Future Belonging - Bouquet #000
Learn more about this experimental web3 newsletter. Here, each email is like a digital bouquet made with flowers picked from the digital gardens where we belong.
Good morning,
This is our first email! Here you will learn more about Future Belonging, an experimental web3 newsletter. If you haven’t already, consider subscribing. It’s better than free!
"Future Belonging" is a name we, the people of Floristic, hope can serve as a prompt for questions like "If the future is already here, how can it be better distributed?”, "How can we find our place in the world by changing rules instead of compromising ourselves?", and more importantly: about the longing for the futures of our own design.
With the help of old and new tools, we are here to make sense of what is coming into being, of where collective imagination and action meet each other. If you’ve ever wondered wtf is web3, what comes after the internet, or how can we regenerate our physical and digital environments, this place is for you.
Floristic is a collective growing new digital forms of regenerative impact. Our projects range from education and arts to tokenization, technical writing, and action research. Our approach comes from playful explorations of how the way we organize ourselves to produce knowledge will determine everything else we produce. I'm Pedro Parrachia, a researcher and strategist that recently fell in love with writing. A Kernel fellow, Token Engineering Academy alum, UNESCO-SOST board member, and Floristic’s founder. Who strives to lovingly make a difference toward a more equitable world; one that fits many worlds.
Picking flowers from the digital gardens where we belong
You should curate because when you become a collector instead of a passive consumer it changes your relationship with the Internet. — Sari Azout
It is no secret that newsletters, digests and other forms of curated content are experiencing a resurgence. While generative AI is reducing content creation costs, so curation will become proportionally more valuable. What's not so clear is how to best go about leveraging new mediums and ways of organizing for curating.
Among these resurgent forms is digital gardening, a way of publishing and managing knowledge like an evergreen bricolage of insight. In these gardens, shared ideas are left to evolve and take shape over time, connected by contextual associations rather than publication dates. Notes may be half-finished or unpolished, but that's what makes them so exciting – they allow for learning in public as a form of care. A much more inviting alternative to the static perfectionism of traditional publishing formats.
Digital bouquets, more recently, extend the metaphor of cultivating ideas by adding notions of arrangement and cyclic harvests from such gardens. Just like a gardener needs to take care of plants and soil, a digital florist must care for picking and arranging what's most fitting to a certain period, context and aesthetic. Digital bouquets are experimental new forms of curation that can involve decentralization, co-ownership and composability.
Blueprints for Bountifulness
“Ain’t just about prospering, it’s about progressing, connecting, tappin’ into something larger than yourself, so you can really see. Can’t build nothing if you can’t feel nothing. Community comes from feeling and feeling comes hand in hand with creation. What y’all out here creating now?” — Janelle Monáe & Sheree Renée Thomas
Every other week, you will receive an email as a digital bouquet, with an arrangement of what the frontiers of knowledge and experimentation have touched us the most, in the shape of external references, action items, small blurbs, full essays and more. This is bouquet 0.
Every other month, you will be offered a digital collectible as proof of attendance (aka POAP) for being part of this journey. In the future, these artifacts may come to life, evolve and acquire unexpected utilities. All artifacts (emails, articles, NFTs…) will be found in our Digital Garden, Floristic’s evergreen space where our insights intertwine. You’ll also find room for comments, polls, Q&As and co-creation.
This newsletter has three ways of participation: reader, subscriber and gardener. It is free, and all are welcome to read it. By joining as a paid subscriber, you’ll receive our gratitude in multiple ways, such as 1-1 sessions, early access to things to come, and untold gifts. At the same time, contributors may offer their own curation or editing powers and be rewarded for it!
Enter the garden
For those of us who create, we owe it to ourselves, and to the world, [...] to rediscover our aliveness, and allow it to flow into the digital world with generosity of spirit.
And for those of us who consume, we can reclaim our attention, and our humanity, by directing it towards the oases that make us feel seen, connected, alive. — Rob Hardy
As you keep reading this, we want you to know that this project is a labor of love for you, me, and all who touch this, a celebration of our collective curiosity.
As you keep reading this, we want you to know that while our fingertips may sometimes move fast with jargon, our eyes and ears are open to all questions and feedback.
As you keep reading this, we want you to know that slowing down is how we handle the urgency of this world we live in, this world that we see as a house on fire with our loved ones burning inside.
This is a sensemaking experiment in the shape of a garden-like knowledge base and a bouquet-like newsletter symbiosis. The garden produces evergreen content, and the bouquet provides paced curation. You’ll find what's at the forefront of sociotechnical issues at stake.
Find effortless and joyful ways to be a part of this cultivation. Subscribe below to learn more about how to be a part of this and earn your first collectible.