I believe that change happens from the ground up.

Nothing is given to us in life or as a culture. It is always the commons that rises en masse to make changes that define who we are.

True for the movements that have bookended my life. From civil rights to gay liberation to the women’s equality movement.

True as well for the uprising around climate change–but with a twist.

There is something different here, something truly unstoppable coalescing at the ground level. A revolution starting with the youth at the center. At a pace driven by the urgency of the need and by a new fuel to the community structure that is unique and platformed on top of tech and entrepreneurial possibilities.

The fact that I wake up challenged by a 16-year old activist from Sweden to do something, and that the thousands outside my building last weekend in New York were teens and younger is something to stand in awe of.

This is a wave of cross-generation connections that is more prevalent than in any other movements I’ve lived through. Parents, their kids, their grandkids all focused on a world beyond themselves. Mothers and fathers proud of the young children for speaking up. Kids finding their voices as such an early age.

This coalesced unity is immensely powerful. Possibly unstoppable.

Climate change is different as well as a collective cause as it is a high-level umbrella touching everyone cross countless potential actions. It is larger than a single issue, it is a mindset, a behavior, and collective change

This is in itself a political uprising albeit, as well, a social revolution.

Unique as these generations are in many ways empowered by their own uncompromising leadership and creating their own heroes and leaders from amongst themselves.

Such brazenness as Greta’s speech in the UN yesterday is something to kick us all to do something.

Notable because it is the younger generations that will impact the voting direction and priorities of the older voter blocks. These are kids changing views of their parents and extended families in ways only they can.

Equally unique is the connection to entrepreneurship, tech, and innovation.

There is so much work to be done and it will create new businesses, new innovation bringing science, technology and community together in brand-new ways.

I admit, I can only look at it from my own vantage point, of my generation, talking to friends and family with younger members.

But on the action side, in my world, there is also direction for change.

I am connected to a number of environmental non-profits that conjoin tech, entrepreneurship and the environment. And to movements and projects in the NFT blockchain space addressing new forms of economizing communities for environmental impact.

Certainly we raise money for projects, in old and new ways, but the majority of companies being funded are impact businesses, For profit, equity funded, hanging loosely under the idea of creating businesses that grow while they are equally part of a collective solution for social good.

The problems of environmental change are daunting and the need for tech innovation to build product to ameliorate the impact of climate change many.

What makes entrepreneurship economic and possible, as a business not as a philanthropic movement is a vast change in market coherence.

It is not enough to build products that scrape for example plastics out of the ocean. It requires the common belief of the mass market that it matters. It is people’s will that is the change agent to support technological innovation. The same market force that drives Amazon’s move to electrify its delivery fleets, and will force it eventually to rethink its packaging from an environmental perspective.

I’m a pragmatic optimist, but I fight daily against laziness and the ease of doing nothing. I’m also fortunate to have found avenues to lend my skills to do something and potentially make a difference.

The drive is the immediacy of the need.

Twice in the last handfuls of years, I’ve been evacuated from my building which is in the flood plain of the Hudson River in downtown New York and subject to the fury of this new age of super hurricanes.

I acknowledge I’m a big dreamer, forever positive about change happening.

Interesting as a counter point, on a blog string yesterday, I was told point blank from a friend, that I’m basically being stupid and am totally misinformed, part of an environmental cult based on ignorance.

Changing his mind is not a good use of my time, acting is on my own convictions is. I need to lean into this to get stuff done.

The fear of this change, changing our world forever in unimaginable ways is real. And obviously terrifying.

But in the end, doing something, using the inspiration of possibility, is the only logical and creative response.

I hear the voice of my father telling me as a kid to get up, turn off the TV, do the stuff that matters to the world beyond myself as that is the stuff of being a man, a member of society.

If everything is in the end a process of getting there, this is tens, possibly hundreds of millions, choosing to spend some piece of their time to make an impact.

That to me is a win. It is what we can and must do.

An outcome in its own right even as a first step.

———–

Big thanks to my friends Bill Tai and Gigi Bresson for leading an industry to think differently and giving me early opportunities to figure out how to lend my hand to participate.

And to the projects that have trusted me to be part of their drive to build something different, tell a story in a new way, to a better end.

I jumped on the creative possibilities of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) early.

They spoke to everything the web hadn’t let me do in games, in the art world, in new economies, in community development, in playing with unique, naturally scarce objects in digital forms.

These blockchain-based objects are not just unique, they are a wrapper for stories that sit on top of a stack of programmable capabilities that simply were not within reach for marketers and developers.

Endless discussions and projects have occurred over the past few years on how top down, to utilize these new consumer reflexes. How game designers and collectible fanatics, now brands, will put them to use in existent genres.

It will come I believe but today it is certainly not here.

Not for lack of trying and innovation, not for lack of consumer friendly crypto wallets, and certainly not for lack of exchanges to buy and sell these objects on.

I think we need to start from the market first, not layering perceived user reflex to tech, but building on new constructs as the market grows and the funnel opens from the bottom up.

With NFTs specifically whether you use them in a game or something else, this is pertinent. They are not currencies, they are assets whose value is subjective, based on the market’s want, on what the consumer sees and feels.

My bias is to start with environmental philanthropy as a market emotion and build on it.

Let me explain.

What we learned from our Honu the Cryptokitty charity auction experiment was that the mass market truly gives a shit about their connection to doing something for the environment. That tens of millions of people in our news cycle simply wanted to belong to a common cause that makes them feel good.

And that communities are atomic in nature, meaning that each individual is part of many adjacent groups so when you capture someone’s attention you can create a community network effect of sorts.

Enter this programmable tool—an NFT—a gift to builders from the blockchain.

So now, someone can, for example, create a unique digital icon for an endangered species that needs protection, partner with the global environmental community, philanthropic agencies, all within a game. Each time that object changes hands, in game or on an exchange, funds are automatically sent back to support the wildlife reserve or the educational institution.

Or you start from the other side, with a unique, real-world case, like a family of chimps that is under the protection of one of Jane Goodall’s foundations. Create a series of collectibles not just around the chimps, but around Jane as an RBG-type role model for new generations (which she should be). You can iconize the locations, the people that do the work on the ground, the classrooms that visit them. You can create an episodic narrative with digital dynamic objects.

You can stack these icons (NFTs btw) using protocols like ERC 998 where objects can be grouped in a hierarchy to create collective value, where one object can be a superset of the rest. You can imbed a transactional ‘commons fee’ to support causes as a variant of Harberger Tax possibly.

My argument is that environmental philanthropy reimagined as a series of branded causes is a global market of good will that could drive games, collectibles, educational directions, events, projects, and more.

We need to stop making excuses.

Stop worrying about on-boarding as the problem. Stop obsessing that the NFT exchanges are too hard to use. They sure aren’t perfect, but any net native can configure a wallet and trade an asset if there was a reason to.

Start with the market.

Always start with a strong, nascent belief. Start with this rare opportunity to encapsulate stories in a new form of secure, unique, exchangeable, programmable objects.

That the why of NFTs.

My area of expertise where environmental philanthropy mashes up with gaming, brand development and community creation is one way in.

If you start with true behavior and market belief, lay on creativity to harness a collective global want, these unique blockchain tools could just help bring it to fruition.

There are many other ways and markets of course.

This is the one I wake up thinking about often.

All day yesterday working on my schedule, whenever I noticed the date, my concentration ground to a halt.

I kept thinking back to that Tuesday, so many years ago, being stranded in San Francisco on business with the country’s air space shut down. Sitting in bars, watching the news with strangers and having the reality of what happened burned into memory by the incessant replaying of the events on network news.

Talking on the cell to friends in New York, every one of them, shell-shocked. Many of them seeing the plane hit the second tower. Watching the buildings crumble and a very different world appear as the dust settled.

I came back on the first flight out, the Saturday night redeye, circling into JFK over the smoking debris.  I remember walking to the intersection of West Broadway and Canal, staring at the barricades on the South side of Canal Street. The surrealistic image of a Schwarzenegger movie billboard that was coming out with him fighting terrorists somewhere. In smug contrast with the real grim reality on the streets.

I’m not going to recap. We all have our memories and have dealt with them. Many moved out of town. Many took years to come to grips. Everyone moved on.

This was a pre iPhone camera world. A pre Facebook and Twitter reality where real-time sharing and connections were absent. Rather than post, you walked around seeing scores of make shift memorials with flowers and pictures of people. Telephone numbers scrawled on papers to call if you saw or heard of someone.

In retrospect, it feels like a black and white photograph of a different time. Frozen yet wrapped in very real memories. My memories as I was there.

People need memorials of horrible events to place them. I light a candle for the passing of my father and grandfather and it helps ground my thoughts. The fiasco of  building the new Freedom Tower and the passage of time has squandered the memory of this event somewhat. Even today, more than a decade later, the memorial is not really complete, surrounded by a fence and a construction site.

The reality of 9/11 was that we felt attacked where we lived. As you went further from the physical event, even uptown, it became less real, less yours and less somehow immediate.

In the years following, when I worked in LA, I tried mostly in vain at my companies to make the day mean something. Invariably it always fizzled. It meant as little to many on the west coast as to many people I work with today in their 20’s. They aren’t insensitive, but, to them, it’s a historical event, not an experience that shaped any part of who they are. That distance is the difference.

I’m not a romantic about this. And I didn’t lose any friends or family. And while sensitive and a downtowner, I don’t gush over this often or have loose emotional ends.

But it’s important, because if I don’t make it so, it will indeed go away. If the only reminder is of the skyline view in pre-9/11 movies or photos with the towers in them, this is indeed a waste.

When I posted something about this on Facebook yesterday, a friend responded that the  9/11 light sculpture that they erect every year is her favorite.

The light sculpture is indeed amazing but it’s more art than memorial to most unless we personalize it.

The connection between the fact that crazies who truly hated us navigated hijacked planes using Broadway as their map to the towers, is somehow below the surface. The family from New Jersey who I met in Union Square that brought their then young children into town to experience the community side of this nightmare, is absent somehow in those beams of light till I talk about them.

This post is my nudge to myself to spend a few moments thinking about it. Connecting the dots so that they stay real.

I’m all about moving on. I’m a hardass generally. For this particular memory, making my own little memorial of it on my blog seems like the right thing to do.

Note: First published in September 2010, a few years after I started this blog and started chronicling my thoughts. Time has passed, the Memorial completed but this moment in time still feels true to me, even today.

We need to step back and think about the relationship between technological capabilities and market adoption.

Get over the idea that the issue with blockchain adoption is some arbitrary number of active wallets that will magically make a crossover market viable.

And realize that tech innovation has always been about personal value creation that is adjacent to the tech, platformed by it often, but never because of it.

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are a brilliant innovation first realized in the CryptoKitties game and still hold potential to capture the market’s imagination, acting as a Trojan Horse onramp to blockchain usage.

They make possible a new value chain primarily because while NFTs are tokens on the blockchain obviously, they are not cryptocurrencies in how they behave or how people relate to them.

Cryptocurrencies are valuable because they are by their very nature scarce, and the controlled issuance of the currency in theory at least drives a math-driven market economy.

NFTs as tokenized objects can be valuable because of the story they respresent in our hearts and minds.

They wrap context and give form to a narrative that we embrace as our own. A story, a myth, a brand, a collective value, something we see and imbue with want and hold close.

An asset surely like a piece of art, tradable with liquidity luckily, but subjective, personal, and nothing less than a shared collective story.

NFTs are not valuable because they are scarce, yet scarcity is an underpinning that preserves whatever value they could have. Supply and demand applies of course but not as the defining principal.

They are a storied object, not a currency. In that distinction is their power.

If we think of art objects, collectibles, even in-game things as NFTs, they are a manifestation of what we think about them. True of art objects online or off.

As an example, I’m sitting as I write under a large, hand-pressed, limited intaglio of the Statue of Liberty that Lichtenstein made in 1982. Just a big piece of paper with pressed ink, someone’s signature, date, 1/how many scrawled in pencil on one corner.

It is valuable because it iconizes the story of this fabled artist, within a historical context, at a specific time.

My love of this piece is tied to my story of acquiring it and why, and is the amalgamation of all of these particulars, including Lichtenstein’s status as a genius of new artistic expression.

The story is the superset, scarcity is the subset. The growing value of this piece is nice obviously but not something I think about often.

We can make similar analogies with baseball cards, or any online object that can be represented as unique within the structure of an NFT.

The story in aggregate of any collectible, art object, and every NFT, is the value quotient that will eventually set the market asset price.

This seems simple and obvious but is not reflected in the NFT market today.

There is a powerful, early market infrastructure where an object as an NFT can be listed, sold, bought, and is interoperable to a large part between a variety of exchanges.

But it is being visualized and presented upside down.

Listing hundreds of NFT images with no story or value quotient discovery outside of the sale price doesn’t create value, it creates a catalogue with cost, alongside perfunctory likes and simple market sentiment indicators.

We are simply looking at this backwards and not understanding what we have in front of us. We are searching in the wrong place for value.

These objects are not static entities but programmable stories, carrying metadata as dynamic paint functions in a art object. Innovations like ERC 998  will potentially let an object own others, deepening the palate of storytelling and consequently the accrued value. And by their very flexibility, an object can define its own economic intent taking constructs like Harberger Tax which allow an ‘always for sale’ state that we have only just begun to experiment with.

Add to this the rare opportunity to create unique programmable objects that are the visual icon of a collective story that are 100% liquid at inception.

The What Ifs are many:

• Artists, issuing 1/x sequenced NFTs of work in the same way Lichtenstein issued prints of his paintings to create a market for his work, transferring value and brand more broadly.
• Making simple NFT creation tools for families or communities to build campaigns around transferable tokens to fund kids’ educational projects. Or monies for medical bills. Or school supplies.
• Program in smart contract tax-deductible incentives so that every time an NFT changes hands, part of the price goes back to support social good projects be they environmental, educational, or just about anything.
• Start with offline true value, creating collectibles around for example, one to one representations of  Jane Goodall’s chimps, or any number of endangered species or places transferring existing offline value and community online.
• Embracing this unique opportunity to iconize value as a tool, reimagining philanthropy, revitalizing the maker revolution, financing the arts, and blowing the lid off of the restraints of economizing communities.
• Starting not with the tech but with the market, the needs, our cultural wants themselves.

As artists, gamers, conservationists, developers, and marketers, we need to think imaginatively to create a new value chain. We have a unique, never before available programmable tool at hand.

With NFTs, we have a potential onramp for the mass market that will not happen with a Cross the Chasm type of early adopter leap. NFTs offer a way to entice the mass market from the ground up.

We obviously need to capture value with storytelling, community building, and marketing as we have since the beginning of time. But now we  have an incredible new way to present, economize and share it.

NFTs are playdough for our imagination in a way that money and currencies are not.

The market sandbox is not the financial system, it is life in all the things we do, collect, raise money for, believe in, and connect around. We naturally want these things, now they can be bridges from offline on, from online off.

This is where NFTs can uniquely matter.

Making a difference in a new, more powerful way adjacent to the unique potential of the blockchain.

If you involved in or interested in this idea, please share your thoughts below or contact me.

Being in love is a wonderful thing.

And this summer, forced by circumstance to be in NY most every day, I’m rediscovering the local ease of this place I’ve known and loved my entire life.

There is something about waking up just before first light, pre the summer heat, to take a stroll out to the end of my local pier on the Hudson and meditate.

People stir slowly around me as the city awakes.

The early runners, Tai Chi aficionados, folks who scribble Morning Papers, people doing grueling interval training–all starting their routines.

In a meandering walk home, food trucks are unloading, store fronts unlocking, with the ever present veneer of people washing the sidewalks like we wash our faces to wake ourselves.

I’m working this summer but since most of my clients are other places in earlier time zones, a few hours of prep and a few hours of Zoom calls either early or late give an unshaved, hyper casual pace to my days.

The thing I always loved about New York, was the joy in finding a personal spot in a public place.

That corner of the bar with friends. Grabbing some sliver of space on a bench or bar stool, or stoop, just hanging around. This is a city of true repose defined by the swirl of busyness around you if you care to make it your own.

There are things I have done for decades, that this summer are giving me the same familiar and deep pleasure with a new twist.

Pre-crowd walks across the Brooklyn Bridge. Taking the train to the top of Central Park for the millionth time, wandering down through the Rambles, sitting by the reflecting pond, just…reflecting.

And the people, insanely diverse. Crazily kooky of every sort.

From the Cat Adventurers who gather in Central Park with their cats to visit and watch their cats for hours.

To every possible variation of street artist and performer, in every shape and form, speaking languages that sound like nothing you’ve ever heard when they ask through gestures for directions.

People complain of a vanishing New York. I of course feel the longing for those hyper local places that defined me in different times in different corners of this town.

When I lived in upper TriBeCa, we would gather at Teddy’s on warm nights to drink Margarita’s by the pitcher, then move to the dive bar at the corner of White Street where we grabbed beers and had pizzas delivered to eat at the outside tables late into the night.

These places are all long since gone.

This city is like a flywheel of change and discovery though, with new things popping up as the old disappear.

Being able to jump on a CitiBike and ride along Hudson River Park to the Water Taxi Terminal, catch a ferry uptown, or the Bronx even,  or anywhere in Brooklyn, not to mention the Rockaways.

Or ride my bike from Wall Street to the GW Bridge listening to a podcast, stopping at the marina to grab an expresso and take a call.

Or like today, moving my mid-day meetings to Bryant Park with fast, free WIFI, finding a casual table on the lawn, under the greenery to work and watch and simply take a moment.

There is also something about the pace of life on the sweltering streets here in the summer that I had forgotten.

The leisure of stopping by my local wine shop and lingering as friends who work there take out a bottle the staff tasted to share.

The easy generosity of stopping by one my local natural wine bars for a Pet Nat at 5 or so on a hot afternoon to shoot the shit, talk spontaneous fermentation, or get a spot education on how to make Picquette over a bottle from the Hudson Valley.

That unshaved lackadaisical meandering that comes not from vacation, but from life with a summer pace in the heat of the city. The casualness of falling in love with something that is familiar, but still with a buzz of allure and excitement to it.

To me, this is a re-energized discovery of the never ending pull towards an always changing yet familiar status quo.

The magnetism and comfort of a place that is rapt with memories, yet in constant flux.

Images float to the top of my mind every day.

Proudly going to work with my grandfather as a young boy at the factory where he labored on a sewing machine in the garment district. Saturday visits to the Museum of Natural History with my dad, then strolling the sidewalk book stalls downtown. Visiting Aunt Molly on Sundays at 181st and Cabrini Blvd, her singing opera as she set the table, and the memory of the impossibly steep escalator at the subway stop there.

All those people and memories, woven into the fabric of this place in a new way.

Ever changing as I am.

The circumstances that made this summer more static are honestly not great. But my rediscovery of why I love this place and a vision of myself in it, is a wondrous gift.

To my community of readers, this is a nudge to look at where you are with new eyes.

The summer doldrums may just be the platform for innovation and renewal you need.

To me, this year, they certainly are.