GCR

I

Cmv: when one person makes a dollar another person loses a dollar. There’s no way around it.

I only have two options where I take my dollars from: 1) from people with more dollars than me or 2) from people with less dollars than me. Being that I believe having more dollars equals having more power and having more power equals making more rules and the people with the dollars who’ve been making all the rules for a game we call capitalist society (I owe due respect, it was a fun game while it lasted) are the people I will nonetheless elect to take my dollars from and encourage the same from those adjacent me in the middle. It’s us people in the middle that have found a way to reinvent the rules on the generation of wealth and the concept of value with this thing called the blockchain.

I learned young to network across. Social climbing doesn’t work anymore when you become a host for someone in power whose nature tells them to stay up. High rests on low says Lao Tzu, so where does the middle rest? Back on the middle, so network across. band together. lean on each other. Form community and I mean real community not a bullshit $COMMUNITY launched from Medium essay and Discord server and a weekly call where you yammer about how crucially important this community is to you, no I mean a real group of humans that care about each other but only because they care about something else first and they don’t play pretend about it.

Anecdotal interstitial:

1. I worked at a casual dinner restaurant and I became friends with the other servers and I was proud to be a top appetizer salesperson especially when management treated us to celebration outings and we all knew what it was like to work at a restaurant where the bread came from a hot metal drawer and the soup spoons were always 86’d.
2. I went to a public university for psychology with professors that let me join their research teams as a data logger and I didn’t care that it was free labor I was just excited to learn about the scientific method in a field I enjoyed with a lot of cute girls who also cared about schemas and biases and cognitive dissonance and the hippocampus.
3. I practice yoga with a Los Angeles studio and never have I known an instructor who pushes the limits of her students and motivates them to grow with as much attention and acumen as she does and I’ve since moved cities but still take livestream classes with her instead of looking for a new studio and I think my classmates are doing the same because the studio seems to have made money last year and is doing much needed renovations.
4. I write for an online collective called Global Coin Research and I fuck with this hybrid approach of equally incentivizing researchers and investors to further blockchain adoption together so here I am opening up meandering and incoherent op-eds on various topics I am passionate about in web3 alongside co-contributors who apparently make good investments and I’m glad they do because that ain’t me, I don’t get money.

I just get power.

Now apply an incentivized token model to the efforts of the individuals in each of the above social identity communities and what do you see happening?

II

We naturally gravitate to what we like, we find an identity in the things we do and we can even make them grow if we are incentivized to invest our time in them with people who feel the same as we do. We find family there and everyone eats as long as they bring something to the pot luck. If you start thinking about a community this way, identity-led first, you realize this gigantic internet thing that was once hailed for connecting people across continents and culture barriers is better used to localize instead. It sounds counterintuitive until you realize localizing your identity is all the middle can do to generate new wealth anyway…and it’s just about the only thing that can redistribute wealth from the high and create new opportunity for the low.

So get off the internet and get on the blockchain, that’s the message. Begin to limit your knowledge of what’s happening in random nation-states, yes, begin to limit your knowledge of what’s happening in random cities, yes, begin to limit your knowledge of what’s happening in random Facebook groups, yes, and try to get off TikTok’s FYP for at least 2 hours today, ok? You don’t have time for the constant noise anymore and you certainly don’t have the dopamine for it either. I know I’d like to know less about news with no bearing on my life and no overlap with my identity, lower my cortisol levels and incentivize my participation in my own self development, contribute locally to areas where I can make real positive progress while simultaneously increasing the numbers in my digital wallet and strengthening my social circles. No more watching dogs starve on streets on the other side of the planet or listening to reports about extremist groups plotting violence in nation-states I’ve never been or seeing posts about an old classmate’s self-help and life coaching venture that I’ll never relate to. I’m more concerned and better equipped to deal with the robberies and vandalism on my own mother’s block and the success of my town’s animal shelter and everyone else on the planet can say something to the same effect.

Now you might think about how global shifts constantly affect all localized decisions so ok think about how there are people who will specialize, just as there will be all kinds of specialists in an incentivized community, that we’ll call inter-community liaisons (for now) and it will be their identity and their elected responsibility and their incentivized purpose to make sure that the communities they liaise are living in harmony without infringing on each others’ peace, tranquility or token price. The global internet shoots flares across newswires escalating fear uncertainty and doubt and now you have an incentivized ambassador to assimilate only the necessary bits of information for you, and hopefully just the bits that raise your community’s token value. Actually, let’s call these people web3’s politicians and yea now even political systems can be reworked with these localized tokens for social identities pitch. The web3 pixie dust is good shit and I just hope I make a morsel of sense.

III

IV

Remember: localizing identity doesn’t necessarily correlate to physical geography, though in many cases it will. Some other thoughts I’m having today below.

• Localize agriculture and food distribution: Incentivize supporting the local grocers, starting urban farms, and contributing to the green space development of a neighborhood. If a region specializes in producing something specific (say Champagne to France or Mezcal to Mexico) that product’s community token is now “localized” across geographic borders.

• Localize tastes in music and film production: Incentivize the specific thematic production companies (like Blumhouse or A24) and reward their contributors supporters and dedicated artists. Incentivize the collectives that form to create music labels and music venues because they are all already on the same frequency.

• Localize the news: Incentivize journalism that covers your local news on television, radio, and digital media. Incentivize the wider-reaching media companies with a specialized focus or a specific interest appeal (like Pew Research Journal or National Geographic)

• Localize your town’s government: Incentivize the transparency, participation in and support of local budgeting and policy making. Allow the community to invest in the planning, zoning, infrastructure and building. Invest in your public and emergency services and incentivize participation in cleaning up the neighborhood. Incentivize sustainable waste programs (like metal recycling and composting) among neighbors. Accrue power with time and efforts and then directly implement changes to policies.

• Localize live events and entertainment: Contribute to and organize local music festivals and town fairs. Incentivize the community to invest and participate in local arts and culture hubs (like theaters and orchestras and dance studios and seasonal attractions).

• Localize social justice organizations: Or continue taking money on donation, or plain not have enough money to mobilize your cause ????.

• Localize youth development and education: Incentivize the organization of recreational athletics and tutoring programs. Create more community backed trade schools and art instruction classes. Localize guilds and societies and magnet programs and STEM and now the youth who participate have stake they take with them.

• Localize health care and pharmaceuticals: Incentivize the new development of companies with like-minded philosophies on treatment strategy and techniques. Allow academics and scientists to own and invest in the research journals where they are published. Incentivize the production of and contributions to effective herbal and alternative medicines. Go find what works for you and go prosper with others it works for too.

• Localize all other interests and social identities: Android OS fanatics, the International Olympics Committee contributors and athletes, Toyota Racing enthusiasts, Takis eaters and producers, the BTS army, the UNICEF workforce, Anonymous guerillas, Doctors Without Borders, The Church of Scientology… whatever just go form tribes it’s the only practical next step after late stage capitalism.

If we incentivize everyone to localize into social identity communities we begin to move away from our current globalized strife. And we’ll create different problems too but whatever we’ll deal with those when they come.

Anyone trying to cmv?