ColivingDAO Insights: The Web3 Path for Regen Living

Digital Art Revolution: NFTs and the New Frontier of Art Markets with Alex Estorick

• Daniel Aprea & Gareth Thompson • Season 1 • Episode 31

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Discover how the global art scene is being revolutionized through digital art and NFTs with our special guest, Alex Estorick, the editor-in-chief of Right Click Save. We promise you'll rethink the way art is perceived in the digital age, as we explore how the pandemic shifted the spotlight from traditional galleries to digital marketplaces. From transforming art from static displays to dynamic tokens, we examine the opportunities and challenges digital creators face in a post-pandemic world. Alex sheds light on the profound impact of NFTs and how they're offering unprecedented platforms for artists who’ve been sidelined by conventional art structures.

Explore the transformative potential of Web3 technologies and how they're empowering artists by challenging traditional power hierarchies. Uncover the intricacies of the SEC's attempts to regulate NFTs as securities through insights from other experts. We dissect Ethereum's energy-efficient merge and its implications for a more equitable digital landscape, while also debating the need for clearer regulatory frameworks. This conversation promises to equip you with a deeper understanding of how these burgeoning technologies are reshaping the art market and the implications of regulatory scrutiny.

Step into a thought-provoking dialogue on how blockchain and Web3 technologies are reimagining societal and economic landscapes. Our discussion ventures into the ethical considerations of data transparency in art provenance and its potential to democratize power. We also envision a future where digital and physical worlds converge, leading to more inclusive and regenerative economies. From the potential of DAOs to coliving communities, we explore how these concepts could bridge the digital-physical divide, creating a synchronized society where digital innovations support a fairer world for all.

Daniel:

Welcome everyone to another episode of Coli ving DAO Insights. This is your co-host, daniel, and I'm joined today, as usual, by my co-host, gareth, as well as our special guest of the day, alex Estrick. Alex is an editor-in-chief of Right Click Save, the world's leading magazine for digital art, and he's published on DAOs and alternative approaches to building community after the internet. Alex, thank you so much for being here.

Gareth:

Thanks for having me both of you. So, alex, if we can start with digital art, because I love art, I'm a bit of an amateur, uh, art lover. I'm not an expert by any means, but, um, I see a lot of really interesting developments in that digital art space. Can you start just by telling us a bit about your background in art and nfts and digital art?

Alex Estorick:

yeah, absolutely. I um started, uh, editing a called Flash Art, which was an old contemporary art publication, and I moved to Freeze for a little while and around about the time of the pandemic perhaps not a coincidence the ability to sell digital things became an imperative because people couldn't go out and see physical exhibitions anymore, and so that created a kind of flattening, I think, of the different art worlds, and the result, I think, was quite exciting. People driving a market for NFTs, as you say, became the most popular word in the english language in 2021 and then promptly crashed and my magazine right click save um was sort of built off the back of that boom and in a, but in a sense the the, the market downturn was an opportunity for us, because a lot of the initial interest in nfts was basically premised on hype and perhaps the ejection of some of those speculators was positive in the long term because it meant that people like me could develop interviews, essays that gave digital art its due, situated it in its historical context and tried to come to terms with the aftermath of the NFT. And I just want to say something about the NFT, because it's become such a sort of almost toxic and polarizing concept. The NFT basically transformed art from an object to be displayed to a token to be transacted. It's very common now with digital artists. A lot of them will say it doesn't really matter whether it's displayed on a phone, on a screen printed out the highest resolution form of display is actually still a print. So there is a sort of analog, physical component even in this sort of what you might call natively digital world. And the thing that the NFT allowed was this sort of sale of a digital thing digitally. So the whole process, from creation, if you like, to sale and display, could now take place in a non-physical environment. So that was obviously pretty transformational. I think a lot of people are still coming to terms with that.

Alex Estorick:

On the other side and this is something I've focused on at the moment I'm writing a few articles not only for my magazine but also for the art newspaper or art review or even art bars or trying to kind of cajole the mainstream art world into kind of more active embrace of digital things, and the principal reason for that is that artists fine artists who painters, sculptors, whatever have been using digital platforms for years.

Alex Estorick:

They've been using digital photography, they've been using um, you know, uh, 3d sculpture platforms that then get cast in bronze.

Alex Estorick:

But the digital component of that contemporary art practice is usually masked either by the artist or by the gallery, because something digital is unsettling for a traditional art audience. So this is the kind of environment into which I've been sort of publishing articles and, I guess, ultimately trying to cover a community of creators that has tended to be ignored or marginalized as commercial artists, people like graphic designers or game engine designers, and obviously, as I'm sure you're fully aware, there's a sort of global community of generative artists, code based artists, that has tended to not sit easily within the traditional fine art frame. So that is the community that I've principally been trying to represent, and what we're seeing right now is a sort of slightly awkward flirtation between a sort of natively digital Web3 NFT space and the sort of mainstream contemporary art world of big galleries and a hierarchical structure which is to some extent at odds with the sort of horizontal and decentralized principles of Web3, which is, I suppose, where the concept of more equitable governance frameworks and DAOs and so forth comes in.

Gareth:

You've touched on so many interesting elements in there, alex. And just to go back to the beginning, you mentioned that NFTs were sort of born of the pandemic and requiring a real-world use case, where digital pieces and digital objects or digital properties were being transacted, and then that led to the boom in NFTs and then a lot of sort of as you mentioned a bit of toxicity, and some bad players entered that market to take advantage of the boom. You also mentioned that there's some opportunity to weed out, you know, get rid of the dead wood in a down market or a bear market, and there's a lot of opportunity there in terms of innovation. Some people say the best innovations come out of a bear market or a bear market, and there's a lot of opportunity there in terms of innovation. Some people say the best innovations come out of a bear market or a recession. And you also touched on bringing power back to the artists and digital artists.

Gareth:

And you know it's so fascinating to me when you talk about that traditional art world not fully embracing some of the aspects of digital art, because artists can use all media.

Gareth:

You know all all media are fair game for artists, right? Whatever way you want to express yourself. It's all legit. There is no, there is no boundary between what is allowed to be art and what isn't art and in my opinion, that's that's my take on it. But yeah, so if you go into that, if we just explore one of those bits and we'll come back to decentralization and empowerment later on for artists and for other people, because it's very relevant for what we're doing but if we go back to the NFT fad and how do you see that recovering and coming out the other end, how do you that recovering and coming out the other end? How do you there's an opportunity to make you know really good, strong art and good, strong, solid NFT concepts coming out the other end and how that relates to art and, in a simple sense, how do you see that recovery coming, coming back and making NFTs a really useful real world thing?

Alex Estorick:

I think it's really tricky right now. As I understand it, the contemporary art market is also down, and usually, after a Bitcoin halving which happens once every few years and I think the most recent one was in April you tend to have a little span of time and then the NFT market rebounds. So we may see soon a rebound of the digital art market before a rebound of the contemporary art market, and that could, I think, help to kind of um, as I say, cajole some of the more traditional actors into, you know, reinvesting, so to speak, in the nft as a as a concept and as a concept, and as not only a sales mechanism but actually as a kind of platform for all sorts of cultural form. The reason digital art was the proof of concept for NFTs was because there was this pent up demand for a way of selling digital things or creating scarcity in a world where you can right click, save an image, of course, and look at it and it be on your screen or printed out, for whatever reason, and there's a kind of, you know, interesting insight into human behavior. People are happy with other people seeing their work, so long as they can be the owner of the work, and so I think that idea of digital ownership is not going to go away.

Alex Estorick:

At the moment, the SEC is trying to regulate NFTs, it seems, as a security. That creates a very unstable environment for, certainly, our digital artists, because right now there's an order gone out against OpenSea, which I think is the world's largest or second largest NFT marketplace, so that creates a level of a lack of trust or continues that, I think, longstanding narrative against digital assets, crypto, assets of all kinds, from mainstream centralized and national institutions. I suspect that, in order for NFTs to become common currency, so to speak, I think there's going to have to be buy-in at an international level. At a national level, there's going to need to be stricter regulation, I think, but I hope that doesn't come at the cost of the individual artist. What we saw in 2021, I think, was a number of artists benefiting from resale royalties, which became a minimum 10% sell-on requirement, and that created, I think, a windfall for a number of artists, for a number of artists, but also it created a a way of a way for marketplaces, uh, to insert themselves in the way that a traditional gallery might have inserted itself in the past. And so you know, on the one hand, I think there was this. There was this sort of utopian moment where people saw the boom as a crystallization of a kind of digital, decentralized utopia, and I think the reality is that maybe the utopia existed just prior to that, and what the windfall did was it hardened those old hierarchical behaviors. And I think that there's also one point I would like to make here is that I think there's a sort of there's a sense in which Any kind of capitalist technology now is, to some extent, not only a neoliberal project but also a neocolonial enterprise.

Alex Estorick:

One of the things that we saw with the early days of crypto art before 2021 is was it was a generation of digital creators from the global south, from Mexico City, from Sao Paulo and from Lagos all over the world, and building careers without having to need to rely on a centralized gallery. There's a very famous story of a Nigerian artist called Ozanachi who shared his work, which was made with Microsoft Word, with a German gallery and he got accidentally copied into an email exchange where, basically, the gallerist was saying who does this guy think he is? Does he really think we sell microsoft word art? And I think that and and oz, and actually subsequently went on to to become a very uh successful crypto artist and selling through a marketplace called super rare and super rare was went from being this very inclusive space to being the most exclusive marketplace. The only reason I use this example is it's a very good case study in how what can seem like a potentially uh, inclusive, a decentralized, even emancipatory technology often is is used to entrench those old patterns ultimately and you know, one of the first articles we published was an interview with oznachi where often is used to entrench those old patterns ultimately and one of the first articles we published was an interview with Ozanachi where he asked you know, are we just the new gatekeepers?

Alex Estorick:

And so I think what we've seen over the last few years is this is maybe unfortunate reality of sort of turbo financialized capitalism, where new technologies are sold as solutions to problems we didn't know we had and they end up just entrenching exploitation and extraction once again, which, of course, is not the premise on which a lot of people got into Web3.

Alex Estorick:

The one thing I would say to its credit is Ethereum, which is the main blockchain for NFT sales, along with Bitcoin, went through an extremely complex sort of system-wide shift, infrastructural shift called the merge in September 2022, which made it much, much more energy efficient about 99.95% more energy efficient.

Alex Estorick:

It's on the level with standard computing now, I believe.

Alex Estorick:

And so what that says to me is that, whilst you know, to some extent Web3 is the emperor's new clothes, I think there are examples where we can see the ecosystem making the kind of concerted effort to be better than prior iterations of the Internet, I would say.

Alex Estorick:

Finally, you know, I would say the reason that I am really here is out of discomfort at the kind of Web 2 sort of techno social infrastructure that we are all enfolded in, sort of techno-social infrastructure that we are all enfolded in, which is to say, a space both digital and, in practice, physical, where our data is captured, sold behind our back. We don't profit from it in any way or benefit, and it continues this kind of hierarchical or it actually exacerbates this sort of hierarchical privatization of life, and so I think that's something that I think you guys are well aware of, and I think it comes into property relations, but I think it's certainly what I continue to sort of rail against, and I think it's a reason a lot of artists, creators, members of the precarious cultural economy have tried to embrace blockchain, smart contracts, nfts, daos, data trusts, because they're looking for, I think, a more equitable alternative.

Gareth:

Awesome. Thanks, just to paraphrase your answer there, and then we'll go back over to Dan, because I think Dan's got a question. The recovery of NFTs, you see, is an opportunity to move away from these old sort of capitalistic hierarchical structures and ownership and move more into a decentralized empowerment of artists is the example you gave, I think. How do you get empowering artists? You mentioned the Microsoft Word artists, which I thought was hilarious. Again, judging what is art and what isn't, and it's a classic case of this isn't art. How dare you? That's just going to put fuel in the fire and empower that artist even more. So, yeah, awesome. So there's an opportunity there to really hand power back and decentralize power, you see, in the recovery of NFTs and Web3 and other related technologies. Dan.

Daniel:

Yeah, thanks, alex. That's very insightful, and we did touch on some topics that are very relevant to what we do here as well, so we'll be happy to explore those, but before we do that, I'd like to stay for a moment on the SEC, because I know it's a topic that a lot of people talk about. Sometimes it's enough to just mention Gary Gensler just to catch everyone's attention. So what's the deal here? If I buy physical art, am I buying a security or am I not buying a security? And how is that different if I buy digital art or, more specifically, nft? So why is the SEC addressing this specifically, claiming that NFTs are securities?

Alex Estorick:

this, specifically claiming the NFTs are securities. So my simple answer to that is read an article we published last week by an artist and law professor, brian L Fry, who makes the case that art is not a security even if you sell it as an NFT, and that article is titled why I Sued the SEC. We haven't seen the result of that, but basically Brian is, along with his artistic collaborators, suing the SEC on the basis that if you securitize NFTs, or if you regard NFTs as security, invariably follow because digital art is the principal reason, I think, for a lot of people to use NFTs as a way of making a living. So the short answer is this is an open question. Recently the SEC served a Wells notice on OpenSea and Brian Fry's response is that that's bad news both for OpenSea and the NFT market, because it means that the SEC thinks at least a substantial number of NFTs are unregistered securities.

Alex Estorick:

For Brian, the SEC is overreaching and needs to be corrected. That's why my co-plaintiff, jonathan Mann, and I sued it, asking a federal court to tell the SEC it can't regulate art just because people are selling it as NFT. So we are really at the moment of really lively discussion because Congress did not give the SEC did not intend for the SEC to claim the right to regulate art. The question now is whether the SEC is right. I noticed that two of the five SEC commissioners dissented in one of their or two of their recent cases, which were settled rather than judged, which were with two big NFT projects. In those instances the SEC, it seems, went after entities that could probably afford to settle. But I think what Brian is trying to do is to have his day in court, as it were, so that a judge can answer your question really.

Daniel:

Awesome. Yeah, that's great to hear, because, of course, on one hand, we have some uncertainty and lack of clarity, but on the other hand, the feeling general feeling is that this is usually short-lived and there's plenty of examples where the sec was suing or trying to claim that a project was a security or selling non-registered security, and we have already plenty of examples where we've seen that at the end, there's been an establishment that some tokens or some assets are actually not securities, like Bitcoin, for example we're pretty clear on that Even Ethereum we have Ethereum ETFs right now, just like Bitcoin ETFs and so on. So all these to me, are signs of a nascent and growing landscape and environment where the lack of clarity is kind of short-lived and, at the end of the day, it's all leading towards clearer regulations and an easier environment to do business with and, more importantly, knowing exactly what type of relationships we're establishing, what type of assets we have and so on. And once that clarity is fully there, things can only improve. Gareth.

Gareth:

Yeah, just a clarification on some of the terms that we're using here. The sec is the securities exchange commission and that's the us-based regulator. Over in europe we have our own regulators where we are based and the law is slightly different. The regulation is still a big gray area for many of these issues over in europe as well, but europe in general is a bit more of a pro sort of tokenization environment at the moment. It seems anyway, just to give a bit of context for anyone listening but what happens in the US obviously influences European regulators and vice versa. But at the moment Europe is a much friendlier sort of regulatory environment for NFTs and other Web3 projects regulatory environment for NFTs and other Web3 projects.

Daniel:

Awesome, thanks for the clarification, gareth. That makes a lot of sense. And another thing that we mentioned, alex, we'd love to expand on is how these new technologies effectively have the potential to create a fairer and freer society, potentially a less hierarchical society I think you used this term as well so can you expand on that and see how these technologies can really steer the society towards something that a lot of us want?

Alex Estorick:

So I don't know if I feel comfortable arguing that the technologies I think technologies, particularly under capitalism, capitalism, serve capitalism. Um, and I sometimes I feel slightly this is a slightly Hegelian situation, where I feel like there are limits to what humans can, uh, how humans can disrupt the activities of those technologies that I they are both actively and and sometimes it feels, sort of inadvertently producing. And I think, in an age of-human agents where we are right now, I think that that Hegelianism might be more valid. So when I teach about Web3, I have a slide up and I I go through, uh, blockchain, nfts and smart contracts as as what I consider to be a principal web three technologies, so to speak, web three being the third iteration of the internet, premised on blockchain technology and distributed ledgers and decentralization, to some extent in a similar spirit to Web 1, different infrastructure and that was a reaction you could say to Web 2, which was very hierarchical continues to, in a sense, be the techno-social infrastructure on which we rely and on which large multinational companies like Amazon, apple, facebook or sorry, meta and Google rely. Facebook or sorry, meta and Google rely.

Alex Estorick:

They rely on that sort of shadowy world of that sort of data farming that people are not necessarily fully aware of all the time, and so, with each of those technologies, if we start with blockchain, a blockchain as a transparent ledger of transactions could be a very useful and progressive development, because it means, for example, in the narrow case of the art world, there wouldn't necessarily be any doubt about who owns a particular work of art when they sold it, when it was minted. So that idea of having a verifiable provenance, I think, is a really positive addition and it helps to. I think it undercuts the hegemony of certain artist estates which have an outsized amount of power to deem one work by Andy Warhol or one work not by Andy Warhol, for example, and so, in that sense, the blockchain can be a force for transparency and good. Of course, if you're locking down people's data transparently for all to see, that is something that makes me deeply uncomfortable, and it's also something that would seem to entrench the nefarious habits of web 2 yeah, absolutely.

Gareth:

I mean, you're touching on a very powerful sort of meta theme here, and a favorite phrase of mine is that technology is double-sided. Right the same technologies can accelerate negative outcomes that can be used to accelerate positive outcomes. It just depends who uses them and when and where. And the potential for Web3 and blockchain technology in general is there to decentralize power and empower artists and other people through different ownership structures. I just want to offer a little white pill, if I'm borrowing, and sort of twist the concept from the matrix, and the white pill is an alternative future that's better than the present. There's a lot of work and I'm involved in that and what we do at Co-Living Dial feeds into it of how do we build a fairer society and how do we build a regenerative economy and and some of the elements. That's a really big concept, but a regenerative economy basically is an economy that works for all people, all beings, including nature, and also generates financial wealth and inclusivity, and there is a potential role there for web3 technology for sure.

Gareth:

It's discussed a lot in these spaces but, as you quite rightly said, how do we build systems that prevent them from these technologies from being used in a more nefarious, more power-concentrated way. Should we say Power and wealth-concentrated way? Concentrated way, and maybe this is probably a good segue into the sort of use of these technologies for real world assets and what that means. For how do we empower people and build a fairer society? The question there is in those real world assets and you mentioned digital art there's a role for fractionalized ownership of art. If ownership is the right word, maybe it's not the right word. There are other words that go around, like stewardship, for example, in these spaces, to move away from those old power models. What role do you see for fractionalized art and how that relates to fractionalized property in the context of fairer societies?

Alex Estorick:

in the context of fairer societies, so there have been and particularly in 2021, where there was a lot of liquidity there have been attempts made to fractionalize art. So far as I'm aware, the fractionalization of digital art has not been particularly successful, but the fractionalization of physical art has had some success and I've encountered a few people in the mainstream contemporary art world who are developing sort of alternative approaches to, as you say, either ownership or stewardship, so that, for example, someone can take a piece of fractional ownership in a particular work of art and have that work on their wall for maybe a limited time. So I think that there's obviously you know that's a very narrow case study, but I think that notion of a sort of time-bound ownership could be potentially interesting. I would also say just another point. This may sound a little bit niche, but I think it speaks of something larger. I don't think this is about fractionalization, necessarily, and but what we have seen in in the digital art world is the growth of what what's become known as long form generative art, which is to say, a line of code or a many lines of code, an algorithm used to produce not one image but many hundreds or thousands of images.

Alex Estorick:

A good example is the CryptoPunks, which is a class of, I think, 10,000 avatars. Originally they were gifted and, of course, perhaps unsurprisingly, they've become very popular as a means of identifying someone in an online context or even masking their physical identity, and the only reason I think that might be an interesting example, if a case study is that what you see there is a community really converging on a set of, you know, 10 000 um avatars, and so what we see there, think, is this not fractionalization so much as a sort of a single painting put on the wall, at least in a digital context? And we've moved towards the large classes of digital assets where people, sort of a particular community, will buy in, buy-in, and, of course, in the art context, we tend to talk about things like aesthetics or meaning. We don't necessarily talk about utility, which is to say, if you have a punk, for example, or if you're a member of the Board 8 Yacht Club, you also are given access to a set of restaurants in Manhattan or something.

Alex Estorick:

And the point I'm getting at together online, congregating around this asset class, if you like, does to some extent change how we think about identity after the internet and our pluralization of identity, maybe our masking of our physical bodies, um in some sense, and so for me that I find that very interesting because that's the moment where, as it were, art interfaces with society and it's where also, you know if you're the broad eight yacht club, if you're yuga labs, the people who, who own um, these projects, uh, you are not only engaged in sort of trying to entice people with funny images, you're actually trying to sustain a community.

Alex Estorick:

I personally, you know, don't feel particularly I'm not a part of that community. It's not a community that I can identify with, but I do think as a model for how online communities can congregate and come together, blockchain-based works of digital art we've seen in the last couple of years, I think is a really sort of what Ruth Catlow would call a set of translocal communities. Ruth Catlow was one of the writers of Radical Friends, a decentralized, autonomous organizations in the arts, friends, decentralized autonomous organizations in the arts, and so I think that there are. I quite like the idea of embracing, if not kind of a fractionalization of ownership, then a kind of a pluralization of online identity, and I think the definition she gives for translocal is people brought together not by geography but by affinity, and I think for me, that's probably something you guys can speak to.

Gareth:

Yeah, that's really. That's super cool. I love that concept of the 10,000 avatars and having that sort of long form, the pluralization if I'm getting that right pluralization of art and identity in service of a community, right. So, bringing it back to okay, how do we make this real? How is this really useful? Maybe Dan can talk a bit about this and what we're doing with our federation memberships for Co-Living DAO, because I think there's a relationship there for co-living dial because I think I think there's a relationship there.

Daniel:

Yeah, I love how you brought in the community element because, as we know, even before we talk about digital assets, a lot of people buy art because they like it and they want to look at it. A lot of people buy art as a sort of value, but a lot of people buy art to be part of a community, and that's not just with art, is with collectibles in in general as well. People buy watches to be part of a community. People buy paintings and artworks and all sorts of things. So that's true for online and digital assets.

Daniel:

Having said that, what really interests us here at Color of Endow is how we can bridge this gap between online communities and in-person communities as well, not needing to have necessarily one or the other, but bringing everything together.

Daniel:

And one of the things we're doing with our memberships here at Call of the Vendor is we are going to launch them in the form of NFTs, which means we are going to utilize the advantages of the technology that NFT can provide, the advantages of the technology that NFT can provide, but, at the same time, there's a major element of in-person communities, because we're building, effectively, a federation of co-living communities that are all interconnected, but they have a strong physical element, because we're talking about people physically living together, which is the most physical element I can think of. So, with your expression, building community after the internet. What are your thoughts when bridging the gap between online and offline? So having NFTs or tokens as well as part of Colvin Dow, we also envision fungible tokens. That represents stakes in different communities where there is a connection not just within a single community but within the broader federation of communities, with this very simple, seamless way to interact online and offline.

Alex Estorick:

I think it's the core of this kind of cleavage we're seeing between our, our online selves, our physical bodies, our haptic experience of the world, our lived experience of um you know, um our neighbors, and you know our own sort of micro ecologies. Um, I studied under someone called mat Fuller, who wrote a book called Media Ecologies, which deals with the sort of the way in which different media environments interact with one another, and I think that's something that you're exploring in a physical sense and, of course, I think that that is fundamental to trying to drive a more inclusive and sustainable way of living right now. So I applaud you for doing that. It sounds also just fascinating intellectually, but as a more than intellectual conversation, I think certain sort of little interactions I've had I found quite telling being told that I can't represent someone because they that would. They they're not doxxed, for example, and so if we, if we show a photo of a famous collector, we have to cover their face with an avatar and trying to organize exhibitions, but artists not wanting to be to meet me in public or have a public presence, I think that, yeah, this is possibly not a particularly interesting answer seeing individuals react to this, this, this sort of, as I say, a kind of cleavage between physical lived experience and the sort of I don't want to say performed identities, that that many artists in particular have developed, or brand identities, even um, that they've crafted online and continue to craft, and indeed many collectors, many non-creators, choose to craft, not least because in this sort of immaterial, this world of immaterial labor, I think one's cultural value, one's social capital, to some extent does derive from one's performed identity.

Alex Estorick:

And so for me, that is, I think, what I would maybe finish with a question for you guys is maybe how you see a kind of maybe not only equitable way but also, I think, non-destructive way of trying to cross this sort of physical and digital divide people becoming acculturated online to a particular set of habits and behaviours and then having to map, or trying to map, those habits and behaviours onto their physical lived experience, which is dependent on old structures, legacy structures, physical space, confined space and high council tax, for example.

Gareth:

It's a really good question, Alex. I think in a nutshell, the way that we're tackling it here at Co-Living DAO is that we believe by setting the right container for our communities, then the communities can decide those things themselves. We need to trust them, give them responsibility, and that's part of the gig. They get a share in power and wealth and they have a voice. So we have to trust them and step back and let them shape that. But what we can do is sort of create a safe container for them to interact in and to determine those things.

Gareth:

There's a really interesting aspect of living in a community where you want to safeguard your private world and this touches on what you said but also be part of that community, that public community, and how that plays out in our co-living communities is yet to be seen right. Some people may wish to remain relatively anonymous and yet still partake in the community activities, which is up to them. That's completely fine. An example you gave of artists having avatars and and having a private, a private life and a public persona that are completely sort of disaggregated, almost banksy's. The classic right of the, the well-known sort of artists retained anonymity but is also world famous.

Alex Estorick:

There's definitely a balance to be made there and it'll be interesting to see how residents and our co-living communities choose to navigate that and how we help them to navigate that is the most important thing by setting that safe container I think that's a great model and I think um one thing it just made me think of was just the extent to which I think Web2 in particular but maybe the progress of sort of tech capitalism until now has created this sort of enforced atomization of identity.

Alex Estorick:

And I think what you're doing and I think what a lot of people who are trying to seek out a kind of you know, progressive or inclusive potential within Web3, working with the blockchain, working with DAO structures, working with data trust is the principal reasons people wanted to engage on the Internet in the first place was this idea of existing with people with whom one isn't geographically proximate, and that seems to me to be something that's definitely come back in Web3, almost by dint of that um decentralized infrastructure of the blockchain, um.

Alex Estorick:

But I think that the work you're doing to to sort of develop those um sort of those networks, um, those sort of networks of mutuality, um, I think is is very important, um. I do think it's it takes human solution not I want to say solutions, that's, that's not the word I want but I think it takes sort of human caregivers, caretakers, caregivers to I don't say massage these technologies, um, but to to try and prevent them becoming sort of reiterating exploitation and extraction, which it seems that they want to do almost automatically, probably because we've hardwired them to do so.

Daniel:

That's brilliant, and I like how you use the expression legacy as well legacy structure, legacy laws and certainly there's a tendency which is more than a tendency, it's definitely a pattern there of tying the physical world with more legacy structures and laws compared to the online world, which is part of the appeal for which a lot of people that just go online and they can detach themselves from a lot of patterns that they felt stuck in.

Daniel:

One of the things we really focus on here at Call of Endow is challenging the status quo and realize okay, there's going to be some legacy laws, say, for example, the laws of physics, mechanics and all sorts of things. Some things are not going to change anytime soon, but there's other things that can be changed. We don't take anything for granted and, rather than taking our financial system as a given, or even the monetary system or legal and so on, we know that things can change and we also know that things are going to change anyways. What we're really looking to do is make sure that we can steward, shepherd this change and get closer and closer to the society that we envision and ultimately integrate the online and offline world to ensure experiences that are as human, as vividly real as possible.

Alex Estorick:

Yeah, I agree, and I just want to, if I may I just your words made me think of a quote from a colleague of mine, chris King, who co-founded ClubNFT, which manages RightClickSave. He says the trustless web so the Web3 web, the web of blockchain, nfts and smart contracts actually depends on trust. Government, especially local government, can bring trust to automated exchanges, while the damage from government missteps can be mitigated. Rather than attempting to control the blockchain itself, governments could focus on collaboration with exchanges and platforms providing regulation and the force of law as a service, and I think what you guys are doing is sort of helping to build that reality at a time when I think the government is going to have to come to terms with working with, rather than simply regulating out, these new sort of technological infrastructures.

Daniel:

Awesome. That's a beautiful way to wrap up this very insightful conversation and Alex thanks a lot for what you shared A lot of very interesting points and also opportunities to explore more for all the listeners and the audience out there. Very quickly, if you want to share any final thoughts or, more importantly, if you want to share how the audience can find you, maybe connect with you or reach out to you online or find out more about what you're currently doing, yeah, no thanks.

Alex Estorick:

Thanks so much, dan. It's been a really interesting conversation, slightly a different angle to what I'm used to, which is fantastic. I think what interests me about digital artists right now is when they are working with the law, with science, with technology, in a sense, working beyond a kind of narrow realm, and it seems like that's something that you guys are concerned with that sort of hybrid creative economy. Yeah, I think the magazine is RightClickSavecom, I'm Alex at RightClickSavecom, the magazine is rightclicksavecom, I'm Alex at rightclicksavecom, and anyone who wants to follow up on these ideas or pitch ideas for articles can reach me there.

Daniel:

Fantastic. Thanks a lot for being here as well. Thanks, gareth, great to have you here as well, as usual.

Gareth:

Thanks. That was a great chat, alex, really interesting. We touched on so many amazing things. I'd love to dive deeper, but we'll need to wrap up now. Thank you so much.

Daniel:

Thanks, brett, and thanks everyone for listening. If you're not subscribed yet, make sure you subscribe to this podcast, make sure you share it with your friends and everyone else you think may have an interest in this, and we will be back as usual. So see you all in the next episode.