Epilogue/Prologue

So, what happened?

I mean, Shokunin is broke, basically. Since we commited to funding the projects we agreed to fund, until their goals are achieved, we have roughly 2 months worth of funds (~3 months of funds for a project being funded by an independent treasury shokunin is drawing from) under our current set of commitments until we have to stop payouts.

Does that mean this is the end?

Not neccesarily.

What was the point? What is the point?

"If you make a project where the main attraction for people is the money they make, and you run out of money, you shouldn't be surprised if the people leave."

I guess there must be some great misunderstanding here that needs adressing. If people thought Shokunin existed to give away money, or to make money. Or even "to be a source of basic income for creators", after all, that's simply giving away money again.

A gift given regularly, no longer given, is not a gift taken away.

The point of Shokunin was never the money, and will never be the money. The bigwigs who have the money are too weirded out in contributing funds to a project that runs "optimistically" - or as another unattributed quote puts it: "Yeah, it's a good idea, for small amounts!". Nobody takes it seriously if it's about money, other than perhaps, the people who decided that they were happy asking for and receiving it. But that's the thing. The money's not the point. And I've tried to make it explicit all along.

To quote a comment (by "playing with dust") on the post that started it all:

there has been a move a away from consensus as a mechanism to get anything done and a move towards consent, biased like this - towards assuming agreement.

In their case it is a matter of operating under the conditions of emergency (you are not going to sit down and wait for a whole group to reach consensus to launch a lifeboat on a sinking ship - is the usual example here).

And that is indeed what I saw Shokunin as - a small lifeboat for people and projects in the Polkadot ecosystem who do see the emergency we are in, that we built a tower with doors, so now there are gatekeepers at the doors, and we can no longer believe in the idea of constantly compromising our values to those who already have power and resources - and desire to be gatekeepers for whatever end - in order to do what we need to do for our communities.

That was the point. That is the point.

Creators, being domain experts in their fields, have good taste and good judgement in what they create.

Creators know best how to do this without infringing on their own creative direction or artistic integrity.

inform and act, but permission is unneccessary,

It's not about the money, it's about the power. It's not about giving away money, it's about giving away power.

The point is that - and correct me if I'm wrong about this being the foundational concept of our broader ecosystem as well - we do more, and reach more people, and affect more real change, by giving up on the idea of trying to prescribe everything for everyone the way we want it to be, and instead allow people to create the way they believe best.

In Shokunin, the organization, that meant that I said yes to supporting people and projects I don't neccesarily believe in enthusiatically myself. That meant supporting people and projects I fully expected to fail, or disappear, or disappoint me, and some did. But it's clear to me that every project and person who is still here now made all of the failed ideas and ghostings worth it.

The Relay Chain - in theory - embodies the same ideal; it is meant to be a great message relay and security source for parachains and little else, it does not define the properties and behaviours of it's parachains nor does it restrict them in their behaviour and goals;

Parachains are meant to be optimized for their intended goals and offload other tasks and information to other parachains, but in a functioning ecosystem, they do not prescribe how their users use their features and optimizations [- unfortunately we appear to live in an ecosystem where often parachains decide their true users based on prepayment, and the broader community is the product];

While shokunin may have, in hindsight, been far too broad in the areas it supported projects in and the criteria around which projects it supported, it didn't go out and comission creators to make things for it "in the way we want it". People contributed their time and effort in the way they believed best in the benefit for our incredibly vague ideas of our common goals --

the goals of the network are what it's current participants believe it to be, with the exception of self-enrichment.

-- perhaps that vagueness was a mistake.

Polkadot and Kusama and Dotsama and the Paraverse and whatever you want to call it all stands at a strange crossroads.

The crossroad is strange because the ecosystem can appear to be moving while it stands still there.

We stand with massive repositories of undeployed resources and untapped community power, seemingly limited solely by bottlenecks of... hubris? People who think they know better and are better than everyone around them? processes that a type of person has designed to ensure that every decision can always have their oversight and control. Processes that aren't designed for communities to share power, but for egregores to accumulate it.

Maybe you are the most qualified for the task, you do have the most expertise, and resources, and the biggest network. But you suffer, and your goals suffer, and your community suffers, when you try to direct and define and control everything yourself.

The traditional "solution" to this dilemma is to bring people onboard under your wing, delegate your goals and tasks to them, and trust them to do the right thing in fear of your judgement.

And on their side, they contribute whatever amount of work they believe is worth the salary or resources you provide them, hoping that the grand sum of your vision aligns with their personal interests and goals. Fair enough, and almost certainly true, if the only thing in their interest is getting paid.

But. Notice something about that?

I've always been a critic of the saying...

"Less Trust, More Truth"

It's always grated on me, that the words "trust" and "truth" are things that mean so many different things to so many different people, and like any masterful marketer does, it is never corrected when people misundertand it to your benefit. When they trust you and mistake your words and opinions for "truth". When they trust in a "few" and suffer them control of the direction of communities that they have never been part of and have no true intention to participate in!

Whatever happened to it?

Why do we trust faceless monoliths of money and power? I'm not talking about the friendly faces and people I'm sure you all know and love that live at the base of the monolith, pretending to understand it and be it's stewards and guardians. I'm talking about the massive big-fucking-elephant shaped slab of miasmatic rock in the room behind them, sucking all the love and joy and blood out of the ecosystem in the form of [the idea that resources and power should be collected centrally and disbursed from central entities and repositories by people who "know best"].

Yes, we should trust experts.

But no, an expert of architecture is not an expert in human behaviour. Being a good writer does not make what you write truth. Making a coherent structure does not make that structure useful in any meaningful way. Building an unstoppable and unassailable moving castle does not mean that people will actually... want to live in it?

We should build homes. That people want to live in... no. We should give people the ability to build their own homes. "What is substrate?". Yes. This. Now let more people use it. Encourage that. Make it as easy as fucking possible. Focus EVERYTHING there!

Shokunin is, at the end of the day, merely a low-effort, human-accessible, heavily-watered-down, no-code, subjective, half-assed attempt at dragging up the suffocating and bloated body of Substrate from under the weight of "opinion" and "complexity".

Don't communities know their truths the best? Don't individuals know their truths the best?

The truth is that we live in an ecosystem that has ossified in it's distribution of power - the same folks benefitting from all this have been doing so since very near the beginning of this industry, this ecosystem, this community. Heck, I'm personally included in those "folks". And their early luck and wealth and success have lent them the resources to make their ideas on how to run things reality, which they lent further on to those they trust to achieve those goals. And almost everyone wants to put themselves on the top of it all, don't they?

Shokunin was never intended as the top of something.

They say you should be the change you want to see in the world, after all.

It was meant as a demonstration.

You can do what it has demonstrated yourself, too! In fact, you should! Because that's what the point of it is!

And the maybe sum of all the small, personal demonstrations lending a small amount of discretionary power and privilege and resources to one another - not in trust, but in shared interest, and security in the fact that any action is done with /DIRECT/ revokable consent (a tautology, since consent MUST be revokable) - is far, far greater than the acts or visions or goals of the few.

I'm not here to make an unstoppable castle, an unkillable hydra. Or maybe I am, but the way I see it happening isn't a single immortal creature, but an evolving and interconnected family of creatures.

I'm not here to come up with some new mechanism to come to consensus on things. Consensus is Dead, it's rotting corpse tries to drag us back into old heirarchies and structures that benefit some old rotting corpses in denial. We have technologies now where the consensus layer is present and neutral and universal, and while we slowly realize that even that is largely unnecessary, we can at least build atop it and demonstrate the power of coming together towards our goals without a fog of indirection - where leeches and vampires and smoothtalking ideologues can hide - by exchanging consent directly to one another to use resources for common goals.

That demonstration isn't over. It has barely even begun.

So. What now?

Shokunin isn't going anywhere.

It's going to make and facilitate and support proposals to further our vague and nebulous goals as a governance delegate on Kusama as soon as the high tower deems it safe to grant us lowly ones access to the magicks.

Watch parathread ID 2,228. Kusama needs more chaos, and maybe a bigger lifeboat for the true believers. We're on a sinking ship after all. I want more people to see it. And I don't want to wait for permission.

And maybe, if you are feeling generous and/or riled up, join the network to keep the still-living heart of the idea beating by pumping in some of your own blood.

Inspect, modify, and then submit the extrinsic linked above and you'll be automagically part of the fold and give us some limited access to act through you, and use your resources. This is not delegation, and this post is not our request for delegation (that comes later). This is a material contribution to our existing network and projects.

(or less poetically, we're seeking supporters willing to demonstrate our model - tell us your wishes, and we'll try to support those who want to make it happen! Modify the delay to something you feel comfortable monitoring the chain for, and contact us (presently on discord) if you want more concrete help on monitoring proxies onchain safely~ and then maybe you can even modify who you are giving proxy permission to and we can get a real network of shared resources going that isn't centered on some collective of weirdoes - all I care about is saying good riddance to the central treasury model someday.)

-- JAM