ZINE - The Product is the Process: Prototyping Reality with Public Assembly

According to design theorist Keller Easterling, solutions are part of the problem. When we innovate only in terms of a solutionist framework, Easterling argues in her book Medium Design, we optimize for static outcomes wedded to the status quo of product-market fit. Solutions are one-time fixes, usually implemented by someone else, which break as soon as the context theyre responding to changes (which it does, constantly). Solutions are blunt tools in the face of a reality that is interdependent and always evolving.

In lieu of such app-for-that thinking, Easterling advocates that we design for protocols of interplay, prizing relationships over neatly separated objects, complexity over convenience, and open-ended potential over single-purpose products. Building for interplay is indeterminate, which is also what makes it impactful.

Easterlings ideas provide a useful preamble for the ethos of Public Assembly, a burgeoning DAOborn of Zora and now running in parallelwhose amorphous activities are organized around the core maxim to create whats missing. Public Assemblys current output includes educational materials, experimental prototypes, and a bank of resources that together provide an infrastructure supporting the fundamental right to createa purposefully capacious framing that puts the principles of open-source engineering in conversation with the DIY ethos of independent punk labels. Rather than finished products, Public Assembly ships rigorously documented templates that encourage iteration and experimentation. Public Assembly understands that reality is made; it wants to build the culture, coordination tools, and technical literary necessary to expand the scope of who can make it.

In the wake of the DAOs move to being fully onchain, ZINEs Guy Mackinnon-Little spoke to the Public Assembly founding teamthats Valerie Andy, Max Bochman, Dain Blodorn Kim, Neesh Chaudhary, Salief Lewis, Joey Lim, and Javier Szyfer, who together go by #FF89DE, about the projects origins, collective agency, and leaving crumbs in the dark forest of the internet.

____
Guy Mackinnon-Little (ZINE): The stated mission of Public Assembly is to create what's missing. Everything else builds out from that core behavior. It's a statement that is very immediate and concrete in a certain sense, but also very expansive. You can stretch it to quite a high level of abstraction. What does it encompass for all of you?

Max Bochman: The way we interpret create what's missing is that it comes from a constant observation of the state of things around us, and then not being afraid to have opinions on how things are. If things are not correct or not how we would like them to be, then it's a call to action to correct those things. To do something that moves what we're seeing to a place where we would like it to be.

Dain Blodorn Kim: I would add that we're at a time when we just assume that everything is solved and everything is already done. It's a contextual statementcreate what's missing. We're creating things that may already exist in some respects, but they don't exist in the context that we feel is important. Its about not accepting what's already there and being complacent and continuing on this path.

Salief Lewis: There's also this mutual acknowledgment that there is a high capacity for things to exist and theoretically they're possible, but the actual linkages between things don't exist. Building those bridges and actualizing things that people think and conceive and have accepted should exist is part of it too.

GML: I really appreciate the through line that emerges; instead of thinking about engineering and design and creation in general as being about streamlining or optimizing an existing set of things in the world, you are instead trying to shift that locus towards seeing what isn't there and what could be there. What does that problem space look like that led you to come together as a collective in the first place?

Neesh Chaudhary: Max was a connection point for a lot of us joining together. For me, I worked on some curation with music that was our first product, Neosound, which was reflective of a lot of experiences we've had in the year. I did the Zora Hackathon in the summer and met Salief. We had an understanding because our project was about curation. In tandem I met Max online. I went to LA and I met him and Dain at a random Songcamp meet-up.

MB: That was the second day I moved to LA.

Javier Szyfer: I live in Argentina and I met Max through Developer DAO. We started bonding and talking about Zora and different scenes on Web3. We were talking about ideas for making music onchain which was the door to many aspects of the Web3 world, and specific to Public Assembly as well.

DBK: There's a pattern here. Max is no longer in LA either, because Max is an entity that is just this raw energy that gets channeled through whatever the physical infrastructure of the internet is and only appears in real life sometimes. I got connected to this concept through my position at Zora. I was a wild card. It's hard to figure out where Dain really belongs. I'm trying to learn a conventional product development flow in the context of a tech environment, but what I really care about is using the internet in the most exciting and positive way possible. It's just been really exciting to work with a group of people who feel an urgency to build and experiment and discover distribution models for our friends, for ourselves, for anybody.

MB: A quick bird's eye view: It's April. I meet Javier when I'm living in Buenos Aires. I also met also Astrosuka and Sofja of unun, who were also influential in the ideation that eventually led to Public Assembly. At some point, Joey DMs me on Twitter about my 100 days. We started our relationship there. I  then meet Dain, Neesh, Salief and Val similarly, right as I started at Zora. I met Salief in person in New York when I went to the Zora offices. I had talked with Val during the Metabolism Hackathon. I met Neesh in August when I first moved to LA. There was then this call to action to create what's missing in terms of products and in terms of this energy to collect people.

GML: Zooming out a bit, how would you position what you're doing against the existing models we have throughout culture and technology? If this is a different way of doing things, why is that difference necessary? How are the tried and tested formats or protocols not doing the job or falling short?

Joey Lim: One of the core experiences of modern life, at least in the Western world, is the acceptance of consumerism as the de facto state of being. This compounds into numerous tangential issues. For instance, the denial of the right to repair, which ultimately means, "Don't touch, just consume. Once you buy, just look at it, just use it, but don't expand the boundaries of what owning means.

This is where Public Assembly decides, if not us, who is not only going to protect, but also create new doors for people who are constantly restricted to being mere consumers. We want to ensure that everyone has a right to create in the most approachable ways possible. Were creating a way for people to understand that they can create. That could be through education videos that Val makes, or the work that Neesh and I do to inspire intrigue. We get people thinking, What is the connection being made? What is fueling the product designs and the decisions that we're making? Once we set the foundations for this intrigue, we have enough faith that people will take it in directions that make the most sense for them.

GML: It's not trying to present a finished, perfected model. It's about building this platform that others can iterate upon.

MB: Exactly

JL: We have no intentions of being a platform per se, but we want to provide an ideological jumping board so that people can actually test and play around with whatever actually interests them.

DBK: Repair is really salient in this context. Part of having individual and group agency is understanding how things are made. In an older era when there were physical, tangible objects in front of us, it was a little bit easier to understand. But in the world of network technology, everything is abstracted and far away from the consumer so it's hard to think about what it means to build things yourself. There's a really important thread there. We want the right to repair. I want to learn how to make this thing myself. The educational component is really important. We're rethinking what a product is. Maybe a product is actually a process and how you organically contribute to a larger space.

MB: Speaking to what Joey said about not really trying to build a platformI think we also need to make it wildly clear that we are just a team that is inside this greater entity that is Public Assembly. The seven of us are calling ourselves #FF89DE, which is a shout-out to the hex code for a specific shade of pink that was prominent on the Neosound website. We are just the team. To do what we're describing is a potential goal for Public Assembly as a whole. It's obviously not possible to do that with just one team calling the shots and making all these decisions. While we're instilling foundational value, energy, direction, we by no means want to be the eternal leaders.

NC: We provide these templates in the sense that we're giving the building blocks and resources for individuals to learn. They then create new artifacts, become more creative, and proliferate a new era of creation that's defined by having the resources that we're giving them. Eventually, we want them to move away from our templates. The templates are there for you to become self-sufficientfor both online and offline. To speak to our influences, we're indebted to DIY crafting, early internet era. That ideology is our spirit. Raised By The Internet art collective, Brockhampton. Those are all influences.

We Want To Set New Standards For What Thinking In ...