How meeting The Fairies from the Cardano Community sent me down a surprising rabbit hole: The Kindness Imperative.
When not building communities of a digital variety, I have a not-so-secret life as a live visual artist. As a “VJ” who owns two Beeple animations, I project map light and live mixes to complement musicians onstage or enhance the spaces behind the DJ. Sometimes I send warped visionary art to screens in festivals and forests. I do the live mixes as a tribute to the artists and the audiences, and for many years prior to NFTs, many of my animation clips were created by artist friends around the world. They used to be shared for free — exchanged within a relationship of mutual admiration.
These forest festivals and how NFTs have changed my immediate world were what went through my mind as I logged in to talk to The Fairies.
One ring…No answer yet.
It was 4:30 am in Australia, and I was calling from Barcelona, Spain.
My mind circled back to how flabbergasted I had been when Beeple sold an NFT for $69 million. I have art made by him sitting on my laptop — procured about a decade ago when he was known in our artist circles as digital artist Mike Winkelmann.
“Good Morniiiing!” says Fairy Godmother in a tone I half-expected. Cheerful and genuine. I learned quickly that the origin story is tied to Molly (Tinkerbell) having been affected by bullying when she was young and how mental health of the developing mind is of utmost importance to them.
Tinkerbell elaborated on their Why:
“News and social media have had a prevalence of hate and fear. It makes you feel bad about yourself. It affects us all negatively. Why couldn’t there be more spaces that affect us positively, where we go out and give compliments, where people would share laughter and just general advice and life experiences that could help people feel better? Why couldn’t that go viral? Why should hate go viral? CryptoFairies started as one way to switch the algorithm from fear to hope.
“Web3 gives us a chance to make a new rule book. The blockchain was made to promote transparency.
“…It seemed to us an opportunity to spread the message of treating each other nicely. Leave the power struggles and negativity in Web2.”
After five minutes more, the discourse was easy.
Me: Share your vision in a few words…
Tinkerbell: The CryptoFairies mission is clear, bring our #FairyFrens to the Blockchain to spread kindness, awareness, and magic. While raising awareness for mental health in children online, too
Me: Who do you want as your biggest fan? And Why do you want them to love what you do?!
Fairy Godmother: Our ultimate audience is the developing mind. If you want to seek magic for the mind, then you are precisely the audience we need to find.
Me: What on earth started it all?!
Tinkerbell: It was a random post on Twitter where someone said I’d buy that art, and the rest is history. (Incidentally, at the time of writing, their last minted NFTs sold out. I’m happy for them!)
Me: Brand Crush and Collaborations?
Fairy Godmother: Our brand crush is the UN — fighting for rights is ingrained in us, Fae. Some of the companies we have collaborated with in the Web3 space so far are the Cardano Foundation, CoinSpot Australia, Saltera Training, and many more notable NFT projects and dApp brands.
Our conversation ended with the possibility of seeing each other again (live this time) in NFT NYC. This conversation, being the catalyst to many other stories that are now writing themselves in my mind, I can hear questions that I myself asked before I started this metaverse journey.
But wait. Is the world really that broken? What is the metaverse anyway?!
Maybe it is easier to start with where we are now. You are reading this in Web2. Web 1.0 was all about sites that were strictly information. Web2, our current popular platform, has sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon. With these, in Web2, people could interact in some ways. Many can co-create or, in fact, author content. But over time, social media, in particular, is often deemed to have devolved into a rather spiteful and acidic place where trolls disguised as people hide behind fake profiles and algorithm trickery to service an obsession with likes and follows. Not to mention…all of the above sites are all owned by big businesses — the 1%, if you will.
Web 3.0 is a possible future version of the internet based on public blockchains, a record-keeping system best known for facilitating cryptocurrency. Blockchain Technology makes users much more transparent, as well as deems them the owners of their own domain. Love it or hate it, it is here to stay.
So what is it? It is all still unfurling as we speak. It seems likely to be the next phase of the online universe. Although younger generations may spend more time in it than Baby Boomers, it seems more inclusive than everything else we try to sugarcoat as diverse, non-ageist, and all the rest of it. Some say the metaverse can be a tool to connect humans better than how it’s been of late.
Imagine attending a concert in Milan from your sofa or learning how to DJ while whiling away time on a plane. It is pretty much all possible. Imagine a world where likes did not reign supreme.
Circling back to my rabbit hole: Is there anyone else out there selling kindness?
Fun fact: Discord recently acquired Gas, a compliments-based social media app for teens. Though not quite a web3 app (yet?), the fact that this exists: something whereby the algorithm says you’re good for saying good and kind things seems a tad odd to me.
On Gas, users sign up with their school, add friends and answer polls about their classmates. But the questions in the polls are intended to boost users’ confidence rather than damage it. Teens might be asked to choose which of four friends is the best cheerleader, oboe player, or has the best smile. Then the person who was chosen will get an anonymous message with their compliment, sent from a vague “boy in 12th grade” or “girl in 10th grade.”
Gas was founded by Nikita Bier. According to data from Sensor Tower, Gas reached 7.4 million installs and almost $7 million in consumer spending since its launch in the summer of 2022. Discord is listed as “Chat for Gamers” in most app stores. Indeed, initially, Discord was designed by gamers, for gamers, and has everything players need down to the smallest detail.
Discord is often used as the main platform by most DeFi and NFTs projects and plays a vital role in their ecosystem. Sandbox, Star Atlas, Somnium Space, and many others have an official server to communicate with their community.
Also, in Discord, users can interact directly with important figures, such as CEOs, game developers, and artists, about innovations, fashion, and technologies, like NFT, blockchain, crypto, metaverse, and other Web 3.0 topics. Users get verified and reliable news, opinions, and insights from the different Web 3.0 fields.
And they just acquired, well, an app of the kindness variety.
Maybe it’s just my feed — subconsciously curated by me — all of a sudden getting more positive vibes than the usual toxic trolling social media has come to be. Maybe it’s all just a coincidence that I found Gas and beautiful articles about “awe amid everyday splendor” in the same timeframe as when I met the objects of my affection in this article.
I smell fairy dust.
Also published here.