Explaining new stuff
Articulating the potential of new tech isn’t always simple. Here’s a popular clip of Bill Gates trying to explain the internet to David Letterman in 1995.
The problem with most of Bill’s examples is that they are kind of skeuomorphic. Skeuomorphism is the design idea of representing real-world concepts/objects into the digital world. This is why the ‘save’ button is still a floppy disk and the ‘phone’ app icon is still a landline handset. Obtaining information about cigars or auto racing is stuff that can be done without the internet and hence they were easy for David to dismiss as trivial. This clip is funny now because we all have an internet native intuition of what can be done online. Back in the day, web pages were just called web pages. Today we call them social media, streaming platform, e-commerce platform etc.
A useful way to develop this ‘new intuition’ for new tech would be to answer the question ‘what can I now do with this that I could not already accomplish'?’ or ‘ how does this tech make doing X easier?’. Today we explore this question for web3 applications and dive into one particular project that caught my attention.
A text adventure?
It all started with a story. The owner of BAYC ape #1789 decided to name his ape ‘Jenkins the Valet’ and came up with an origin story:
Jenkins, the person behind ‘Jenkins the Valet’ noticed how people used CryptoPunks only as a digital flex by updating their twitter pfp’s. This was back when Bored Apes were just launching and were not a big deal yet. He was really impressed by the art in these NFT projects and felt he could develop rich characters out of individual punks / apes. That is exactly what he went about doing. He shared this origin story of his ape, which has to do with how he got a job at the BAYC as a valet and how he got to rub shoulders with some of the finest apes there. He finishes the story with the promise of revealing all his adventures with the club in a ‘tell all’.
The tweet went viral. Soon after, the twitter account shared a form asking other ape owners to share with Jenkins ‘what they did together’. The tweet had hundreds of responses with all kinds of ‘incidents’ which Jenkins (the person) would mould into a short story and share online. This was when the founders realized that they were on to something.
The writer’s room
The founders came up with the idea of creating a writer’s room to scale this kind of community driven storytelling. They launched a 4-tiered NFT collection of 6942 ERC721 tokens as ticket to the writer’s room. Members of the writer’s room get to vote on the creative direction of stories. The writer’s room’s first project is called Book One and it is the ‘tell all’ that Jenkins promised in his origin story tweet. Here’s a summary of what the community has already voted on:
The team did not stop at this. They got the CAA (Creative Artists Agency) to sign on Jenkins and onboarded Neil Strauss who is a 10x New York Times Bestselling author. You can already check out the cast of the book here lol. If you think about it, the writer’s room NFTs are a neat solution to continue telling stories with other NFT projects. Wild times:
The neat part is that the writer’s room even provides a free to use liscensing agreement that you can use to create partnership with ape owners if you do not own one yourself.
The new and improved Web3
This whole thing reminds me of the first web3 post on Ideal Gas. This was the post I wrote soon after buying a fraction of a CryptoPunk:
With the implicit objective of enhancing the market value of this punk, we stared brainstorming different aspects of the punk, like name, backstory, means of collaborating with other punks / punk owners, sponsorships etc. After all, these jpegs are cultural artefacts that gain value from memes and stories surrounding them
I was still concerned with the lack of a mechanism help the group stay on course, which is why I immediately followed this up with:
…..they lack proper division of labor and role clarity even though its members are super excited to be there. I was able to observe some of this on my own DO (Decentralized Organization). In other words DOs need leadership at the risk of looking like a centralised institution
I feel this is precisely what Jenkins has achieved. For example, even though the writer’s room facilitates a process for complete strangers to enter into contracts with each other (for free liscensing), these agreements are still centrally stored with Tally Labs - Jenkins the Valet’s parent organization. Having a bestselling author to anchor the storyline is not exactly a fully decentralized approach but who cares? The writer’s room model has facilitated a bunch of things - creating liscencing agreements with strangers for their digital assets, community driven storytelling, a method to distribute profits / payouts - all of which are much more difficult and less exciting to perform through a traditional centralized mechanism. Perhaps this could be an example that Bill could talk about if asked about web3 today like he was asked about the internet in 1995. It sure is exciting to watch these developments start to bring a ‘web3 native intuition’ to the mainstream.