pulse

Why are we building? What moves us?

The Manifesto

Mint on Zora
It is the fall of 2022, and the old world, the old guard, the old values, are burning.

What will take their place? What will the new world look like?

The answer to this can only lie with us and what we choose in the coming weeks and months. Is the current moment a vacuum deprived of air and light, or the darkness of nascent possibility and power?

It is our choice to make - and once made, we will have to make the same choice again and again, though it may present itself in different forms. We will be uprooted by a decision space, unfolding in cascading infinities, whose greatest challenge may be the self-reflection it continually asks of us.

Two years ago, we kicked off an experiment called Forefront. It was inspired by an intuition, a stolen glimpse, of a future, collective awakening. Even now, the subtle stirring from countless quarters toward that future state can somehow feel momentous… like small perturbations rippling across the surface of water, criss-crossing and amplifying one another.

pulse
We knew we were reaching and sensing for a new form of community, built on a new form of the Internet.
We knew the siloed, centralized platforms to which we committed so many hours of our lives made up an exquisitely designed Trojan horse. But there’s a reason we don’t hesitate to agree to Terms of Service we never read. These digital networks have transformed our social and civic existence. They have made our lives indescribably richer. A door has been opened we would never want closed.

Launching Forefront, we sensed the promise of token-powered, member-owned digital networks. But we couldn’t have anticipated then how much would be asked of us.For most, schooling and upbringing never so much as touched upon basic preparedness for the most important crossroads of our lives. So too, we are not shocked to find, there is no playbook for revolution. Add to this the unique confounder of our training ground: we are the inter-generational generation schooled on the virtual, the digital, the simulated. From screens of dancing pixels we have drunk and drunk to subdue our restless online lives.

Recent events are showing us the need to step outside of our comfort zone. The revolution, if it is to be a revolution, asks us to tend to the beautiful world that already exists. It is not enough to merely build a world-simulation.

The revolution asks us to re-examine our conception of the self (not just our networked self), the foundation of our relationships, the ways in which we discern and evaluate truth and the grounds of our action. The revolution compels us to grow beyond ephemeral resonances forged from ❤️s and 👍🏻s to charged encounters of greater complexity and depth.

Approaching the end of a tumultuous 2022, Forefront is preparing for this revolution.

We’re building navigational compasses for tokenized communities. We believe communities can govern themselves and steer through their challenges only if they have converged, at some basic level, in their views and understandings of the world.

We’re incubating an information-curation protocol for tokenized communities to empower collective sense-making around ideas.

We’re pushing the cutting-edge of analytics for tokenized communities to solve the critical pain point of contextualized governance.

Finally, we are doubling down on the foundation stone we laid two years ago. The oxygen of all communities, of all movements, is storytelling. Forefront will continue to invest in and broadcast the essential memes, narratives and deep dives of web3 social.

We’ve just begun!