The crypto world has had a tough summer. The prices of bitcoin and etherium have plummeted in recent months. The NFT craze has cooled after the market was flooded with low-quality projects and scams. And regulators have begun cracking down on a number of crypto companies that have allegedly engaged in questionable behavior and potential fraud.
FWB Fest in Idyllwild was crypto’s Woodstock
Despite this dim view, more than 500 people recently took over the campus of Idyllwild Arts Academy, a private arts boarding school in Idyllwild, California, for a weekend festival that local media deemed “the crypt Woodstock.”
The event was called FWB Fest, and the artists, writers, musicians, software engineers, start-up founders and creatives who gathered were all united through their membership in Friends With Benefits, a crypto-based online social club that you have to buy a token to join with.
At FWB Fest, crypto’s downturn was welcomed. “I don’t think this festival would have worked six months ago,” said Alex Zhang, 26, one of Friends With Benefits’ leaders and an event organizer.
The people at FWB Fest weren’t the typical crypto conference attendees who fly between Miami and San Francisco. Many were working artists or creative professionals. They were there because they believe that the blockchain, crypto’s underlying technology, can be used to build a better world through community and decentralization.
“What’s happening on a larger level,” Yancey Strickler, the former co-founder and CEO of Kickstarter, told a room of other attendees during a session titled “Beyond Crypto,” “is that we’ve had decades of extreme and increasing individualism as the primary value, where each one of us is expected to stand on our own … but now we recognize the hollowness of that, and the loneliness of that, and the laugh.”
“I think we’re all getting our sea legs after decades of neoliberal market brain individualism,” said Austin Robey, a Friends With Benefits member and co-founder, with Strickler, of Metalabel, a platform that provides tools for online collectives.
While the public image of the crypto world has largely been defined by a brand of hyper-capitalist libertarian individualism, participants at the FWB sought to use the crash to usher in a different, more inclusive techno-utopia centered on community and creativity.
“Crypto is obviously divisive, and there’s a lot of language and tools we’re comfortable using that don’t translate into the mainstream,” said one attendee. “But how we’re going to have a greater positive impact on more people’s material lives is by building tools on public accounts that aren’t hyper-funded.”
A $100 million group chat
In 2020, entrepreneur and artist Trevor McFedries began exploring how to bring a more mainstream audience to crypto. He had long been at the forefront of art and technology, having built a company that created the first virtual influencer, but after the pandemic he began to delve into the world of Web3, the broad and somewhat fluid term that acts as an abbreviation for a new type of internet that is built on decentralized blockchains. While Web 2.0, the current iteration of the web, is defined by a handful of large technology companies that own and control user content and data, proponents of Web3 see decentralized systems leading to more egalitarian ownership.
In a single weekend, McFedries created a specialized cryptocurrency token and sent it around to his friends in the music, art, design and technology worlds as well as a few Twitter followers.
The “FWB” token gave them access to a Discord community called Friends With Benefits. The community operates as a DAO, or “decentralized autonomous organization,” which is basically a blockchain-based collaboration where each token holder owns a stake in the organization.
In the two years since, Friends With Benefits has taken off. Fueled by the crypto boom, the group chat grew into a full-fledged online social club, generating media attention and attracting thousands of high-profile members, including celebrities and music artists such as Erykah Badu and Azealia Banks.
As the organization scaled, the price to buy a token to gain membership grew, at one point reaching $175 for a single token. Last year, Friends With Benefits raised $10 million from investors including venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz in a funding round that valued it at $100 million.
The group used the funding in part to expand offline. It hosted events and parties in Los Angeles, Miami and New York, increasing its cultural footprint. At one point, the group discussed a futuristic dream of one day taking over a defunct liberal arts college and hosting a festival. When it was discovered that a friend of a friend was working in admissions at the art academy, after some negotiations with the school and local city representatives, FWB organizers landed the spot, and FWB Fest was born.
Crypto-utopia in the forest
Throughout the weekend, Idyllwild Arts Academy was transformed into a utopian summer camp where discussion groups and conversations throughout the day on topics such as “Social Justice and Web3” and “Where do NFTs go from here?” gave way to evening performances by musicians including Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of the anarchist feminist group Pussy Riot, experimental electronic music producer Oneohtrix Point Never and rapper JPEGMAFIA. James Blake played a piano set.
There was a natural vineyard, ambient sound baths where participants could sip mushroom tea, late-night stargazing and a pool party. Andrea Hernandez, founder of the Snaxshot newsletter, which has become an oracle in the food and beverage world for its ability to spot upcoming products before they hit grocery store shelves, curated a custom snack booth and NFT marketplace OpenSea collaborated on a digital art gallery.
Throughout the weekend, directors Adam Faze and Ari Cagan hunted down contestants for interviews for an upcoming reality show backed by Mad Realities, a web3-oriented production company, based at the festival.
However, outside of the conversations, the topic of crypto seemed secondary, if it was mentioned at all.
Greg Bresnitz, director of cities and events for the FWB, said that was on purpose. The FWB, he said, was really about “using Web3 as a coordinating mechanism for culture.” “The last two years [crypto] has been at the forefront,” he added, “and now with the crash it’s receding into the background.”
Other attendees agreed. “There are a lot of people here who are relatively new to web3 but are really interested in culture, and that’s their entry point to FWB,” said Cherie Hu, founder and publisher of Water & Music, an independent newsletter and research DAO focused on music and technology. “I haven’t even heard a lot of buzzwords or people talking about crypto in the corner,” said Patrick McDermott, an artist in Los Angeles.
Due to the serendipitous nature of its founding, Friends With Benefits never started with a mission statement or business plan. “It started as a scene,” Zhang said. “Most people who are part of a scene can’t recite the mission statement of a scene.” During a session on the second day of the festival, members brainstormed how to expand the FWB into new endeavors, whether it was product launches or another festival.
Everything about FWB Fest was organized in collaboration with FWB Discord members. “The community is full of people who work in different industries, so when we do events we try to hire from the community,” McFedries said.
Zhang said he thinks of Friends With Benefits as a city. “New York City, for example, puts on festivals,” he said. “There are also restaurants, museums, parks, etc. FWB feels less like a company and at this stage, and more like a small town that has a vibe.”
Despite the recent downturn in the crypto market, everyone at FWB Fest remained steadfast in their dedication to using blockchain, crypto’s underlying technology, and said they hope FWB’s success will usher in a new era of web3, built around community and inclusion.
“We’re trying to build while we can before big terrible companies come and ruin it for everyone,” said Joshua Eustis, a music artist known as Telefon Tel Aviv. “Capitalism is superimposed on our way of life and our financial system, and the fact that web3 is currently woefully inadequate to correct for that is not reason enough for us to abdicate our responsibility for shaping it in its early state.”
“If we don’t,” he said, “there will be a hole later and we’ll have to use it.”
