Let’s Form Group: Screening and Q&A with the Filmmakers & Subjects w/ Anjali Young & Thobey Campion

This is a series of short documentary films produced by Collaband and created by Lore Machine. Uh, yes, we're going to introduce them today and then we'll have a little...we'll have a little Q&A session afterwards with the filmmakers, the editors, and some of the stars of the films. So I hope you enjoy them. And here's Toby Campion.

Brilliant. Hey guys! Hey, thanks for coming. Uh, last September, Jolly and James approached me, a guy who makes videos, to do a sort of love letter to Web 3. I'd grown tired of Web 2 media, and Web 3 offered solutions to problems that Web 2 just didn't seem to have.

So I felt I was the right man for the job and I volunteered. And together with a great group of people, we managed to produce seven episodes. So let's show you the trailer. Then we'll watch three of the episodes today, and the stars will join us to talk about weird stuff. I don't even know what we're going to talk about.

Yes. But in any case, thank you for coming and I hope you enjoy them. Yes. In my opinion, Ethereum is feminist. It is a tool that allows men and women to use it equally.

Web 3 is a unique moment, and I felt like the wheel was being reinvented in real time. It was a great project that I joined. My God, this is real. People really care about this. It has changed how I see everything and I have completely immersed myself in it.

I truly believe I am changing the world. We thought, "Okay, that's it." Yes. There was no going back from then on . These technology companies promised to change our lives, but in reality they were just obtaining our data.

I lived in a village with dirt roads. The word NFT was not on my radar. It clicked for me immediately. Hey, maybe there's something interesting about this blockchain thing. It's about having ownership over your digital footprint.

That's what has completely changed my life. I said, "I think I could have signed a contract." And he said to me, " Why did you do that?" "It's a terrible idea." I dropped everything I was doing the next day and devoted myself entirely to NFTs and blockchain.

The reality right now for the general public is: "Oh yeah, crypto is a scam." And then you see things like the collapse of exchanges. It's like the lawless Wild West. But a time will come when real solutions will emerge. Web 3 is a unique space where you can have this vibrant community of people who support you.

Pizza raised one million dollars in one month. In other words, something unprecedented. Thank you so much for all the free Web 3 dough. That's where we'll do it. This is the most beautiful intersection for what I've been looking for.

If I didn't build something now, I was going to regret it. You can control something in a world where we control nothing. The game here is to take advantage of this digital scarcity to generate analog abundance. This will be the most massive transition we have ever experienced. I think this is setting the stage for what's to come, when everyone will do it and it won't be strange anymore and we won't need to make documentaries about it.

If that's not enough to wake you up in the morning, then [ __ ] everything, man. Do you know what I mean? If we envision a new reality here on Earth, new reality here on Earth, what would its ideal state be? So, what would its ideal state be? So, what do we really want to do?

If we could do anything on this planet, well, we should probably throw a party. Here we can take action. What do you need for that party, right? Pizza. So that was part of how we got to where we are.

We're going to organize a global pizza party that we'll fund by selling blockchain-based pizza NFTs, wanting to build a world where everyone can eat. People came to Pizza because they wanted to unite the world through pizza. So having a really solid mission that people can get involved in, that was our secret. We're here at Pizza Brain, Philadelphia's famous pizza museum. Very good.

Pizza is a global phenomenon. She's beautiful, isn't she? Each pizza is like a work of art. Each pizza is community in a box. Because there are eight slices in there and you probably won't eat them all by yourself.

That's why pizza is what I chose as a vehicle to bring blockchain-powered community ownership to the world. What am I going to do? I'm not going to eat it. Oh, something funny about me is that I actually can't eat gluten or dairy. So, it's not really about pizza.

What pizza does for Web 3 is that, instead of approaching people and saying, "Oh, we're Web 3," we say, "Hey, do you want a slice of pizza?" So it's a really good way to start saying, "Hey, maybe there's something really interesting about this blockchain thing." I run a Facebook group in South Philadelphia called South Silly. And that's why I have relationships with many of the local businesses. When the pandemic hit, businesses suffered, many closed, and it made me start thinking deeply about how to change ownership structures in neighborhoods so that communities could support businesses in other ways.

They all combined their skills to create this super community-oriented pizza place , you know, from scratch. Like this , you know, from scratch. Like this , we installed these floors. We did everything here ourselves. The story of Pizza DAO, in short, is that we brought together a community of artists from around the world to create ingredients for a digital pizza.

We created a generative project of 10,000 digital pizzas. We sold them to raise funds. We took that money. We bought pizza with him and gave it away all over the world. Thank you for our pizza.

I love them. Free pizza. Pizza. This is cheating. This is Charm.

Thank you so much for all the free dough. Pizza DAO raised one million dollars in one month. I mean, it's crazy, something unprecedented, impossible to do without Web 3. Collabland fulfills several functions in the Pizza DAO Discord. Protect our proposal channel so only those who own the rare pizza NFT can see it.

And this is the essence of how Pizza DAO really works, right? We put the proposals in the channel and vote on them. We want our voting to be anonymous and one person, one vote. So, in reality, that's how we make all our decisions now. It is an enormous force for organizing people.

I don't think we should simply reinvent on the blockchain what isn't on it. That's not the task. The game we 're playing here is to take advantage of this digital scarcity to bring analog abundance. To date, Pizza DAO has given away around half a million dollars' worth of pizza in more than 75 countries. We have partnered with over 400 pizzerias.

Free pizza. We have fed at least 100,000 people. And going forward, we want to continue spreading the community and the spirit of community ownership and Web 3 through the vehicle of pizza. Maybe, you know, there is a world where humans really don't have to think so much about whether they can afford food. I don't pretend to know how we got there, but I do want to get there.

What if Domino came along and offered to buy you for a billion dollars? [ __ ] them . I ended up in the Web3 space. It's really due to a lack of art supplies, basically, when it comes down to that. The Web3 NFT space was very far removed from what I was doing at that time, which was living in a very remote Aboriginal community in the far north of Australia, in Arnhem Land.

That is not the case. It is a coastal community closed to non-indigenous people. Once the rainy season arrives, you really can't get in or out by car. Unless you have a purpose for being there, and that's through government work. My husband Tom was at work.

He is a teacher. We had been traveling for a year on the road, living in a trailer with our four children, and I didn't have any art supplies with me. I didn't have any canvases. She was used to creating art. I tend to create no matter what.

So I had an iPad and that was all I had to create with. So, before that, I didn't really work digitally at all. And yes, simply trying to figure out what my own purpose was for being there. He definitely lived in a town with dirt roads. The word NFT wasn't on my radar, but I remember receiving a message from Gina Anderson, who is the founder of Honey Badges.

Gina shared a piece of my artwork that caught the attention of Allison Downey and Alex Cavalucos. There he runs a technology company. Alex had a very successful startup. This girl Gina saying, "These two women want to meet with you." Don't ruin it.

They are really important. I was like, "Okay, I feel terrible." Um...I got on a phone call with them. It was obvious that we were all mothers.

It was very comfortable. I had to cut the call short because we had just gotten a new puppy. I was like, "I'm sorry." "I have dog urine and a 2-year-old child rolling around in it 2-year-old child rolling around in it ." "I have to go".

And they agreed to that, which made me think, "I can work for these people." They had two NFT PFP projects of 10,000 units. That's a lot of acronyms. Meta Angels, which was the first, and then Honey Badges. It's essentially a membership token that people are buying.

So they will buy one of these 10,000 and gain access to a membership offered by that project. What they were looking for was something that would stand out in the NFT space and be different from the caricatures of guys that were circulating. I signed up for both because I usually say yes and then figure out how to do it. Tom returned from Outbush. I told him, "I think I could have signed a contract."

And he said, "Why did you do that? It's a terrible idea." So I told him, "I a terrible idea." So I told him, "I think you just need to do a few layers and it'll be fine." It turned out to be much, much more complex.

I needed Tom to join me in order to do it. It seemed like something worth doing for my artistic career. We left Man Greeter in a hurry. We went to the nearest major city, Darwin, and lived in Airbnbs for the 6 weeks of school holidays with our children. I simply started producing images nonstop.

It was a big commitment that I took on. It's difficult. It's hard work, but it was also an extremely exciting time. It was a huge turning point for us. Then everything snowballed from there.

I gained many collectors who joined because they discovered me through the Meta Angels Discord server. Web 3 is a unique space where you can have this vibrant community of very supportive people around you. People are interested in who is creating the art. They want to support someone they believe in They want to support someone they believe in . I think if we have our friend doing his thing, like that kind of scenario, what I found through Web 3 is that it can really grow and open doors that, you know, were never there or weren't accessible before.

The NFT space has been the most fruitful community I have ever been a part of. Definitely in my professional life. Did you do it? Good job. I'm very proud of you.

I love you. Have lots of fun. Congratulations on your " I am an artist of unique pieces" title. The work I focus on is really the same as my work in the world of physical art. It's simply making art that I feel good about sharing with the world.

focusing on building myself up as an artist who has control over my work and my life, whether in the NFT space or not. In my opinion, Ethereum is feminist. It is a neutral tool that allows men and women to use it equally. About 50 years ago, you still had to get credit in your husband's name. The tools we can build on platforms like Ethereum allow you to obtain loans from a financial market that doesn't care who you are, as long as you have, you know, collateral.

These are important advances that are not valued enough, simply for offering a level playing field that was otherwise difficult to achieve. The mere fact of having digital wallets is a significant innovation digital wallets is a significant innovation . We like Las Vegas. Let's go for a walk. Unicorns.

I love it. The people who can benefit from Ethereum and these new, more resilient financial systems are those most marginalized by the current financial system. For years, sex workers have been banned from PayPal and Cash App and have had their bank accounts closed . We have a company to bring the benefits of blockchain to the adult industry. Our main product is called Spank Pay.

It's a cryptocurrency payment platform to help you process payments. Great, we're down one now. I am a software engineer by training. I used to work at ConsenSys as an Ethereum developer. How's everything going?

I was researching micropayments trying to find a good use case for it. After reading a bit about the adult industry and its problems with banking and financial systems, I thought maybe this was a good combination. Yes, there was a lot of excitement surrounding cryptocurrency companies for adults. I think we were one of the few who tried to focus on useful services, so we're handing out promotional items to raise awareness of this. It used to be a meme that nobody paid for their pornography.

But clearly that meme was fake, because many people are willing to pay for their pornography if the payment doesn't go to some strange studio, but directly to the model they actually, you know, fantasize about. Creating more direct content and financial services that better connect fans with their models really unlocks a lot of the willingness to pay for content that was previously just a meme. Can you name it Spank Chaining? Spank Chain. We hired sex workers and started going to conventions and meeting sex workers.

And so, one of the first things we did was come to this AVN and give away, you know, $20,000 in cash and cryptocurrency for signing people up for wallets and trying to onboard them for wallets and trying to onboard them . Is it okay if I take a picture? Yes, I'm fine with that. Yes of course. Fine, thanks.

Brilliant. Spank Chain was my introduction to this world. Uh, it's been quite fun. I've learned a lot. The adult industry tries everything at least once.

They have the advantage of being willing to experiment. Have you ever been whipped by a siren? So they're learning a lot about how to navigate this crypto world, because for them the tools are simply useful. In the sex industry, your accounts are constantly being closed. and I exist in a legal capacity.

Everything I do is legal. So for me, having all these things shut down is truly terrible. When you create products that models use, it's an amazing thing for us. That's what we need. We need these problems to be resolved.

Having Spank back you up makes you feel like you 're not doing anything wrong. You are a businesswoman or entrepreneur, not just anyone. It gives you that freedom. It gives you that empowerment and you can control something in a world where we have no control over anything. Much of the legal money she's earned, you know, selling socks and whatever, being mean to men on the internet being mean to men on the internet .

He is having difficulty collecting it and has even had problems with mortgages and credit. You wouldn't expect your utility company to cut off your water because of something you tweeted. So the conversation about regulation is a bit complicated because most of the rules are not necessarily enforced by actual laws. Most of the rules governing the content you can post and things like that are set by Mastercard and Visa, based on what they are willing to process. And that's how they impose their own kind of morality.

Legislation is being proposed in Congress regarding banking discrimination against sex workers. We are going to Washington to meet with different committees about this type of financial discrimination. Like the lobbyists we have in DC right now , testifying before five different committees about this thing that will probably become a bill. We started with financial discrimination and moved on to decriminalization. That is the hope.

Financial discrimination is an easy point to start with because it will literally change the life of every person in the industry. Nobody had done anything like this before. It was truly a historic event because no one had taken sex workers seriously, partly because it was easier not to acknowledge that this is a real economic issue. We want to change the world. It sounds a bit cliché change the world.

It sounds a bit cliché , but we just want the world to reflect our values. One of the things we can do here is help combat the stigma. You know, creating educational content, helping people integrate. About 5 years ago, we had to work hard to get people to have wallets, and now everyone puts their ETH on Twitter. It's like the best thing that's ever happened.

Now we have big porn stars selling NFTs for ETH, right? I'm excited to see more models using DAOs excited to see more models using DAOs , more sex workers using DAOs to coordinate. So, that's where we've ended up, right? I think this continues to pave the way for what will come next, which is when everyone will be doing this and it won't be strange anymore and we won't need to make documentaries about it . Hopefully, we can figure out how to make this useful and bring its benefits to a wider population.

Thank you all so much for coming and watching the collaborative short films. Um, we only have seven minutes left for the panel discussion. So we probably won't be able to take questions, but what I will ask is that each of you present introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about yourselves, where we can learn more about your project, and perhaps a memory from the filming, um, of the short film. Um, Toby was the director here, so um, everyone probably has some memory of him. So, in our seven minutes, I hope to have the greatest possible impact.

So, shall the greatest possible impact. So, shall we start with Toby? Yes. What's up, guys? Um, I'm Toby Campion, founder of Lore Machine.

Um, and we're a next- generation studio that leverages AI and web3 tools to enhance storytelling on the internet. Um, and basically we traveled around the United States and Canada, uh, meeting with all the subjects, um, and really finding, uh, a human thread through many of these organizations that are a Discord or a collection of NFTs, something very much like a lack of face in it. Um, so what we strive to do with these films is to bring a more human, compassionate, and relatable set of circumstances to each of the filmings, in the hope that we could, um, inject some energy into the Ethereum community. Not that I need it, um, but also to create a bridge, uh, for people who have no idea what the hell this is all about . Um, so the hope was to unite those two worlds and, uh, I couldn't have done it without all these people.

So, thank you. Thanks, Toby. I am Orin. I am, uh, the editor of the piece, so I won't take up too much of your time, but, uh, I own a company called Burnish Creative. So, we partnered with Lur Machine to put this together, and we did the post-production, the editing, and we really learned a lot in the process.

I am a Bitcoin veteran. I bought Bitcoin in 2011, so I know a lot about that world, but this whole world of NFTs and everything you guys are building is amazing and I think it's really cool. So, very well done. And this is the first time I've met the editor in person. We did everything via the internet and I'm very pleased to discover that he bears an impressive resemblance to Kurt Russell.

So, congratulations. Yeah. Um Russell. So, congratulations. Yeah.

Um , I'm Snacks, uh, founder of Pizza DAO , I'm Snacks, uh, founder of Pizza DAO . Funny thing, huh? I also go back quite a while with Bitcoin and, uh, I used to organize Bitcoin events at the 30th Street station in Philly, outside the Pizza Hut. We used to put the tables together and talk about DAOs back in 2012, very early on, when Bitcoin was at $20, you know, at $100. And well, the circle has been closed here with, uh, with Pizza DAO.

And if you want to join our community, we're in 75 countries and we'd love to give you your pizza mafia name. It's a combination of his favorite ingredient and his favorite mafia movie. Um, I'm Ali Knox. I've been in crypto since 2014, when I got kicked off all the platforms. Um, I've been with SpankChain since just before their ICO in 2017.

I'm an advisor there. Um, fetish artist. Um, thank you for having us and watching our story. We really appreciate it. A round of applause for Ally.

Hello, my name is Ameen Soleimani. I am the CEO of SpankChain. Hey. It was quite a fun documentary to film quite a fun documentary to film . One of the things that happened while we were filming the second day of AVN was that our payment processor shut down or announced that it would.

So , I was actually managing a total crisis while filming. And although they didn't close a week later, I regret to inform everyone here that two weeks later we were discriminated against by Synapse because they had a new payment processor called Checkout.com that didn't want to work with adult businesses. And Synapse expelled us without hesitation. They also refused to make any kind of public statement about it, saying they were sorry or that they were forced to do so.

And now, the next time we return to Congress, which Alli managed to organize through her prolific documentaries describing all the ways in which she has been expelled from every payment system. And we'll be able to say, "Hey, look what happened." Since we were here last time talking about discrimination against sex workers and adult businesses, we were also discriminated against. So it will be part of our story and I thank Collaband for helping us tell it. Thank you so much.

You know, part of what we try to achieve with these short documentary films is to give it a human face. As Toby said, it's about putting a human face on what we're doing here in crypto. Our goals and aspirations for crypto are truly to elevate and eliminate the problems of previous generations. Is that possible? Can we somehow use this technology to undo some of the discrimination of the past and give more wealth-creation opportunities to people who were previously excluded?

So I really appreciate this opportunity. Our co-founder Raymond is here, and so is James. And we really just want to share with everyone what is possible with crypto, blockchain technology, and through crypto communities. And if anyone wants to say a few final words about what makes the community so powerful for you and what you think is the key to crypto, that is, from Collaband's perspective , what are communities? For us, simply the promise of an NFT and what it meant as a symbol of contribution to our effort was enough to mobilize a community of thousands.

For us a community of thousands. For us , in the editing, I focused on making these pieces a bridge for people who don't really understand this world and look down on it or think it's just a big load of crap. So , that was my job. I think—I don't want to have the last word here if you have anything else to say—but we see these six documentaries as a starting point for how we can continue to elevate the narrative about Web 3. I think one of the things I've noticed as someone who was previously an outsider and is now part of this, is that the community sometimes struggles to explain itself to the rest of the world.

Well, we're looking for all kinds of collaborators, whether you're an individual, a sponsor, or a community, to get involved and continue building these kinds of narratives. So if you're interested, please contact me, James, or Jolly; We're all ears. Because this cannot be achieved alone. This is truly achieved by working together. Thank you all so much for watching.

Collab Land's website is collab.land. In addition, Lower Machine is the director and production team. And if you want to continue watching these movies, today we're showing you three, but there are seven in total. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel.

It's collaband or let'sformgroup.xyz. So , you know, we hope you'll join us on our journey of short documentary films. So, thank you very much. And really, as Toby said earlier, it's a love letter to Web 3.

So that's what we hope you enjoy and appreciate as well. Thank you.