Comic #4 Design Sprint Notes

--- ###### tags: `Gitcoin Graphic Novel` `Universe Guide` --- # Comic #4 Design Sprint Notes #### What We Know - We have characters, landscape, and a rough outline for the narrative. - Already identified some inflection points and how the comic will end, so we can work back from there. After this point anything could happen, so no sense thinking about those possibilities. - List of future DAO collaborations will be sourced from Owocki's Impact DAOs book. Current top picks are Yearn, Coordinape, Commons Stack + TEC. #### Primary goals of Comic #4: - Top priority: lock in the general narrative arch and try to map to a page count so TW can begin writing the script. - Second priority: identify some general directions so Horacio can start experimenting sooner than later. - Third priority: all of this 👇🏽 - Elaborate interpersonal relations of characters. - Expand detail of individual characters through backstories or artifacts. - Expand detail of specific landscapes, to infuse them with more meaning in the Gitcoin lorecraft and increase the fidelity of *The Quadratic Lands.* Away from high resolution, towards high fidelity. #### We Begin at the End - Last 1/2 or 2/3 of the book will be dedicated to inviting future DAOs/protocols to participate in the project by splintering/fracturing the narrative into numerous branches. We will design the end as an opening, sockets that future imagination engineers can click into. - **From the "end" of the RaidGuild narrative until the "end" of the book, we will experiment with multi/pluri/omni-directional time-space contortions in the narrative to destabilize the Single Source of Truth.** The goal is twofold: - Experiment with the comic form itself, to demonstrate we are having fun and pushing boundaries, to attract an audience that respects the risk we are taking - Destabilize our centralized ownership over the IP, to extend an invitation to others to take up the reins without forcing them down specific funnels. #### From Phantasmagoric Moloch to Psychosomatic Moloch? (WIP) - Taking up this last point, we will elaorate the shadow play of Moloch into the interior spaces of the characters. - A simple goal here: to *show not tell* that all the previous narratives (from comic #1, #2, and #3) are all delusions manipulated by Moloch, and to suggest that all future narratives will go on continue being Moloch unless we figure out a way (as a character, and also as a reader) to manifest our vision differently. #### Secondary Considerations of the Sprint - **Identifiying artifacts**, meme-able inflection points, and other distinguishable imagery that we might extract and use as *interfaces* between the comic universe and IRL Gitcoin lore. - These elements will be set aside to ideate/iterate into **transmedia opportunities**, can be integrated into the auction rounds, extended to the community to play with, etc. - This is a bridge between comic>UG>auction. We might **consider the visual/conceptual IA** (information architecture) of these elements to some extent, specifically in relation to how NFTs or other artful artifacts are extended to public facing. Let's be careful not to get distracted with the infinite possibilities. - Octavian might help a bit, or we might consider **enlisting a designer** to help with this. If so, we might render a clear set of needs so they know what they are in for. - In general, we should dedicate some time to **ideating on the auction itself**. - There is a lot here to unpack, but if we can **setup a repo of references** and analyze them in a methodical manner (1-2 references each week for X number of weeks) we might begin to articulate a market strategy as a foundation. - We might also consider recruiting someone to help with marketing strategy, or source from the Gitcoin community. That's up to Colton. --- ## High-Level Storyline Sketch for Comic #4 - Comic #3 ended with an image of the Phantasmagoric Moloch. Comic #4 pickups up from here. - Begins with a low point of extreme desperation. --- #### Page 1: Sacrifice - A sacrifice of self-interestedness, of selfish desires that threaten the future potentials (a definition of Moloch). - Could also explore the negative sacrifice: degens willfully sacrificing that future for their own gain, to elaborate the dangers of the degen world-view, to personnify the "evil" of status quo business-as-usual conduct. - Illustrate sacrifice as a form of **surrender** to ourselves, to each other, to a greater good. Surrender is posed as a way to generate trust in opposition to *building, earning, accumulating, winning* trust. - Sacrifice/surrender is shown on the subjective/personal level, put in relation to larger categorical imperatives (a metaphor for green pilling). - Should introduce parallel storylines, stories within stories. Remembering back to the green portal inflection point (and further) to begin to entangle these narratives together with subtle suggestion. - Reference: crypto winter is coming, desperation in degen ##### Notes - Alternative game theory scenarios: beyond **prisoner's dilemma**, or alterior universes of prisoners. Characters acting out the prisoner's dilemma while striving to reach the Quadratic Lands, to coordinate in a way where no one is left behind. They all need to make it together; no one will make it individually. - Simulate the different choices to illustrate inflections, keep open which choice is best - Multidimensional bentoism: representations of global simultaneous sacrifice > Campbell taught that sacrifice is a theme that runs through all things natural — death (the sacrifice of a living being) gives way to new life in an ever-continuing cycle. But death is often metaphorical and may be the death of a habit, a pattern of thinking, or an attachment to something. Once the hero has made “the ultimate sacrifice,” there is a realization that takes place. This is the stuff of enlightenment wherein the act of total surrender of the personal self gives way to the realization that there is no “other.” This, said Campbell, is “the breakthrough of a metaphysical realization that you and the other are one” — and that the idea of separation (a separate “me” and “you”) is only due to being stuck in the temporal idea of time and space created by the egoic self. --- #### Page 2: Catharsis/Climax - A battle? Action sequence? Pitting the characters against themselves and the Phantasmagoria of the landscape. - How is this sequence different from that illustrated in comic #3? It's more psychological. It's about coming to terms with the realization that we cannot defeat Moloch because *we are Moloch.* - Rivalrous antagonism shifts towards shared agonism; the realization that is simultaneously a high-point of psychic tension on the brink of death that threatens material life, and also (because of the sacrifice or death) points towards a resurrection. - Reference: battling with the irresponsibly and low-fidelity metaphors that are distributed through the crypto ecosystem - Aesthetics: internal, mental, move away from weapons and towards internal war. How to represent this visually? Are there artifacts to explore/extract here? ##### Notes - Are the characters trying to escape their own game? Does this rejection amount to a kind of symbollic death, or require a leap of faith that they will be able to pass beyond the veil? > Psychologically, anxiety or depression are released by bringing unconscious material to the surface. The hero and the reader have reached the highest point of awareness, a peak experience of higher consciousness. Catharsis works best through a physical expression of emotions such as laughter or tears. --- #### Page 3: Resurrection - Lots of transcendental ideas we might explore here: cyclical regeneration, karmic paradoxes, [vertical hierarchies of nested voices](https://integral-life-home.s3.amazonaws.com/SteveSelf-Altitude.jpg), the eternal return[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return), etc. - References: the bullish/bearish cycles of the market, a more profound relationship towards death, or a welcoming of death (of the old world or way of doing things) that embraces new ways to come. - The aesthetics of this page should push the boundaries of the aesthetics. Gore? Psychedelic particles flying through the air? Breaking/contorting space-time continuums? Need to align on some experimental visual approaches. ##### Notes - Turning off the game = implosion or explosion? Collapsing on itself. - Turtles all the way down. Blind men and elephants all the way down. Cosmological hierarchy: how to model the mouse on the cat on the goat, etc. How to describe the entry/exit points between the worlds? - Or does it become a universal paperclip maximizer all the way down? > Vogler describes the resurrection by way of sacred architecture, which, he says, aims to create the feeling of resurrection by confining worshipers in a dark narrow hall, like a birth canal, before bringing them out into an open well-lit area, with a corresponding lift of relief. Danger is usually on the broadest scale of the entire story and the threat is to the entire world, not just the hero. The stakes are at their very highest. --- #### Page 4: Becoming a Master of 2 Worlds - Here, the story shifts away from RaidGuild and towards the Impact DAO idea. - There's a way of inhabiting the world in contradiction, with all of it's catastrophes, while remaining proactive in generating impact or reverse engineering reality to enter into a new state of awareness. - Implies the multidimensionality of pluriversal perspectives, as a reconciliation of the psychic elements introduced so far. - Also plays with the metaverse-as-interface idea: accessing multiple simultaneous contradictory and paradoxical timelines. This is where aspects of the UG mechanics are introduced into the story: governances, transactional relations, pockets of uncertainty that contributors are invited to fill. - This is an emancipatory moment for the characters (and readers)! A taste for total freedom stripped of ego and hubris, condescension, and all the manifestations of corporate org management traumas... free of Web2/trad traumas to realize another way of conducting ourselves. - Aesthetics: maybe a gatefold image or experimental format that leads to the complete unraveling of the singular narrative arch. Plays with multiplicity and simultaneity on the page itself. Invites new forms of narrative experimentation to come. ##### Notes - Kaleidoscope vision, like an extension of Flatland to the 16th dimensional aperture - Need a concrete example: Holacracy vs DAOs = (Moloch-style) DAOs prioritize the autonomy of the individual to reach a similar goal of maximizing the agency of the organization. Are there other examples we might draw upon? - Stepping outside of the Matrix: the moment of epiphany where something clicked and empowered a shift in agency, unlocks the superpowers. - What is the utility of the game we were playing? What was our goal, how did we get lost, why are we fighting each other? - How do we transcend from playing a game against other players, from playing against a game, towards playing with the rules of game making, playing with the notion of a game itself? - Related to **the constitution** as a doc: it doesn't determine the rules, but the standards of rules that we all agree to. Using meatspace governance might be a highly relatable strategy. - Might rules about the rules be a definition of the metaverse? Not virtual reality, but alternate realities that interface to the real substrate. > Once the hero's transformation is complete, he or she returns to the ordinary world with the elixir, a great treasure or a new understanding to share. This can be love, wisdom, freedom, or knowledge, Vogler writes. It doesn't have to be a tangible prize. Unless something is brought back from the ordeal in the inmost cave, an elixir, the hero is doomed to repeat the adventure. The return is where the writer resolves subplots and all questions raised in the story. She may raise new questions, but all old issues must be addressed. A good return unties the plot threads with a certain degree of surprise, a taste of unexpected or sudden revelation. --- #### Page 5+: The Story is Over; The Story is Just Beginning: The Eternal Return of Moloch! > The Eternal Return is a concept that the universe and all existence and energy has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space. - An exploration of **lore itself,** of the metaverse as an interface, the relationship to organizing via coordination/cooperation in Quadratic Lands in higher detail: - Outlining specific catastrophes and how we will avoid them, beyond the general hysteria - Introduce specific elements of the Quadratic Lands as an exercise in sensitive futuring or critical defuturing. - Complex illustrations of difficult events, based on recent Owocki interviews and conversations (ETH Denver, Greenpill Podcast, etc.) - Opportunities and inflection points to the UG and auction: not to narrow possibilities, but to layout as many opportunities as we can identify. This might require a community effort with Gitcoiners! - The page layout will experiment with illustrating simultaneous and alternative timelines while hinting at what timelines might follow. Sets up a representation of a handful of Impact DAOs. - Doesn't close the RaidGuild narrative, but sets it up alongside other branches that can be forked. - RG characters are put alongside ETH Bot, Anon, and other characters from comics #1 and #2. - **Moloch is manipulating this dream sequence.** Moloch is pulling all the strings; all of the following events occur with a delusional/hallucinatory landscape that remains unclear, incoherent, disorienting. The only clear reference is the characters performing **critical embodiment** (this is an idea that will be elaborated in a long-form braindump soon and connects with a CTA in the UG). The landscape is blurred. - How far can we push this anti-storyline within the Phantasmagoric Moloch idea? - Future storylines will take up an embodied form of storytelling - CTA: let's diligently explore the ramification of alternatives with detail, in the mechanics, to execute a radical combinatorics of existential agility, to put the pieces together in novel ways (while avoiding habitual patterns of mind) - A new vision of the Quadratic Lands! - Let's be critical of the utopian image put forth and offer alternatives to branch possibilities. - Dystopian? Not necessarily, just *othering* to avoid universal mythologies that swallow the diversity of the world. - This means wielding uncertainty: fucking with time-space, narrative coherence, experimental lorecrafting and mythological ontogenesis (origin storytelling). - High-priority: address the integration with the Universe Guide! - Might happen by breaking the fourth wall and addressing the reader directly - Another great opportunity to play with experimental narrative devices from literature and cinema. Let's setup a research repo on this topic and crowdsource inspiration. - **Play with the narrators voice.** How meta can we get? Operatic! The script of the second half of the book might explore disembodied narration, multiple voices singing as a chorus, building up to an incredible crescendo and illustrating that all the books before are building up to the meta point that facilitates a (Cambrian) explosion of possibilities (without getting carried away with the biological/evolutionary metaphor; in fact being very critical of it). - The north star of Comic #4: (re)defining **impact** to coincide with the release of the Impact DAO book. ##### Notes - Maybe we don't venture to answer these questions ourselves, but to pose really good questions and open them up to the community via Gitcoin PGF? Allows for more inclusion and diversity of perspective. - Also an opportunity to think about the co-design of the transmedia/auction initiatives: we have a clear vision of where they begin while releasing control over where they end up. ##### Primary Topics to Explore - Tying together comics #1, #2, #3, with the new comic #4: - **1, 2, infinity** - comic #1 = money legos, composability, as a bot, begins with the external. ETH Bot emphasis. - comic #2 = continuation, how Gitcoin tells the story about crypto and itself. Anon could be a member of multiple DAOs. - comic #3 = the story the RG tells itself. The whole raid party is the character. - comic #4 = how does a comic about crypto see itself, combined with Gitcoin internal lore about itself - comic #5 = how the protocol coordinates itself internally and how it relays that story to the greater world - Lore itself. How the comic might be falling short to get the message across. - Invitation for contributors to iterate on the content. - Create a higher fidelity vision of the Quadratic Lands. - Embodiment, disembodiment : playing upon the *Three Body Problem* in DAOs idea, an opportunity to explore allegories of embodiment in Web3-DAOs towards character design. > According to Stoic physics, the universe is periodically destroyed in an immense conflagration (ekpyrosis), and then experiences a rebirth (palingenesis). These cycles continue for eternity, and the same events are exactly repeated in every cycle. > On the other hand, Origen (c. 185 – c. 253 AD) characterises the Stoics as claiming that the contents of each cycle will not be identical, but only indistinguishable: *To avoid supposing that Socrates will live again, they say that it will be some one indistinguishable from Socrates, who will marry some one indistinguishable from Xanthippe, and will be accused by men indistinguishable from Anytus and Meletus.* > Johann Gustav Vogt argued in favour of a cyclical system, additionally positing the spatial co-existence of an infinite number of identical worlds. Louis Auguste Blanqui similarly claimed that in an infinite universe, every possible combination of forms must repeat itself eternally across both time and space. > "What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness, and say to you, "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine." - Nietzsche's *The Gay Science*, section 341