MetaCulture is a community initiative from Cult DAO, which itself launched in February of 2022.

Cult DAO: Background

As a summary of purpose from The Cult Manifesto: “CULT serves to fast forward the collapse of the old financial system, to end the tyranny of sovereign nations and central banks. The current financial system serves to keep the people poor, a society built on debt needs inflation to function, and inflation serves to rob the poor and allow them to never catch up with their overlords in the ruling class.”

The Cult Manifesto reads directly as Cypherpunk and Lunarpunk with clear statements of the generator functions underlying accelerating global issues. In combination with defining the problem space and elements for addressing it, The Manifesto and permissionless nature of the DAO’s governance provide open conceptual space for interpretation and fertile ground for builders of all creeds.

Problem Statement Becoming a maximally impactful contributor to Web3 requires revitalizing social and cultural value exchange between Cult DAO and value aligned communities across and beyond Ethereum.

But, there is currently no consistently available internal incentive system for contributors to Cult DAO governance, community development, or problem solving more generally.

Furthermore, Cult is trapped in a self-fulfilling feedback loop of being perceived as a memecoin (for more, see the Addendum to the Problem Statement).

Proposed Solution Open up Cult DAO’s memetic filters through MetaCulture, allowing current and potential governance members to build a sense of community ownership with an eye towards long term community building. MetaCulture will function as an expansive cultural attractor and flywheel reflecting the values inherent to The Cult DAO Manifesto and much of Web3. For more on grassroots community development read: medium.com/1kxnetwork/how-to-grow-decentralized-communities-1bf1044924f8

We therefore are seeking support for the building of bridges between what Cult DAO stands for, our contribution across Web3, and in service of the global issues which transcend crypto communities.

Cult DAO, vis-à-vis its design as a decentralized and highly adaptive funding mechanism, has the potential to culturally and materially contribute to long term, positive sum relationships between web3 and the wider world of social impact. For this reason and because we believe strongly in the need for scaling decentralized directions and public goods development, we extend our immense gratitude to Kevin Owocki for initiating this process and generating the momentum for Cult DAO’s first ever Gitcoin Grants proposal.

The intention for this August’s Gitcoin Grants cycle is two fold:

(a) Cultural First and foremost, we seek to initiate cultural value transfer between Cult DAO and aligned communities across Ethereum and beyond. This includes interested folks from value aligned communities , as well as current members of The Many and The Guardians (Cult’s bicameral governance system).

I foresee this beginning with public discussions (probably Twitter Spaces/Q&A across socials) seeking to explore the dynamics between Solarpunk and Lunarpunk communities.

(b) Financial All generated funds shall be earmarked for Cult DAO’s September QF Round matching pool contribution.

Given (b), I should say something about Cult DAO’s September Round. The intention for September is to formally build out MetaCulture, a community education Schelling point with the purpose of building the conditions for composability between Cult DAO and Web3 subcultures.

In other words, MetaCulture will build self-sustaining dialogue between Cult and value aligned communities. This means evolving a distributed education and cultural network with its own decentralized architecture and public goods funding interface with the wider world outside of Crypto as traditionally conceived.

My current vision is that this begins in a more centrally designed and guided way, with the integration of on-chain tooling over time which functions as a groundwork for MetaCulture becoming a self-organizing and replicating decentralized iteration of this initial stage.

Down the line, my aim is also to generalize MetaCulture such that it functions to bridge barriers between communities and conceptual schemes in general which seek to find value in discovering common ground in service of global issues.

In a word, the initial objective of MetaCulture is to jumpstart a virtuous cycle of social interoperability by attracting builders and growing a culture of sustained, grassroots value interchange.

This involves:

(1) Attracting Builders & Contributors, including existing community members and other passionate individuals and communities interested in scaling decentralization and funding public goods.

(2) Converting from Cult DAO’s status quo to a hub of sustained contribution to decentralization and public goods funding.

a. This requires that builders perceive a vibrant, open and value aligned CULTure which leads sustainably to value capture. A la Gregory Landua’s parable of the rain, MetaCulture’s aim is cultivating an ecosystem which both receives and then also cultivates various forms of value inputs in a pattern of a positive sum regeneration. The gap to close in this regard largely divides largely into public perception and available incentive for builders and contributors (Cultural and Financial development).

b. We will hold an initial model discussion series for defining, connecting, and where appropriate composing communities and subcultures across the highly dimensional expanse of crypto’s aesthetic and philosophical spectra. Kicking off this process is discussion on the contrasts and potential syntheses between Lunarpunk and Solarpunk, for example. I am in dialogue with individuals from several communities in this regard.

(3) Manifest sustained value capture and regeneration over time, growing a virtuous feedback cycle on behalf of global need for scaled public goods funding.

Building this self-regenerating and replicating metaculture requires the natural flywheel effect of sustained quadratic funding and social interop in combination with the right intercommunity translation and composition approach. This includes opening the design space for Cult DAO proposals and antifragile treasury funding mechanism contributing to future Gitcoin funding Rounds, and incentivizing contributors in building public goods which address the memetic perceptual trap Cult DAO has found itself in.

We of course also will incentivize educational and cultural development on zk-EVM Modulus with a portion of matched funds. MetaCulture itself will launch as an intercommunity education network on Modulus.

Looking to the Future An attribute of Cult DAO’s online presence is the passion and dedication demonstrated by governance members who have found personal meaning, purpose, and a sense of self-efficacy within The Cult Manifesto and our community.

I hope that Cult DAO’s capacity to provide decentralized, automated public goods funding at scale will grow as governance members recognize and leverage the potentials afforded by Gitcoin and other QF funding mechanisms.

We are incredibly excited to synthesize this passion with quadratic funding with an eye towards translating the stone soup of a single community into Stone Soup as a public goods meta.

Quadratic funding converts ideas, passions, and diverse representation into sustainable value capture vastly more reflective of broad public preferences than traditional funding mechanisms. For Cult DAO, this helps resolve the memetic gravity well which contributors have struggled to break out of.

Extending this, MetaCulture bridges from where crypto’s public reception and leverage is today, to addressing our multifarious global metacrisis via scaled public goods funding, memetic momentum, and transcultural decentralized contribution on (x)Punk rails.

Recent Milestones Cult DAO is a decentralized community currently without a formal roadmap and milestones, with several intraDAO subcultures having their own focuses and objectives. This being said, recent major events in Cult DAO from the anon founders & devs include:

February 2023: Launch of second ecosystem project, The Rug Game, a blockchain implementation of cooperative game theory and strategy. July 25, 2023: Deployment of zk-EVM Modulus’s public testnet build v0.9. More information here: https://wearecultdao.medium.com/modulus-testnet-v0-9-eb149f606574

Addendum to the Problem Statement Seeking funding within Gitcoin as a respected Ethereum ecosystem Schelling point provides the immeasurable help of addressing a core factor inhibiting Cult’s growth and contribution to decentralization and public goods across Ethereum and beyond: Cult’s self-fulfilling memetic prophecy.

In brief, Cult has been stuck within the bounds and dynamics which allowed it to grow in the first place. What does this mean? It was only via the medium of memetics in March of 2022 that Cult first gained traction on its message.

Currently, on the outside, Cult is often perceived as a memecoin. Effectively, this generates a self-fulfilling prophecy and illusion of dependence on “memecoin tactics”, Cult’s innovative tokenomics, vision, and other intrinsic features notwithstanding. The initial phase of MetaCulture is to break this pattern.

About Cult DAO: Addendum All proposals must conform to at least a majority of the following open-ended criteria:

● Fight Against Centralisation ● Further the Cause of Decentralisation ● Directly Benefit a Noble Cause.

In addition, Cult’s liquidity on Ethereum is locked for 263 years and ownership renounced of the smart contracts. Since these two factors are held constant, my interpretation of the above proposal criteria is that they provide general direction while also being adaptive across cultural boundaries, and responsive to evolving and diverse needs.

Since Cult does not have a single set of agreed upon “goals” per se set by the community outside of supporting “those building and contributing towards our decentralized future”, the following partial list of objectives reflect the ethos & values of The Cult Manifesto:

● An expansive, decentralized, and flourishing web3-world education & onboarding interface including automated consensus building

● Sustained, permissionless funding and social support available to anyone who meets proposal criteria

● Education in relevant domains (technical, philosophical, community development) at scale. This might include: Decentralized Web3 education in programming, mathematics, and economics; political philosophy and history of political economy; phygital grassroots community outreach and development.

For more about Cult DAO, read:

● The Cult Manifesto: cultdao.io/manifesto.pdf

● wearecultdao.medium.com/a-declaration-of-the-independence-of-cyberspace-a-reminder-for-the-many-f3cc9a5f4596

● wearecultdao.medium.com/cult-is-a-public-good-3525181ade26