We carried out a set of 1 on 1 conversations to better understand peoples' experiences of inclusion and belonging in the web3 space. For this conversation, Princesa meets Natalie Crue - Protein Founding Member and Lead Curator of mClub.
Princesa:
As web3 changes rapidly, is there anything you miss about your earlier days in the space?
Natalie:
Yeah in the last few weeks I've been having moments like oh I miss this or that thing. I've been here for a long time but one thing I miss is that we used to be in rooms for 2 or 3 days, which I don't actually recommend, and we would be sharing knowledge and education and within that it was very intentional to be like these are the underwires of the blockchain and this is what the generation that came before me has done in terms of values and while you may not at this time align with that, this is what the space is about. It is about independent artists, creatives and it is about building new frameworks and thinking very differently than the world that some of us have run away from. It is about migration, revolution and transparency... all these things at the same time. Now I'm seeing a lot of people onboarded to this space at a deserted gas station, with nobody for miles and people not getting that piece of the puzzle and then challenging me on those things. But you can't challenge something that... there are people who have laid the foundations for this space for almost a decade, so how do you challenge that and disconnect that from this space? This is something that's been annoying the fuck out fo me recently and I miss the camaraderie on clubhouse and I do miss hearing people speak about liberation. I miss that and I miss the idea that we could be like yo you racist guy go away and people would agree and then they would be outta here. I do miss those things, I think things are changing.
Princesa:
I'm really resonating with what you're saying. I've only been here less than a year but I can definitely feel it. I was kind of on the outskirts at the time when Clubhouse was really popping and I miss the energy that the collective was on as a whole, but in terms of specifically blockchain and web3, everything that you said makes total sense. I'm doing some educational work with another DAO that I work with. It's an underground film festival in Chicago... last year it was a web2 job and I was doing social media and I told the producer I was getting into web3 so we started doing the research together and now we're having a July festival and the DAO framework resonated with her, so we're doing the damn thing. I had to write out educational research and basically got into the bitcoin history and even before that, the cryptography club side of things. This has all been happening for a very long time and the original intentions of this space are very, very clear. So I can definitely see that this is something I would miss if I was in your shoes too for sure.
Natalie:
Yeah it's this digital colonisation for me... that's what it feels like, colonisation. I'm a black and indigenous person so I could find another language for that, but at least at the moment, that's what it feels like. I'm looking at the metaverse, or people onboarding in the space and being like 'I'm the first to do X' but no actually we've been doing that for a long time already, what are you talking about? Like there is documentation, a lot of the history of the space isn't written down, but people talk about it verbally online still, so you can actually go reference when these things happened.
Princesa:
Do you think there's any way to recreate the energy of what bought you peace before everyone started coming in Christopher Columbus to the space?
N:
Many of my peers and I still hold onto that energy. I think when we think about mass adoption, there's a lot of people who do believe in things like we do but also a lot of people entering the space who don't get that hardcore education. I feel like we can hold more educational spaces... I see them a lot but they don't feel the same or are more about luring people into courses... but we would literally just stay up for 2 or 3 days learning stuff and we're old now, haha! Some people still hold onto that good energy though, but these people go here naturally, and new people don't know where to go to these spaces or know what they are.
Princesa:
How do you feel about the current state of DEI in the web3 space?
Natalie:
Spicy take... I think there are people that look like myself that are helping and building projects and initiatives that we support because they look like us, in a way that feels good. However, the larger initiatives that I see, feel very performative, to be very frank with you. Within the DAO space, NFTs... there's a lot of performative shit and white saviourism, people engaging in problematic behaviour that's not actually empathetical to what people like me are trying to build or have built here. It's not enough for you to be like 'oh if all the black people post their NFTs or their projects in the space that isn't even helpful because you're not buying any of their stuff and not actually helping. Then there are these other people with loads of resources and money in the treasury saying they want more black people to be involved, but not pay y'all to do labour... like tokens for some of us don't pay the rent, so we don't have the luxury to work 40 hours a week for a DAO to exert extreme amounts of labour. It feels very extractive and exploitative in the way people are pushing forth these initiatives under the guise of DEI or equity or inclusion or diversity, because if you're a bunch of white women pushing forth the initiatives, you ain't doing this shit right. If you're not asking black or brown folks, indigenous folks, queer folks, trans folks what they actually want or need, you're already starting from a place of inequity from the gate. That's how I feel a lot of these projects feel like. Even when I've piped up and said 'hey your initiative is actually quite problematic and here are the reasons why', then you have the people trying to do philanthropy in web3... like you can raise 50 mil for UkraineDAO and that's great, but why not put the same energy into black, brown, indigenous folks, trans folks or queer folks? We know y'all got it because you've done it multiple times. Why not put that same initiative into say for example a black woman and give her X amount of funding towards what she's trying to do? Or if you're actively trying to engage with spaces and talk about DEI, are you actually going to put funds and resources into black and brown folks and all under-resourced people in this space on a level where they can actually take that bread and do something with it? Instead, we have a bunch of people asking us to compete in this grant competition, compete in this thing, do this... but it's never like here's some resources or how can we split resources between y'all to do whatever the thing you need for your community? Or can we foster some cross-collaboration between our communities? It's never that shit, it's always let us control the bread or figure out how I can extract from this shit. Like no, that's not DEI, it's not about hiring the 2 black people that literally are glorified volunteers on your payrolls. Pay them to do the work, and even if they're not doing the work you should be paying black folks anyways as reparations. I have so many thoughts about why this shit is so fucked up and web3, we can never get to a good place where shit is actually having a good impact on black and brown, indigenous, queer folks, unless people are like "I'm gunna give up my bread and going to assess some of my privilege and open up access to shit that I have". This stuff is about resources but also about how people weaponise access in the space. Some of the stuff being rolled out is still weaponising access and controlling how far people actually get in to the rabbit hole, and people are being watched while they access these things. So people haven't really got true access because it can be weaponised at any time, but people act like you do. It's mostly white women doing this shit that I can see, white men don't even wanna have this conversation on twitter spaces. It's fucking wild to watch.
Princesa:
Period. Seriously, you speak to so many things that I, as a newbie, did not have the language for, but I've slowly started to learn it and see behind the curtain, in web3 and in the world in general. It's all so true. If I could speak to specific DAOs right now, we could do that off the recording, and I would say so much. What most stuck out to me was what you said about tokenising black people to do the work and one of my questions that I have, is about putting the onus on us to talk through and imagine what a fully inclusive web3 could look like. At the end of the day, I think I have to lean into my educational background and give white men and white women the worksheets and say what do you think? Doing it over and over again until we get it right, because it's clear that y'all aren't gunna listen to us, coz you need to have the ideas come to your brain yourself, it seems like that's how they work sometimes. I'm not tired of manifesting or envisioning, but I'm tired of trying to manifest and envision taking into account that some people just aren't going to listen.
Natalie:
Yeah, I love manifesting and envisioning this stuff but not for y'all white folks. With my people, yes, all the damn time. It's also like, they haven't even done the work to even unpack their privilege or racism outwardly or ingrained in them... how you really are a coloniser in this space and some of the shit that we've learnt or extracted from are indigenous practices, it's innate in many of our communities that we move around in life. Y'all should unpack that shit. People are discussing NFTs and not speaking about people still using the N word. I remember being in a DAO, being involved in the first season and really believed in what they wanted to do. However they said for their next season they were pushing for a 40 hour work week... what the fuck? Even regular jobs know that people don't want to and can't work this much. I was like do you guys understand how problematic this is and how this ties into being racist? Or how this ties into being problematic in labour practices? I don't even need to work 40 hours to ship some shit. I can work 2 or even 5 hours a week! The ways in which things are manifesting in web3 is crazy to wrap my head around... this example boggled my head for months and they didn't wanna even speak about that shit so I just left, I didn't wanna argue. No sad face, I'm happy!
Natalie:
Good! So this entire conversation, I think we spoke about this in one of the Twitter Spaces... this concept of inclusion and respecting peoples' energy levels. Like you said, you don't need to work 40 hours a week to shift some shit you can work just a couple hours and be perfectly ok. I totally agree with that, especially how many people are looking for jobs and how many people are competing. As well as the fact that people on a spiritual level like they're being guided to this space, something other than we can see, pulling the string. So with respect to the fact that something else is in control, my biggest problem with inclusion is something that doesn't even specifically to a white person relate to race, but the expectation that for whatever project you work for, you have to seriously work your ass off to get a little bit of access or a little bit of money. I just don't have it, I'm tired of having meetings so that other people can tell me about their projects and I'm tired of feeling like I'm not in the loop to some people just because I'm not in the group chat that week. Not everybody is like that, I've come to a point to gatekeep myself enough to know that I'm in the right spaces right now, at least privately. You just really brought to mind, the relationship of rest as resistance and I'm not doing that shit in regards to web3, because the excitement for me is a lot and this is just my life now. But wow, yes to peacing out shit that's not for us!
You said that in terms of what you like about DEI stuff, it's mostly grassroots people who you know, person to person, rather than the big people with the white women employees and all that money, running the grant opportunities and competitions and stuff. So my question is, would you say we need more resources, so people cna atcually have our best intentions at heart and so they can run these things and do these things in ways that actually work for us? But also, give us the money.
Natalie:
I've already seen the phase where there are all the people with 'good intentions' that have created standards around DAOs which is another black hole. Here are the people that have some strategies or experience doing DEI, which I think is problematic, but also in reality, if we think about wtf is DEI, like for real. Are y'all tryna create a kum buy yah moment? If so, then let's forget it because unless y'all embrace your internalised racism, and for a lot of people that ain't happening. DEI in this space can be very empathetical, but speaking for myself, I don't want to be the token black person leading shit with my peers that look like me or are disable, which we don't ever speak about in this space. We are often positioned or shafted to lead these things but not given enough resources to actually execute things fully or meet these KPIs or these standards or these things. These things are often set by people who don't look like us. So what are we actually doing here? In reality, if we think about radical imagination and think about what does equity and inclusion look like, coz we have hella diversity let's be honest, we have a lot of disabled, queer, black folks who have carved out multiple corners of this space but have had the least resources. We have a bunch of indigenous folks who are fucking killing it and going hard doing dope shit. We have a bunch of folks from Uganda to Zimbabwe, back on up and the list goes on, South East Asia... these people are fucking here but do they have the resources to actually execute the creative projects they wish to push forth? Do they have the resources to actually launch the ideas they want to launch in the space without competing with each other. In reality, it boils down to can y'all give up your resources so that people who look like myself or have layers of identities that are soaked in being under-resourced... I hate the word marginalised... but these people who are extracted from and exploited, are y'all actually ready to give up your resources? Not just your ETH or whatever, but your access and your power, your power dynamic attached to that in order to actually make shit fucking move. There are people like LATASHA with probably more resources but she is still scrapping, we are all scrapping here! So can you actually part with resources and give back reparations so people can do the shit they want to do? Because when black, queer, disabled, trans and all us under resourced folks have the resources, access and the space to do the shit they do best... because we're the ones making culture with the least amount of resources... we still doin it. At the end of the day, give up your shit! Why do I have to sit up here and be your DEI consultant to tell you how to hire more black folks when you could just actually do it? You shouldn't analyse how to hire black folks you should analyse why you don't have any black folks hired in the first place. Why are black folks and women just community managers? Why are they not on your founding team, your strategists or on your board? Give us the fucking resources, you go raise 50 mil and then put forth black folks and more equitable ways to be like here's a pot of money, put forward a proposal, do you need any marketing resources? Keep doing this so that you can enable more and more black folks to do things bigger and better than they've ever done before. But people don't wanna give us their power dynamics and their resources and they hoard that shit in the space like I've never seen before.
Princesa:
Plus one to every single thing you just said. What I'm picking up from what you're saying, is that the actual change we need, requires an amount of sacrifice that they are currently not willing to give up. An international pandemic, all of these market crashes, food shortages and every single thing that is going on in the world, is still not inspiring a lot of them to do what they need to do to support us. At that point, it's really sad. Wow. It's crazy that the entire world is crashing down and that the treasury is still locked and not opening for anyone, it's wild.
Natalie:
Yeah that's a macro thing, but internally in the DAO ecosystem, people won't even change up their communication styles. When we go to DAO meetings, none of them have interpreters or anything, I've only had 2 communities ask me how they can resource those things for me, because I can't listen to people talking for hours! I've never heard anybody else ask me about disabilities or access needs. I can't write a dissertation about this stuff, I can speak it, for sure! But with work like policies and longer stuff I can't write like that, if you ask me to contribute to your Figma board I'm just gunna put stickers to entertain myself and my neurodivergency because I need to think, process this shit, it's really challenging for me to do that on the spot. I don't see alot of DAOs, thinking about how do we meet the access needs of people in our space? And even if there aren't people in our space that have those access needs, can we still provide transcripts for our recordings? Can we actually, when we're hosting events, can we have somebody live captioning what's happening? Are there other ways we can present this information visually, so it's open to peoples' different types of ways that they learn and soak in content? Can we put this visually, can we do translations for different languages? There are people that speak multiple languages in this space, different dialects even. There are other people that have other needs that need to be met. So when we talk about DEI, at the least, can we have those conversations. Asking ourselves, are our values rooted in white supremacy? Or are they rooted in a wealthiness that represents a large swathe of our community? Do we have things in place around gender identity? Yeah my pronouns are she/her but you didn't know that because you didn't ask me, I could be they/them. Sometimes I just say I'm they so that people get used to saying that shit and that's just how I feel today. Some of us shape shift and that's ok too, but you didn't ask me that shit because you live in a cis/white world that doesn't require you to actually manoeuvre between anything else. Some people can't see beyond their own identity and the identity of the common people they're surrounded with, people sometimes look and live only in a cis-white world because that's what's around them and it's hard to see anything different from that. So I can't expect people to evoke some radical imagination from a place where they don't see anything else, but, you're coming to me for ideas because I know you haven't got that shit in you because you don't exist there.
Princesa:
I feel like every time we speak I just agree with everything you say.
Natalie:
You're more than welcome to disagree too!
Princesa:
Which is fair! And I often have a lot of disagreements with people online and in person but I just really agree with what you're saying and really respect your perspective, so I'm really grateful and glad that you're open to sharing your world view.
Natalie:
For sure, I think it's not talked about enough and wherever this shit lands, we have to have these conversations and figure out how to have them in ways that make sense. Hopefully whatever comes out of that, we're at least able to extract learnings from that research and apply them.
Princesa:
Of course, and it takes multiple conversations to really understand things. I love the conversations we have and I feel like this time we're coming to a different understanding than I've heard before in our conversations. You've given me so much to think about in regards to DEI initiatives not always matching up with the initial goal, and in terms of radical imagination, like... what in the world would we be able to accomplish? What kind of festivals, songwriting camps would we be able to put on? What kind of missions would we be able to fill if just being ourselves wasn't the reason behind our initiatives? A lot of us desire to put so much energy into making sure that we have what we need to the point of what in the world would we even create and do if we already had what we needed? I'm so curious about what that looks like.
Natalie:
There are some people from previous movements like from the 60s and 70s, the aids movement, who always speak about imagination and I'm like... what about radical imagination? Imagination ain't enough for me. One of my mentors and peers sent me this quote from an article, "We approach the radical imagination not as a thing that individuals possess in greater or lesser quantities, but as a collective process, something that groups do and do together through shared experiences, languages, stories, art and theory. collaborating with those around us we create multiple overlapping contradictory, coexistent, imaginary landscapes, rises of possibilities and understanding. These shared landscapes are shared by and also shape the imaginations in the action of those individuals who participate in them". That article made me think holy shit, because I used to speak about radical imagination all the time and it's something that I theorise every day. Radical imagination we think is a trait, but like this article states, it's a collective process and can also be an individual process too, but in reality, radical imagination in its greatest form is a collective thing. What can we imagine through the lens of possibility? This space speaks about scarcity all the time... but if we embrace abundance, what can we actually dream of? What can we build, co-create together? What can we build through the lens of possibility? If we had the resources to do so. Could we build workshops, festivals, events? In the metaverse and IRL? What does this actually look like and how do we ensure that these are safe spaces? And also places that people can not just see but feel. What does it look like to over resource those things? Maybe it's not DEI that we need, maybe people need to imagine themselves outside of themselves or these constructs that have been plaguing ourselves because we've been thinking about these things all of our lives and experiencing these things... I've always experienced racism, and that's why I live in the metaverse. So what could we actually build that we don't have the resources to do so? What if we don't invest our time in being like the 2 black people in the DAO or the 2 queer folks in the DAO? Or being the only disabled person in a DAO? Because people don't see disabled people as whole people, and that's just me being honest to myself. How do we actually move away from being that person in the DAO or company and moving in some other type of energy that allows us to see ourselves as a whole person within that realm and then we can build all the shit that feels good to us and play and experiment and not be bound to initiatives that in reality... where are trying to go here? What's the ultimate thing about DEI that we are trying to see? At a DAO you can be doing what people believe that you're only able to do, XYZ, but what is the ultimate goal here? What can you actually do?
Princesa:
When you were talking about radical imagination, you were talking about disability and what we could do if we weren't the tokenised individuals in the DAO...
Natalie:
Yeah, I was thinking about what is the ultimate goal of DEI? Is it to tokenise the queer, black, disables, whatever folks we are? Can we evoke some radical imagination to think about what we actually want? Where does our radical imagination actually lie? If we reframe DEI to be something different. A lot of what we see in the space is onboarding loads of black folks, but what is the ultimate goal here? To get them hired at jobs where they're not overly resources to do the actual thing? Just replicating vulture capitalism or making them a product of that, because that's ultimately what we're becoming, even in web3, a product of capitalism or the vehicle for exploitation. So how do we reframe this to be like, how can we overly resource ourselves or how can these DAOs with hella money and resources, resource us to help evoke radical imagination to build, play and experiment. That way we can onboard people, educate folks, support festivals and events, build an ecosystem that doesn't rely on performative shit.
Princesa:
I completely agree with what you're saying, you're giving me a lot of perspective as far as what I personally need to do with this space. Because I have a DAO on the back burner, it's an initiative I started in web2 and has been in the back for a long time because I didn't have any experience at the time. I've changed it from a business into an initiative and it's been doing well and I'd like to change it into a DAO and have been meaning to for a while. The message I'm getting from my own reflections as well as what I'm learning from what you're sharing, is that I just need to do that shit. All of the advocacy in the world is not gonna get me to my imagined future. I still do web onboarding but I don't want to make it a matter of metrics anymore.
Natalie:
We should focus on the tangible things people can do right now. It's hard for some people to embrace change and do things but we should think about how people can spend time with their own groups of folks and spend time unpacking their privilege, racism and have conversations around these things. People continue to sweep things under the rug but people need to consider what it actually means to give up their access and resources and privilege to others. It starts by having those conversations but those conversations are also not enough. People from under-resourced communities have been having these conversations since we were dragged over here or put in residential schools or mental institutions and the list goes on of things that we've faced since the inception of this colonisation project called America. What can we actually do in web3? Let's not kid ourselves, there's a lot of fucked up shit happening in this space across the DAO ecosystem, across web3 and NFTs. If we don't hold space for conversation or hold folks accountable, then we can't even begin to have a conversation around DEI. So ask people, do they have access to ETH? Ask people, how could we resource you to contribute in a way that feels good to you? Not more, because y'all be asking for that later from us anyway. What does it actually look like to hold space for folks and have these conversations within meetings? Yeah we can decentralise, but how can you decentralise yourself? Because some of you need to detach yourself from your ego and never ending white privilege and what does this actually mean within the space of web3? Let's create space for radical imagination, play and experimentation. And resources! Let's over resource under resourced people to lead those initiatives without people hovering over them and do so in a way that's not exploitative and extractive and people can divvy up the funds or figure out ways to cross collaborate. Those are things that at the very least need to occur, if we speak about how we create a system shift in web3 before it's too late. There are a lot of practical things you can do to assess your DAO and where they land in terms of these things, but DEI is the minimum. How can we move beyond metrics, KPIs and really seek something taht actually creates us some change.
Princesa:
Agreed, RT everything, plus one! Thank you so much Natalie.
