Just and Joyful - 005 - Icon Sets, Digital Twins, and Metaverse Workers
Hey Friends,
While putting this newsletter together, I realized that I although I spent a lot of time reading about crypto and crypto for good, I curated mostly crypto-related news this week. Next time, I'll share more about the crypto for good opportunity. There's a lot that we can do together, and I'm excited to dig into it with you all.
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Let's jump in.
1/ I've always thought that it'd be an incredible opportunity to design an icon set for financial inclusion in emerging markets. Imagine how much fun it'd be to do a multi-country art project that explores different money / financial inclusion concepts in a visual way!
So much of how we approach financial inclusion today is from a Western perspective on what banking is and is not. I have a hunch that the art project would highlight some very big misses in how we're approaching the design of different digital financial tools for low-income individuals in emerging markets.
Daniel Burka (@dburka) has led a team of volunteers to create a set for healthcare. Check out Healthicons.org.
2/ Staying on the design train, these gender inclusive icons are definitely worth a look.
3/ Once you realize that the internet is just rectangles (seriously, once you see it, you can't unsee it), it's easy to doomscroll your time away. But I have to admit it; web3 has made the internet fun again.
The energy, creativity, and collision of personalities, projects, and protocols (ah, see what I did there!) are sparking some incredible experiments in art, design, technology, community, money, music, etc.
Holly+ is a mindnumbingly cool project that explores voice models, NFTS, and DAOs.
4/ Songcamp is experimenting with different ways to produce music. This article provides a great snapshot of how they were able to bring together people over the internet to create three tracks in 40 minutes. They recently crowdfunded 41.35 ETH (equivalent to ~$73 K) to build Elektra. Music + NFTs + DAO + metaverse. C'mon, this is fun, right?
5/ We're going down the crypto rabbit hole again, aren't we? Well, here are a few things for you all. If you're interested in learning more about crypto generally, read guides from Coinbase, explore DeFi with Rabbit Hole, and go on a trip with Station.
6/ Sales of NFTs reached $2.5 billion in the first half of this year. But don't worry, Nita as an NFT is still for sale.
7/ I mentioned Axie Infinity and the play-to-earn model in the previous newsletter. I initially had a tough time sitting with the idea that a game was incentivizing people to spend their days in front of their phones / computers.
But when you realize that (a) people already get paid for gaming, (b) grinding away in front of your computer for hours a day is not so different from an office worker anywhere in the world, and (c) some people may prefer to earn money doing this over other traditional jobs, the situation begins to look very different. When you squint at this, do you also see the emergence of the Metaverse Worker?
8/ Read about The Leaping Corgi Scholarship (hello, 2021) to see how a scholarship model was created to support 57 Axie Infinity players.
9/ Here's the latest on social tokens.
10/ And I'm not saying that any time someone utters the word culture an anthropologist will appear, but this post describes the importance of culture in DAOs.
Ok, that's it! Hope you all have a great week.
Best,
Dave