Why Kawaii? by Tyler Miller

testing to make sure this works and then I'm talking into the mic correctly awesome uh thanks for coming uh I was wondering who was going to show up with a title like why Kawaii uh but if you're here that means you either like Kauai or you read the description of the event which is good uh and I hope that I don't disappoint too many of you either we won't be diving too deep into Kauai but instead using it as a prism through which to imagine a better future together and while I'm apologizing let me also add that I'll be using terms Loosely in this talk I'll use the word Dao to refer to organizations that are dao-like and doweling and similarly I may use AI where ml is more appropriate and I'll try to be as exhaustive as I can when including players but as you'll see during this talk defining players involves including everyone and everything my name is Tyler I'm a designer with a background in small community organization and information management I'm currently building a coordination game called Mochi a game that organizations can play to stick together better recently someone asked me to show them what I'm working on and I pulled up my Mochi profile on my phone to show them and they looked a little puzzle they asked I thought you were building a tool for Dows is this an nft why does it look like there's points and is it a game but that character is really cute and I think we all have some idea of what cute is or Kawaii is and I'd imagine that y'all are thinking about Pokemon or Hello Kitty or Animal Crossing maybe gudetama or Snoopy maybe Doodles axi Infinity cool cats this is by no means an exhaustive list crypto has been engaged with Kauai as an aesthetic for a long time now and on the surface Kauai has a very distinctive look it is cute and it is easily recognizable as it also tends to anthropomorphize anything and everything giving personalities and faces to stuff that doesn't have it like fruit and animals and places and Susan the guy posits that the epitome of acute would be an undifferentiated blob of doughy matter in our aesthetic categories and despite the objectively adorable characters on the screen right now you might be thinking like I did once that this isn't me I'm too serious for this but consider for a moment your personal aesthetic whether you identify as a techie a regen a Degen a cyberpunk or none of the above we've been conditioned to think of our identity when it comes to work is serious I've fallen into this trap before too but all Aesthetics are deeply rooted in play in role play specifically and in make believe none of us is a one-dimensional being each of these Aesthetics asserts a view on our future and our world out of these Kawaii imagines a world significantly different from the Rest by giving life to everything Kawhi asks us to imagine new ways of being as James Bridal might describe for the world that we interact with this includes our environment and also our software can I get a quick show of hands for anyone that is in a Discord that is also has a bot in it and do any of you have a Discord profile that has multiple aliases and Alias used specifically for a certain Discord not as many but these are important questions for us to consider when we continue to craft our dows because the worlds that we're building will not be composed only of us even today we share space with any Bots and Discord in slack or on Twitter and some of these are even connected to powerful AI it seems inevitable now that our future communities will be comprised of a mix of all of the above smart contracts AI humans and our alter egos just like Kauai we must begin to see all the components of our world as living breathing things by treating the world around us as beings just like us deserving of our love and care we will be able to play together better underneath the cheerful Kawaii aesthetic is an attitude one that can be adopted by any other aesthetic visual that you choose a playful attitude Maria lugones was an Argentinian philosopher who studied post-colonial feminism and her definition of play is the loving attitude of traveling across worlds and this Maps really well that what we're trying to build as we all build our dows play involves an openness to love it involves leaving your own world to visit another being in theirs beings of course here meaning an entity human or not and in recent years game of connection has spent quite a bit of time in the Limelight and we've seen the encroachment of play into technology as a thing to be wary of clay certainly has a dark side and can be wielded by those with power to control those without but if used correctly play could be the thing that shifts our current paradigm because play is the best way to interact with software including Dao's AI chat Bots Miguel sicard's latest book playing software asserts the play is making sense of software play invites exploration it welcomes surprise allows for mistakes construction and reconstruction of society clay can bind humans and non-humans together in very productive ways play is also the primary source of culture as the grandfather of game studies Johann heising has said as children we use play to explore the World clay teaches us about others what they like and dislike and how to coexist in this way play is a natural thing to do in a Dao by playing together we can coexist better if we can play with it we can make sense of it and if we can play with it we can respect it we are used to thinking of play as competitive but sakart among others believes that this is subservient to the other major type of play make-believe this is something that heisinger got wrong and others like Corey Dr L got quite right in walk away this isn't a competitive play but rather to re-examine our relationship with it is the world really zero-sum or is there enough for everyone I'm not going to talk about even distribution but I will say that before we go fully black pill it is worth considering that perhaps the reason that seems can seem Bleak is because rules we observe is ontological facts are probably just parts of a model that we don't fully understand and this gets back to the Contemporary roots of Kauai which can be traced back to the 70s through mariji the round and friendly shapes of this style of writing and it being horizontally written instead of vertical with the inclusion of emoticons while looking fairly common now was a subtle Act of rebellion by young Japanese schoolers okay young Japanese schoolgirls against the stifling Norms of the time challenging power calmly and casually countersignaling and while suits may also feel like the epitome of a stifling culture at one time they were not Beau brummell was credited with the invention of the suit as a means of making fashion more accessible to the middle class of London in the 1800s but times change and if there is an anti-kawaii today it is the suit David Graber says bureaucracy is a fear of play the suit may not be present visually in Tech and crypto but the attitude it conveys still pervades the suit represents 20th century management thinking of workers as data in systems not as beings the suit is only a serious person and the suit doesn't have much personality or Flair it is defined more by its similarities than its differences which is the opposite of how Kauai appears almost exclusively as heads or faces each somehow different than the rest unconforming an amorphous if we're going to build headless Brands and organizations we'll still need heads to talk with and two they should just be fun and cute and quirky and possibly zany if we're going to make new kinds of money with the cryptography on the inside the outside outside can be anything it can be everything else so in these future communities that are going to be composed of humans of many different ages and backgrounds and possibly the environment and software and personas and blockchains and smart contracts how are we going to imagine these different agents interacting and how does play facilitate their interaction all of the agents in our future dials will behave similarly whether they're human AI or smart contract they all have they all have the same level of agency within their system though different roles to play humans can create data blockchains can store it and Ai and Bots can use that data created to interface with Community agents of course it can go any number of ways here the addition of information to a blockchain could be seen as creating content as could an AI generating content from Community data Dows acting as magic circles create a local context by stewarding data in rules for the community Dows facilitate data privacy and ownership for their members local context enables transparency and transparency invites play in transparent systems we can trust in our understanding of the rules and toy with them Dao's also incentivize participation they encourage World building and role play and they ask us to imagine what our goals are and how we relate to the local context play can be used on a fundamental level to power goal setting to incentivize participation and to allow a dow to feel more responsive and alive play reduces governance and onboarding and increases contribution and collaboration to something that is accessible to everyone to who wants to participate but I also want to talk about practical applications and mochi we've been exploring how play fits into future communities by blending AI Bots and Dows together and some of you probably don't know what Mochi is so uh Mochi is a modular coordination game and it enables types of all types of web 3 groups to play to play positive Sun games together you can map it onto the magic circle model but it's not very Kawaii Emoji proposes that players set goals and intentions with the community you uh usually based on the best way that they can contribute their skills and their goals to the Dow though not always players take tokens on their goals as a demonstration of their commitment and we've seen that this has a huge effect on the likelihood of a player staying engaged with the Dow and the state can be claimed at the end of the game players lump together in teams giving them smaller space to coordinate within the larger hole and find new ways to work together when they share progress towards their goals with the community if they don't they sorry then they share progress towards their goals with the community if they don't share progress part of their bond goes to the Dow Treasury and can be used by the Dow all of the above can be customized per community and per game per community and this might not sound like your typical definition of a game but just by using these playful techniques you can find real effects in your Dao we've tested lots of different types of play and we've been tracking the outcomes we observe membership endows is very fluid we wanted to provide a new way of determining membership in Mochi And We Begin by using games to determine who is a member members who play two games a year with us are considered active and this is a simple but easy way of measuring engagement and it also encourages a healthy way to disconnect when a member doesn't have time to play that's all right they can find time later and easily come back it can be tricky to remember to check in with your friends when you've got a busy day after a busy day and a million things going on it's easy to drift away or feel annoyed at being pulled in many directions so we built a bot to serve as interface for the game acting and responding to users messages and sharing content within our Dow Bots can deliver messages and notifications directly and do so in regular ways that can be customized to the individual so they don't arrive at inopportune times one of the benefits of working with Bots is that it gives a face and a name to your Dao being able to speak with a bot makes it feel more real and in turn makes the dial feel more real when dial members are contributing ideas feelings and progress within the Dow you quickly build enough content to train your own models we created a cohort last year called The Dream oscillator where we track the dreams of members and practice lucid dreaming we use the content of dreams to explore what the average Mochi dream looked like and generated images to match by the end of the cohort people were lucid dreaming regularly for as long as we've been around we've been using Kawaii Mochi characters to represent our players and their relationships with the Dows as players adhere to the rules of the community their Mochi become happier and more full and they embody their mochi this creates an easy way for players in Mochi to understand how their engagement with the Dao matches the Dao's expectation when members are flaky their Mochi may be sad when members are active and consistent their Mochi could be happy play is transparent and understandable and when other members of your community or people outside it observe it they can understand the values that your community has and they can learn to play games with you we've seen this play out with many members who've taken Mochi and used it in their own doubts for example in using Mochi shifai plays games with their graduates giving them a framework for continued engagement by exploring and learning about new protocols and rewards them for their contributions TK's Eternal Garden uses Mochi to generate Collective action and spread Art Online by bringing this community together and giving them a framework to play with he's now the fourth highest primary sales artist on sound so in closing I want to invite you all to consider how play can benefit your Dao or organization that you're building how can play create larger surface areas for your community to engage and participate if done correctly play will allow us to travel between worlds between Dao's and across technology to meet each other halfway if you're interested in learning more about play I highly recommend a Miguel sakart's recent book playing software and if reading is not [Music] want to thank you for your time today and I'm looking forward to playing with you soon foreign [Music]