Radical Change...in Half Measures?

Recording artist, producer, and Web3 creative director visionnaire reflects on the next internet, and Black creators' place in it.

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“… survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” – Audre Lorde

I first read Audre Lorde’s poetry as a hot-headed, indignant 11-year-old boy, itching to avenge my ancestors and make good on the books prescribed to me so I could stay Black in the white suburb I was tasked to navigate. A young bull of (in hindsight, poorly and pre-maturely) informed rage in a sociopolitical china shop.

Before the vsn...

I was merely a victim of the master’s tools and house.

My entire life has been deliberately dedicated to trying to solve white supremacy and capitalism, much to my chagrin.

Finding my way to the vanguard of Web3 was both unexpected and subconsciously manifested. Spending  the past two years in the thick of it proved that we exist at a major inflection point in human history.

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Technology has advanced to the point where we can craft our own tools to construct our own house.

The potential of Web3 to equitably propagate transformative concepts through art and culture lie in its ability to allow creators to own the means of distribution of their work. Blockchain technology establishes a unique digital chain of custody, actualized by NFTs. These modular components weave a community through the design and intention behind each project.

The nascent power of NFTs translates to creator-distributed experiences that can establish and sustain profit via culture creation; digital building blocks that users can link together to establish new mediums and metrics for engagement.

And as we know from two iterations of global mindshare and communal design on the internet...

♻️Experience breeds compassion. Compassion inspires action. Action requires planning. Planning yields design. Design is the creator’s reflection. And reflection leads back to experience.

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The questions I ask, based on my life experience...

Whose experience informs the design? Who reaps the fruits of the designer’s compassion? Who is the plan made in service of?

A lifetime spent in a fight I’m still learning how to defend myself in provides context clues. Every move I’ve made to position myself and my people at an advantage is met with an invisible resistance, despite the immense potential for true equity and harmony for People of Culture.

Take a close look at the metrics by which success and viability are measured in Web3. Watch the effortless flow of venture capital vs. its’ reluctant trickle. Glean the stances of platforms who only allow the already profitable to profit with unrestricted margins. Note the marketplaces adhering to archaic, limiting concepts about content release by rote (and quite frankly, lack of vision).

The fraternity of white mediocrity wields control of the tools, and heads up this new household.

Every head-start and double standard afforded to white people as a result of their painstaking societal design has led to the digitization of their wealth and its privileges.

🏦The Greensteins, Cubans, Andressens, Horowitz, and Turleys of the world are playing a pretentious game armed with the engineered “luck” of a plot-armored protagonist.

The more money there is to be made in a space, the tighter white men hold the reins, all while gaslighting themselves and everyone else into believing their hands are empty and their intentions are pure. Web3 is just a concentrated enough microcosm where the rhetorical strategy can be seen through the space’s underdevelopment. We also have social media, which (for better and worse) throws our research and reaction times into hyperdrive when race, equity, or funding come into question.

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WAGMI (we’re all gonna make it) is the American Dream software update. The illusion of community that white-led organizations only have to approximate in order to achieve minimum viable diversity, convincing themselves of the lie that is their contribution to radical change. WAGMI is the idyllic façade we accept while established power builds the construct to confine our progress and extract profit from our induced dormancy.

“Decentralization” is the antithesis of white power structures. Period. Without the consolidation of control in some hierarchical format, white people would have to survive alongside the greatest survivors in human history – without the handicap or socioeconomic tether that keeps them in an automated position of power (read about how much our handicap costs the US). There was  racial integration in the 50s, equality in the 60s and 70s, and the ridiculous notion that Black life matters to the conscience of this country.

🧿 Today, monied white men standing alongside us in our crusade, upholding ideals that are in direct conflict with their violent approach to our existence is the great lie of our time.

If you follow the money, both fiat and crypto, it’s clear that vested interests lie in Web2 modalities cloaked in Web3 garb; projects that control the flow of culture or money in a centralized fashion; business as usual.

These cultural and financial bottlenecks force creators and builders into cliques made up of unsustainable shapes by design.

The consequences of which are sycophancy disguised as networking, curation as a euphemism for gatekeeping, desperation applauded as persistence, and most dangerously, rations of capital passed off as radical change for the disenfranchised.

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This is the nature of the master’s house.

It forces us to compete for space in it. As we vie against each other for ETH and exposure in an endless offering of petty Twitter popularity contests, we are conned out of the value of our attention. Instead of using our energy to think critically about our own sovereignty, or at the very least, helping those of us who need it more than others, we either inadvertently or deliberately cut our own people off at the knees for fleeting, individual success. To our omnipotent oppressor, these settlements we make amount to foreseen breakage in their socioeconomic model to divide and stay the conqueror.

The mechanism that locks us in the house – the tool one can only use against themselves: the ego.

This is the tool being weaponized against us most. Ego is stoked by platforms, warped by the take-it-or-be-left-out opportunities presented to us, and detonated at the first sign of our attempts to unite and leverage our cultural prowess. The ego is the tool that forces us to capitulate to our enemy in the form of undetectable compromise.

It’s true that in lots of ways, we are more equipped to create a new future than ever before as a people. My belief is that we are close to making strides toward that future because of our capacity to heal ourselves.

My plea to my people, as unfair as our circumstances are, is don’t forget that we’re in a fight, too. And decisive victory requires a commitment that can only be measured by our propensity to take unified stands that actually challenge and disrupt the status quo.