Humans 3.0—Where To Now?

Closing Town Hall

Unbelievably, our 20-long asynchronous conference has come to an end. And to celebrate the fantastic contributions and participation we have witnessed along the way, we have gathered together one last time, with some of our participants, contributors, team members, and members of the audience.

To start, we aimed to quickly summarize the key aspects of exploring Beautiful Business in Web3 discerned throughout these past 4,5 months:

• The metaverse seen as a parallel reality that creates new opportunities for interaction, and brand-consumer engagement, like team members from Journee, argodesign, Aglet and Journey have shown us.
• The narrative of decentralization — and democratization — of the internet, wherein platforms no longer exist based on data that’s being capitalized by Big Tech’s oligarchs, the historical context for this narrative as well as its feasibility.
• Increased representation in Web3 and an overview of new models of participation, with the advent of DAOs and incentivization driven with tokens.

Speaking of which, we heard specific examples of such initiatives that drive positive social impact through token-driven incentivization from our hackathon participants, Sofia Ambrosioni and Katia Poenigk. Their projects—using umbrella tokens as an incentive for companies acting in the blockchain environment to be 100% inclusive with their products and services, and allowing citizens to become better ancestors through purchase impact tokens to decide on their city’s natural sources used for the common good and the future generations—were imagined in just under 72 hours!

This recap was followed by Monika Jiang, head of curation and community at the House of Beautiful Business, in conversation with Kevin Dulaney, executive vice president of technology and innovation at Hotwire, based in NYC. They about whether the Web3 hype is myth-making; reflected on the image of a “tech messiah;” discussed Mastodon; and touched upon the measures that need to be taken to shift the current platform economy.

A “centralized decentralized” music performance from our musical director Mark Aanderud and composer Warren Walker that followed next paved way into the last part of the town hall.

Having gathered some of the contributors to the program, we asked them to shortly answer the same question:

How can we make the dream of Beautiful Business in Web3 real?

The responses were diverse and reflective.

“Having more joint conversations like this one, and making room for representation of all kinds of people,” Joana Lacerda said.

“Having the power in our hands to create organizations as we set up Facebook groups today, and developing data ownership and accountability through progressive decentralization,” Nishant Bhaskar said.

“Using these new tools while remembering to think about the real world, driving real-life impact,” Rica Amaral said.

“By building places that are beautiful that we can emotionally connect with as humans, and that will slow us down, and by creating global accessibility and simple onboarding processes,” Ida Kymmer said.

“By demystifying and showing users that Web3 isn’t unattainable and that this new world isn’t so far out of reach,” Kevin Dulaney said.

“By not falling into the trap of ‘the next big thing.’ By not necessarily using scale as a driver of something beautiful we’re trying to create, and by accepting that it’s not a failure if we don’t reach that scale,” Greg Sherwin said.

We couldn’t think of better words to close these 20 weeks of communal reflection, discussion, experiment, and learning. And, even if our conference came to an end, this Discord channel remains open for you to have further discussions and continued access to all talks and material from these 20 weeks—including the full recording of our closing town hall.

Just sign up here at any moment.

Thank you all so much for your beautiful presence, energy, readership, participation, curiosity, and trust. We really hope it has been insightful and helpful, and inspiring for you — it certainly was for us.

Katia Zoritch, writer at the House of Beautiful Business

Beautiful Business in Web3 is the first community-run, asynchronous conference on the future of humanity, technology, and business in a decentralized world. It is run by the House of Beautiful Business in partnership with Hotwire, a global PR and communications consultancy.