The peregrination to catch the sunset at FWBfest. Photo courtesy of Friends with Benefits
For its second consecutive year, the Decentralized Autonomous Organization Friends With Benefits, one of the crypto industry’s most expensive and popular social clubs, gathered in the mountains of California on August 3rd for a weekend of music, tech-savvy talks and assemblies called FWBfest. DAOs continue to grow, in spite of the bear market, and may actually be more popular now than they were during the last crypto market surge. When people say there’s nothing tangible behind tokens beyond speculation, what they’re missing is the IRL activities facilitated through such DAOs.
FWB has offered the industry an example of how to grow a DAO
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Fest performer Ricky Lake and friends during FWBfest
Stepping back, FWB was founded in 2020 by Trevor McFedries, an entrepreneur that co-founded the agency Brud behind the lucrative, computer-generated influencer Lil’ Miquela, is now focused on growing FWB as a token-gated DAO, meaning that members need to acquire a certain amount of $FWB tokens (70, to be exact) to join the club. There are currently 7,386 FWB token holders, based on publicly-available data from Ethereum explorer Etherscan, with the token at an average price of $3 (on August 10th, 2023, some days after the Fest took place) and an all-time high price of $196.19 in August 2021, as seen on coin tracker platform Coingecko. Several members of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz are among FWB’s most famous advocates.
FWB is undoubtedly, the largest social DAO, including celebrity members like Erykah Badu, Nadya Tolokonnikova from Pussy Riot, and Azealia Banks. It has also amassed partnerships with brands such as LVMH via Hennessy.So when I attended the latest FWBfest , to give a presentation on cultural organizations, I also stayed to interview interview FWB leadership, speakers and festival attendees to get a first hand report of what brought them to the token-savvy festival.
A talk hosted by crypto accelerator Seed Club at the Library of Idyllwild Arts Academy the venue … [+]
Alex Zhang, the “Mayor” of FWB, told me that while the first edition of the festival in 2021 was fully organized by the DAO operations team, this new edition tried a more collaborative approach. By this Zhang meant that 30 external but like-minded communities helped plan event programming, from the nonprofit Rhizome, to the media company Zora Zine to the podcast club and woman-centric DAO Boys Club, in addition to leading crypto companies like OpenSea and Optimism
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“This led to a much more pluralist fest experience, and more of a ‘choose your own adventure’ experience. Or in our words, continuing to push the idea of FWB being a city, and these different subcultures being neighborhoods,” Zhang added.
The main stage at FWBfest, a magical place shaded by parachute fabric.
With regards to ticket sales, Zhang confirmed the festival sold out, doubling ticket sales from 350 in 2022 (when token prices were higher) to 700 in 2023, which meant the DAO was able to afford more scholarship passes for community members that could not afford the $399 ticket price.
The festival’s programming included a diverse roster of speakers ranging from technologists to artists. There was a cinema, a series of free generative art workshops by NFT platform Highlight.xyz, yoga sessions, concerts with DJ sets, even a tennis tournament that had many festival goers strutting around in full all white tennis attire. The educational talks focused mainly on internet culture, especially on using AI for creative projects. Writers Eileen Isagon Skyers and Ruby Justice Thélot gave an almost-theatrical presentation on authorship in an era of AI. Later on, and on the same stage, Washington Post journalist and internet legend Taylor Lorenz explained how the term “creator economy” was co-opted by venture capitalists. Based on her research, it was the early mommy bloggers that pioneered content creation and monetization.
Caroline Polachek was the main musical act. Photo by Jasmine Safaeian courtesy of Friends with … [+]
“There’s been a phrase used by Internet anthropologists in the last couple of years, which is The Dark Forest, It refers to parts of the Internet where you can be ‘your true self,’ away from ad-monetisation and surveillance capitalism. FWBFest literally took place in a forest, where parasocial friendships forged over the past years via DMs were expanded into the Forest Dimension,” Shumon Basar, a Bangladeshi-British author, that took part as a speaker, told me about his experience of the festival. “After the pandemic’s denuding of our senses into screen-everything, I feel like we appreciate even more these occasions where our avatar selves can meet-greet in all our fleshy, inimitable eccentricity. The future is already here; it’s a forest.”
But not all attendants were there to join the token revolution. Ann Liu, a 23-year-old artist and fine art dealer who drove up from Los Angeles, said the festival was more like a regular music festival than a crypto conference or hackathon.
“It was cool to meet a lot of thinkers and writers in person, who offered resources and jumping off points for continued research,” Liu told me. “If the goal was to integrate or introduce people to Web3, I hope there is more onboarding next year, because I had a few conversations with people who left Fest still not caring about NFTs.“
Community is FWB’s biggest value proposition, regardless of the token price, while IRL events reinforce the DAO’s brand. The software c-corp recently created under the Friends with Benefits brand to develop new applications and products for the FWB members is ready to take off. According to the DAOs forum there’s now a clear distinction between the DAO and a legal entity with a software development venture. Yet the business hasn’t strayed far from its token governance roots. The DAO approved this spinoff via a community vote last May.
