A little more than a year ago I wrote about the end of social media. I think a lot of what I wrote there holds true and is more obvious from this perspective, especially if you consider the trajectory X/witter is on. Regardless of how you personally feel about Musk or any of his choices (like removing block functions and unbanning abusers) the fact that he’s moved from apolitical to heavily pushing one side, and will have a role with the incoming government, it’s fair to consider things objectively. If the US government set up a social media app today I don’t know that many people would be rushing towards it, nor would they trust it to be open, fair, objective, or secure. Well rando normies might but most people I interact with online spend a few minutes thinking about privacy and security and take that into account at least somewhat. I think it’s probably reasonable to hold X to the same standard, which I also imagine for a lot of people it now fails.
For the moment I’m still there, though I cancelled my pro+ check mark thing a while ago (yet still seem to have the perks) and admit it’s mostly nostalgia and cryptotwitter keeping me engaged, but for how much longer I can’t say. I have been revisiting some of the newer decentralized options I’ve talked about in the past, and making a more concerted effort to spend time elsewhere. Truthfully, a future where I never even think about social media gets more appealing everyday, but without it I don’t know how to communicate or stay in touch with anything but a very small group of people, and everyday the thought of consolidating to only that gets more appealing, but for now I still need to work and let people know what I’m doing, so I’m still in the game.
Given that, I thought I’d share a bit what I’m playing with and how, for anyone that wants to follow along.
My one big realization is that there’s no way for me to be 100% engaged in every app all the time, so while for much of the last almost 20 years Twitter has been my primary goto, I’m actively trying to shift primary to Bluesky. The addition of account switching was big, and the recent launch of deck.blue will make anyone who still misses the golden age of Tweetdeck feel warm and cozy. I also really like being able to use my own domain as my username which serves as verification that I am who I say I am.
For a while now Bluesky and Warpcast were my kind of alternating 2nd and 3rd place though I’d admittedly sometimes go days or weeks without looking at them. At one point they were both very much Twitter clones with a dash of their own flavor, and while they’ve both grown a lot since then and there’s lots of factors and issues to consider, the big thing for me is that anytime I went back to Bluesky it felt immediately familiar where as every time I’d go to Warpcast I’d feel lost and like I was starting over from scratch. I don’t understand the recent change with channels and while I’m sure if I set aside a few hours I could get up to speed I’m just not motivated to do that, because I feel like I might have to do the same thing next month to get up to speed on whatever the next major change is. It also feels like it’s getting kind of hostile in ways I just don’t have time to worry about. So while I have the account there I’m admittedly not paying much attention. This is feeling kind of similar to Mastodon for me at this point, I’m there but I never go there.
I very occasionally look at Nostr and when I do I use Nos or Damus on iOS. The web interfaces I used before don’t seem to be working anymore and I haven’t bothered to look into why or what else might be a better option because it still feels very heavy inside baseball bitcoin land there, which is fine, just not my vibe. I don’t even know how to link my profile, so yeah.
I’m using native apps, but also enjoying some of the 3rd party options taking advantage of the open protocols to allow interacting with several different accounts in one place. On iOS I just set up Openvibe to sync Bluesky, Nostr, and Mastodon – so with that I might be passively engaging more with Nostr and Mastodon than I had been in the past. It sounds like Micro.blog does that too, and also syncs with other places like Medium, Tumblr, Flickr, LinkedIn, Threads and others which I was initially intrigued by but while you can set up a free account to read a combined timeline you have to pay to post anything which was too much friction for me at the time. I’m not opposed to paying for apps at all, don’t get me wrong – I pay for a lot of apps, but no free trial + similar functionality that I have elsewhere + short attention span worked against it here. I may revisit later but I think Openvibe sort of covers the bases.
I’m not on Threads because Facebook, though recently I was wondering if I was being too much of a hardass about that so I asked on some of my feeds if I should try it out, and the admittedly biased group of people who bothered to respond to me were split at about 10% enjoying it and saying I should join, and 90% saying it’s just another algo driven feed by a major company pushing things I may or may not want to see and same drama as elsewhere so I think I’m still avoiding it for now.
This is all largely text focused, for images it’s a whole other collection of fun.
I’m still using Instagram, which yes I know Facebook, but I was there before and just never left, though haven’t converted to any of the meta/facebook/whatever stuff they have brought in which probably hurts me but the dumb thing is that in order to file a DMCA report with Facebook for something on IG – something I need to do from time to time – you need to have an IG account. So, yeah.
Sunlit is apparently a very nice Instagram clone/replacement made by the Micro.blog team, but when I tried to look at it I needed a MB login for it which I didn’t have at the time so still haven’t checked it out, but others seem to like it. Popset, Rodeo and Perma are also interesting next-gen photo/image blogging apps (Rodeo being more art focused) which have the bonus of being on-chain though that aspect is obfuscated for the most part, so onboarding is easy and if you don’t want to think about web3 stuff you don’t have to, but if you want to take advantage of it there it is.
I think we’ll see more and more of that in the future so it makes sense to have that foundation in place on new things being built.
For chat I spent a lot of time with Telegram these days, and Signal being a close second. Admittedly I’m not on Discord as much as I once was and can’t remember the last time I opened Slack. It’s for this reason that Beeper has my attention. I haven’t gone through the paces with it yet, but it looks to be a chat aggregator similar to Openvibe but for Signal and Telegram and Instagram and Slack and Discord and LinkedIn and Facebook and WhatsApp and several others so that might be a great option for people struggling to juggle between all of those places.
One final thing I’ll leave you with that I also have only lightly scratched the surface on is Delta Chat. Despite it’s name, it’s not a chat app – though maybe it kind of is? It’s actually an email client but it’s not like any email client you’ve ever seen because the UI is 100% chat focused. Gone are subjects, addresses, CCs, etc – all the things you think of with email. It really breaks your brain if you add your main business email address to it, however if you have a secondary address that you just use for friends and family and mainly just talking (vs sharing big files or something) it might be interesting to play with. I’ll dive into email more later, some other time.
That’s all for the moment, see you out in the ether…
As many already know the book CRYPTOPUNKS: FREE TO CLAIM that I worked on most of last year, which is being published by Phaidon, is currently at the printers. As far as I know it should be in people’s hands in early December. I may or may not have seen a copy already, and in either case I can attest that it turned out beautifully. This thing is a brick, at over 800 pages it truly is an epic piece of work. It’s substantial in every way. Beyond just a catalog of all 10,000 CryptoPunks, it’s filled with thought provoking essays and insightful commentary. Interviews and assessments. And it’s put together in such a way that you can pick it up, flip to a random section and spend a few minutes reading and walk away feeling like you gained something from it. It’s not a cover to cover read, but a collection of powerful stand alone work. I’m deeply honored to have played a role in helping shape this from idea to final thing, and will be proud to have it on my shelf, and delighted when I see it on others.
Which is inevitable due it’s size and color. I mean, look at this thing:
You might think being this thick, it’s 100% all encompassing. In our initial talks that’s certainly something we aspired to. The end all be all, totally comprehensive book on CryptoPunks. And in many ways it is, but also–it isn’t. As we got into it we realized how this is a living thing, changing day to day with new stories being written and old stories being revised. While working on it we kept having to change something because something else happened, a big sale, new information uncovered, etc. At some point we had to say “this is the cut off point” otherwise it never would have been sent to the printer.
I also concede that there’s a level of information many people will find interesting and then another level that only the super nerdy dorks like myself even care about. Where possible, this book sticks to the things that are most interesting to the most people. Don’t get me wrong, it goes deep. But not too deep, if you know what I mean. And I think it’s stronger for that. I’d be remiss if I didn’t send a massive thank you shout out to Stone at Yuga Labs and Belle at Zak Group who were my constant and often daily contacts obsessing over this thing as much if not more than I was.
That said, I am a super nerdy dork and I admittedly go too deep all the time, as any number of blog posts here can illustrate. Which brings me to the next point – I realized that I regularly find myself sending people links to things I’ve written on the subject, or hear from someone that they read one of my older pieces and that sent them of on a search of their own. There’s also been a few interesting things that have happened since our self imposed cut off date. So I decided I might as well go ahead and pull all that together, update old things, document and explain some new things, and put out an unofficial companion to CRYPTOPUNKS: FREE TO CLAIM. I floated the idea to a few people and the response was an overwhelming yes, so that’s what I’m going to do. So I present: PUNKS NOT DED.
This one is not for everybody, but it’s definitely for some people. I’m pulling things together and deciding what new to include right now but thinking this is going to come in between 60-100 pages. I’m matching height dimensions as best I can so it’ll look nice on the shelf next to it’s larger sibling. Full contents forthcoming but this will include previous blog posts, expanded wiki articles, some updated and expanded history as well as some new events. Depending on how it works out I might dive into some closely related derivatives a bit more too, as part of the larger conversation, but that’ll kind of depend the page count I land on and what I need to fill it. I’m thinking there will be a few different versions of this.
Semi-limited Softcover. Unsigned. Print run to be determined by preorders, plus a few extra. Available now.
In the meantime, if you haven’t ordered CRYPTOPUNKS: FREE TO CLAIM yet make sure you do so you get the first shipment. It’s available from Phaidon as well as on Amazon and everywhere else near you. I can’t wait for everyone to get this thing in their hands, it’s just worth it.
In my last post I floated the idea that the Cryptopunks IP might be better stewarded by a non-profit foundation than a for-profit company. My rambling thought process might have seemed like I was suggesting Yuga Labs should start a foundation, and that might have been what I was thinking at some point, but that post has led to a number of discussions and I now think the best way forward is the formation of an independent non-profit with a singular mission that everyone could rally behind. A lofty goal I know, but also something I’ve seen play out before and in the conversations that I’m having and seeing, seems like it could be feasible.
For context, in 2009 I co-founded the non-profit community space, Crash Space in Los Angeles which quickly became part of the global hackerspace and maker movement. In 2011 I co-founded Safecast, an environmental non-profit initially focused on building an open repository of radiation data in the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown in Japan. I was awarded a fellowship with the Shuttleworth Foundation in 2014 and over the following years worked with dozens of other non-profit founders as we helped solve each others problems with learnings from our own experience, and co-authored a book about it. I’ve sat on non-profit boards and advised, mentored or unfucked a number of others. All that is just to say this is a familiar topic for me.
The first thing I wanted to do was identify the problem that we’re trying to solve, this is important because if you don’t know the problem then you might end up solving for the wrong thing. This isn’t perfect, but it’s kind of a working problem statement at the moment:
“A single commercial entity controlling the Cryptopunks IP inevitably faces the challenge of trying to satisfy a diverse community with varying ideas and visions for the future. This situation creates an ongoing struggle to balance commercial interests with the wide range of expectations held by individual owners, making it difficult to take any action without upsetting some of the audience, leading to a kind of mission paralysis. While some may suggest that the company simply “do nothing,” this is not an ideal solution either.”
Once you have a problem then you can think of what a solution might look like. Right now, we have this:
“Separating commercial interests from IP stewardship presents a promising path forward. Establishing the foundation as a non-profit entity dedicated to the stewardship of the Cryptopunks IP, with a board of directors focused on preservation, offers a balanced and mutually beneficial solution. This approach ensures that the legacy of Cryptopunks is maintained with integrity, allowing the community, including Yuga Labs, to trust that their assets are being protected and valued by a dedicated group with a singular focus. By focusing on protecting the historical and cultural value of Cryptopunks, we support their enduring significance and value.”
Again, not perfect but it’s a start. Those two statement are related, so as we edit one the other changes as well. They also serve the purpose of helping understand what the point of all this is, which helps get to a mission statement. The mission is important, because it’s the guidepost that we can constantly check back on and be accountable to, ensuring that future efforts are in line with the initial vision. Another tentative bit of text which is starting to take shape:
“The foundation promotes and celebrates the cultural significance of CryptoPunks, the genre-defining cryptographic art project created by Larva Labs in 2017. Our mission is to see that the legacy of CryptoPunks is maintained with integrity, focusing on its historical and artistic value rather than commercial potential and act as guardrail against exploitation. Dedicated to preserving and maintaining access to the cultural and historical legacy of CryptoPunks, we provide a home for the intellectual property and develop educational resources for the public. The foundation strives towards building a secure future for this iconic work. We engage with a variety of supporters who share our vision of protecting and promoting the cultural impact of CryptoPunks.”
So these are shaping up to be some helpful starting points that we’re building conversations around, which so far are interestingly only a little bit about Cryptopunks generally and more specifically about the non-profit/foundation world, governance, process as well as some very high level “what do we see this doing 10 years from now, 20 years from now?” kind of discussions. There’s also a very big “if” that this hinges on around the Cryptopunks IP of course, so we’re also talking about time frames and things the foundation could do that would be helpful to the greater ecosystem even without having the IP in house. I think that’s an important discussion because if everything the foundation wants to do depends on the approval of a separate for profit company, that’s a pretty large weak spot. Conversely, if the foundation can do a lot of things on it’s own, and get real momentum and serve a purpose independent of anything else, that also helps justify things and strengthens the initial ask.
There’s another interesting thing in this specific case – with previous foundations and non-profits I’ve helped get going we’ve often had a clear goal. “What’s the thing we’re trying to do? At some point that thing will be done, so then what?” but thinking of legacy and art on the blockchain, right out of the gate we’re facing the reality that – if done right – all of this will outlive us. At least that’s something I’m thinking about a lot – so in addition to all of the above I’m thinking about the time I’m willing to invest in this, and what kind of future I’m hoping it enables. This is actually part of a larger conversation I’ve been having about (in my view) what kind of actions are beneficial to society (art, creativity, etc) vs what kind of actions are rewarded and encouraged (lots of douchebaggery) and how, with whatever time I have left, I want to try and help make things better. But yeah, that’s a different thing.
If any of this sounds interesting and you’d like to join us in hashing some of this out, let me know and I’ll invite you. I’ll certainly write more about this in the future as we get further along, but I wanted to put this out there now just as a bit of a marker, if only so that months/years from now I can look back and see what I was thinking at this point.
The last few days have been wild and I don’t even know where to start, or where to continue from because everytime I start writing something it changes and I have to keep starting over. Some wonderful things happened alongside some terrible things. This is a series of somewhat connected thoughts and observations that I hope leads somewhere helpful.
If you want to skip my recap and jump right to the commentary, click here.
Some Background.
Cryptopunks are art. Culturally important genre defining art. I know it, if you are reading this you probably know it, and others are starting to realize it every day. When Matt & John (collectively Larva Labs) the artists who created Cryptopunks walked away from their creation it was largely because community was attacking them for everything they did, or didn’t do – and demanding they do, or don’t do any number of things. They never signed up to manage community expectations, they just wanted to make art. Honestly, I can’t blame them for that at all. This space can be brutal, and they certainly saw the worst of it. At least up until that point, but we’ll get to that later.
Yuga Labs, who bought the IP, stated from the start that they saw their mission was to provide more for the community, and to work to establish deeper recognition of Cryptopunks in the art world. They said they saw themselves as stewards and wanted to make everyone proud.
Museums, and Prints, and Books, Oh My
Under Yuga’s care, punks have found their way into the permanent collections at major museums like LACMA, ICA Miami and Centre Pompidou in Paris. 24×24 pixel on-screen images were recontextualized with high end limited edition large format art prints that no small amount of collectors have proudly framed and hung on their walls. Phaidon, one of the pre-eminent art book publishers in the world have started taking orders on a massive 800 page slab of a book about Cryptopunks, filled with images, essays and interviews. To say they have been making headway on their goal of art world recognition is an understatement.
In Residence
Another initiative Yuga announced was an Artist In Residence program, playfully titled Punk In Residence. AiR programs are a long standing tradition that often gives an artist a chance to explore something they might not have, and gives an organization or institution a way to support the arts with something tangible to show for it. The work produced by not just an artist, but by all the artists who participate in the program becomes a kind of creative conversation, playing out across various canvases (or proxies) and through many lenses. Importantly, these programs are not just one off – they need many artists in series over a period of time to tell a story. I was an Artist In Residence at the MuseumsQuartier in Vienna and have a catalog/book they published at the end of the year showing my work along side the other artists involved and it’s a really cool way to feel like a real part of this thing. They do this every year, and when you look at all the books together it tells a beautiful story about how MQ has helped and furthered all these different kinds of artists experiment with something they might not have otherwise.
Recently
To kick off the Punk In Residence program Yuga announced that the inaugural artist would be Nina Chanel Abney, a contemporary American artist known the world over who has works in the collections of museums like MOMA, Whitney, Ruebell, Brooklyn Museum and others. Abney’s work is unapologetically political often touching on topics such as race & gender, but at the same time is colorful, fun and poppy, leading to the apt description that it’s “easy to swallow, hard to digest.”
Why, 2015, Nina Chanel Abney
Some people might argue that picking an artist with a strong political voice to start this program was a mistake, but both art and punk have always been built on political activism and to ignore that is kind of ridiculous and I think illustrates an ignorance about what this is all about to begin with. Matt and John have said from the start that CryptoPunks was inspired in a large part by the London punk scene, which gave birth to classics like God Save The Queen by The Sex Pistols and White Riot by The Clash. Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ anyone? So if art makes you uncomfortable, that’s probably the point.
[As an aside I think there is a wide gap between people who think of CryptoPunks as art and people who think of CryptoPunks as financial assets. They can of course be both, and if you think of them as primarily a financial asset you are probably less likely to want to see politics anywhere near them, but both Larva Labs and Yuga Labs have stated plainly they believe CryptoPunks are art, so that’s the argument I’m running with here. The financial asset side doesn’t have to like the art aspect at all, but can’t really expect it to just go away.]
A struggle with how things are communicated and cultural literacy was also revealed during promotion of the Phaidon book. Cryptopunk owners (myself included) like to think of ourselves as having our fingers on the pulse and knowing whats going on at all times. But in talking about some of the contributors to the book it became clear some people didn’t have the same reference points as others. We saw people assume that since they didn’t know who someone was, no one else did either. Or perhaps, because they did know who someone was everyone else must know as well. This led to some confusion and a complicated situation – how to inform people who think they already know it? Don’t give enough information and people get mad that they feel left in the dark, give too much info and people feel like they are being talked down to. Striking a balance there is hard, and usually results in everyone being a little irritated.
Beyond promotion the book itself was not without controversy, while many people loved the idea and immediately bought several copies, others felt like they should have gotten one free either because they owned a Cryptopunk or because the book says “Free To Claim” (an obvious reference to the fact that Cryptopunks were originally free to claim). Others had strong opinions about who was or wasn’t contributing to the book, which led to some heated debates. This is a perfect example of how no matter what you do, you can’t please everyone, and how no good deed goes unpunished.
Currently
Last weekend (May 18) many people, myself included, traveled to see the opening of Nina Chanel Abney’s new exhibition LIE DOGGO at Jack Shainman’s The School museum/gallery space in Kinderhook NY. The exhibition includes some retrospective 2D canvases from the last 4 years, leading into a new series of 3D sculptures she has just produced and finally unveiling the world she did for her Punk In Residence project – a collection of 500 animated 3D generated characters built with Abney’s interpretations of many recognizable traits from the Cryptopunk collection, rendered in her own style as well as a significant amount of her usual character traits to make something that was distinctly her own, but with a knowing inspirational nod to Cryptopunks. She called this new collection Super Punk World, a clear world building expansion of the idea she began with her 2022 digital body of work which is called Super Cool World. There were about 3,000 people at the opening, the vast majority of which had never heard of Cryptopunks before, possibly never heard of generative art or NFTs even and every one of them learned about these things in the end. This was a primarily art world audience, not crypto people – so thinking back to the mandate of building exposure of Cryptopunks into the art world, this was a huge success. Everyone was delighted.
(photos by me)
A few days later the official CryptoPunks social media account announced the launch of Super Punk World, and all hell broke loose. Criticisms of the art and misunderstandings around the project quickly turned into attacks on Yuga, the artist and individual Yuga team members who had worked on it. Things got ugly quick, and open forums like Twitter devolved into a flood of racist, sexist personal attacks with trolls and shitposters trying to out do each other to catch the engagement stream. It was the worst of stereotypical cryptobro-ness on full display. I was disgusted by what I saw, embarrassed for the space, and heartbroken for the artist and people who have spent the last year working on it. Before the end of the day Yuga’s CEO would step in and make an announcement that these pieces would be randomly given away rather than sold, and there would be no future Cryptopunks efforts from them.
It’s especially disappointing to see that in an industry like crypto which celebrates independence and being censorship resistant, many essentially admit through their actions that this only applies to ideas they agree with, and lack the self awareness to see that.
Where this goes from here remains to be seen, but this brought up a bunch of things to consider.
Some Thoughts
Communication Misses
Judging by the number of people complaining about “Super Punks,” talking about diluting the original CryptoPunks collection as if this was Cryptopunks 2.0, suggesting no one has ever heard of Nina or that she was hired to make derivative punks (or any number of other ridiculous claims) it’s pretty clear the communication missed some marks. This is valid criticism, recently understood with the book comms I mentioned earlier and Yuga was most likely not trying to flood people with information and assumed they understood things better than they did. This issue probably would have been helped by much more in depth discussions about what an Artist In Residency program is for, who Nina is, why she was chosen to kick it off, where it’s headed next, etc etc etc. The collection having “punk” in it’s title seems to have confused a lot of people, and posts from the main Cryptopunks account very likely exacerbated that.
It’s important not to be one sided here- lots of people also reacted without reading anything, ignoring published information while imagining their own histories and narratives and then panicking about them. I saw lots of people insisting everything had been wonderful under Larva Labs or even that Cryptopunks had been a decentralized community project until Yuga made it corporate. It’s a disappointing state of the world when anything outside of 10 second tiktoks are basically ignored by everyone. What? 2 paragraphs of text? I’m not reading all that!
Hindsight is 20/20 and it’s easy to sit here today – barely 24 hours after the drama kicked off – and say if the collection was called “Punk In Residence: Nina Chanel Abney” and it was announced from a newly created @punkinresidence social media account after several weeks of posting educational materials this probably would have landed very differently, but here we are.
Trolls Gonna Troll
Another crucially important detail: Yuga is a troll magnet. There are a dedicated group of haters who will criticize anything they do, and will look for any opportunity to go after them. This isn’t unusual, in fact it’s online trolling 101 – target the big accounts and you’ll get some of their attention. We’ve seen this tactic deployed across countless genres for decades, it always works because people always take the bait. But Yuga has been tied up in years of battles, both legal and social, and that’s made them both a big target and hypersensitive to it – which ironically makes all that much more rewarding for the trolls. Which complicates things when you consider the next detail…
Yuga has a Trust Issue
Be it massively hyped NFT drops that feel neglected after launch, mini games missing the mark, surprise acquisitions, layoffs, sales of properties, mea culpas, management changes, mixed messages from various accounts and unclear priorities – Any of these things are easily justified or explained one at a time, but in aggregate and the fact that if it’s not one thing it’s another results in Yuga having a serious trust issue, and as such anything they announce is now taken with skepticism and questions about how long until they change their story or abandon it.
To date the Cryptopunks team has largely been exempt from that. Preferring a low key hands off position, under the guidance of Natalie Stone the steps taken from Cryptopunks have widely been seen as thoughtful and considered. The Cryptopunks community has enjoyed a a kind of siloed relationship with Yuga, ups and downs at “corporate” have rarely impacted Cryptopunks initiatives. While there are lingering promises from the early days of the acquisition that are still uncompleted (*cough* revamped marketplace *cough*) most of what Stone has put into motion has been delivered, or is obviously in progress. She’s also been there for the community, listening to concerns, requests, and trying to help people understand where things are at and why. Even over the last 24 hours when the timeline has been full of hate directed towards Yuga, much (not all) of that seems to come with a caveat that people still trust and appreciate her. This is difficult to pull off, and to me least, reads like all is not lost.
The wild card here is yesterday’s post from Yuga’s CEO. To begin with it’s vague as to what next steps, if any, there are. It also brought up a lot of questions, which at least as I’m writing this are not yet being responded to. Announcing something and then changing course less than 8 hours later feels reactionary. No matter how they decided to proceed, I think it would have been better to take a week – hell a day or two at least – to think about it, let the dust settle and give cooler heads a chance to prevail. If you launch a big long term project, work on it for a year, and the first release lands poorly the thing to do is iterate, learn from what happened and apply that to the next round. This is a public show of a desire to improve things, and makes good on your promise to do them. If you cancel it and walk away at the first (and entirely predictable) backlash then that puts every future promise you make into question. Why would punks (or anyone) take Yuga at their word going forward if it seems they will pull a 180 if the road seems bumpier than expected. Why would a world class artist like Abney even consider working with Yuga again if it seems they will just give up if faced with any pushback?
In the last few weeks leading up to this launch several people have asked me for predictions, and in every single case I’ve said the worst thing that could possibly happen would be Yuga panicking and canceling the whole program. I deeply hope that’s not where this is headed. The “in Residence” program is important and valuable, things don’t always work perfectly the first time but efforts should be made to keep it going and try again.
Perceptions by Others
Another very serious problem is that the reaction to Super Punk World was filled with really hateful, xenophobic shit, and even though this mostly wasn’t coming from CryptoPunks, the association is there and sulking away leaves that lingering taste. As an example I’ve mentioned that people still blame the V1 Cryptopunk community for the actions of random trolls because lots of drama happened at the same time and there was no one to come forward and say “this isn’t us, we don’t condone this.” The official Cryptopunks account should post a strong condemnation of the attacks on Nina and others, and Yuga should stand behind her and this project they did together. Abandoning her at this point makes everything I’ve just talked about worse. Standing up and defending an artist would score a lot of points.
Update: Several people within the punks community put together a statement to make clear that the hateful attacks were not from punks and that kind of approach is not welcome in the community.
Way Forward
I’ve had many conversations with many people about what Yuga should do in relation to Cryptopunks. In February when co-founder Greg Solano returned at CEO, one of the announcements was the creation of a new company, BAYC LLC, to house all of the Bored Ape projects. This made a lot of sense to everyone, Yuga shifts to more of a quiet parent/umbrella role and individual properties get siloed teams, budgets and focus. I said at the time that a follow up announcement of a “CryptoPunks LLC” or similar would be welcome and calm fears that the rug might be pulled out from the Cryptopunks team at any moment, or that they would be sucked back into other parts of the company.
That could take a number of shapes, but I’ve iterated on the idea a bit and now think a sort of non-profit foundation or trust might make more sense. Yuga Labs owns a lot of CryptoPunks and is legally obligated to protect that investment. I think if they set up a foundation to house and protect the Cryptopunks IP, similar to to the Warhol Foundation, while keeping their punks as assets, then actions of the foundation would in turn protect their investment.
There’s a huge fear in the Cryptopunks community that Yuga, hard up for cash, will try to commercialize Cryptopunks. Transferring the IP to a foundation resolves that fear instantly. This also allows the foundation to launch initiatives (like In Residence or licensing) without the fear of “cashing in” as they would be under a legal mandate to protect the IP. This could be funded by Yuga, or by other foundations, or even in part by the community which has already had many discussions about what it would take to buy the IP back from Yuga and self manage it. Yuga matching an investment from the community would be a very powerful statement here.
As it stands right now we’ve seen several statements from Yuga about wanting to protect Cryptopunks, but in light of the aforementioned trust issues and potentially backpedaling on the Punks In Residence program, anything they say is being taken with several grains of salt. Taking a step like this I think would be welcomed by almost everyone.
Update: This suggestion has led to several conversations which have come together and a number of people are now working on setting up a foundation independently, if you are interested in joining the discussions please let me know. More on this in the near future.
A few inquiries lately so figured it was time for a check in / update. As I’ve noted in pervious years – where I am, specifically the weather where I am, has a shaping influence on the basic set up. I’ve been living in Vancouver now for going on 4 years which is much cooler climate wise than Tokyo and that’s reflected in the modifications I’ve made since then – though if you read my last update this one is probably predictable.
Socks – I’m about 50/50 between Stance cotton socks and Darn Tough wool socks. You’ll recall that one of the things I loved about Darn Tough was their 100% guaranteed no questions asked replacement policy which essentially means you buy them once and then for the rest of your life if your socks wear out you can replace them for free. One of the things I’ve learned about Canada since living here is that there’s a bunch of exceptions for everything. I’ve been told a lot of this is due to panic that foreign companies were going to come in and take over the market, so there’s a bunch of laws and policies requiring business goes through Canadian companies which has led to some obnoxious monopolies and a bunch of “exceptions” to policies that apply globally, but not in Canada. Darn Toughs policy is one of those. So rather than just sending them in and them sending you new ones, you have to send them to their Canadian distributor with a note explaining what went wrong and why and they will then decide if they replace them or not. In the last 4 years I’ve sent in 4 pairs of socks, one was rejected because I didn’t buy the socks in Canada, one was approved but it took 3 months to get the replacements, and two other pairs just disappeared, and Darn Tough hasn’t responded to any of my inquiries about them. So if the goal was to make the policy too painful for anyone to take advantage of, consider that a success. As a result I’ve been getting Stance socks instead, which are very comfortable but not really as durable so I just know I’ll have to buy replacements next year.
Underwear – David Archy Bamboo Boxer Briefs. Bamboo is such a great fabric for underwear, so comfortable and more sustainable than whatever synthetic blends most “tech fabrics” are made of.
T-shirts – Reigning Champ mid weight standard. These are great and I prefer them over everything right now. One of the selling points of wool shirts was “wear them for several days without worrying about washing them” and while cotton isn’t as forgiving, these are solid enough that they can easily be worn 2 days in a row without any concern at all. I really like this cloth weight and build quality. If I could get this exact same thing in Bamboo rather than cotton it would be my dream come true, but so far Bamboo seems to always be much thinner and not as structurally rigid. I hate thin t-shirts and that ended up being part of the deal killer with the Outlier wool shirts, they were either so super thin that I felt like my nipples were going to rip through them or so thick that they couldn’t be worn anytime outside of the dead of winter and took days to hang dry after washing. Also the ethical trade off was no bueno.
Pants – Still on my Iron Heart Japan jeans kick. I’ve got 4 pair of various weights, 14oz, 18oz and 24oz. Iron Heart repairs these for free in Japan too, so as they’ve worn over the years I coordinate dropping them off when I’m in Tokyo and they mend them in a way that seems unheard of outside of Japan. They don’t just slap on a patch, they re-thread seams and darn the denim so when I get them back it’s like thy never had a hole or rip. It’s incredible. I hunted all over Canada to find anyone doing repairs like this, and no one even comes close. The Russian seamstress at the tailor down the street from me almost ripped my head off for asking if they could repair without a patch. I prefer black pants, the 24oz ones only come in blue. So I attempted to dye them at home with some RIT dye which was kind of successful? For a few months anyway, then it kind of washed out and was a bit messy in the process. That said, I do like the black so I’ll probably dye them again.
Most of the time I’ll add a crew neck sweatshirt or sweater because I’m running a bit cold these days and prefer long sleeves. If it’s hotter I’ll swap to light hoodie or track jacket zip up thing.
Shoes – I realized the toe box on some of my smaller profile “skate” shoes were cramping my toes and starting to hurt, so I’ve switched back to Adidas shell toes almost entirely and with their new official vegan versions I don’t have to hunt for all synthetic models as hard as I used to. The big toe area is much more comfortable and they are fairly water resistant too which is good here where it rains so much. I have some Gore-Tex Adidas cross/hike shoes that I’ll use if we’re going out into the woods, but I don’t love them so not going to specifically recommend.
I wrote a long essay about a new body of work I’ve just created called Two Bit Punks, I’m a bit long winded weaving my way through inspiration and interpretation, but I hope you’ll take a few moments and read it. I’m really happy with where I landed.
Washington DC. Bradenton. Chicago. Los Angeles. Vienna. Paris. Tokyo. Vancouver. I've lived all over the place, mostly I'm from the internet.
I've built hackerspaces and blog networks, run an art gallery, a design firm, a record label, an environmental non-profit. I've been a Associate Professor and a Researcher. I write, take photos, make noise, and spend a lot of time thinking about art and communities and the web.
Join The Crowd My semi-regular email newsletter collecting links and interesting tidbits from around the web, plus thoughts and rants. ---> Sign up here
