Web3 supporting IRL
Currently, web3 early adopters are beginning to realize that the technology enables some fundamental shifts in community creation that are brought together online. But our hypothesis is that humans still crave in-person communities at the end of the day. Yes, the internet can facilitate the bridging together of people far and wide, but more authentic life experiences can be coordinated in a physical setting.
While building these communities, we realize there is a demographic that is craving community and is also open to more non-traditional approaches to living: recently graduated college students and dropouts focused on passion projects. Think about entrepeneurship clubs on college campuses, but with people who have a more mindful and conscious ethos towards sustainable living and creation.
I’ve been talking with a lot of friends who are recent grads or who have spent some time in the workforce post-college. The resounding theme here is that the college community experience is something they greatly miss. Furthermore, finding roommates and micro-communities that align based on value systems is difficult to find. Now multiply these individuals across colleges. Some already have found roommates that are from their college communities or that match their interests. But there’s a resounding call for a broader unifying purpose/community that we believe web3 communities are proving the need for.
Especially with Covid, a lot of people in more fringe majors and communities like IYA and Spark are more open to counter-cultural approaches to living. Dropping out of college and revoking the “4-year-college experience” is just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve had friends go live in the desert with communities they met online, people who have gone to launch houses, or even committed themselves to travel and road-tripping on the little savings they have. When we’re young, our threshold for risk and the downside of failure is a lot less.
I wrote a prediction piece in the midst of lockdown back home in New Delhi about how this global disaster would be a unifying force that was going to bring about a resurgence in the countercultural lifestyles and cults, just like the communities and people that emerged after the World War II (the summer of love, flower children, cults across the world, etc.). Although there are glimpses of this emerging in the physical world, I hadn’t predicted that web3 was going to be where these new transitions occurred.
Similar to how past eras of counterculture approached society and life in a radically different manner, the time is ripe for an internet-spread culture that is similarly radical. From challenging the norms of patriarchy to counteracting a purely techno-utopianism approach to “progress” to even identifying new life paths that eschew the suburban lifestyle and getting married and having kids at 30. Who knows what this will entail, but culture evolves through the people that are a part of it, and web3 as an underlying layer can enable a culture that everyone can contribute to and that can spread organically.
How this ties to web3:
We’ll be developing a web3 based platform that enables any individual to create a group, or an existing group to link into the hydrant society and create their own micro-working (artist studio, entrepreneur house, etc.) or micro-living community (think roommates with shared values). Each hydrant represents a node (an in-person community) in the society. This also enables each hydrant to become a brand on its own that is quantified by the node’s contribution to the hydrant economy. The society’s platform will enable decentralized governance and community building backed by in-person locations.
This is essentially a DAO, but I think the Web3 technology should actually be an invisible tech layer that enables new forms of community-led, decentralized decision-making in this metaverse product. Just like most people don’t understand the fundamentals of how web2 internet works, there isn’t a need to make everyone understand web3. Simply understanding that hydrant society engineers new social dynamics for being able to contribute to community vision, direction, etc. (think Socratic seminar from elementary school).
Self sustainability (to be explored in more depth)
The advantage to joining hydrant society should be that you’re buying into a community that incentivizes participation in global matters. I’ve spent too much time in NGOs and development sector firms where good talent is seemingly impossible to find because the personal incentives don’t line up (personal survival/comfort is still important at the end of the day). Hydrant society aims to change this. By contributing and collectively investing in the central treasury, the goal will be to redistribute yields and dividends back to all the community nodes that are working on impact/art projects. This frees up each connected community to focus more on the utopian ideal of being creators and focusing on selfless impact projects. Think about a UBI for hydrant society members.
What this is not:
You’ve seen hacker houses, tech incubators, and hype houses. These are proof that communities can coalesce around certain interests and fields of study. Unfortunately, the ethos is still exclusive, and the cultures are often grind/hustle-oriented.
Not a virtual social media. This is an in-person culture. This service is a tool that is commonly owned and reduces the logistical friction of internet-backed friendships.