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Essay 1: Higher is Not a Headless Brand
It is important to note that the higher scene began before the HIGHER token was launched.
In it's beginning, higher was simply a Warpcast channel, where people could meme higher without price talk.
But then, along comes Martin - deploying a token and airdropping it to everyone in the channel.
Importantly, distribution to the scene was whole. Meaning that everybody in the scene now had a form of financial exposure to the burgeoning scene.
Some sold, and, to this day, some believe that referencing the token at all is a bad idea.
Not only do I disagree but I believe that HIGHER (the token) is the perfect site for conversation, collaboration, and experimentation in relation to the cultural practice of exploring new ways of seeing and feeling higher irrespective of market action.
What is required is that we earnestly decouple our view of the token from it's price, and begin to see the token's mere existence as an opportunity.
To understand further what I mean, we can ask the question:
Simply put, immediately, a whole range of new dynamics are introduced.
Foundationally, things are much the same: scene health continues to rely on conversation, collaboration, and experimentation. However, now that a token has been introduced, there is a financial primitive that can take up scene mindshare in conversation, collaboration, and experimentation through it's association.
The obvious value of the token is that those who historically would not have experienced any financial upside for their participation in a scene can now access financial exposure to a market approximation of the scenes value.
However, this is only possible because a new kind of scene participant activity is also introduced:
financial speculation (on the whole scene.)
Just like the Cubist scene would have included participants who's sole motivation was to speculate on the future value of artworks, the existence of a token invites participants into the higher scene who do not wish to be part of the scene's culture, but instead who's sole motivation is to speculate on it's value.
This is of tremendous potential value to any scene if properly harnessed, but also increases the possibility of contributors using market action to determine how much they themselves value the scene.
Thankfully, in the case of higher, participants are explicitly asked to decouple their perception of reality from price action. So instead of being a problem, market action becomes a site of opportunity.
In order to engage this opportunity, one has to acknowledge that there exist participants who are solely part of the scene to trade the token, and some of these individuals may be actively adversarial.
Without a clear acknowledgement of this it is difficult to establish how to engineer positive sum solutions. If we are unable to trust the intentions of our scene collaborators, conversation and collaboration are hampered.
In other words, the existence of financial incentives without processes for creating alignment between different parties leads to a lack of coordination. This in turn can disrupt collaboration, leading to reduced creative output, and ultimately a decay of the scene's culture.
At this point, the scene can either completely abandon the token, or embrace the token as an opportunity for creating alignment and coordination.
The problem is the opportunity.
The problem with a token, in essence, is that it can warp the culture of a scene. As opposed to continuing to communicate, collaborate, and experiment in service to whatever the scenes particular way of seeing is, contributors become distracted by the market for the token.
If a scene's actual culture is not strong enough on it's own, it will be consumed by this financialization.
The scene will falter to produce the kinds of genius it's original culture was capable of hosting and the true value of the scene is lost.
The token is not valuable on it's own, it relies on the scene's cultural output.
The opportunity is therefore to use the token to bolster the scene's cultural output.
In simple terms, value should be captured from speculative market action, and invested in the culture.
One way to do this is to pair the token with another, provide liquidity on a DEX, and generate fees that can be used to pay people to do things. In most cases, there is no utility to tokens beyond this. However, if the fees generated do go on to fund cultural activity and lead to the creation of value for the world, there is an argument to be made that new cultural utility could arise, in which case all trading on the token pair could be said to be for the culture.
Whatever utilities arise, the true value of the scene is what it's people create for each other and the world, not it's token.
In the long-term, a token is only as valuable as it's ability to generate value, for the culture.
With the main cultural practice of higher being to explore new ways of seeing and feeling higher irrespective of market action, this is how value captured from market action should be "put to work".
As cultural activity continues, we cannot be sure of what will arise. All we know is that so far, higher has attracted and helped to shape some incredible talent, distributing genius and empowering them to realize their aspirations.
In my estimation, more of that would be a good thing.
Hopefully by now, you can see that the token is both a problem and an opportunity, and that to ignore it completely would be to ignore an opportunity to create more scene health and the distribution of more genius.
Higher's cultural practice of seeing higher regardless of price precedes the token launch.
The introduction of a scene token introduced the ability to speculate on the entire scene.
The token can be both a Problem and an Opportunity for the culture.
