Crypto conferences are as much on computers as they are off of them. Laptops line tables and dot crowded lecture halls. But ‘afk,’ the new event series by Lens – the decentralized social protocol from Avara – is a reprieve from the screen. 

‘afk’ is an acronym borrowed from chat rooms and gaming culture, meaning “away from keyboard.” After the event’s debut at Ethereum Berlin in May, afk returned as a side event at this year’s Ethereum Community Conference. Lens partnered with ZKsync – a “verifiable blockchain network, secured by math” – to commandeer La Patinoire Royale, an art gallery and listed historic building in Brussels’ Saint-Gilles district. 

La Patinoire is modern but cozy. Old iron trusses and skylights adorn a vaulted wood ceiling. The walls, sleek and monochromatic, perimeter a venue filled with couches and Scandinavian-made wooden chairs.

For the event, a makeshift cafe served protein balls, banana bread, matcha, cold brew and assorted juices. And on-stage, a plant-laden translucent box with the Lens and ZKsync logos backdropped the speakers.

“Do ‘degen’ and ‘regen’ mean anything to you?” kicked off Darren Hatch, the sound and light engineer, looking out at the audience with genuine curiosity. “Didn't think so.”

After outlawing laptops (afk all the way), Hatch introduced the event’s emcee, Carlos Beltran. Beltran is the co-founder and CEO of MadFi, creators of the Lens memecoin, $BONSAI. When called he ran on stage, promptly tripping over his kimono and crashing into a table. “Carlos, I just met you,” Hatch said, putting his arm around Beltran, “but I like you already.”

After a graceful recovery, Beltran called up Avara founder and CEO, Stani Kulechov, and Nana Murugesan, President of ZKsync builders, Matter Labs, to talk “Nurturing Culture.”

Read more: Big Questions and the Need for Decentralization Occupy Participants at the SheFi Summit at EthCC

“We want to build fair, open social spaces,” Kulechov said, “to encourage pockets of culture across the whole ecosystem.” With improvements like layer-two blockchains (L2s), Kulechov added, the time is ripe for consumer applications like Lens to flourish. 

Murugesan called L2s – which inherit Ethereum’s security while dramatically reducing gas fees – “cultural extensions of Ethereum.” In other words, because they’re fast and cheap, they make using on-chain applications a comparable experience to off-chain counterparts – a necessity for legitimate adoption and culture-building.

In turn, Murugesan said, we can become “liquid citizens,” wresting ourselves from the extractive, centralized institutions we currently rely on to build culture. “You are a liquid citizen as long as you own your assets, your identity, and social capital,” he said. “Once we have user choice, we can change the paradigm together.”

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Mostly, though, we still don’t have user choice. We’re citizens of nation states and users of technocratic platforms – products of a divisive paradigm that most of us didn’t choose. Yet, that paradigm still defines who we are. 

But as Walt Whitman said: “We all contain multitudes.” And with more agency – across “open social spaces” – our identity can become manifold. 

Lens itself is named after ‘lens culinaris,’ or the lentil plant, which has a symbiotic relationship with certain types of soil bacteria – where roots left in the ground provide sources of nitrogen for their neighbors. 

Poppy Jamie (L) and Simona Pop. Photo by Luke Dyson, courtesy of Lens

The analogy speaks to the open source nature of the protocol, which means anyone can build applications on top of it. Dozens have been created so far, from Hey (formerly Lenster) – an on-chain riposte to Twitter – to Tape (formerly Lenstube), a YouTube-like video sharing platform. Each app leverages a single Lens profile, so that “wherever [creators] go in the digital garden of the decentralized internet,” their social graph will follow.

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Whitman’s quote was the prelude James Beck, Avara’s marketing director, used to commence his afk panel. “How do personalities change across social spaces?” he asked.

Apps built atop the Lens Protocol are part of a nascent phase in “multitudes” reclamation. They steer us away from the one-size-fits-all platforms like Twitter. Even the apps’ name changes – from ‘Lenster’ to ‘Hey,’ ‘Lenstube’ to ‘Tape’ – reflect a transitional moment, distancing from decentralized web2 lookalikes to become distinct communities that, perhaps, can more capably represent our complex personalities ‘at keyboard’ and away from it.

“If these platforms are different in vibe and community, how are we going to split our personalities?” wondered Réka Medvecz, co-founder of Guild.xyz and onplug. “Do we automate our personalities for tone differences?” 

As those tone differences increase, we should ask: are apps like Hey a complement to Twitter or its eventual replacement? 

Today, while the “vibe and community” at Lens may be the first wave of a sea change, its usage still pales in comparison (32,000 daily active users compared to Twitter’s 220 million).

“I feel like we're trapped on Twitter forever,” said Paul Dylan-Ennis – author and assistant professor at University College Dublin – in a fireside chat with Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin.

Read more: A Symbiosis in Web3 Social Media Where Artists and Users Are in Charge on Lens Protocol

“Maybe we’re not in a post-Twitter era, but in a post-Twitter hegemony era,” Buterin added.

As a hegemony disruptor, Lens is primed to chase Twitter’s crown – even if it’s not yet close to taking it. And there are plenty who want to onboard the masses to web3. But as Dylan-Ennis noted, “How do we protect crypto values as we go mainstream?” He then added, “I'm on the record that we shouldn’t go mainstream.”

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Web3 is stuck between a rock and a hard place. To go mainstream means to risk that ‘symbiotic relationship,’ repeating the same cultural flattening that we’ve seen in web2. And not to go mainstream is an existential threat, risking fallout with investors who fund the projects but expect scalar growth and significant returns.

“[We shouldn’t] try to perpetuate [web2’s] intense competition that isn't necessarily beneficial to the greater good,” said web3 thought leader Simona Pop in a fireside with TV presenter  Poppy Jamie. As web3 grows, Pop sees companies transplanting web2 folks into web3 projects without first immersing them in web3 culture – what we might call ‘lens culinaris’ values.

Pop’s session – titled “Why web3 needs therapy” – was rooted in her own mental health journey in web3. As an Internet-native industry, builders can be “at keyboard” all the time – as Pop was, pushing her excitement to its brink, until she wasn't excited about anything.

Now, after a reset, Pop’s empowering people to create boundaries and be open about mental health – “don’t repress the shit out of it,” she said – and to preserve the community values that made her so excited about web3 in the first place. 

“Trees grow both ways,” she said. “It’s called ‘geotropism’” – e.g. roots grow down, branches grow up. “That root system – and I believe we are that,” Pop said gesturing to the room, "is very, very important.”

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The artist Latashá closed the day, DJing for an hour as guests boozed and danced. Maybe we can have it both ways – modern and cozy; scalable protocols and niche social apps that reflect our multitudes; spaces where we can truly be ‘away from keyboard’ while remaining deeply connected.

Latashá Photo by Luke Dyson, courtesy of Lens

“Don’t be afraid to connect with people – I think that’s the real purpose of this space in the first place,” Latashá said the day before, speaking at a SheFi Summit fireside with Lens Protocol’s Head of Growth Christina Beltramini. “It’s really nice to have a new world and new soil,” she continued, “where I can garden the way I want to garden.”

lead image: L-R James Beck, Ines, Justin Bram, Réka Medvecz, Boxer. Photo by Luke Dyson, courtesy of Lens