is it Ingroup or is it Dynasty
What's Lindy, baby?
There’s been tons of talk on the interwebs lately (depending on what corner of them you hang out on) where people do some amount of navel gazing about in-group’d ness.
Community thinking and reconnection to a tribe are ideas I see floating around in the id of America on the interwebs lately. More than ever, people seem to really understand that joining the group means showing up for the rituals and participating in the project in a meaningful way with your time. Participation means putting on the costume or eating the right food, owning the right things, or showing up in the right places to show that you know and do any of the above.
Signaling that you belong to a group is a big part of being the group. Different communities take different strategies. One internet group I follow, the postrats, it seems like the answer to showing off tribalness was “attends vibecamp”. That was the court where the scene of postrat-ism was set to take place: if you wanted to be a part of the scene you’d better show up for court.
For bitcoiners, it’s disavowal and spartan-ism that proves you’re saving sats.
On other projects, like open source or coding it means devoting hours to learning how an arcane system works so that you can participate in the conversations and contribute to what people are collectively building.
For NFT owners, it was owning a piece of a large-ish collection and displaying that as your profile pic. The rarer the collection, or the more elite the owners, the more valuable the ingroup relationship.
Legibility is Valuable
While there’s certainly other ways to be legible as a community (github commit counts anyone?) the NFT movement really grabbed onto the concept of the value of legible communities, and the wealth and status that that legibility can confer.
There’s a reason to gate belonging — it’s hard to hold court and have it feel like court when any and everyone is invited to participate. This is a hard gap to navigate, especially for communities that want to be ‘inclusive’ while also being still an ingroup. Most recent example I’ve heard of the difficulty in navigating this is where vibecamp2 was a bit “overrun” with newcomers that didn’t know how to act at court and it made it a bit of an unpleasant experience. (I expect the real ingroup of that movement to go further underground — they’ll still host experiences but some of the openness of invitation will be cut off.)
The crypto communities solved this problem of access via the legibility of ownership of an asset, with the NFT profile pic communities becoming the biggest and most legible of them all.
The pfp projects that became “big ones” — Cryptopunks, BAYC — launched in-person meetups and groups and cultural spaces to follow on the tribe that they minted into being by drawing a line around early adopters and late comers with enough bags to buy their way in.
Digital assets make group legibility easy. You just need a digital wallet and a blockchain to do the record keeping for you. The value of belonging to the group is a social one: who else is a member of the club? How many club memberships are there? These club passes can be ultra valuable if the right people are part of it, or if the pass gets you entry into the right places.
During the last bull cycle (and maybe continuing through the last bear), I heard of parties that only asset owners were invited to; you had to show proof of ownership to get in. There’s definitely invite only Discord chats that are members only — inclusion is both through knowing another member as well as owning the right thing.
The value of the artwork, the NFT, persists only as long as that affiliation or group remains powerful. And you have to be right person too — owning the right NFT is only useful if you’re able to ‘wield’ it correctly. To say the right things, to navigate space of the court according to the rules.
If you die, who gets your NFT? Will they be able to make use of it?
Royalty is an NFT
Ingroups that gain power and endure across centuries we call dynasties.
Dynasties are ingroups that gained power and the NFTs that go along with it (the crown jewels, the palaces, the reverence of the government).
They’re passed down by birth; the only way to join a dynastic ingroup is by marrying into it, or being born into it.
It’s probably a good thing that access to legible sovereignty isn’t available for sale on the market. That’d drastically reduce the value of the ingroup, which relies on being small and extremely hard to get in to. Luck in terms of what stars you were born under are really the only way to join certain dynasties.
Unless you create your own.
In Exitus
I don’t really have a bigger point here, but thought it was interesting that in order to really make a pfp oriented NFT project live up to its fullest potential, you really do need to create a dynasty.
I’m fairly certain that at least one group this century will become a new dynasty. It’s hard to tell who it’ll be or where it’ll come from, but I’m bullish on bitcoin being at the core of it.