A public group discussion sharing experiences of entering web3.
Kes:
Hey everyone, we’re really happy and excited to see you all here. This is our first Twitter space from Protein and also our first Anecdotal Archives event, which is part of a new series being led by Princesa and myself which we're really excited about and it's been really fun to start. It's a really important piece of work and it's just really nice to have been able to make this space purposefully to have these conversations together around DEI in the web3 space and digital spaces more generally. This project is going to be part of our DEI work in the Protein membership team, which we started recently in order to make some change around inclusivity in our own community and the wider digital space.
The project is mainly to help us learn and understand how inclusive or not web3 has been throughout all parts of its growth process for different kinds of people. We hope it will help us understand people's needs and how we can start working together to fulfil these, but I'll let Princesa are explain a bit more as the idea initially came from them.
Princesa:
Thank you, Kes. So we wanted to create a space for us all to have this conversation together as a group to share our experiences, so thank you for joining us and for joining Protein in their first Twitter space ever. Our intention with this space is, of course, intersectionality. So we're prioritizing the voices of trans women, nonbinary people and black indigenous people of color. Specifically in this space we will be having only women, non binary and queer people up on the stage.
Kes:
Yes, we love it. Thank you for that, Princesa. I also wanted to say that this talk is specifically focusing on the experiences of entering the web3 space and we're gonna have more discussions diving into other elements of existing in web3, so we have that to look forward to. It's really cool to see all of you here! We've got some Protein members and some non Protein members, which we always love to see.. So I don't know if you wanted to set the room a little bit before we begin, Princesa?
Princesa:
Yeah, for sure. We're gonna stick to a few rooms or a few rules that I've seen in other spaces before, so to make sure everybody gets a chance to talk before we move on to the next person, we're going to keep our responses to a few minutes and if somebody happens to go over a few minutes just for the sake of time, we will have to to cut them off at the most opportune moment. We're treating people with respect here even if they aren't speaking in the space, so also we don't have to use names and let's keep the conversation on topic.
Kes:
Amazing, thanks so much. I thought maybe we could start by introducing ourselves a bit before we get into the conversation. You can say however much you want to say about yourself and whatever you feel comfortable with. Maybe you can go first Princesa?
Princesa:
So I'm Princesa, my pronouns, are they/them and I'm mostly working in DAOs. So yeah let’s do like name, pronouns and where you find yourself to be most involved within web3?
Kes:
Ok cool I can go next for ease. My name is Kes, I'm one of the community managers at Protein, so I’m working in the DAO space. My pronouns are she/her and I'm also doing an MA in Internet Equalities which links to me being really passionate about DEI in the space why I'm here collaborating with Princesa. Let’s invite some of our speakers up now! Maybe Mel you can go next?
Mel:
Hi everyone. My name is Mel. My pronouns are she/her and I am wedged at the axis of NFTs and DAOs with my time kind of evenly between both. Thank you for having me.
Natalie:
Good morning or good evening for some of you! My name is Natalie, I use she/her pronouns. Some people call me Nat, amongst other things. I would say I'm a full time DAO person, but I also spent the last, I don't know, nine million years running around the NFT space and other kind of dark corners of web3.
Tina:
Hi everyone. I'm Tina, I’ve never done a Twitter space before… I’m a sociologist based here in London, and a founding member of Protein, excited to be here.
Princesa:
Thank you all for introducing yourselves! So we're going to keep three speakers at a time and have y'all answer one after another and then after we finish our questions, we're going to let more people up if they want so we get to learn about everybody's experience.
Kes:
For sure, maybe we can start with Tina. If we're speaking about entering web3, what made you wanna enter the space in the first place?
Tina:
I did my PhD on women working in call centres in Delhi a very long time ago and I’ve always been interested in the intersection of people and technology. When a friend of mine messaged to tell me about DAOs, it felt very pioneering. And then when I joined my first Discord server, I did really get the sense that it was quite the Wild West. So I think it was just exciting to be a part of. This new wave of activity and kind of not knowing what it's going to be and where it's going to go, really hoping to shape it in a way that's good for everybody.
Natalie:
I think for me it was something similar, interested in the intersection of people and technology and also what technology can do to serve humanity. I was researching crypto which led me to DeFi, which really excited me and I felt like DeFi held such a great potential for marginalised people in the tooling that was coming out. The rhetoric around decentralised finance really sparked something in me and I truly believe that through community, we can liberate ourselves from a lot of the issues that we face systemically at the moment. So it was a crypto to DeFi to NFT pipeline for me and I was excited every step of the way. For me at the time, there was a bunch of people that I knew in Malaysia who had helped spark the music NFT boom years ago, and it was the whole entire underground swell of people that were working collectively, cooperatively and thinking about how to build up a capacity to support artists, this is way back in 2016. Nobody was talking about the term web3 at this point, it was just a whole bunch of artists working together in their own circles and building up that space and creating the technology. I was super interested in that culture that was emerging at the time. During that time we were on Clubhouse building up the community there and I realised we didn't have the tools like that before, we didn’t have the capacity for emergence of culture like we do now. Whereas now we can actually build all the infrastructure in the ecosystem to actually really support artists and creators and build this global creator economy. I started to realise that people were galvanising around DAOs and building things, so I thought, I'm just gonna jump in. I also got really sick of people on Clubhouse, there were battles with people being kicked off stage. So I just dived deeper into the black hole that was NFT's and the very nascent web3 space.
Princesa:
Thank you. OK, how did the rest of y'all feel entering this space?
Tina:
I'll be honest, I felt nervous and I definitely felt like I shouldn't be there. I felt like there was a lot of terminology and discourse that was really impenetrable. I'm also just gonna say this because I feel like we’re in a safe space, but it also felt very laddish. I was having to look up terms and follow all the right links. Even when I joined Protein a bit later I must have spent so many hours reading every post, trying to figure out who everyone is and what they're all doing there and what their backgrounds were. So it was really overwhelming and I guess I felt like there were a lot of boys with toys in the space and I didn't necessarily want to compete with them or play with them, but I at the very least wanted to know what they were talking about. I had to ask a lot of side questions privately because I didn't want to look like an idiot. I still don’t know lots of stuff but now I feel a lot braver just saying it in the moment out loud in front of other people and not worrying about it.
Mel:
I think it was very similar for me as well where I just saw a lot of men everywhere I went. I was doing a lot of research on my own 'cause I'm into that kind of thing, I like studying, it's fun for me. But when it came to exchanging information with others, I found that, and maybe it wasn't intentional, but people would speak in this way that made it very hard to even grasp what was happening, even in direct conversations. I found this moreso with my interactions with men. So honestly I was on clubhouse and I found the DeFi rooms and the crypto rooms and I just began following women into spaces. Honestly, I just followed all the women who I thought were kind and who I saw were on stage and were making a space for other people to be there and be heard. So I guess I cultivated my own bias and found spaces where I was more comfortable speaking, smaller discord servers because the bigger spaces were just truly overwhelming - it does feel like maybe you're not allowed to be there based on who is already speaking and the level of education they already have on the topic.
Princesa: Do you want to add anything Nat or Ana?
Ana:
I've been having problems with my mic since we've been on here. So hello, I'm Anna. I'm heavily involved in Protein. I'm also a DJ and a music producer running my own label, and I'm heavily involved in the digital fashion space. But intros aside, I wanted to lean into discussing what did we all feel like when we started to enter these spaces? I have to say, I absolutely agree with the previous speakers, I didn't see anyone else like me. There were no rooms that I felt safe in like this one, everything was fairly techie. There was a lot of shilling behaviour. There was a lot of pandering behaviour. I didn't feel like I was home yet, but I knew it was just a matter of time until I found my community. I'm still OK with fumbling because now I know there's a safer space now for me to get terminology wrong or to do something wrong. When I launched my first NFT, which was a year ago, I did it completely wrong and I felt lost. I felt like I was sailing this ship by myself. Then there were four other women I was speaking to afterwards trying to help me out, so we have to find a way to guide each other. I'm actually just grateful to be here and that I found Protein and Kes and that I'm getting to know Princesa.
Princesa:
Thanks so much Ana I love what you’ve shared so far. Natalie, how did you feel entering the web3 space?
Natalie:
I always differentiate between my early days in what felt like a nascent web3 space and the space which in my opinion emerged in the last year or so. Back in the early days, I was with some people who would drag me around from place to place. It felt very underground, in the underbelly of the spaces with people that carved out the trenches of NFT's. Then from a year ago we would be on Clubhouse and get kicked off, people wanted to argue with us, we had full 6 hour arguments with certain foundations in the space. It was pretty wild. I also felt like I saw a new kind of crew. People were now coming into the space to climb up social ladders. I felt like we had built out an early ecosystem where artists could learn and educate themselves without having to buy $1000 courses and webinars and all this other stuff. We built up the pipelines for those projects, we did that. We co-created those things and I saw people completely obliterate that and waste things. In this space it feels like we can co-create and hold space to share resources and be open source, so when I see people going beyond or disregarding those frameworks, it actually feels annoying. So the whole web3 thing around DAOs and these emerging organisational frameworks kind of made me feel like we're just replicating capitalism. So I had to really check myself and understand why I was here and really revisit my own pathway and what that actually looks like, I had to check my own ego. I literally can't argue with people several times a day. So I had to really check myself and get back into alignment. Last year was pretty rough for myself and many of my peers building out this space.
Princesa:
Thank you. I appreciate it you sharing your experience. So, our next question that we have, was it hard for you to find your community or a community that resonated with you?
Mel:
I love that question because I intentionally came into this space knowing that I didn't want to replicate my IRL corporate lived experience and so I see technology, this whole resurgence and web3 a really unique opportunity to make sure that I'm, like what Natalie was saying, in alignment - making sure that I’m matching my intent with my actions and the people around me. So when I talked about following women into rooms earlier - anyone who said anything that I really resonated with or felt connected to, I would just follow them. I'm going into the clubhouse rooms that they're in, following them on socials. So I came into this space with a very clear objective of meeting my people but understanding that at the end of the day, the liberation that I was seeing for web3 was not everyone else’s intent. So while I may be here to collect information and bring them back for marginalized people for these types of initiatives, I understood very clearly that that's not what everyone sees here. So I would say that I did find my community comparatively rather easily. I was also doxxed fully the entire time, so that made it easier as well that I was always presenting as a black woman and I made that very clear everywhere I went. I followed other doxxed black women, black people or indigenous people. In general, just followed individuals and people who understood what it meant to be on the margins of society and engaging with this technology and engaging with these opportunities. I just wanted to celebrate that. I think it was easier for me and I'm really appreciative and grateful that those people were being vocal in this space and willing to share their actual identities and lived experiences with me.
Tina: The first DAO I joined was protein. I'm in my late 40s and I'm a woman of colour, working in prestigious universities in the UK where class, race, gender are all a part of the promotion structure. So I was very nervous to call out things I saw as negative for marginalised people in the space. But I actually found that in Protein, I didn't really need to do very much of that. I was nervous about saying anything but in the end I saw quite quickly that others were saying it anyway. I did wonder if this was because there were younger people involved and directing conversations, but then I went and joined a few other DAOs and I realised that not every DAO is like protein and that there are still tyrants who are largely white men in other spaces. In the end, it was a very positive outcome because every time I came back to protein from another DAO conversation, I felt more at home. I felt like this is my safe space in the web3 world. I knew that I wasn't going to be attacked like I've seen people get attacked in other daos.
Mel:
Yeah, Protein has been a unique and beautiful experience, very intentionally discussing hard topics, we call them tough questions, but it’s so beautiful that people are willing to just face the elephants in the room, looking at the heart of the problems, challenging them and sharing perspectives. I learn something new every day in that Discord and I love it.
Natalie:
I think outside of the cats that I was running around with a lot of in NFT or even web3 communities appeal to me for the very same reasons that y'all just shared. At one point I was like, I'm just gonna create my own, and we had a really massive community on Clubhouse. Then some people got away from the core of what we were trying to do, so I went to hang out in other places as some of my friends from those communities built their own spaces. We still hang out if not every day, every other day, and still working along the same values as far as DAOs go. I was a part of Forefront and Seed Club super, super early. When Protein launched I found this community to be so caring. They had a web of care and people were super down to earth. Some of them like I don't know what the hell I'm doing, but we gonna do it anyways…I'm like, that's the spirit! They were just trying to figure things out and hold space for equity, which is something that people are still not grasping in the wider web3 space. I spent a lot of time cultivating relationships in those communities and still staying in the deep, dark web and hanging out in the metaverse. Those places offer comfort to me. The web3 space is not easy, especially early last year.
Kes:
I just want to say thank you to everybody for sharing. We're really grateful for you being here. So I’d like to talk about some experiences in the communities that we've joined that have made us feel comfortable, included or like we belong… what things make us feel this way?
Tina:
It's going to be impossible for us to think about how to create the onboarding for some of the people we’re speaking on behalf of here, to make it easier for them or a nicer experience, or simpler, because everyone is different and everyone is looking for something different and everyone's gonna find different things to be interested in within these spaces. The one thing that did help was the play between things quite light like memes and gifs and then also having that serious element to it. People will write very extensive paragraphs about important things or experiences they've had and they'll put all the links in there. Second, a mini blog post or a mini essay. I quite like having that balance of playing but also the seriousness of it as well and that really helped me because it meant that if there was something I was interested in, I could read more about it if I wanted to or I could leave it at the play. With everyone playing, having a laugh and sending funny memes, you could be in on the joke. Private jokes can be very exclusive and keep others out but they can work really well when they're in a community 'cause it fosters an intimacy between the people sharing the inside joke. All of that sort of play was really helpful, I felt included right away. I never felt like I wasn't supposed to be there or there was a conversation I wasn't supposed to be listening to.
Mel:
The way that I joined a lot of the DAOs that I'm a part of, was maybe unique in that I already knew people, or I was already familiar with the information. Like I said, I was trying to follow these communities that align with my intent. I wouldn't join something unless I already had an idea of what it was about which gives me a unique advantage compared to somebody who might just be trying to hop into web3 and doesn't have the same kind of background and is totally new to the space. In general, what fosters a great and comforting environment for me is just like what Tina said, being able to speak about anything openly, understanding that in this space, the entire community's voice is valued and not just mine. I feel comfortable when I see that other people, whether they look like me or not, are able to speak up and share their opinion openly. I think spaces where there is an active effort made to catch people up are great. We can forget to kind not hustle people along, but people can get lost to the wayside where they're new and feel like they’re the fringe of this thing and don’t understand what’s happening at the core. I just want spaces that make it feel like it's OK for everyone to just be everyone. This is the core essence of prompts me to stay in these communities.
Natalie:
I remember being in DAOs early last year and people were just trying to onboard more and more people but not thinking about what they're actually doing with their members’ journeys and experiences. I was like, we can't on board all these people, you're coming over here to this side of the street without thinking about the most important stuff. I think it's irresponsible, to only care about the numbers, it's this very vulture capitalist ideal that is still here which I think is super problematic. We can't possibly onboard millions of people into the space and keep the values and pillars of the space intact while creating space for artists, creators and builders and caregivers to actually sustain themselves, maintaining that web of care while also trying to nurture creative financial sovereignty. It actually works against us to keep embracing those particular models. We need to think about how we can continue to carve out our trenches instead of rushing to get to Mars. Like why are we really going to Mars? We ain't really explored California yet. We need to continue to build out horizontally instead of trying to onboard these massive amounts of people. We really need to think about how we construct and build more webs of care. How do we build more pods around equity and holding people accountable, building the infrastructure and ecosystem which I don't think we've done as much of as we need to in order to sustain the amount of people here and make sure that people are able to thrive. Right now we're building for survival. I'm always thinking about those types of things and I urge people in this space to process that. We need to onboard people in a way that's true to the chain instead of offloading people on the side of the road with a brown paper bag and half of soggy sandwich in there on a road where nobody is around to actually pick them up. We need to be really thoughtful and impactful about how we actually build that infrastructure so that we're not replicating for capitalism. The ship that didn't work for us. Especially for black and brown, disabled and queer folks, all the under resourced and exploited folks, we have to build for those people and then we can build like a real ecosystem that actually lends itself to what this space is really supposed to be about. That is it.
Princesa:
Ok, mic drop! That was amazing. Everything you’ve all shared has been amazing. Kes, is there anything you wanted to explore next?
Kes:
I'm feeling so humbled and speechless and feeling love from everything everyone’s saying, thank you so much. We’re really grateful for you sharing your time and I'm conscious of not trying to rinse that from you. So maybe we can just round up with one last question. We've spoken about some things that make us feel good, like we belong in these spaces. But what are some things we think are still like missing? Of course we don’t have to go into anything deep and can avoid trigger warnings. Is there anything we would like to see in these spaces that aren't there yet?
Tina:
I wanted to say thank you for organising this. What we're doing here is part of a very long tradition which kicked off in the 60s with feminist consciousness raising circles and it's still really important for people who feel marginalised to come together and just talk, just share their experiences. There is so much raising of awareness and building of confidence, kinship, compassion just in saying that. So I hope we can do more of this because I know that the web3 space can feel quite isolating. You're just sitting there with your device in your home with your headphones and maybe on your own. I think one of the challenges we have is to make this space feel better, not necessarily more like the physical world but making it more about community and less about the tech aspects of it. So thank you Kes and Princesa for bringing us all together do this.
Mel:
About making the space feel more full, I would love to see more empathy. I don't want to use that word as if anyone is being malicious but I think sometimes we forget that our lived human experience is very different than that of other people. So I would love it if we were especially conscious of that while we're building the rhetoric around the space. I feel like people don't recognize that we are all in a very unique position, regardless of our privileges to be able to even be receptive to the technology that we're using and be receptive to the ideals that we're practicing or aiming to practice. It's not always easy for everyone to get there on a mental level and on a comfort level, so I think that would be my main thing. I hope that people would consider other people's experiences more or listen out for those types of cues so that we can better onboard people mentally into the space, because the technology is also not super there. I work with the African FT Community and it's still a very unique experience getting certain people into crypto, getting them access and making them comfortable. It’s jarring to hear people say it's so easy. If you think it’s easy then you don’t have the lived experience to know that there's so many more barriers than that. It's not just that you have to believe in your art, there's so much more to it. Overall, I would say empathy is key. I hope that we can have more discussions like this one. Thank you so much to Kes, Princes and Protein. This is a great thing to be doing to help facilitate that.
Natalie:
My nephew is always asking me why I work too much and wow… it made me think. Why are we working so much in this space? Some of us are pummeling each other into the ground. I think we need to embrace what I like to call recess. What are the things that actually make us happy? How do we do self care in web3? What does that actually look like? What is the programming around recess in each of our respective DAOs or communities so that we can embrace play and embrace the fun things. I was in one DAO and they said in order to be a full time contributor, you gotta work at least 40 hours a week. I’m neurodivergent and already under resourced as a black person, even though I've built out hella shit in this space I’m still not paid on par. For me, it's unrealistic to even ponder working a 40 hour work week. That’s like capitalistic labor models, I think we're working ourselves backwards. So what does it actually look like to really ponder about the future of work? Honestly, when I wake up, I don't dream of working. I don't dream of laboring my life away to build some shit for somebody else. You know what I mean? I dream about embracing black joy and doing things with my friends and hanging out and engaging in play. So I'd really love to see some of the DAOs step up to the plate to build programming around recess instead of building programming about working ourselves into the ground and getting DAO burnout. I think it’s important to push empathy forward with equity and driving that stake into the ground as well as embracing getting to a point where we're actually sustainably building the stuff that we need to build in order to live here. Right now it's not sustainable at all.
Princesa:
Thank you Natalie. Thanks so much everyone for coming out. We didn't anticipate that this conversation would go this way and that y'all would be so giving with your experiences and with how much you all wanted to share, we really appreciate it. Thank you to all of our speakers, all of our lovely protein members who have showed up. Thank you to everyone for positively affirming that we are doing the right thing by having these conversations. I really love what Tina said about consciousness raising circles, that really warmed my heart. I'm so grateful to be carrying on that tradition with this project.
