higher is a brilliant group of intelligent and creative people. There is no shortage of talent amidst the network and committed contributors continue to create new value and experiment to collective benefit.
In this series of essays, I am going to examine some challenges, and reframe them as an opportunity to come together and evolve our approach.
In this essay, I want to explain how I see higher's core offering as distributing genius, as opposed to what people have been referring to as "being a Headless Brand".
It's going to be useful because, as a genius once said:
"Problems cannot be solved with the same mind set that created them." - Albert Einstein
Higher is Not a Headless Brand
I dislike the label "headless brand". The word 'headless' brings to mind a body without a brain and no clear direction. To try and build a brand or propagate a meme with nobody playing host to any form of idea, action, or direction is frankly ridiculous.
Thankfully, this isn't what's happening or has been happening with Higher. A more accurate framing is that Higher is something that is being collectively discovered by many heads, with many feet on the ground, and multiple directions being travelled in at once.
Examples of bodies that are publicly and actively using their heads and putting their feet to the ground in the name of Higher are Chic Bangs, Catra, Nishu, Colfax, Jpegpowell, JR, and Sonya, to name just a few.
Put simply, Higher is not headless, it has many heads.
In contrast to your regular memecoin or company where phrases such as "dev do something" and "the buck stops with him/her" can be expected, Higher distributes the power to create a vision for what higher should be and invites you to do something about it.
In other words, the buck stops with all of us, including you.
This framework for thinking about Higher provides enormous freedom as well as a network of potential collaborators (other heads).
Combine this with a financial primitive that can accrue value through network effects, and you have a financial incentive to utilise that freedom and collaborate.
These unique conditions are fertile ground for birthing both individual geniuses and collective genius, in an entirely new way.
The Birth of Genius
A genius talks the talk and walks the walk.
Firstly, I want to acknowledge that Apple has somewhat ruined the word genius in recent years. Before Apple commodified the word "genius," it held significant weight.
While not always accurately applied, it has often been used to describe people who stand out and innovate in ways that have a lasting impact.
If you look across the Higher ecosystem, you may recognise many such geniuses.
Simultaneously, the word "genius" alone cannot accurately describe what exactly a person stands out for or their impact.
What can be defined is that "genius" is associated with intellectual ability and creative productivity.
Importantly, they not only think and reason well, but they are also able to manifest and realize their visions. A genius talks the talk and walks the walk.
This, however, is still a relatively shallow way of understanding what genius is and how it comes about. To isolate the individual is to misapprehend the reality we live in. The truth is that genius relies on people to sharpen and refine ideas, to be inspired to explore new territories, and even for novel ideas.
Though we usually only hear about geniuses that have been elevated to stardom, it would be silly to think that they always acted alone.
The more probable explanation is that genius is something that flows through a network of people via their passion for a question or area of exploration, and that the people we remember are simply the ones who were recognised as having made an impact. Importantly, all the other nodes in the network are indispensable if we want that genius.
Legendary music producer Brian Eno call's this phenomena Scenius and put it like this:
Like all art students, I was encouraged to believe that there were a few great figures like Picasso and Kandinsky, Rembrandt and Giotto and so on who sort-of appeared out of nowhere and produced artistic revolution.
As I looked at art more and more, I discovered that that wasn’t really a true picture. What really happened was that there were sometimes very fertile scenes involving lots and lots of people – some of them artists, some of them collectors, some of them curators, thinkers, theorists, people who were fashionable and knew what the hip things were – all sorts of people who created a kind of ecology of talent. And out of that ecology arose some wonderful work.
Although great new ideas are usually articulated by individuals, they’re nearly always generated by communities.
The key idea here is that scenes generate that which we recognise as genius.
Whilst some have suggested that Higher needs a singular leader in order to solve the problem of a lack of coordination and generate value, it is my belief that this solution would destroy the core offering of Higher.
It is the very absence of a singular authority that creates the conditions that birth genius.
Importantly, the birth of genius relies on engagement, communication, and collaboration.
There has to be active interaction between scene participants.
Scenes distribute genius and I believe that distributing genius is Higher's core offering.
How it happens
The birth of genius is possible because scenes explore open questions together but without a recognised sole leader. Healthy scenes collaborate with one another, allowing genius to arise.
For example:
Not one artist that was experimenting in the time of Cubism knew what exactly they'd eventually land on, they simply had a way of seeing that guided each of a their own individual practices.
For the Cubists, reality was misrepresented by the artworks of the time - their way of seeing was more dynamic than the average artist in that they wanted to present more than a single point of view.
As a result, their cultural practice became: to explore new ways to depict space and form within a picture plane.
The problem that they found opportunity in was that paintings up until that point presented only a singular perspective when in reality objects exist within multiple perspectives.
The opportunity was to pioneer new ways in which they could represent the dynamic and multifaceted experience of reality.
The question they were asking was: how do I present multi-perspectival reality on the canvas?
This exploration, enlivened by conversations and collaboration, was their scene.
That scene birthed(and distributed) genius.
Higher as a scene
In higher's case, LGHT described a way of perceiving reality consciously through the lens of higher.
In doing so he pointed to the potential for a decoupling of perception from token price.
It's immediate resonance demonstrated a shared understanding of the phenomena even if it hadn't been fully articulated.
To articulate what was being pointed to: it is possible to separate how we perceive things as if price were higher even when price is not.
It is in this way of seeing that we find both the problem and the opportunity for the higher scene:
higher's cultural practice is: to explore new ways of seeing and feeling higher irrespective of market action.
The problem that higher finds it's opportunity in is that token price can influence ones perception of reality, even whilst it's fundamental qualities remain the same.
The opportunity is to pioneer new ways to go beyond emotional reactions to token price and encourage continued seeing and feeling higher irrespective of market action.
The question the higher scene is asking is: How do you perceive reality in the same way as you do when price is higher even when price is not?
This exploration, enlivened now by conversations and collaboration, and a community token, is the scene.
The types of genius higher is distributing are a result of these conditions.
In Summary:
Higher is not a headless brand.
Scenes distribute genius.
Higher is a scene.
