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93: Advocating for Accessibility with Mal · TezTalks Radio - Tezos Ecosystem Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Welcome to Testworks Radio.
• 0:01
  Speaker 1: I am Marissa True.
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: Today, I am joined by Malicious Sheep, otherwise known as Mal, a disabled and queer multidisciplinary artist who is also a photographer, a vocalist, a community scientist, community organizer and disability justice advocate.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: So hi Mal, how are you today?
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: I am fabulous.
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: How are you?
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: today?
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: I am fabulous.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: How are you?
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: I'm great, as is customary on this show.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: I'd love to better understand your origin story and how you ventured into blockchain, but also Tezos.
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: Of course.
• 0:32
  Speaker 2: So I spent a few years as a disability justice advocate as well as an environmental justice advocate, and did a lot of community organizing, picking up many a skill.
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: I was aware of crypto and blockchain for about a decade, but was under the misapprehension that I would need both a master's degree in finance and engineering in order to participate in it, but I was pleased to later find out that I was quite wrong and it was not at all necessary.
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: I concentrated my efforts on other passions, though following along occasionally.
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: I was introduced to Tezos by the lovely Mumu the Stan in September of 2021 through a music community that we bonded in, and I spent a whole month diving into every bit of research that I could get my hands on to learn all about the wallets, fundamentals, everything like that.
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: About a month later, I minted my very first piece October 12th 2021, with an aid from a drop from the at the time hen fountain, now Taya fountain.
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: As I had barriers to purchasing crypto, I had sold a few pieces with that.
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: I minted a few more and grew my collection and creations from that original seed funding.
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: I have never put anything in or cashed anything out as of yet.
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: After Hen was discontinued a month after I joined the space, I immediately jumped into the Hen community and Taya Discord to offer my services in any way that I could.
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: I had met and interacted daily with more people in that short month than I had in over a decade, so I wanted to contribute to what I saw was something incredible.
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: I began taking on tasks like building the Discord social media, contributing to the newsletter and documentation, researching a corporation, ideating lateral governance structures for the DAO, event planning, moderation, mediation.
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: I wore many hats I am the 20th, though chose not to officially become one of the multi-seg holders due to barriers and unique risks that I face personally that I did not want to impose on the community.
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: So I still wear many hats Tezzo's ecosystem fundraising coordinator, tea community organizer, artist support at Orange Cube on Bitcoin.
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: I could really use clones.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: Clones would be great it sounds like from the get-go.
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: The moment you really understood this community, you dove all in like there was absolutely no hesitation, and you spent a lot of your time rallying the tesla's art community across.
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: As you just listed multiple initiatives, what was the thing that got you so motivated to participate in such a rich way?
• 3:05
  Speaker 2: well going back backstory of mal.
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: At about 20 um, I rapidly declined physically due to an alphabet soup of conditions, many of which still remain undiagnosed after over 10 years of investigation.
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: I wasted from 185 pounds down to 125 in the course of a month.
• 3:26
  Speaker 2: I had been tested for everything from MS to brain tumors.
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: The stack is thick.
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: I became unable to care for myself or move on my own for almost 10 years without significant recovery time and a lot of pain, like a single specialist appointment could cause the need for several weeks of recovery.
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: There were no answers and therefore no resources or services made available to me.
• 3:49
  Speaker 2: Yet managing my symptoms and appointments became a full-time job.
• 3:53
  Speaker 2: The creators of the bureaucratic systems, institutions and public spaces never quite considered someone like me, with all of my complexity, as being a possibility in their design or procedures.
• 4:04
  Speaker 2: So I began focusing what little energy I had on disability, justice, environmental advocacy, advocating for the public, educating government officials, writing policy, trying to seek improvements for myself and those like me.
• 4:19
  Speaker 2: I brought my inherent intersectional lens and experience with me to advocate for those who could not make it into those spaces.
• 4:25
  Speaker 2: I brought those skills to Tezos.
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: I'm motivated to enable others.
• 4:30
  Speaker 2: It is my greatest joy to do so, because I had to create that for myself, and if I can be what I needed for someone else, I succeed.
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: So self-serving, hierarchical systems with little room for nuance and uniqueness that falls outside of the bell curve do not serve the complexity of the human experience, and so I will change that with my actions and my efforts.
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: Well, first of all, I'm sorry that you had to go through that.
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: That sounds like a horrific experience to you know, to go through so much and to also feel like there isn't enough resource or understanding to help you through that chapter in your life.
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: But it also sounds like you were very much wanting to take the bull by the horns and do whatever it was that you needed to do to not only take care of yourself but to make sure that no one else was sort of subjected to the position that you found yourself in, or at least to be better able to find the support.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: And I think it's very interesting that you brought that, I guess, activism to the digital space and to the Web3 space, which is sort of new and up and coming.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: What was it that made you think that you know these are critical issues that need to be addressed within these digital environments from the ground floor, because I think a lot of people, when they experiment with new technologies, they're not necessarily that aware of how the blueprints of this design are going to affect people much later on.
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: So what was it that made you think you know we need to get into the ground floor?
• 5:53
  Speaker 2: A lot of the traditional spaces don't have any sort of wiggle room when it comes to things like this.
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: They preserve rather than move forward in their own way.
• 6:07
  Speaker 2: I had this understanding that through my experience trying to navigate these systems outside when I came into Tezos, I could see that there was a willingness to create anything, and that could include things like the things that I needed.
• 6:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so I really think that there is room and there is that willingness within our ecosystem to create things that actually meet the needs of people where they are at, rather than trying to create for this imaginary average user, which doesn't actually exist.
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: We're all within a bell curve.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: So then, can you tell me a bit more about some of the initiatives you specifically organized when it comes to the Tezos community?
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: You know, like what are you currently working on and what are some of the past examples that you would say are perhaps your favorite?
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: well, I am currently working on things like.
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: I've been holding hosting spaces since september with the help of wonderful community volunteers who host the spaces to save us all from my terrible internet connection.
• 7:18
  Speaker 2: So we have like sonnet sunday, which is poetry, short stories, sunday, 9 pm eastern time, with b dwell mellow monday, which is Poetry, short Stories Sunday, 9 pm Eastern Time, with B Dwell Mellow Monday, which is Meditation, mindfulness and Mental Health, with Inza Moment on Tuesday, or sorry Mondays at 7 pm Eastern Time.
• 7:35
  Speaker 2: And Tezos Tea Tuesday, which is me serving as a newsreader with the lovely Papa Bearded talking all things, tezos and tools within the ecosystem at noon Eastern time.
• 7:46
  Speaker 2: I also occasionally host co-host spaces with Kevin Murabi for DeFi 101, contributing as a writer to the Tickle, which is 40 artists who, through smart contract, are sharing all of the proceeds from all of the artworks created equally, which is a very fun and fascinating experiment to do this past weekend.
• 8:13
  Speaker 2: And then currently in the charity research stage of Tez for Lebanon fundraiser to support our Tezos family that live there.
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: Also working on the TEA Equity DAO development onboarding volunteer curators to the TAEA community curation account.
• 8:27
  Speaker 2: I will likely work on more as I find inspiration or invitation, but some of my favorites have been the fundraising initiatives.
• 8:36
  Speaker 2: They are the most nourishing, I find, and I've helped to organize most of them within the Tezos ecosystem, always warmed by the generosity of the Tezos community members who do participate either as collectors or artists.
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: And yeah, I had a lot of fun with the Art for Artists Red Fawns last weekend.
• 8:56
  Speaker 2: It's still top of mind because it's just happened and it was one of the most extraordinary things that I think I've experienced in the way it has shifted people's perspective of what's possible is very invigorating.
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I love there's.
• 9:15
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of things.
• 9:16
  Speaker 2: I lose track sometimes.
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: You are very, very active in the community and I think what's also notable is that it's not within one specific domain.
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: I know that you know when I first introduced you it sounds like a lot of it is within the creative disciplines and the artist communities, but also you know DeFi as well.
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: So there's multiple pillars within this Tezos landscape that you've kind of gotten yourself immersed in, which means that you have a lot of exposure to all of the different communities that make up, I guess, like this macro Tezos population.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: So how would you describe the general sentiment of the communities within Tezos?
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: You know what they represent and what they stand for, and what would you say to someone who was curious or looking to join some of these communities?
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: Well, I have over 100 discords, so if someone is looking for a particular project, they can always DM me because I probably have the link.
• 10:10
  Speaker 2: I've had to prune some over the years, unfortunately, because my limit until recently was 100.
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: Most of the still active sub-community and project discords I do have access to, though there's things like photography through Fotes, mutual aid collectives, volunteer spaces, to name a few.
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: I generally spend about 14 to 18 hours a day managing various projects, providing peer support, working and lurking.
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: I think the general sentiment overall is gaining momentum.
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: After a long market downturn, there was a lot of burnout throughout the community, myself included.
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: There was a period of recovery that needed to take place over the past year or so.
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: Generally, there's a low hum of frustration about the limited supports and initiatives from more institutional powers in the space, but there has been positive movements in that direction, which I'm glad for, but unfortunately many valuable community members have left due to this.
• 11:07
  Speaker 2: Over the years, those who have remained, even in reduced capacity, have been quietly building deepening connections, collaborating outside of the noise of market highs.
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: The people who have remained are here because they believe in Tezos, and that's the group that are here because they believe in Tezos, and that's the group that is very core to what Tezos is all about.
• 11:30
  Speaker 2: There's now a bubbling of activity that's giving me a similar impression when I came in in late 2021 and early 2022, where there's a lot of grassroots onboarding going on in spaces, in DMs, group chats are popping up every week.
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: Everyone's teaching each other about you know the new apps that are being launched in the space Etherlink.
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: You know teaching each other about DeFi, because that was one thing a lot of the artist community kind of tuned out on in the last full run because they just simply did not have time to take any of that in and felt like they were unable to learn it, which isn't true.
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: It's just something that can be more challenging.
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: But in the quiet to lead up to this build, I think is a good opportunity for that grassroots education to take place.
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: We also have new tools and apps being launched right now which are kind of changing the game.
• 12:26
  Speaker 2: I think the one particular note is DeFi apps like Tezfin, which I think will really aid in retaining the liquidity in the ecosystem that had nowhere else to go in 2021.
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: So I believe we are more set up for success than we were, but it is going to take everyone pitching in in their own way to what inspires them within the community to make it thrive, and a consistent and predictable funding pattern wouldn't hurt either.
• 12:50
  Speaker 2: I am going to be working on a tesla's research guide which I hope to release next year sometime to hopefully help with that on board.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: Um, but yeah, yeah, that's where I think we're at right now so it sounds like not only were there all of the grassroots community that sort of emerged when the Tezos art community really exploded in 2021, but that now sounds like there's a lot more cross-pollination against the different domains, because I would say that I guess the NFT art space and DeFi were traditionally sort of worlds apart, but now that we're sort of seeing people interact across these fields is really interesting, because I think it's really kind of creating a more integrated body of people who who live on Tezos.
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: But then to pivot the conversation slightly and to look more towards your own creative work and, like you, like I said, you span multiple disciplines Can you tell me a little bit more about your artwork and what inspires you?
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah, sure, and I do agree with what you're saying with like that cross-pollination From my in my brain, I see devs, defi and artists as like three distinct groups that have had to learn each other's language, and I think we're getting closer, I think we're getting there, I'm hopeful, but yes, so my stuff, which I have a difficult time reminding myself to talk about my own stuff I've worked in pretty much every medium that you could probably imagine, from drawing, painting, sculpture, mixed media, assemblage, fiber, digital sound, time-based written forms, metal work, dance, performance.
• 14:22
  Speaker 2: The only exception is code-based, but I do plan to remedy that with time.
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: I'm planning to learn how to code this year so that I can contribute to the TESOS ecosystem.
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: I am inspired by nature mostly and the complex systems therein of fauna, flora and fungi and how interdependent systems emerge within that and how that relates to humanity and systems of equity.
• 14:49
  Speaker 2: I love biomimetics and seeking textures and palettes that speak to sensations, usually things that in the moment are reflecting, perhaps like one of my multiple pain disorders or other symptoms that I'm experiencing and to reflect on other patterns that I see within the broader world.
• 15:06
  Speaker 2: My photography is unstaged and unedited, without artificial lighting.
• 15:12
  Speaker 2: I explore very slowly through nature to find hidden moments that would otherwise be overlooked.
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: I had switched to photography for accessibility after I developed hand tremors as one of my symptoms and I did not feel precise enough in my painting work at the time to be satisfied and as a means to rebuild my body after that decade of rapid, then stabilized, decline, I went out every day with my camera for as long as my body would tolerate photograph my world.
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: When.
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: I hit my limit.
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: I would sit down on the ground for about 15 minutes, then head back in and research everything that I could photograph for the day.
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: So mix in science and art always.
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: And I slowly crafted a permaculture organic garden to nurture native species, create an interdependent space to photograph and learn from.
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: I built it all up in layers of mini biomes, places to sit and walk that were accessible.
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: Dozens of extirpated species returned, which I was able to identify, a document, which was cool.
• 16:10
  Speaker 2: I think the fact that I move so slowly helps as a photographer, first due to the fact that I noticed things that I would otherwise miss if I was walking in a fast clip, but second because none of the wildlife around seemed to see me as a threat, so I can get some pretty cool photos.
• 16:23
  Speaker 2: I have a banded tree of about 45 chickadees that I'm really friendly with.
• 16:28
  Speaker 2: They ride around on my shoulders in the winter and in the summer they feed on invasive species in the gardens.
• 16:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I feel like for me it was really transformational to kind of get back into it, and I have since started painting again, having more confidence in myself and not trying necessarily to hide my tremors, which I still have in my photographs.
• 16:55
  Speaker 2: It takes me a while to get a nice clear, crisp image.
• 16:59
  Speaker 2: My friend, joshua K Flynn, was talking to me about my tremors and asked you know well, if you have tremors like, why can't I see these in your work?
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: And I realized I was hiding them.
• 17:11
  Speaker 2: So I immediately took that as a direction to go out and photograph the moon and just let my hand tremors fly.
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: So I did make a series called Moon Tremor where you can see the effect of said hand tremors.
• 17:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of my work is reflective of, as I was mentioning before, like what I'm experiencing and what I want to share, but also investigating things like time decay, sexuality, disability through symptom hemometics.
• 17:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's so many, so many elements I feel like I need to talk about.
• 17:44
  Speaker 2: But yeah, I mean I think you should.
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: I should write an essay.
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: I think you definitely should promote and also just yeah, definitely explain your art more.
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: I think the common thread that sticks out to me is that the way you do one thing is the way you do all things, which is to just dive in headfirst and experiment across a multitude of disciplines and then sort of figure out your taste, your preferences and what you want to use that domain for, because from the way you've sort of involved yourself within the blockchain art community and then expanded outwards, is sort of how you ventured into similar to how you ventured into your creative disciplines, which is to span every creative medium and then sort of identify what you want to express and how best you want to express it, based on what you've taught yourself so far, especially given you know coding is next up on the docket for you.
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: I love the sentiment of basically you know understanding your own symptoms and how they impact your work and then shifting from this attempt to conceal them but to also see how it actually might influence the output.
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: And from studying your website, I saw that you know you focused on the intersectionality between like STEM arts, equity experience.
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: How does that physically convey itself through your work and also why do you think it's so important to represent these themes and topics to blockchain-driven communities?
• 19:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so I like to experiment a lot.
• 19:16
  Speaker 2: All a part of the natural world.
• 19:18
  Speaker 2: We're not separate from it, we're an interdependent element within it.
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: As a society, we like to imagine that we're outside of it and its systems, that force and power can somehow bend it to our will, but nature will take it back over.
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: Patterns emerge in nature that are adopted by people to solve many of the most difficult needs and strategies of our time, but they're often reduced to a shallow and sterile representation rather than an expression that actually embraces the complexity and nuance that exists with everything within nature.
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: Societally and structurally, I think we've tapped in too much with this myth of the binary within this myth of hierarchy, the myth of individualism which has dominated every facet of our experience for centuries.
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: The possibilities of our cultural and creative pursuits have been diminished because of entire modes and layers of our understanding of the world.
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: The universe and our place within it are foreign to us due to this structural siloing and a reductive, categorized mindset of you know, one or the other, us and them, ones and zeros, not to say that duality doesn't exist.
• 20:31
  Speaker 2: But the richness of reality is lost to this reductive mindset and I exist in the in-between, at the edge of the bell curve.
• 20:40
  Speaker 2: I experience being a part of and apart from many identities and spaces.
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: Constantly, I am multitudes and singularly unique simultaneously.
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: I am multitudes and singularly unique simultaneously.
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: This is where I love to explore creatively.
• 20:55
  Speaker 2: I exist within the collision where worlds meet and blend, and I find really interesting things occur there, and my approach to creative expression has sought to explore this collision since I was a child, mixing mediums to create new meaning or discover new paths of thought.
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: And, I think, binary thinking, hierarchical structures, individualism.
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: I think these have reached the limit of their benefit, though it could be easily argued that the benefit was only ever designed for a few, and those that think they benefit from it are also harmed unconsciously.
• 21:29
  Speaker 2: We have quantum computing at our fingertips, which inherently rejects the binary.
• 21:34
  Speaker 2: We have lateral structures emerging TEA is a prime example of such a seedling.
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: We have community-driven mutual aid, which has always been employed to fill the gaps created by neglect and exploitation for profit, and I think blockchain spaces are fertile ground for the mycelial networks that are decentralized, global collisions of ideas and will allow us to collectively utilize all of this information that has been siloed and excluded, the knowledges and intersectional experiences that will help us to create the richness that nature shows us is actually possible.
• 22:12
  Speaker 2: A truly interdependent, nimble, fluid and balanced landscape is possible that can benefit all.
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: I think blockchain is going to change that for us.
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: I guess one of the concerns that has always been that, yes, we have this extremely complex sort of digital landscape and I I've always loved the parallel with the mycelial network of all these interdependencies, but also this distribution of power and roles and energy, but at the same time, when we map current systems onto that new technology, often we end ourselves like end up sort of in the same boat where we started with, where we take a system that is so much more versatile than one we've established elsewhere and then replicated it or forced it to conform to, I guess, the ways we behave and, to use your term, in a binary fashion.
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: How do you think these technologies can kind of break out of that paradigm and to actually make this change into something that's more broader, more expansive and more varied?
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: I think for a lot of the challenge comes in with the fact that institutions really do not like change, and because we've been trained under these institutions from birth, we like the.
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: But the great thing about these spaces and these technologies is that the people who are adopting them first are those who are already thinking outside of the box, who have a drive to create something new and to experiment, and because of that, that drives change forward.
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: That drives change forward when it comes to having spent a lot of time within institutions outside of blockchain.
• 23:58
  Speaker 2: They don't like change, particularly change that recognizes systemic neglect or the attempts to repair inequity.
• 24:05
  Speaker 2: They're often very slow to adapt or adopt new technologies or social changes If it does not benefit the narrative through line that that institution in particular enshrines and then, collectively, they all hold the line that they are enshrining.
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: They don't like to lead, they like to preserve.
• 24:24
  Speaker 2: Blockchain communities, in contrast, can lead by example and with, as I was saying before, like that creative mindset, that exploratory tapping into new expanses of thought, merging these silos, like we've seen over the past few years, we've got a global population of creatives, devs, defi and artists all collectively working together on a single chain.
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: All collectively working together on a single chain and then that spread out over multiple chains, the cross-pollination that occurs between all of those.
• 24:55
  Speaker 2: There's less room for a hierarchy.
• 25:02
  Speaker 2: It is more like a permaculture organic garden in my mind.
• 25:05
  Speaker 2: It's like all of these different elements you know, like it's not going to function properly unless you have all of these varied components within it.
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: I feel like a lot in traditional spaces as well.
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: There are individuals in those spaces who are quite interested in adapting and changing things, but they are unfortunately prevented or suppressed either by lack of profit, funding, social pressure from the hierarchy or apathy you know there's.
• 25:33
  Speaker 2: I feel like one of the biggest challenges that is being faced within is, I want to say, systemic ableism actually, and through that, ignorance with the ways in which we are approaching technology within traditional spaces and how, within these new spaces, there is room for that to be dismantled and then for those communities in particular to flourish, which then benefits everyone.
• 26:00
  Speaker 2: Most technology has been designed specifically for disabled people, like touchscreens, closed captions, but they're usually the last to find the benefit of that, unfortunately, because it's not profitable.
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: But in this space we can rally together with our labor and our time and find financing through, you know, project launches and all this good stuff.
• 26:25
  Speaker 2: So there's ways to work around those traditional structures that may otherwise hinder progress for vulnerable communities, who are often suppressed.
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: I feel like I've answered your question.
• 26:39
  Speaker 2: I'm not sure.
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: No, you definitely have, which leads me very tidily into the next and also, in the interest of time, unfortunately has to be one of our last ones, but I think this is very much due a follow-up conversation at another date.
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: But the last question I really want to ask you is how can we make the blockchain community space that much more inclusive for disabled people?
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: Because I agree with you that technology has, like could be perfectly designed but, for whatever reason, doesn't necessarily advantage disabled communities as much as it could.
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: So how do we change that, especially within the Web3 space?
• 27:17
  Speaker 2: So my experience as a disabled person because I am a kind artist, which is spelled C-I-N-D, which stands for chronically ill, immunocompromised, neurodivergent and disabled I am all of those.
• 27:29
  Speaker 2: I've been quarantined for five years.
• 27:30
  Speaker 2: I have many conditions, there's lots going on, but as a disabled creative and participant within the space, I have found unbridled willingness to solve for some of the issues that I've faced elsewhere and that I know other creatives face elsewhere.
• 27:46
  Speaker 2: Unfortunately, for centuries, most people have not interacted with disabled people, knowingly or otherwise, because they were kept home or taken away to an institution.
• 27:57
  Speaker 2: They were never seen, or people hid their disabilities from others for fear of, you know, being shamed or facing some sort of systemic issue from either culturally, societally or institutionally Engineers, developers, other professionals.
• 28:13
  Speaker 2: They're simply not taught how to think about or to solve for access needs while they're in school without taking specialized courses.
• 28:20
  Speaker 2: But blockchain communities.
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: There is such a willingness to learn and excitement because you're interacting with people one-on-one or as a group.
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: There are your community members, tezos.
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: Folks consider most of us anyway, consider each other like a weird, awkward little family.
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: We want to help each other.
• 28:39
  Speaker 2: So there's this, you know adaptation and learning.
• 28:47
  Speaker 2: That happens.
• 28:47
  Speaker 2: There's this grassroots element of mutual aid, where you know new ideas and collaborative effort that sets the space apart from others can really drive that forward.
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: When, like at TEA for example, I have a condition called migraine, I have three types of migraine that I experience.
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: I know many folks who also have migraine or vertigo or epilepsy.
• 29:12
  Speaker 2: So one of the initiatives that I was poking the devs to help me with was to allow for photosensitive tags and not safe for work tags when minting.
• 29:23
  Speaker 2: So not safe for work would be like violent, sexual or traumatic themes.
• 29:27
  Speaker 2: So not safer work would be like violent, sexual or traumatic themes.
• 29:28
  Speaker 2: And photosensitive would be undulating, flashing or high contrast, in order to help protect community members who have conditions like CPTSD or PTSD or migraine, vertical or epilepsy.
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: This allows for users to safely access the site and can easily be adjusted in the preferences in their settings.
• 29:48
  Speaker 2: You, you don't have those conditions, that's great, but it allows for people who do to have a safe experience.
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: So that that was taken on very happily.
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: Go ahead, go ahead no, I was going to say so.
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: It basically starts out with just the willingness to hear out the different needs and requirements of those that are just differently abled, disabled, what have you and accommodate I?
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: I mean.
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: Basically it just starts with listening, doesn't it, and understanding the issue at hand, and then finding the direct solve for those things With equipment we're all very much in possession of and technologies we very much have at our fingertips.
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: So it's not an impossible task.
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: It just requires the open and conscious willingness to do it.
• 30:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, and, like one of our team members actually took this on, synkitty came up with a document for it's a digital accessibility guide for the Tezos ecosystem, which is, you know, freely available to help developers and community organizers think about ways that UX, ui design may better benefit the disabled community or the kind community more broadly, which will then also benefit everybody else, make things more easy to understand and more accessible overall.
• 31:03
  Speaker 2: And yeah, she took in a whole bunch of contributions from disabled community members within the ecosystem and developed this, I believe, in early 2022.
• 31:13
  Speaker 2: But, yeah, it's taking the time to really recognize that that average user doesn't actually exist and that many, particularly in the space, exist on the edges of the bell curve.
• 31:25
  Speaker 2: Recognizing that it's a great first step in considering that these needs might exist.
• 31:33
  Speaker 2: Hiring disabled advisors is helpful.
• 31:36
  Speaker 2: Disabled creatives to guide is also critically important.
• 31:40
  Speaker 2: Listening to the needs, as you were saying, and the kind community already experiences hundreds of barriers in their daily life.
• 31:47
  Speaker 2: They are deserving of access to spaces, especially those that boast reaching past the status quo.
• 31:53
  Speaker 2: But I think everybody who is in that space, like within Testos, is really willing to make that happen, which I think is great.
• 32:00
  Speaker 2: So I feel like if we are recreating the same systems and institutional spaces that we're trying to break free from.
• 32:09
  Speaker 2: We're not doing the blockchain or this ecosystem or this community, any sort of justice that facilitate scam culture, which impacts disabled people in particular in three ways First, as victim, through vulnerability and exploitation.
• 32:38
  Speaker 2: Second, as imitated by scammers to create more victims.
• 32:44
  Speaker 2: And third, then disregarded or dismissed or even degraded in their identity and seen as a scammer.
• 33:08
  Speaker 2: For these inequities and these imbalances, creating as a kind artist takes time.
• 33:15
  Speaker 2: The process is often interrupted due to symptom flare or opportunity missed for the same or the lack of an accessibility plan for participation or the lack of an accessibility plan for participation.
• 33:34
  Speaker 2: The conservative estimate of the number of disabled people globally is 20%, and I say conservative because of the number of conditions that aren't polled for and those not counted because they hide their conditions for fear of systemic and social mistreatment or abuse.
• 33:44
  Speaker 2: That's one-fifth of the population who could otherwise participate.
• 33:49
  Speaker 2: The kind community is not inherently disabled.
• 33:53
  Speaker 2: Rather, they are made to be disabled by the institutions, systems and society that is not designed to enable them.
• 33:59
  Speaker 2: The opposite of disabled is not able, it is enable.
• 34:04
  Speaker 2: And if we are enabled and our access needs are met, then we thrive.
• 34:08
  Speaker 2: Take glasses, for example.
• 34:23
  Speaker 2: Everyone who needs glasses is disabled.
• 34:24
  Speaker 2: Without them take my parents, for example would not be able to drive or work or feed themselves or do self-care safely, but their access need is so a constellation of needs that will help that individual thrive and it only takes a bit of creative thinking in order to solve those.
• 34:35
  Speaker 2: And we are blessed with a whole bunch of creative thinkers in our space.
• 34:38
  Speaker 2: In Tezos.
• 34:40
  Speaker 2: There is a unique opportunity to lead in an equity-minded effort, in contrast to other blockchains, institutional focus on projects and initiatives that seek the same demographics over and over again that have already been tapped.
• 34:56
  Speaker 2: Hoping for new interest is not going to bring new folks in.
• 35:00
  Speaker 2: A lack of predictable funding for development will also not bring that leading edge that could set Tezos apart in new ways will also not bring that leading edge that could set Tezos apart in new ways.
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: I feel like we need to shift our focus to build on the strengths that we have already tapping into the unique demographic that we have, the beautiful community that has all of this grassroots power that bring unique, original problem-solving and creative skills that are needed as blockchain transforms this world and yeah, I think it's very eloquently expressed and I think the crux of it comes down to we have the opportunity to really correct the course here, to not only, you know, provide, I guess, able bodied people with even more opportunity, but understanding that, you know, disabled populations can thrive when given the right solutions, and that these don't have to be barriers or kind of perpetual friction points that everyone has to kind of work around.
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: So I think it's a really, I think it's a really important mission.
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: Zooming outwards a bit, and I guess my closing question for you is what's coming up in the year ahead?
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: I know you mentioned that you are, you're vowing to take up coding, but what else is on the horizon in terms of what you want to work on?
• 36:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so many things.
• 36:27
  Speaker 2: I have taken up painting again, I am recording original music, I am writing poetry and performing that.
• 36:37
  Speaker 2: I'm creating a whole host of new work.
• 36:39
  Speaker 2: I have a project list of 150 for lost time with that 10 years.
• 36:43
  Speaker 2: And also I'm going to be perpetually in isolation, as far as I can tell, for the rest of my life.
• 36:57
  Speaker 2: So I can organize in this way.
• 36:59
  Speaker 2: I think podcasting and character voice work is going to be interesting as well.
• 37:04
  Speaker 2: I can sing and do multiple voices, which is always fun.
• 37:12
  Speaker 2: And obviously continuing my multifaceted efforts in Tezos, serving as artist support, among other things, at the Erdős Ingvalli Orange Cube on Bitcoin, ordinal space, writing and self-publishing some books of many genre and theme.
• 37:30
  Speaker 2: I'm working on my self-portrait for the People of Tezos initiative, which will be a first Doing some larger multimedia series on Canvas, becoming, as you were saying, as proficient in coding as possible so that I can create some of the app and tool ideas that I've had over the years.
• 37:52
  Speaker 2: You know all tentative steps as I slowly work my way towards my dream of founding a non-profit, multidisciplinary STEM residency that is fully accessible, self-sustaining and cross-pollinating.
• 38:10
  Speaker 2: In the year before the first COVID lockdown, two things happened.
• 38:13
  Speaker 2: I was finally diagnosed as immunodeficient, which was very much a happy accident and likely why I'm still here.
• 38:22
  Speaker 2: I had a year-old start in learning how to be safe, diving into immune-related research papers, but I also became the full-time palliative caregiver to my nan for almost four years and, as I was exploring and organizing in Texas, I was also taking care of my nan.
• 38:40
  Speaker 2: She was with me every day until she died late last year and she would always ask about how are your internet friends doing?
• 38:50
  Speaker 2: She'd always want to know how everything's going, which was great, so I always had something new to tell her each day.
• 38:59
  Speaker 2: But I am settled into my new reality without her.
• 39:03
  Speaker 2: I am motivated to do what I missed out on in my 10 years of incapacitation and what I didn't have time for while caring for Dan.
• 39:13
  Speaker 2: I often feel like I am catching up for a lost time, but I think it was all needed for my alchemy.
• 39:22
  Speaker 2: I am looking forward to what comes next and accessing community, which I never had.
• 39:27
  Speaker 2: Forward to what comes next and accessing community, which I'd never had access to before.
• 39:32
  Speaker 2: Before the lockdown happened, I did not have a community and I do want to do everything that I can to enable it.
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it's a beautiful story and I should have known when I asked the question that the list of what you want to work on is equally, if not even longer, than everything you've already done up to this point.
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: So you've got so much to keep yourself busy with and I'm glad you know your your community of internet friends, as your nan would have said are kind of there to back you through every step.
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: But it's been amazing to hear your perspectives today.
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: I think it's one that's not often heard and that we need to make a more proactive point of representing in this space.
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: So you know, firstly, thank you for being such a an eloquent spokesperson and thank you for all the work that you do.
• 40:31
  Speaker 2: I appreciate that and I thank you very much for inviting me, and I have listened to your podcasts previously, so I have enjoyed myself a lot.
• 40:44
  Speaker 2: Your questions were wonderful and very stimulating stimulating, and I'm grateful to you I appreciate that.
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: I'm sure we're going to have another conversation farther down the line where we'll get to catch up on all your projects, but until then, thank you.
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: We'll chat again soon that's good.