šŸ’– Hypercuration: Digging Our Way Out

Salvaging Connection to Self, Media, and Community

Happy weekend friends šŸ’– 

Welcome to Create Your Rainbow - a newsletter created to understand the role of community, culture, and meaning at the edges of technology. šŸŒˆ

I bring you insights, teachings, and inspiration for your adventures.

Time to read - 5 minutes

Was this forwarded to you?

 šŸ’– Three things in tech:

  • Sam Altman wants to raise $7T to solve the global chip shortage and reshape AIā€¦ thatā€™s certainly a lot of money!

  • The first two sessions for Optimism/Greenpill easyRetroPGF training were successful this week. I attended both where across the week over 50 trainees gained insight on how to run their own RetroPGF rounds in their communities. Two weeks remain, Iā€™ll write about the experience at the end to share a complete picture of the time investment.

  • In a previous newsletter last year I talked about the upcoming Decun upgrade to Ethereum. Well, Blobs, aka EIP-4844, aka Proto-Danksharding (yes, silly name) are coming March 13. Read more about them here, how this update will decrease transaction costs, and more.

šŸšØ Iā€™ll l be at ETHDenver at the end of this month from Feb 27- March 3

Want to meet up? Have an event you want me to attend and write on? Let me know, Iā€™d love to hang out!

Also, if you like this issue, Iā€™d love it if you shared around your network.

Hypercuration: Digging Our Way Out

Iā€™ve been thinking about and experiencing hypercuration in the wild more recently. Iā€™m sure you have too.

Last August, I wrote about how hypercuration will be one part of what brings our onchain world out of the Irrelevancy Islandā„¢ļø, largely in response to Reggie Jamesā€™ talk at FWB Fest.

While, yes, crypto is still moseying around in our puddle of irrelevancy; collectively, weā€™ve gathered the troops to aim ourselves in a relatively solid direction now. The builders have been building. The creatives have been pondering.

But hereā€™s the thing: crypto isnā€™t taking advantage of hypercuration to lock in users. Not yet, anyway.

No, itā€™s big tech cashing in on their last-ditch efforts in the throughs of, as Cory Doctorow restates recently in ā€˜Enshittificationā€™ is coming for absolutely everything via a Financial Times piece this week. Everybody loved this piece, and people who missed him coining the term last year have been sharing it around in my group chats.

I first came across the term enshittification when I watched his Defcon talk four months ago (you should definitely watch it, by the way). I shared it with a few community professionals who were fascinated by this perfect word to describe our current social and digital landscapes. Now, heā€™s laid out how it reverberates far past social media.

Anyway, when I first wrote about onchain hypercuration last year, I knew it would be necessary for 2024. But I didnā€™t realize that Spotify and YouTube would get this serious with their experiments so early in the year.

Itā€™s nice that we have a framework for what this hyper-personalized, hyper-curated internet might look like and how itā€™ll grab our attention. However, Iā€™m not convinced that any web2 enshittifactory will be healthy for our nervous systems in the long run, nor our economic futures.

Just this week, in a TikTok interview, Spotifyā€™s Global Head of Editorial, Sulinna Ong, gave us the sauce on how the music industry will change a year from now. In it, she predicts that due to the busy nature of our lives, weā€™ll see lists of recommended media across all apps, not just music, that are hyper-personalized and curated to give us exactly what we need.

The music streaming app is already experimenting with an AI DJ that I tried out for a while, though I found it wasnā€™t that great at consistently solid recommendations.

Another feature emerged this past September called Daylight: a recommended playlist based on genres of music youā€™ve listened to that change throughout the day based on your mood.

The thinking is that if you liked this music previously, youā€™d probably keep enjoying it. And this one might have some sticking power.

Thereā€™s no annoying AI voiceover trying to be silly between songs, the playlist names are easily sharable, and the recommendations have been spot-on so far.

I mean this is totally cute, right?

On the flip side, you have sites like YouTube doing the absolute most trying to get users to tell them what their favorite color isā€¦ I donā€™t know the angle here but all I know is itā€™s weird. Like me, you might be scratching your head wondering what this even does. Iā€™ll tell you, it quite literally analyzes recommended videos solely on thumbnail color palettes. Yes, thatā€™s all.

I tested it out and choosing an option takes you to a tab thatā€™s sorted videos you might want to watch, and itā€™s just a list of red, green, or blue thumbnail images with no real meaning of what you actually might want to watch.

this is just dumb. donā€™t do this.

After reading Cory Doctorowā€™s latest piece, I searched through Reddit comments to see what others were saying about it. Many complained about how it was published in the Financial Times, which charges $75/month to read articles. Surely it was a higher fee than of them wanted to pay nor could likely afford.

Their solution? Some wanted to make microtransactions to pay for single articles. Others had no idea about the quality of work published to FT, which is the presumed main reason for the higher-tier fee.

This all comes back to Irrelevancy Island and how crypto isnā€™t and hasnā€™t been ready to be recognized as an option for media enjoyers. But itā€™s slowly getting there.

The Only Way Out: Through, New, Change

Enshittification is undoubtedly affecting how we interact not just with media but with friends and loved ones in communities online and offline. Hereā€™s what to do about it and where we go from here:

Onchain hypercuration gives us a hyper-personalized, hyper-curated social graph that is not only open source but immutable and interoperable. It enables curators and creators the permissionless option to earn from and own their labor in the form of luxury media.

Hypercuration is the blueprint for niche everything. Iā€™ve seen the power of niche communities throughout my career as a community professional and social media hobbyist/enthusiast. Many of these communities have risen well above 100k members in short timespans due to having clearly stated goals and impact.

None of those communities could take advantage of grant mechanisms that verified and validated their impact until now.

This is why funding mechanisms like RetroPGF and Quadratic Funding make so much sense for the inevitability of hypercuration. They each account for the impact and profits measured by protocols that benefit an entire ecosystem.

However, let it be known that profit in a capitalistic structure is not guaranteed and impact cannot and shall not be measured solely on profit.

Curating a community capable of living to see the next 5, 15, 20 years will require significant patience, sure, but itā€™ll require much more foresight and adaptability from the outset to enable a foundation of trust that goes beyond the simple mechanisms we see today.

Thus, onchain hypercuration requires these primitives:

  • Identity: standardized measurement of connection to both the onchain and offchain worlds

  • Impact: values upheld that create value reverberating throughout a given ecosystem, both capitalistic, ecological, and humanistic

  • Interoperability: transferability and deterministic realities capable of crossing from one protocol to another, online and onchain

  • Interreflection: is impact widening the mean as well as the sense of self?

In a world that has fractured our communal experience, it is more important to understand and find the value(s) one seeks in community with others. Especially as it concerns a future where our relation to work is less than necessary.

It is more important to use onchain hypercuration to itā€™s earliest advantage in preparation for a time lived outside our current hyperfinancialized world.

When we peer into our collective, we understand there is a not-so-distant time when a crisis of meaning will necessitate hypercuration to preserve humanity while facilitating diverse but niche cities.

Being onchain, in this regard, is the tool we work toward integrating but not the answer to the problem in front of us. It is but just one piece of the puzzle and as weā€™ve seen in the last few months alone, can be useful for navigating impact.

Hunting and Gathering šŸ”— 

Watch This

Read This

Bringing Scouting Onchain ā˜ļø 

Show your support by Bookmarking this newsletter issue, sharing it with others, and collecting our membership. Want to join the community? Click below!

Where to next?

Want to partner with Cloud Scouts? Have a new feature youā€™re launching we should know about? Send me an email or DM to discuss how.

When youā€™re readyā€¦

Hereā€™s how I can help you šŸ¤— 

If youā€™ve enjoyed this newsletter, here are three ways to support the work I spend many hours per week researching and writing.

  1. Let's partner! Work with me on bringing Scouting to your community.

  2. If you have questions or topics youā€™d like me to talk about, fill out this form. Iā€™ll cover them next week!

  3. If you or someone you know would like to work with me directly on community strategy, writing, or marketing, check out the services I offer.

te

Reply

or to participate.