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Building community in an industry currently battling the very forces it originally meant to upend is beyond challenging. It's a labor of love and a perpetual source of trauma. In order to build a resilient community, one must embrace the core tenants of resiliency themselves and bake them into the architecture of the community from its inception.
Kindness. Equity. Compassion. Strength. Collaboration. Empathy.
All necessary ingredients for building a safe container for people to gather and build the instruments we need to survive the acceleration of collapse we are all navigating on this planet together.
Community builders must also have a hard edge to them. We must know our boundaries and hold them-- both personal and community boundaries. We must be able to hear the hungry wolves wolves howling in the distance so we can protect our community once the wolves discover our doorstep. And when our communities grow too large and lose sight of their original mission, falling prey to the dark triads of narcissism, psychosis and Machiavellianism, we must take action.
Our industry is currently suffering from an integrity vacuum. Leaders who once sat around a table with their friends, drinking beers and planting the seeds of community, are now sitting on copious amounts of power through their own ability to disregard their original mission in order to deploy the darkest sides of capitalism, greed and consolidation. The very thing we joined this ecosystem to rectify.
When founders and CEOs choose the needs of their own egos over their staff, communities, customers or their colleagues, we need to call them out. Straight up. When leaders look at a community and see extraction and exit liquidity, we need to call them out. When leaders choose to support authoritarian ideology and weave it into their events, exposing tens of thousands of participants to fascism-- we need to remove them.
We are living through dangerous times and if we choose to ignore the facists running our events and still choose to participate, we expose ourselves and our communities to the dangers these dictators can impose on us all. Why do we willingly give our data and our time to these destructive leaders and their toxic events? We, as a community, must be the antidote to such destruction, or we will fall too.
If we don't protect our communities from these forces prevalent throughout our entire ecosystem, we will never be able to provide safe and inviting containers for new folks to enter. We'll merely exist in our own echo chambers. Those of us who've been in this space for years know exactly what I'm talking about and regenerative community builders across the industry are working to dissolve this echo chamber before we lose the opportunities to build bridges between worlds.
We have a choice, as an ecosystem, to demand that leaders do better, or get the fuck out of the way so we can restore balance and decentralization to our communal gatherings and spaces. We, the impact builders, can decide to simply not participate in the narcissist's game-- and create our own. We can initiate hyperlocal movements with our resources and build bridges to the rest of the world who needs the benefits our tech can provide, but get lost in the casino of it all.
We have the ability to create our own solutions, to create our own events, to create our own containers that reflect the values we hold dear in the Ethereum impact ecosystem. We may disagree on how to move towards that equitable and just world, but we are all still building towards it, as a collective force that will hopefully extinguish the dark triad forces destroying so much of what we hold dear about our technology.
GFEL, the General Forum on Ethereum Localism is one such movement. A self-organizing gathering of Ethereum experts and local community members designed to build bridges between worlds and begin deploying our technology for impact. We recently brought the GFEL movement to Boulder, with the help of the core GFEL crew in Portland.
Our event had no one leader, but a handful of compassionate organizers that offered their talents, insights and efforts to hold space for 80+ people from around the globe to explore a merging of worlds. Worlds I never thought would collide did just that and the artist, land stewards, scholars, organizers and business owners danced with the Ethereum governance experts, hackers, builders, storytellers and architects to combine our collective brilliance and create resilience.
We found solutions. We built connections. We funded projects in real time. We created relationships that will help our communities navigate the collapse.
If this resonates, please join the Ethereum Localism telegram or Farcaster channels. We're building a massive Knowledge Garden to support GFELs and hyperlocal Ethereum initiatives and are creating playbooks and support structures for those wishing to bring GFEL to their own communities. One thing we are learning, in this age of upheaval, is that community IS our immunity. Our collective voices and our communal intentions are the antidote we need now. Join us.
Author's note -- for permanence and transparency-- a new participant from the broader GFEL community took part of this essay out of context (it was shared in a semi-private builders channel) and published their own take-down piece on the Ethereum Localism movement before this article was sent to Arweave. I won't give them the oxygen their ego craves, but this is my original piece written in its full context and free from my AI bot friends.
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