An Origin Story from an Epilogue

There are three sides to every story. This is mine.

I love the internet.

I am from the part of the United States that is the furthest out of the loop when it comes to anything trendy or evolutionary: Vermont.

I had dial-up internet until 2012, I got my first iPhone in 2013, I got my first MacBook in 2018, and never lived anywhere outside of Vermont until 2021.

Still, I love the internet.

Maybe love grew during the hours of staring at the AOL running man “connecting,” or while strategically positioning fans in order to cool down the tower of my family’s computer.

All of that is to say, I love the internet enough to dedicate my life to making up for lost time.

I worked at a company called Superplastic from 2018 to 2021.

I was employee number 3. I spent 90% of my day for three years on the internet. Researching, sourcing, talking to people, planning, analyzing, writing — the list goes on.

We [the internet and i] were making up for lost time, no doubt.

But it wasn’t enough.

In December 2020, I discovered Web3.

I was falling in love all over again – deeper than ever before.

I developed a personal philosophy for URL solutions to IRL problems. The future of the internet is the future of human existence.

I couldn’t stop thinking about this. I still can’t.

I quit my job in March 2021.

I just checked (because I love the internet) and around the same time I quit my job, a cryptopunk sold for 27.27 ETH (woah — synchronicity — if you know you know).

At the time, we were pre-BAYCs, pre-mass production of PFPs.

Pre-token airdrops. Pre- ‘dot/eth’ usernames. Pre-Discord all day, every day.

At the time, me and about 50 other people whom I had never met spent our days asking questions, sharing ideas, and building community.

Real community.

Basically what I’m trying to say is, I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was be on the internet. I was determined to build something.

I sold everything I owned, packed everything I couldn’t live without, and moved across the country to LA where I was certain people were doing internet stuff.

I rounded learning curves, overcame barriers, worked my ass off, and somehow became someone that people wanted to learn about NFTs from.

My internal index of internet learnings gave me a framework to understand, educate, and on-board hoards of people to Web3 and NFTs.

My NFT family tree is strong.

The internet’s greatest love-child is meme culture, in my opinion.

Meme’s help us communicate our feelings, understand trends, and connect to other internet users.

That’s when it hit me: meme’s had to be leveraged Web3 on-boarding.

At the same time, I was still really obsessed with an Instagram account I discovered during the pandemic called “Global Hypnosis.”

This account seamlessly bridged millennial and gen-z internet users, while staying topical and funny as fuck.

In the summer of 2021, I decided I was going to create a crypto-centric version of the account I was so obsessed with.

My friends, at the time, Nathaniel Parrott, Chad Knight, and Samantha Webster were supportive as ever.

“You have to do it”

“Oh my god, it’s so funny”

They even offered to help with the visual attributes. Global Hypnosis was to be the blueprint.

At the same time, the PFP and collectibles trend was heating up.

Everyone was doing it.

The four of us, being thick as thieves and loving jpeg summer more every day, thought we could totally do it too.

But the ideas just weren’t hitting. We would alternate between talking about NFT Affirmations and brainstorming PFPs.

Until August 10th, during a “CHAO” (Chad Dao) call, I had the idea to merge the two.

NFT Affirmations as digital collectibles. Holy shit.

It made so much sense: use this as a medium to educate about a technology –by leveraging the technology itself.

In my mind, the core “utility” was an A/B scenario: A. relate, or B. educate.

Scenario A was for the crypto- and Web3- native consumer: the hypothetical Twitter/Instagram user would see an Affirmation on their feed, relate to the message, and share it.

Scenario B was for the crypto- and Web3- novice consumer: the hypothetical Twitter/Instagram user would see an Affirmation on their feed, consume it as a meme, and microdose educational content related to the Web3 ecosystem by following the NFT Affirmations account.

The part of the story I’m skipping over is the part that is/was most obvious to me: the affirmations themselves.*

*note the capitalization of affirmations vs Affirmations.

The entire NFT Affirmations collection has 10,000 unique, written affirmations.

AI helped a bit, but the trends, vocabulary, and proper nouns in Web3 are still so new and nuanced. And generative programming is not trained to spell check.

On several occasions, I wrote hundreds of affirmations in one sitting.

They just came naturally to me. My internal index of internet culture coupled with my multiple months of obsessive immersion in the culture made sparks fly.

10,000 affirmations were written in 2 months; followed by 2 weeks of manually reviewing each cell, line-by-line, in an Excel spreadsheet.

I’m not claiming to have done this alone, but we [the team] agreed to distribute tasks based on our strengths.

Chad & Parrott would be responsible for the 10,000 backgrounds.

Samantha would lock in operational and logistic details like building the website, source the generative programmers, engage Web3 developers, and handle the project’s management.

And I would handle content, copy, marketing, and community.

Every day that I spent writing the 10,000 affirmations got me more excited to share NFT Affirmations with the rest of the world.

I knew this was just the beginning and NFT Affirmations were just one brand of a grander idea that had yet to come to me.

The more I wrote, the closer I got to that eureka moment. Every line I wrote was supercharged with intention to reach a broader demographic of internet users.

I love the internet.

While it started as an on-boarding tool, disguised as a meme account, it was romanticized as an NFT drop and I had to honor that.

My motivation to impact Web3 onboarding kept me on track to launch NFT Affirmations.

Any delay or roadblock, I set out to solve.

I partnered with my friend Eyelids to define the brand identity, found someone to build a kick ass website, got a team to do the generative programming (shout out Eyelids, again), and even pulled some favors to get a smart contract written 2 weeks before the drop.

The only thing I physically could not do was create 10,000 backgrounds, but if I could’ve… I would’ve. Believe that.

My emotional investment in NFT Affirmations became deeper and more complex every day.

I was actually surprising myself by my ability to triage, problem solve, and learn new things. I cried when I deployed the contract because it was the first time in a long time that I could remember actually doing something for the first time.

After all the hard work and emotional labor, I was ready to mint.

To me, drop day is day zero. I’ve said this time and time again.

The overarching brand still hadn’t come to me, but I convinced myself that the missing piece was the community.

Spoiler alert: I was right.

How could I possibly anticipate what the quintessential bridge between Web2 and Web3 would be without a community to inform and influence that?

Whatever it is, we have to build it together.

As you might already be assuming, the friendship between the founders was being tested.

The challenges, roadblocks, delays, and weight of the project I was carrying coupled with my white-knuckled emotional investment and a Mercury retrograde took a toll. I justified any contention or discomfort by telling myself that after we got through mint they’d meet me there, emotionally.

The days after the drop are a blur.

I was so exhausted, physically and emotionally, that I couldn’t get out of bed –let alone think about the future of NFT Affirmations.

Prior to the drop, I never thought about the ETH and I never thought about the floor. Probably because before NFT Affirmations, I’d never made an ETH. I barely had even participated in the PFP bull run.

I never understood why people cared about a floor because I thought they were buying for art, or community, or purpose.

Silly girl. Lol.

I thought that by rooting an NFT collection in meme culture, the project would be accessible to ALL internet users.

I was thinking about the people I hadn’t met yet. I was thinking about the people who were still trying to wrap their heads around the acronym ‘NFT’.

This was negligent.

Mainstream media had spun a narrative that metaphorically positioned NFTs as the internet’s very own lottery ticket.

New people were coming into the NFT space every day, the entire time I was writing affirmations, they were minting. Doing your own research is not a requirement for minting. In my own naivety, I thought everyone spent as much time on the internet as me: learning, researching, connecting, and internalizing the philosophy.

Almost instantly after the mint, someone would write in Discord: “What does mine mean?”

I would read their Affy: i forgot to change my cryptokitties litter box.

I couldn’t believe it. I thought CryptoKitties was Chapter 1 in the imaginary universal NFT textbook that I learned from. Cryptokitties is one of the first NFT projects ever launched. Cryptokitties is one of the first projects I ever studied to learn about NFTs.

The speed at which the space had been moving created this false perception of urgency. I don’t blame anyone for this, but people were not taking their time to learn about the technology. They entered the space and felt entitled to the opportunity for limitless earning potential.

The concept I built to dismantle barriers to Web3 and crypto culture accidentally reinforced them.

This was my, very obvious, eureka moment.

The unanticipated problem with NFT Affirmations was my own hypocritical urgency to onboard new communities before taking the time to educate existing communities.

NFT Affirmations still had the potential to evolve to become the platform and project I wanted it to be.

The amount of work required to do so is astronomical.

I’m committed to building something that pays homage to NFT Affirmations and the collectors who believe in the vision. I have felt, for the last several months, that the mint function for NFT Affirmations should be disabled because building takes time, passion, and dedication.

in the months following the pre-sale and initial mint day, we built a remarkable community and programmed some incredible activations. we partnered with GN Club and infinite objects for our inaugural event at NFT NYC, i partnered with Minty Garden to have Affys on display during Art Basel Miami, and we were included in the first-ever Artcade curation at Fred Segal on Sunset BLVD.

i hired a community manager, two social media managers, and a head of product. i designed a full apparel capsule, partnered with quantum.tech to give NFT Affirmations holders access to their exclusive hub, we had weekly twitter spaces, and remained active.

the amount of support i received from within the community & my own network kept me going as long as i did, but ultimately i struggled to maintain alignment or garner support from the other three founders.

once again i found myself in a position of being responsible for the physical work, as well as the emotional labor. i was trolled for having a “worthless” project – the same project that i valued more than anything in the world.

i was mocked and bullied by the other founders, i was slut shamed, the team i built was criticized – i got to the point where i felt like i couldn’t do anything right, but i couldn’t walk away. eventually i just shut down.

it’s important to know that if it weren’t for jackson & kureshee, the community would’ve gone dark.

i proposed many ideas to the other founders to find a path forward as employees were going unpaid, collectors were impatient, and the path forward was unclear.

unfortunately, the response was no action would be taken unless i transferred the small amount of remaining ETH in the contract and gnosis wallet. at that point, i knew that hope for NFT Affirmations as it existed was lost.

i am heartbroken that 6,793 affirmations will never formally become part of crypto culture by manifesting on-chain.

the decision to contain the token supply and disband from the commitments made by a union that is no longer intact, i feel free mentally & physically to create real utility for NFT Affirmations.

all that i have is all that i can give; and all that i have is my word.

i love the internet because it captures glimpses of who we are as individuals and as a society. i try to share more than just glimpses of the good stuff in life because i want to be held accountable in my pursuit to bridges.

my goal is that these bridges will be strong enough to sustain a community long after tokenized hype and bull runs end.

I know this story includes a substantial lapse in the timeline from October 14, 2021 to now.

reliving or recounting the events that occurred during that time are not conducive to the future. the future is all that matters now.

I live by the words of Christine Caine, “Sometimes when you’re in a dark place you think you’ve been buried, but you’ve actually been planted.”

I cannot begin to share my gratitude (and remorse) for NFT Affirmations collectors.

i am sorry that i’ve let you down. i cannot even put into words how much the thought of you all energized me and kept me going. your trust in the process, vision, and in me got us this far. that will never be lost on me.

i love the internet because it gave me you.

thank you for reading this and for being a part of this journey. explore nft affirmations forever here.

from my heart,

karsen daily