Speaking of purpose, Salim asks what gets VESA excited in the Web3 space these days, and VESA tells of one of his projects that he began with Brittaney Kaiser, the famous Cambridge Analytica whistle blower, whose life story VESA is turning into multi-layered NFT art with a complex concept around the production. Brittaney’s story is of course iconic when it comes to data ownership, but even when we think about digital identity and the leaps Web3 has seen on that front, it is incredible to think what lies ahead. VESA points out that as long as humans are the ones using Web3 spaces, human psychology will be the motivator behind our choices, like the motivation to purchase digital sneakers for metaverse use will be motivated by similar factors that purchasing designer brands in the real world is. Salim agrees on the gravitas of digital identity and tells a story from when he was the Creative Director at Yahoo! and how he understood the power of the blockchain and digital identity.

A lot of what is possible is predicated on the axis of scarcity and abundance, and Salim makes the observation that technology is often very good at distributing scarce goods abundantly, like for example Uber, and that this is the female archetype that distributes rather than hoards. VESA makes the poignant observation that in our western societies, it is women that own most of the consumer debt and most consumer choices are made by women. Perhaps these statistics speak of a changed society, where women swipe right on dating apps only 5% of the time and give their attention to a very narrow sector of the male population. The natural structure, the geographical location, has been muted in the era of the internet.

The conversation returns to the concept of growth needing consolidation, when the two touch upon what is happening in America recently. ‘It is the fulfilment of abundance without enough consolidation’, Salim says. They talk about the structures and institutions that historically have provided that consolidation, and he adds ‘perhaps it is the spiritual and religious institutions that have done that in the past, and largely still today’. He makes an interesting parallel between Star Wars with its more religiously inspired themes and Star Trek that could be categorized as the more free thinking, blossoming creativity type of world view, and the general opposition of centralized and decentralized. VESA finds these two forces to have a uniquely different outlook on life altogether; the discovering and the engineering type. The discovering type, typically, believes in some universal natural laws as opposed to the engineering type, which believes that most things are how we make them to be, with little underlying principles.

As the first adopters of Web3, we live in an extraordinary time in history. We have more opportunities than any other people in the history of the Earth. It is incredible to think that a small team of tech enthusiasts went ahead with their plans against all the doubters and created Ethereum, a coin that is in the center vortex of creating the new creative economy. Salim tells an example of impoverished people creating a 3D printed sports car in Sri Lanka, and how the heads of German auto giants could not cope with this reality, where the power wasn’t tightly gatekept and regulated.