I've been thinking a lot about what is actually happening in these markets since getting to NY.

Some new things have clicked and become really undeniable with being here, it has just been fascinating watching all of these people talk about web3 and the metaverse as buzzwords, and so many VCs position and scurry to try and gain an advantage.

But, the reality of the stories, the impact, the power and the wealth, that has built up through the years on block after block in this city, or even just take a tiny section of it, take one street in the garment district for example, and going from shop to shop to shop to these old tailors and merchants that have been in the business forever that no one ever talks to.

Their reality gets treated like it is so far away from the headline numbers in all of the web2 media and all of these VCs, VC wannabes, WGMI wannabes, Punks and Apes. They are so convinced that know where things are going enough to keep being in the green.

But the fundamental thing that they don't get, which is just in every atom of every square inch of this city for free, if they bothered to pay any attention at all, is that when anything can be freely copied and culture can be encapsulated and encoded and shared and again copied and made money off of by anyone, it means that centralised sources of money aren't needed anymore. The VCs aren't needed anymore, and the only really power and leverage and source of exponential wealth, the only ability to set up structures that benefit from convexity are relentlessly authentic and undeniable stories.

Culture isn't just some quick knock off spread through rapid injection meme distro channels.

There is a real richness to it.

And, as the open metaverse rises that is what the flood gates are opening to.

So, instead of coming to me and asking me about what I am up.

Tell me, why your story, what's your story, what are you doing that is more interesting that anyone else in the web3 'investing' circle. Who are you collecting that I should know about and tell me why.

What is amazing about them, about their story.

You want to know what I am up to?

It is all right there transparently and has been available for the past year, more so than anybody else in this space. If you want the inside track of collecting the next greatest talents, just go to the marketplace or straight up ask me who you should collect.

But these old VC games are over, you'll keep making what looks like good money for a while, but one day you will wake up and find that the metaverse as I am explaining it to you, beyond the bullshit Zuck is going on about, has fully arrived and left you in the dust.

So get busy being real.

Focusing on the indie and upcoming, getting fully web3, including decentralising the capital and governance stacks, or go enjoy your moment in the sun whilst you have it.

Cause it's not going to last much longer.

Gatsby's party is almost over.

Attempt to shut down and control and constrain raw power.

We don’t need your debt to do this shit.

Come in from the cold and leave behind your barely better than pharmaceutical industry debt peddling ways and become genuine buyers of the greatest renaissance market that humanity has ever known.. great! We welcome you.

But don't pretend you have sincerity or that the VC game has been all pro founder and rainbows.

You have no relationship to any step along the supply chain. It's the same shit as the GFC. Packaging a bunch of sub-prime abstract entries in a ledger somewhere without any connection or familiarity with what those numbers in a spreadsheet actually mean. Are they mortgage back securities?

There is no familiarity with the underlying assets, let alone the details of what it is like to travel through a supply chain, physical or digital. Do you know about the specific security guard in the Panama Canal who has a niece who needs a kidney transplant and that is why the next delivery is so critical?

The worst of it isn't even the part about it being subprime. VCs are trying to lock down the wrong part of the content, not the story, but rather the subprime meaningless abstraction, a bleached abstraction, a normalised bit of data. And there are massive problems that come with normalising data that actually shouldn't be.

Look at white rice for example; when you strip away all of the unique elements of the grain, same thing with white bread or sliced wonder bread, you strip away everything that makes something unique with something else so that it is all like for like fungible, and you have stripped away all of the nutrients.

That's the literal value of the NFTs— it is what makes them unique, not just through a time stamp, but the uniqueness of the content, not the visual representation, but of its actual story.

Don't pretend that you know what the hell an actual story means. You think that a story means some sort of abstraction away from clarity, something that takes people away from the real thing, in order to pacify the mind and submit the consumer to corporate control, whatever corporate spreadsheets and bottom lines require to be sold into the market, the story is mis-framed as the thing that will pacify the mind as consumers simply sit back and accept it.

That is such a brutal bastardisation of the beauty, power and capital value of stories.

The actual value of stories is in how they communicate the signal not the noise.

How they enable each person that interacts with them to become better at playing the market, each and every time.

That's the real power of NFTs.

If the NFT isn't making you better at recognising the signal in the market, through the quality of the story that it is engaging you in, then you might as well a dig up some fucking beanie babies from a fucking landfill.