#50: Building Non-Linearly With Flowcast 🌊 🌱
Let Your Thoughts Flow Into Your Onchain Brain 🧠 🔗 ✨
News This Week - Flowcast is Live 🌊 ✨
Let your thoughts flow onchain with Flowcast, an immutable journal for mindfully building your onchain brain 🌊 🧠 🔗
Flow. Reflect. Mint. Repeat.
You can read more about Flowcast on the home page FAQ. Let me know if you have any questions 🫡
It's incredibly surreal to me that I am able to share this screenshot of my Flowcast Genesis note 🌊 😌 This note was minted onto blockchain on June 11, 2024. The full note may be found here.
I've been working on this Flowcast idea for over two years, with the initial idea beginning back in 2020 when I read the book: Finding Flow - Psychological Engagement With Everyday Life by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
"It's a note-taking system, so what?"
Flowcast is SO much more than just a place to take notes:
a micro-blogging interface for publishing notes without needing your own website, hosting service, or architecture;
a digital garden to link your thoughts non-linearly, while enabling others to explore your published garden;
a second brain (digital mind) for organizing your thoughts, ideas, knowledge, and experience;
a minting platform to put your words permanently on blockchain;
a digital identity aggregator (wallets & decentralized socials);
an author-verification system to prevent fake news and identity theft.
We're just at the beginning of what Flowcast will be 👀
Note: whether or not you "believe in" or care about blockchain, NFTs, or Crypto, Flowcast can still be of great value to you. I built Flowcast as a way to help everyone with their writing & mental health, blockchain is merely a way to decentralize costs/hosting requirements of a publishing platform (along with providing a way to improve copyright claims through time-stamping, authorship proofs, and monetization 🫡 ).
Follow /flowcast, @flowcast.eth, or @wanderloots.eth on Farcaster to keep up to date with changes to the user interface and blockchain features of Flowcast.
Recalibrating Recap
Welcome to Recalibrating! My name is Callum (@_wanderloots)
Join me each week as I learn to better life in every way possible, reflecting and recalibrating along the way to keep from getting too lost.
Thanks for sharing the journey with me ✨
Last week, I did a deep dive on cryptographic wallets (digital wallets) to help you understand 1) the value of digital wallet signatures in a world increasingly filled with AI content and impersonation and 2) the difference between a traditional digital wallet and a smart wallet.
I had quite positive feedback on this entry saying that it helped people understand the value of crypto like never before 🫡 Happy to help!
This week, I'm incredibly excited to announce Flowcast, the writing and personal knowledge management system I've been ideating for the past few years and building over the last 4 months.
I hope that Flowcast can provide a public good to help people keep track of their thoughts & ideas, build in public, and monetize their writing 👀
What is Flowcast?
Flowcast is a blockchain-based application that makes it easy for you to put your writing onchain, while linking your thoughts and ideas to build a knowledge graph. This knowledge graph creates a "digital garden" over time.
You can think of a digital garden as a non-linear publishing system, where you plant "seeds" as notes and link them together to build "trees". Over time, as the garden grows, you'll begin producing "fruit" in the form of longer-form writing and original ideas.
Flowcast provides an extremely easy and low-cost minting workflow that enables you to create a journal of your thoughts, onchain.
In other words, Flowcast operates as a micro-blogging/publishing service, a personal knowledge management system (PKM), and a timestamping service on blockchain that may assist with proving the copyright of your writing.
A few goals of Flowcast:
help you build in public;
structure your digital garden;
help you build your second brain PKM;
help you journal/write onchain (on blockchain);
augment your flow states;
increase mindfulness;
improve mental health.
Building with Flowcast is building in public through blockchain. Building in public helps you publish thoughts/ideas to collectively build a better Internet and a better world, in real time.
Each flowcast mint produces an ERC 721 NFT minted to your connected digital wallet. A 721 token is a unique 1/1 token, which means that it is time-stamped with an ID that is not duplicatable, with a digital signature that is not impersonatable.
Each NFT operates as a data point filled with information (a node, like a building block). The more flowcasts you create, the more building blocks you have to build a world with your thoughts, as a public PKM.
The more practice you have finding flow 🌊
Once you have minted (published onchain) your first node (flowcast NFT), you can begin customizing connections with all subsequent nodes. These connections are called edges that link nodes together, building your digital garden 🌱
Building a knowledge graph becomes part of your personal knowledge management system. Connecting the dots of your thoughts to build a map of your mind.
You can organize your thinking into a way that makes sense for you, all onchain.
Your onchain brain 🧠
The Bigger Picture of Flow 🌊
Flow is a term coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in 1970 to describe a form of peak experience. Of being "in the zone". Of melting action and consciousness together.
Mihaly helped found the area of positive psychology. Mihaly decided that, instead of studying what goes wrong with the human brain and how to fix it, he would study what happens to the brain when things go right.
When in a "flow state", a person goes with the flow of their experience, without being self-consciousness every step of the way. Participants in Mihaly's studies described the feeling as floating in a current "floating" or being carried by flow.
Flow can also be considered as "effortless attention".
Much of our attention is drained by highly effortful actions. The more often we find flow (effortless attention) the more attention energy we can save for when we truly need it.
In other words, the more we find ways to introduce flow into our lives, the more positive psychic energy (attention capacity) we are able to conserve throughout the day.
Conserving attention and psychic energy can introduce an element of effortlessness to life, helping to reduce anxiety and burnout and increase mindfulness.
Additionally, people who regularly experience flow are generally more "psychologically engaged" with life, leading to a greater sense of fulfillment and happiness.
The more you find flow, the better your life becomes.
Flow + Cast
Flowcast is a term that came to me a few years ago to describe a natural form of self-expression. Natural self-expression. I was working through difficulties with my employment at the time as an IP lawyer and patent agent, feeling as though much of my flow was stifled.
The idea is to experience flow (described above) and then find a way to "cast" it (perhaps my undergrad in materials science/metallurgical engineering coming through haha).
Cast has two important definitions:
to give a shape to (a substance) by pouring in liquid or plastic form into a mold and letting harden without pressure
to transmit the sound and images of (something happening) in real time via the Internet.
Definition 1: to solidify a liquid
A goal of Flowcast is to help you increase the amount of time you spend in flow. As noted above, Mihaly's term of "flow" is often related to a liquid state of being, of going along with the flow.
However, much of flow is lost the moment it is completed. As soon as we are knocked out of the zone, it can be hard to find it again. Additionally, we might not have anything to show for the time spent in flow, which can make it difficult to learn how we can find flow again.
The liquid evaporates without record or analysis 🫥
To cast means to solidify a liquid into a particular shape. With Flowcast, you are able to "solidify" your flow by describing your experience in words. Words provide containers for your thoughts and ideas.
Next, you "mint" the flow onto blockchain, solidifying the flow as a block "onchain" in the form of a token.
A unique token of your flow is created as an NFT (non-fungible token, a type of digital asset).
The liquid flow is solidified and time-stamped. Thus, the flow is "casted" into a form that is unchangeable across time (immutable), providing a permanent record of your flow experience.
Definition 2: to transmit in real-time via the Internet
A perk of "casting" flow on blockchain through Flowcast is that each token minted onchain is available for anyone in the public to see and access. This public access means that, not only is there a record of your flow, but this record is timestamped for anyone in the world to see.
Effectively, the minted token is broadcast to the entire Internet.
If you have an idea during flow that you think is great, and don't want to keep it private for yourself, you can share the idea online and get a permanent timestamp of that idea online showing what and when you thought of.
Proof of idea 💡
In the future, if someone uses your idea (or if you continue building on it), you will forever have a record of when that idea was published to the world and what the idea was, providing an easy way for people to credit you for the idea.
🚨 Note: if you have an idea you would consider patenting, it is advisable to not publish the idea online unless you have discussed the idea with a patent agent or intellectual property lawyer. Please reach out to me @wanderloots.eth on Farcaster if you have questions about patents or intellectual property.
Farcaster and "casts"
Related to the broadcasting definition, Flowcast is also integrated with Farcaster, a decentralized social network protocol. Farcaster gets its name from the book Hyperion, where farcasting enables teleportation of people and objects across the galaxy (the Web).
Flowcast enables the ability to broadcast flowcasts as "casts" on Farcaster. On Farcaster, a cast is equivalent to a post on other forms of social media, but is authenticated with a blockchain signature.
The name of Flowcast is coincidentally aligned with Farcaster, with the original idea and name of Flowcast being developed several years before my discovery of Farcaster.
If you would like to learn more about Farcaster, please read this intro guide to Farcaster here.
Why should I use Flowcast?
There are three main benefits to using Flowcast:
(1) the act of journalling;
(2) tracking your flow experience; and
(3) publishing work onchain (second brain + digital garden).
1) Reflecting & Journalling
Flowcast enables an easy way for you to journal onchain. Journalling is an excellent use of your attention, with numerous mental health & productivity benefits arising from the act of writing and reflecting regularly.
By journalling regularly, you increase your ability to recall previous ideas, process difficult information, and build on your previous thoughts and ideas, thereby conserving valuable time and attention.
Time and attention are the scarcest resources we have in this world. You can imagine each flowcast as an investment of your attention rather than a payment. In other words, you can invest your attention and time rather than paying attention and spending time.
By taking the time to journal your thoughts/ideas and put them onchain, you convert your writing into a digital asset. You take your attention and solidify it (cast it) with blockchain to produce an immutable (unchangeable) record.
The next time you have a related thought or idea, you don't have to start from scratch to continue with it. You can take the attention you invested previously and build on it, bootstrapping your idea with the work and attention from past you.
Future you will thank you 🫡
2) Tracking & Analyzing Flow Experiences
I view finding flow as a kind of lottery. When you attempt your action (hobby, work, art, sports, etc.), you may or not find flow (aka win the lottery).
If you do not make time to find flow (get a ticket), there is a 0% likelihood of winning. The more often you attempt an experience that may bring you flow (buy tickets), the more likely you are to win (find flow).
However, that is where the analogy ends. Buying more lottery tickets has a linear impact on the odds of winning. If you are forward-thinking and track your flow experiences over time, you will begin identifying patterns in activities that enable you to find flow more frequently.
By using Flowcast to track your experiences, you begin to understand your own personal nuances for finding flow. The more you understand these nuances, the easier it will be for you to engage in that activity and find flow.
Over time, you will also reduce the amount of time it takes to find flow with each attempt, drastically increasing your productivity and fulfillment in your task.
In other words, the more you practice finding flow, the better you get at finding it, the more you increase your odds of flow experiences. Finding flow becomes a non-linear pursuit. Our brains and thoughts are non-linear, so it makes sense our knowledge management systems should be as well.
Flowcast helps you with this tracking and analysis, helping you augment your flow.
3) Putting Work Onchain
Putting your flowcasts as an onchain journal means that you are taking your writing and adding an unchangeable timestamp to it (minting the writing onto blockchain). Your journal becomes immutable.
Blockchain was originally created as a way to notarize documents so they could not be backdated.[source] Minting your writing onchain provides a similar benefit; you are able to sign the writing at specific date, with your unique signature in your crypto wallet, to produce digital assets with timestamps that are unalterable.
This onchain digital asset may assist with copyright and/or patents in some jurisdictions in the world. Please consult a patent agent/intellectual property lawyer in your country if you are unsure if your ideas should be kept private for the time being. Reach out to me @wanderloots.eth on Farcaster if you have more questions related to idea protection or intellectual property.
There is value to building in public, but there is also value in waiting until an idea is developed before publishing it 🫡 💡
Building An Onchain Brain & Digital Garden with CODE
CODE
"Onchain Brain" is a reference to the popular note-taking concept called a "second brain". Effectively, a second brain is where you write notes and keep track of your thoughts and ideas so that you can offload them. An extension of your first brain by offloading information and knowledge (either physically or digitally).
A popular way to build a second brain is to leverage the "CODE" note-taking system:
Capture (rough notes on what resonates)
Organize (reflect and restructure the rough notes)
Distill (condense the rough notes into the core idea)
Express (publish the note)
Flowcast enables the use of CODE: you can write down rough thoughts and ideas, reflect on them to organize by connecting the dots of your thoughts, reduce the length of your notes by distilling them to their core essence, and express the note as a flowcast, onchain.
Taking the time to distill and express your ideas is one of the hardest parts of building your second brain. The writing flow of Flowcast helps you through this process to identify the most important parts of your brain to put onchain.
See the "how-to" section on the Flowcast home page for more practical details on writing flowcasts.
Linking Your Thoughts & Ideas
You might also be wondering, why do note connections matter? Why should I care that I can connect (link) the dots (nodes) of my thoughts?
Well, you are able to link related ideas/thoughts together to help you find, access, and build on previous ideas/thoughts. As much as we wish life was linear, most of our experiences, thoughts, and ideas tend to be non-linear.
You can use the attention you invested in the first flowcast note as a foundation for your next one.
You don't have to start your ideas from scratch.
For example, if you start an idea related to mindfulness and web3, you can include these words in your titles/description or tags of your note. A month later, you might not remember the specific idea, but you know that you started it somewhere. You can search through your notes and continue from where you left off, creating a link between note 1 and note 2 that helps organize your thinking.
You can follow your previous flow or train of thought, helping you to refind flow more easily.
In the future, you'll forever be able to see that connection and refind it again when you need it.
The best part is that the style of note linking is completely up to you! Each of us makes different associations with different topics. Only you can build the best system for you.
Onchain Brain 🧠
When you click "mint" and cryptographically sign the transaction with your wallet, you are putting your flowcast "onchain".
The note becomes a digital asset in the form of an NFT (non-fungible token, digital asset) with a timestamp and cryptographic signature from your wallet.
Over time, the more notes you mint, the more "nodes" you will have in your personal Flowcast NFT database. These nodes can be considered building blocks of your thoughts and ideas.
The more building blocks you create, the more data you have, the more you can build your onchain brain - filled with your thoughts and ideas.
You can watch this onchain forming in real time as a knowledge graph, with every note you add and every connection you make.
You begin extending the power of your physical biological brain by offloading your thoughts and ideas onchain. Not just your second brain, but your onchain brain 🧠.
The more you connect and build out your onchain thoughts and ideas, the more complex and personalized your onchain brain becomes.
Flowcast Structure
Now, let's take a look a little more at the structure of Flowcast.
Each flowcast is an ERC 721 token (note & node) with the following features:
Title
Note body
Links
Tags
Author Trait
Timestamp
Attestation
(optional) 1155 Edition Creation - Coming Soon
The Title is how you can find and reference your previous notes when linking them to new notes.
The Note Body is where you write the contents of your note. You can link to other notes by typing two forward brackets [ [ and then selecting the title of the note you want to link.
Links will appear in the Knowledge Graph display of the note, showing a map of your onchain brain so far.
Tags are a way to organize your onchain thoughts by category. Examples:
I could use the tags "mindfulness" and "flow" when writing about how mindfulness helps with flow
I could use "flowcast" and "web3" and "creator economy" when writing about how Flowcast helps creators build and monetize in web3.
I could use "travel" and "canada" and "astro" when journalling about my astrophotography trips in Canada
The specific tags are up to you! Your onchain brain is fully customizable so you can map your thoughts in a way that works best for you.
Author Trait is an automatically generated attribute of your Flowcast NFT. The Author Trait is the minting address of the wallet used to put the token onchain. If your wallet address is associated with an ENS (Ethereum Naming Service), the trait will automatically resolve (convert) to your ENS. For example, instead of 0x3fa....4F3Df, the author trait could display wanderloots.eth.
Using an ENS helps make wallet addresses more easily readable by others, to help authenticate the validity of the author
A Timestamp will appear under the Author Trait indicating the exact instant the Flowcast was put onchain. This timestamp is tied to blockchain, making it immutable (unchangeable).
Attestations are a form of two factor authentication (2FA) that is used to validate the Author Trait. Attestations are built into the minting flow of Flowcast, which means that each time you mint a Flowcast token, you will be asked to attest to the validity of the Author Trait.
If the attestation wallet address does not match the author trait of the Flowcast token, an error will appear, helping to ensure that Flowcasters are not impersonated on the Flowcast website.
Who should use Flowcast?
Flowcast is designed to be used by anyone! The act of writing is incredibly beneficial for adding clarity to your thoughts by helping you work through your problems and improve your solutions. Additionally, blockchain enables you to "build in public", which can accelerate your social reputation and credibility while you're building out your ideas.
Flowcast is for anyone interested in improving themselves through reflection and writing. A goal is to help you reach a self-actualized state of being (the best version of yourself).
The minting element of Flowcast is cheap on the Base blockchain, making it very accessible to keep an onchain notebook of your journal entries.
To get started, you just need a wallet and a small amount of Base ETH.
Digital Ownership & Monetization
Each flowcast is minted into your connected wallet, providing you with a ERC 721 NFT. The ERC 721 token standard produces a 1/1, unique token.
In other words, every note you mint on Flowcast is completely owned by you. Any original content you produce should be covered under copyright law (not legal advice).
Ownership is a core element of web3 and is an important part of the philosophy of Flowcast.
It's important to me that you are able to do what you wish with your NFTs 🫡
Monetizing Your Onchain Brain
With digital owerlship comes an incredible power: the ability to sell your digital assets. Typically, if you wanted to sell a digital asset (such as a digital download of a photo/book/anything) you would need to set up infrastructure on your website or use an e-commerce platform to sell them.
With blockchain, you own all of your digital assets. Each one is tied to the cryptographic wallet you used to create (mint) the note. This ownership right is inherently built into the crypto and blockchain ecosystems.
Note: I don't recommend selling the ERC 721 tokens (the notes in your knowledge graph), as these notes form a key part of your onchain brain and will be removed if you sell them.
Instead, I am working on the next update to Flowcast, which will enable selling derivative copies of the original token as an edition. You can keep the original 1/1 token for your own onchcain brain and sell copies to fans who wish to support you.
In the next update to Flowcast, you will be able to create an ERC 1155 derivative copy of your ERC 721 token. This means that you can use your unique, 1/1 ERC 721 token as a "printing press" to create editions of that token, available for sale.
Future-Proofing & Looking Ahead (predictions)
More and more I see the Internet becoming a place filled with AI generated content and AI powered algorithms that leave people feeling anxious, depressed, and unfulfilled with their experience.
My hope is that Flowcast provides a place for people to be themselves without reacting to external pressures. Your onchain brain builds a digital garden over time, a place for you to wander through your own thoughts so you can feel understood in your safe place.
My hope is that Flowcast also provides an easy way for people to turn on monetization of their digital garden (the knowledge graph) if they want to, injecting more sustainability into the creator economy ✨
I foresee the world shifting to a "cozier" Internet, where people slow down and become more intentional, more mindful of their actions and reactions.
I hope you like Flowcast 🌊
Next week
This past week was quite hectic as I was at the Collision Conference displaying Flowcast as a featured startup. I attended many talks on the future of AI, blockchain, economics, and quantum computing and have a lot of information to digest.
I'm also in a writing hackathon this week on Farcaster, so I will be working on my entry this week 🌊
If you take a look at Flowcast, I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback so I can continue recalibrating 🫡
Stay tuned ✨
P.S. If you do use Flowcast, please consider using your ENS as it will assist with the author trait. If anything goes wrong, please remember Flowcast is in beta testing mode :)