You can look beyond the contracts with major labels now. There is a new way, take the reigns to your archive, your creations, your music. Start understanding the mechanics of the social world we live in, and build with your audience directly.

With smart contracts, you can deploy your own on-chain contract and store the art on chain (in the contract) or through a decentralized permanent storage where the file is referenced in the contract’s metadata. Digital tools enabling creators to preserve their archive’s provenance and claim any secondary sale royalties. We’ve often hit I Agree and shared our digital captures and words, a feeling of social pressure as the community forums were only filled on these corporate owned stages. Now as we build beyond labels, we’ll be able to use smart contracts to connect with our audiences directly, bringing collective value to our creations through community engagement and a truly social social media.

Before we stored our data and media through servers, owned by a specific company, and a lot of those companies (and our government), use AWS. Amazon’s storage services.

Through IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) and Arweave it’s a community effort like the Ethereum and Bitcoin chains. A community all working together to store information across multiple computers around the planet. Arweave and ArDrive are pushing the space forward with their tools for permanent archiving going beyond NFTs, where they also preserve news, data and personal archives forever. Utilizing “blockweave” they have developed a system to validate that the data is in deed being stored permanently, while also maintaining a financial reserve to compensate the ones storing the data. While they are only in their beginnings, they are paving the path for decentralized web with their storage tools.

A common theme is “we’re building it as we’re taking off,” but we’re not the firsts.

Generations before us built with the expectation of technology accelerating based on Moore’s Law. It’s all matched on the curve, and many have brought their dreams to life as the technology improved, they all watched the curve match. As we leap towards the future, it’s always good to take a glimpse at where we’ve been and how we got here. From the way we coded video games and computer games, to the beginnings of AI and machine learning. The pixel’s moves and the code which shaped the maps we jump across in digital space. We’re only at the beginning of our learning, but understanding the learning that brought us to this now rapidly accelerating curve, may provide us a stable foundation upon which our society can stand collectively side by side and not on top of one another.

Just like sports, it’s good to understand the fundamentals, especially in a system where you are your own bank.

From blockchain fundamentals, to smart contract fundamentals, to eventually utilizing decentralized finance fundamentals, the entire space grows more wholesome when all parties are learning. More companies are entering, more “consumers” are entering, and as the world continues to enter we must make fundamentals a part of the culture if WAGMI. Let’s build a more solid foundation for the future generations to build on as the previous ones have done for us. We were given much progress through technology, but the organization of so much digital information and passionate contributions will need to be efficient if we are to continue building.

Many in our generation have been fooled by the ladder climbing and award seeking.

While we decentralize the social spaces online, we have an opportunity to create for community and not “top down.” Building around us and not above and below us. Being vulnerable and honest with ourselves as creators, and then bringing that to the World as creative solutions…that is being the change, not winning an Oscar or buying a mansion. Our social spaces need more artists thriving as our society dusts itself off from years of isolation. Fashion and art have inspired many generations after wars, we can revive new light with authentic creations—ones that are manifested around a purpose bigger than self money seeking creations. As we build new foundations, we’ll need to prioritize wholesome communication. We’re in a trust-less peer to peer system, but we’ll all need to be authentic and less sales pitchy if WAGMI. The beginnings are where we lay the foundations for how we’re going to make it.

Seeking the truth.

A constant pursuit, the truth in life, society, politics and even our families, we seek to know. As I jumped in, I followed the breadcrumbs of Murat Pak. “What is a pixel?” I couldn’t understand, I always saw a pixel as a square. I searched, I wondered, I wrote, and then I found Alvy Ray Smith, co-founder of Pixar. One block clicked.

From on-chains SVGs, to Pixar…all it took was a desire to know and the mind space to grow. All knowledge is passed down through generations, within our time as part of this generation’s history, we can stitch and mend the holes with patches, but we have to want to see us all grow. Let the pursuit of truth lead the way, and allow your unique voice a space to create with honesty. This is our story together, across generations…we build our generation’s commUNITY.