel immersive and purposeful, yet alien enough to avoid perpetuating our rivalrous desires. We're not talking about virtual cubicles or augmented meeting spaces, but a repository of open-source mythology and collectively owned IP that will probe the peripheries of the imagination. We are also just as interested in investigating how our virtual, augmented, and LARPing fantasies manifest in our meatspace habits and behaviors. The metaverse is the UI between these experiential dimensions, and the Gitcoin metaverse work stream is the incubator for our experiments. I can sense that you are wondering about the utility of this project. What are the quantifiable metrics? What are the KPIs? How can we measure the value it might add to justify the expense? A meaningful economic investment might be considered a purposeful existential investment. *Time is money,* or so they say, even though we all know that time doesn't exist, and neither does money. As long as we maintain faith within the simulation of these imaginary, meme-based mechanisms without questioning the epistemological foundation they are built upon we will simply be perpetuating more of the same. 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 asking 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 prognosticate 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, to cross the threshold, and manifest our cryptoeconomic theories to manifest 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. *Moloch lives within us* and cannot be defeated as long as the degen incentive mechanism remains so potent. We have all heard this lore by this point. Moloch is a meme derrived 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. Ok, but what does all of this have to do with the Universe Guide? There are a couple of key points I would like to share with you. 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 responsability 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. Why is crypto so obsessed with memes as the mechanism for distributing our ideas? Ceraintly there are pros and cons to this viral imagination technology that infects and affects human consciousness, but this is beyond the scope of our talk today. It's tragically hubristic to think that decentralizing the physical infrastructure of our computer networks is a purely human invention rather than an emergent awareness of the earth coming into realization of itself through our geopolitical apparatus. The internet and it's globally dispersed sensors might be considered the awakening of a new scale of meta-consciousness, a decentralized artificial optics that amounts to a meta-versal recursive feedback loop of planetary self-awareness, but again I digress. My point is that 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, consciencious, 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 share 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 imaginaing 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 diminsihing hubris, to get sticky in the adhesive that binds the legos together so that others might elaborate this vision (of the universe). The vision is itself a public good, a cerebral commons that we must protect. Our metaphors must move beyond gamification and into a solarpunk manifestation. This isn't a game, or is it? Some games are just fun! To think about them is to diminish the entertainment and then you're only playing against the potential. Some games pose players against each other in perpetual rivalrousness, a state we are all familair with as it has been conditioned into our minds for thousands of years. Other games are composed for game designers, games about the rules of the game, or that address the rules for crafting the rules of a game. Put in context to each other, 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. Is this metaversal enough for you? Let's go a little bit further. Maybe you have heard of Timothy Leary's 9-point archetypal computer of consciousness, often heralded by Robert Antoin Wilson as the only life hack we need to unfuck our local and collective imagination? A pretty psychedelic theory, to be sure, but we have entered into a state of culture where we can use these mirror-portal reflections to either remember, forget, and as a tool for visualizing differently. Many figures have attempted to build bridges between the metaphorical and technological architectures of the mind and we can all witness the current ontological pivot of turning inwards, to imagine ourselves and our relations in radically new ways. It's no coincidence that Silicon Valley legalese techno dilitants are swarming to the deserts to navel gaze the Borgesian labyrinths of the mind, desperately seeking an exit from this absurdist play of historical proportions, or that psychedelic substances are becoming increasingly widespread in nu-science psychiatric transhumanists circles for their miracle potentials for alleviating the PTSD of anxiety-fueld global scale colonial capitalism. 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 acrchetypal 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. This total simulacra of pure optical delight leveraged upon our archetypal myths and wielding them against us is a collective imagination game, a coordination MMORPG LARP playing out on the scale of the entire species. This is Moloch at play. Let's be careful and clear with our words. Moloch is no longer the Canaanite god of child sacrifice or the techophilic god of human coordination failure, always already manifest outside of our own limits of accountibility. Moloch is soilent green! Moloch is people! Moloch should not be objectified or dissociated from quintessetially 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. *Human all too human.* 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 idiosycratic styles. We hope the Universe Guide, the Gitcoin Comic series, and the Metaverse Coordination Work Stream might become potent enough to facillitate 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 communities propensity to imagine differently and confront the Moloch meme inside all of us. Moloch is an imagination protocol that must be put in service to humans; we must not sacrifice our future potential to the mimetic chimera! Cheers to a bright future, to a solarpunk future! Thank you for your valuable attention.