For the culture. ✔

For the Culture is a term being coined with regards to ThreadGuy’s recent PfP change to a custom Opepen PfP made by the artist Jack Butcher.

My second post in my newsletter is about culture and is partly due to it being a commonly referred to subject within crypto but it is also something that has interested me for many years. Culture is actually more important than many people may think. I talk about the subject a lot in twitter spaces and I have studied it in various capacities during my time at university.

“For the Culture” many people do not realise is a phrase that stems from African-Americans and is used as an expression for support and enthusiasm for aspects of their cultural heritage. As with most things in life other emerging social groups will steal favourable aspects from established cultures to build onto their own.

Identity is an important aspect of culture and when i was younger I struggled a bit to identify what my culture was. This was partly due to living aboard in various countries from Dubai, Bahrain, Cyprus and the UK. Calling somewhere home was very difficult for instance. The older I got, home was less of a issue but culture was what helped me keep my identity. It is still a fascinating subject for me especially some of the stuff i discovered whilst finding out what culture I vibe with more and this is where the storytelling begins.

The Culture Social Experiment

In 1951, 22 Inuit Children were sent from Greenland to Denmark aboard a ship which would change their lives forever and actually one of the most impactful deculturations of the 20th centuries. The 22 children were part of a social experiment, taken from them homes, aged between 5 and 9 years old, many of them never saw or lived with their families again.

Greenland was once a Danish colony, and during the 1950s, the Greenlanders experienced a period of severe poverty and a low quality of life. In an effort to enhance living conditions, Denmark decided to create a new generation of Greenlanders. Collaborating with the Red Cross and Save the Children, they developed a system where Greenlandic children would be brought to Denmark to learn Danish, be fostered by Danish families, and then return to Greenland as "little Danes".

On arrival into Denmark the children were sent to spend the summer at a “holiday camp”, known as Fedgaarden. It later emerged this was actually a quarantine environment. It was a farm so remote no other house could be seen and the children were there for fear they could have had something contagious.

At the time the project was so prestigious even the Queen of Denmark visited. The children were then sent to foster families around the country. The life was so different for these children that many either hardly spoke or engaged much with their foster family. Most did not really understand why they were there. A year past and the children were sent back home. One child recalls seeing her mother for the first time,

"When the ship docked in Nuuk, I grabbed my little suitcase and rushed down the bridge into the arms of my mum," says Thiesen.

"And I talked and talked about all that I had seen. But she didn't answer. I looked up at her in confusion. After a while she said something but I couldn't understand what she was saying. Not a word. I thought, 'This is awful. I can't speak with my mother any more.' We spoke two different languages."

Worse the children were told they could not live with their families and had to stay in a new Children’s home in Nuuk. The new ‘mum’; director of the children’s home” ran the new home and the children were told they could only speak Danish.

The experience had long term consequences. The children had never actually been told they were part of an experiment and one found out when they were 52 years old in 1996. Instead of becoming a model for cultural change in Greenland, the children found themselves as a small, marginalized group, disconnected from their own society. Sadly, many of them fell into alcoholism and passed away prematurely. They lost their identity, they lost their connection to their culture.

Simply being part of a group or a community can provide an individual with a sense of identity and belonging. It is also important for connecting people, but does have limitations and challenges. I associate NFT Twitter and Crypto Twitter very much so as having a culture and it is definable.

Digitized Culture

Those of us who have survived “Alt season” (a term used for alternative cryptocurrencies) and have invested our remaining liquidity into the last remnants of NFTs struggling to hold value or into Ordinals if you had a 10K plus followers Twitter account and could spare 0.2 BTC, are here for something. I am being facetious partly of course to some extent, but its interesting to see the speed of profile pictures switching their short Ordinals Summer Orange backgrounds to Opepen Profile Pictures.

Is it all part of a historic movement? Or, as a cynic might suggest, is changing your profile picture to an Opepen for engagement farming? Or perhaps changing your profile picture to an Opepen one is the need to feel a sense of belonging? I believe it may be. So it makes sense for Twitter NFT users to use this term as the society evolves. The movement around the ThreadGuy Opepen was quite evident. The movement cries,

“We are still here!”

…It continues…

“We are still clinging on for dear hope that we get something out of this for sticking around during the bear market.”

“For the culture!” all 10K (who had liquidity left in the space to buy a Opepen Threadition) roar!

Since the bigger NFT movement of 2017 with the emergence of CryptoPunks people flocked to throw $1000 at NFTs. But what does web3 culture mean?

It consists of a set of shared beliefs, values, and normalizes aspects of behaviour and actions within a society or grouping. Those of us in NFTs we get it, not all of us agree with it but they conform. Not to be confused with a cult or tribe, but as practices and ideas that run across a collective society which consist of essential parts. It is complex and has several concepts but 8, in my opinion, are the most important ones.

A list of Culture Attributes:

1. Shared belief and values

2. Customs and Traditions

3. Art, Music and literature

4. Social Organisation

5. Communication

6. Cultural Artefacts

7. Food and cuisine

8. Historic collective memory

Each of these i could write a book about 😂 but I will save you from that and instead give you this. On each of those attributes they trigger a thought in your head to do with NFTs or NFT Twitter.

For instance cultural artefacts (6) are actually our Non-Fungible Tokens. Social Organisation (4) is how we pen everyone into token-gated communities. Its part of the culture is it not? Our communication (5) is on twitter, spaces and discord…we tried threads for a bit some even tried Nostr and Bluesky but we are back to Twitter. Even our historic collective memory (8) sometimes astounds us. We have a very short collective memory as a social collective, think of what happened last week, another rugger a few weeks later the same rugger deemed the hero. Importantly we stick with the culture. 🤷‍♀️ I also laughed when i thought of Food and cuisine (7) and how tacos has become synonymous with our web3 traditions. 😂

We have all the pillars covered for an emerging influential culture and so as we stick and round and find out, Ashley DCan nails the strength of the NFT Twitter culture with a video she did ending it with,

ThreadGuy - Opepen Theadition

So, when ThreadGuy switched to an Opepen after an attempted offer of a rare (001) OpenPen owned by Bored Elon in exchange for ThreadGuy's Mutant Ape. I say "attempted" because ThreadGuy declined the offer and subsequent offers, Jack Butcher, the artist behind the OpenPen, created a custom OpenPen for ThreadGuy.

ThreadGuy whilst hosting a widely attended twitter space changed his PFP to an Opepen ThreadGuy Edition. This has spurred a movement with multiple influential people developing custom Opepen to match the livery of their existing PFPs. Even the infamous Beeple tweeted about it.

The result was Jack Butcher releasing a $2 version of the Opepen Threadition with the intent to make it accessible to all but at the same time raising all the funds for ThreadGuy. Basically anything anyone does in the space there will be haters but then there will be the cultural attuned who understand that this is actually the perfect NFT in the circumstance.

1. Its accessible for anyone to mint.

2. Its $2 which is affordable.

3. Its got zero utility.

4. Its decentralised.

5. Allows you to be part of something.

The last point is actually very important. Acceptance into web3 culture is not actually an issue, Its a given. It could also be argued it is part of your wellbeing and development. Keep in mind there are bad things in web3 but there are bad things in any culture also. The bind to web3 like in any culture is the feeling of belonging and how you identify being part of it.

So what is web3 culture? It’s simple. It is the feeling of belonging and being rooted into it. Regardless of peoples bags and number of followers on twitter you are part of a larger evolving movement. You are part of the culture. You may disagree with many things that happen in web3 and certain aspects of the movement but you can not deny that it all forms part of the culture. Web3 for the people by the people, community empowerment in a constantly changing and evolving landscape and you are part of it.

Keep Exploring and Learning,

Chewie (Chewie On This) ✏️

100% written by human

AI Tool to try: YOU.COM 

I was asked recently about alternative chatbots to ChatGPT and you.com sprung to mind. The key difference between ChatGPT and You.com is that it is search engine that uses AI tools to enhance its search capabilities and is integrated with an AI chatbot. It gives references on websites and can do a raft of searches and can also do code. I also like that it can help individuals that might struggle to write to also help them learn to write better. The you.com community is also very strong and the devs are reactive to introducing new things to it. It is an old platform now but still very relevant in my opinion. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Chew on it 😋😋or Spit it out? 🤮🤮

Ask me about something and i will tell you if i would chew on it or spit it out. 😁Simple. (FYI if you send me a DM likelihood is I will add it here 😂 Anonymous ofc unless you ask me)

 I am going to Chew on it. 😋😋 

Keep in mind there is no utility but it is half the price of a coffee from Starbucks (2023). NFA. DYOR.