hype and noise
on sifting through the madness
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After my few months of leave, some patterns and realizations are starting to re-surface over and over again within my interest areas, and it’s pushing me to rethink my value of education and guided learning once again.
For starters:
I’m frustrated by the gold rush of web3. So many students on leave are saying they’re leaving school for this so-called wondrous unknown of the tech future broadly now referred to as “web3.”
I’m frustrated by the corporate rat race to be involved in the metaverse. I love playing with VR/AR projects, but I really don’t see a place for it to be monetized and used to further encompass the digital identities of everyone to gain more information for ads.
Web3 and Metaverse quite literally have lost their meaning — it now just broadly means something to do with the internet and online.
In addition I’m just incredibly drained from tech, meeting people who “are proud to be genZ,” “building the web3 equivalent of some platform,” “trying to onboard the next generation of people to web3,” or “meeting others in the metaverse.” I know there is still so much value, talent, and opportunity within these spaces, but it’s all buried under several layers of noise.
While I was building DropoutDAO over the last 3 months, I realized the disconnect between the type of student who takes a leave because they wanted to present an identity of “dropping out” versus the type of student who loves learning, but just were not able to bottle up their curiosity into what school was teaching them.
I had some close friends tell me they saw a red flag when they first heard the name DropoutDAO, and I realized that we really were not setting the right filters and tone upfront for the community.
First of all, calling ourself a DAO really gate kept us to a group that is interested in web3, and the name “dropout” implied that the group was made up of dropouts.
I didn’t want either of those personas at play, and realized it brought so much noise to the community. I realized DropoutDAO was not the community I want to build.
As a result, I’m taking a break from building DropoutDAO to refocus back in on learning and exploring information free-range. I’ll take the time to study trends in history, past governance models, and deeply understanding cities and communities and how they scale before circling back to creating a community of my own.
I’ve met an incredible group of students across the world with their own interests outside school, and could not thank this community enough for have given me the reach and ability to meet such amazing students. I’m still always going to be a part of helping other students on leave / thinking about taking a leave and in making connections between people, but will no longer play a role in thinking about this at scale or with the constraints of monetizing to continue working on this.
what i’ve been up to ✨
trying to detox from web3 hype and recover from burnout in meeting way too many people too quickly
started my house in sf and it’s been a lot of work but such a rewarding learning experience
went to a hackathon at mit with some friends and made a sword fighting game & it was so so much fun
am in pittsburgh for the next few days and had a lot of fun at carnival and meeting up with friends again
will be going to AR House for the spring cohort starting next week & vv excited to be in LA for the month !!
ate the best pineapple breads of my life from pineapple king
went on the sf trolley as public transit for the first time !
tried a pilates class with david for the first time !
got my last 2 wisdom teeth removed !!
thanks so much for tuning in :) let’s catch up sometime ✨
Rare to see this type of revaluation —excited to see what you do next Nancy :)