Conversations among web3 initiates tend to begin with a rabbit hole moment. For each person there’s an encounter with some blockchain application that’s so alluring that peeling back the layers can’t be helped – an entire Wonderland of possibility, rife with the ridiculous and the profound.

Recently at Studio 9294, a converted warehouse in London's Hackney Wick neighborhood, the Nickel Factory hosted Down the Rabbit Hole, an evening of talks from local web3 leaders that was stitched together by an apropos non-fungible token (NFT) treasure hunt.

The Nickel Factory was conceived around the idea of gamified events, where “less confident” web3 voyagers could gather in social spaces with less pressure to feign connection. To facilitate that, the organization partnered with OpiPets, a “play-and-earn” platform for collecting, trading and selling characters and cosmetic items. 

Throughout the venue, posters urged people to “find the missing OpiPets NFTs – they have been lost down the rabbit hole.” OpiPets employees in branded gold and purple polos patrolled the space, helping people play the game and ostensibly ease into the environment.

Fifty or so attendees milled about the main room, leaving plenty of space between themselves and the stage. The evening, similarly, was laced with a certain hesitation. Most speakers made uncertainty a central theme – an acknowledgement of the nascent web3 ecosystem’s unpredictability.

“That was the crux of the evening – nobody knows where we’re going or what’s going to happen.”

Kurt Larsen – the co-founder of the Signet app that was used to collect the OpiPets and reward people with free drinks and after-party admission – spoke about the dubious peril of hacks, citing that a disconcerting $1.25 billion had been lost to exploits in the first quarter of this year alone.

Alex Garcia – co-founder of Metabyte, a studio that helps brands capitalize on web3 through various blockchain solutions – pointed to decentralization as an ongoing disruption to more conventional, hierarchical organizational systems. He posited that community managers – the people who tend to cultivate and sustain community engagement on places like Discord – will become the next c-level executives, presaging a still-to-be-defined web3 leadership structure. 

Janine Subgang – a venture capitalist, co-founder of FriDAO and governance lead at the London-based web3 hub, DLT Hub – broached the challenge of collaborative work in still-fledgling decentralized models when so many of us are accustomed to top-down management where we’re told exactly what to do. “How do you copy when there is no rulebook?” she said.

The ground we walk on is fertile and untilled. That was evident again in a panel on the metaverse where the first question was: “What is the metaverse?” The scope of responses was broad and varied, with a general consensus that surely it’s some “layer between the physical and digital worlds.”

Decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, are clearly a part of the metaverse. By creating currencies and governance bylaws that work toward a shared vision, DAOs are a potent weapon indeed. They have the potential to redistribute power to localized Internet communities that are less dependent on traditional institutions like banks and nation-states. 

“I suddenly considered that web3 might be our own weird tech-driven hippie moment”

A subsequent panel on the future of finance – moderated by Nickel Factory co-founder Matt Bradley – focused on the emerging role of the DAO. “We can govern ourselves and do some mad shit,” said Nick Almond, who’s “building the next generation of DAOs” at FactoryDAO and has a PhD in biophysics.

“Now forgive me,” Bradley chimed in. “I’m not a doctor, but what exactly is ‘mad shit’?”

"What we're going to do with it we don't know, the point is mad shit," Almond said. “What I'm trying to create is the substrate of mad shit."

That was the crux of the evening – nobody knows where we’re going or what’s going to happen. Decentralization has suddenly made imagination a de facto tool for progress. As imaginations are limitless, that makes everything impossible to predict – but it also makes it exciting. 

“We've lost faith in our existing system – that's why you're all here,” said Ozgur Kaplan, another panelist and the founder of DLT Hub.

“We don't know what's going to happen,” continued Almond. “We've created our own money printers…we’re letting people be people.” All of that opens up potential for what he called “unfiltered human creativity.”

At this point there were wafts of renaissance in the room – the same kind of air the hippies breathed when they canonized psychedelia as a tool to gum up the western world’s productivity machine. What does unfiltered human creativity look like with less acid but more blockchain-enabled money printers? Somewhere inside my head Grace Slick’s “White Rabbit” was rumbling, chasing me down the rabbit hole where “logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead.”

The song’s final directive “feed your head” – as much a reference to reading as it was to taking mind-altering drugs – thumped in my skull the rest of the night. Beneath the Alice lyrics there’s that ominous march inspired by Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain – a wild union that “was in step with what was going on in San Francisco then,” Slick once said. “We were all trying to get as far away from the expected as possible." 

I suddenly considered that web3 might be our own weird tech-driven hippie moment – a reaction to an “existing system” we’ve lost faith in that’s turned Slick’s San Francisco into a venture capitalist-fueled tech haven, forcing erstwhile residents to leave or live in a squalid reality where the expected is all there is.

In Almond’s DAO-driven world we can rid ourselves of the “that’s the way it is” mentality and pursue passions like music instead of deferring to money-making endeavors for the sake of easier – not more fulfilling – lives. 

“Today if you want to make more money you have to move to a job you're not good at,” said Kaplan. “But what if you didn't?” What if there were 10 million DAOs instead of a couple dozen conglomerates and every single contributor was a specialist who enjoyed what they did and got paid well for it? What does that world look like?

But before idealism takes the day, it’s important to remember that the tiniest input can have significant effects on the output when put on-chain. We have to be humble when thinking about our personal impact on a system that relies on collective validation, and realize not everyone will use these new tools in cooperative ways. 

Because as great as creativity sounds, human creation doesn’t exactly have a flawless track record. Humans have also come up with ‘mad shit’ like war and slavery and incels. And fraudsters and goldrush-minded speculators remind us that web3 isn’t some panacea we can leave unchecked.

Still, while the excitement was palpable, the lack of detail was mildly unnerving and given the setting I kept thinking of Alice’s Cheshire Cat. “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad,” he said. “If you don’t know where you are going, any road can take you there.”