Hic Et Nunc AMA — The Good, the bad and the ugly
It’s no secret I love to find analogies (or would it be metonymies?) to explain real world concepts. The easiest comparison to sum up today’s AMA would be Finding Nemo as most of the questions epitomized the lesson that the father had to learn in order to create a lasting relationship with his son — “If you truly love someone you have to let him go”. But where’s the fun in easy and clichéd comparisons?! Let’s get more creative with this!
First, a big thank you to Rafael Lima for accepting being part of the AMA and hats off to organizers Homeworkpunks, VerticalCrypto Art and Gonrasa for making it work so smoothly. Another great surprise was the moderation done by Edgar Dubrovsky who managed to ask all the tough questions while also keeping everyone calm.
Language barriers apart, and getting to the core of this recap, Rafael answers were more in line with the drama that you can find from a Spaghetti Western than what you would expect from the lead developer and creator of a platform that just a few days ago became one of the most used NFT platform by number of users.
If you’re in hurry here’s the sum up of what happened:
THE GOOD — Hic Et Nunc will continue to be the same weird, experimental platform, for the foreseeable future. Rafael clearly views it as an experiment and for good or bad has no plans on changing that.
THE BAD — For all the global popularity that Hic Et Nunc gained, and all the artists from around the world that are making a living out of it, unfortunately Rafael’s vision is still local and didn’t grow together with it. Keeping it experimental doesn’t mean that developers need to be underpaid, that only one person should have all the keys to the project, and also that there shouldn’t be a structured team with well defined roles.
THE UGLY — The community seems to be more of a nuisance that is constantly pressuring him to turn Hic Et Nunc into something he doesn’t want than the biggest asset that is currently leaving all other platforms drooling. Kinder words were given to henexploiter thanking him for helping find a solution than to the community in general.
Sovereignty, voting is vicious and transparency
There’s a very popular Brazilian music from the 70s called “Mosca na Sopa” (Fly in the soup) where Raul Seixas sings about the nuisance of a fly that he tries everything but just can’t get rid of it.
In the AMA it seemed that the community is this fly in Rafael’s soup. I personally think that his view on the community is better than he let go in the AMA. But seeing that he talked in kinder words about Henexploiter (the only one to help him find a solution) than about the community it sure seemed that we’re this fly that he just can’t swap off. There were complaints that he is constantly being pestered about transparency, about voting in the decisions of the platform, about new features, etc. His answer to most of these questions was that the community needs to respect Hic Et Nunc Lab’s (which at the moment is Rafael) sovereignty. What does that mean? It means to respect his techno-political vision of the platform and not interfere in anything that will change this.
What is his techno-political vision? That’s more complicated as this point is not so clear. The only clearer answer regarding this is that he doesn’t want HEN to fall prey to the North hemisphere hegemony. Maybe a clearer manifesto from him would help us understand exactly what kind of soup is his. And then maybe, us flies could decide for ourselves if that soup is good enough or not.
Circular economy?
More Brazilian culture to give a proper background! Back in 2011 I was doing a documentary on a rising savvy figure in the Brazilian cultural scene named Pablo Capilé. He quickly gained legions of followers with the Brazilian youth with ideas such as circular economy, alternative cultural circuits and autonomous news medias. Starting with a house in the city of São Paulo where the collaborators would all live together it soon spread throughout the country and all major capitals soon had these shared houses called “Casas Fora do Eixo”. People would live and work there 24 hours per day organizing music festivals around the country, producing media and news to distribute on social media and many other cultural productions. In return for their work they would receive free housing, free food and also some coins of a currency that was only accepted in the places that were part of this circuit and that they could exchange for some basic items.
What does this have to do with Hic Et Nunc?! I’ll get there in a second.
Fora do Eixo was an utopia that lasted many years but upon closer inspection the high turnover rates and dissents from the collaborators revealed how poorly paid they were. For all the supposed decentralized cultural production their was a huge lack of transparency that turned out was hiding a lot more than what was visible at plain sight. After proper journalistic investigation a series of articles published at one of the leading left-wing magazines helped open more serious overviews into the process that lead to the the downfall of this utopia. In fairness, the citizen journalism media wing of this project (Mídia Ninja) survived and even thrived after restructuring itself.
To be clear, I’m not in any way linking Rafael to this collective that I talked about but from the AMA today many of the comments reminded me of the interview I did way back in 2011. I most likely think this is because of the most common philosophers and theories that are popular at Brazilian universities but to be completely honest, as many in the community I was shocked when words such as circular economy popped up when questioned how is it decided how much developers are paid.
Rafael, by citing circular economy reflected that people should be thankful to be a part of Hic Et Nunc and should accept what they can get. A circular economy is essentially flawed in smaller environments as it forgets that people live in the real world and that there are expenses that need to be paid in fiat currency. In HEN’s case Tezos has to enter from the outside from some point, it circulates and is redistributed (to what point this really works is another study) and part of it will leave in order for artists and developers to survive. Most developers that are working for Hic Et Nunc are also artists in the platform? Does Rafael expect that their payment is being part of this economy and getting their share whenever they sell their work?
He raised the issue that he’s stressed out and that most work depends on him but when questioned about forming a team his answer is that developers that are collaborating shouldn’t expect to live from this. He points out that no one works for free but the current payment rates are so low that even in Brazil the 25–50 tezos a week isn’t enough to pay rent in most of the capital cities. The platform is now global but the vision on how to maintain a team that can keep it up and running hasn’t developed in the same speed.
HEN is all about “becoming minor”
Deleuze and Guattari in their book Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature create the philosophical concept of becoming minor. As Rafael has constantly cited Deleuze (in other places and not in this AMA) it seems that this helps a lot to understand how he positions HEN. Without getting too much in depth, the notion of becoming minor is an ethical action that involves constantly aiming away from a majority. Applied to the NFT space, a platform that is always becoming minor means moving against any practices that aim to brainlessly expand only for the sake of expansion or financial gains. It also means being a place where anyone can enter, a place where unique voices are able to be heard (as long as it’s not about changing the platform it seems).
The silver-lining from the AMA, and this will depend on your point of view on how HEN should expand, is that Rafael doesn’t have any financial ambitions regarding growth. In my opinion (and in my opinion only) there’s even a sort of conflict between the financial aspects of this project and Rafael’s notion of wanting to keep Hic Et Nunc away from the practices of the big NFT platforms. The comments on trying to save money on a 2.5k USD server a month seems misplaced given the almost 50k that HEN is getting in fees each month, but it makes sense when seen through the optics of Rafael planning on how to survive on the long run even if no one else is using the platform. Getting big and famous is not the priority, keeping it minor is.
Unfortunately this sounded almost as a “Love it or leave it” message which in the blockchain space is more akin to a “Love it or fork it” alert.
If you liked this brief recap on some points on the Hic Et Nunc AMA make sure to check out the article that I’m finishing about the last happening in more details.
