Can web3 learn from the vegan movement? / Dobroslawa Gogloza

Transcript

foreign [Music] and as you can see the title of this talk is more of a question so I don't feel that I have the answers but I would like to invite you to uh discussion uh because I strongly believe that in whatever type of social movement or in any type of social activity we are in we

can always learn something from what happened in the past or what's going on in other areas so first of all I'm a long-term vegan and I'm a long-term animal rights activist actually the last time I've been to Prague was at the care conference it was an international animal rights conference organized by Czech organized organization called obras and to make this event more meaningful we also organized a big protest in front in front of Starbucks um to ask them to stop using caged eggs in their restaurants for the last two years I've been working

with the Golem Foundation as part of the communication marketing team and the more I saw I don't know the challenges or how the community Works how the community perceives it itself versus the the masonry Society I couldn't help but notice that there are some similar some similarities similarities between what I what I knew from my previous community and what I can see here and of course you can ask yourself a question like what can be more different than this Cutting Edge technology that

we have here and something that is like the most basic type of human activity which is agriculture and food production so first of all I believe that um no matter the type of the product that we want to offer in the end everything is about the society and what the society prefers about the the choices that people make and it doesn't matter if it's food or or very or very sophisticated technological

products we have to understand how people make choices what motivates them to make our products successful I also believe that and I feel that that sometimes this this assumption is very very popular in in communities that are very technology focused that sometimes people believe that if if you get the technology right it will somehow get Universal adoption just because it's good and because it serves people needs but again if you look at the history of Agriculture and you know something for

example about how potatoes became popular in Europe then you can have a potato which is probably one of the best vegetables there are after all you can make it into both vodka and french fries but still when potatoes came to Europe they needed long-term very intensive marketing campaign to persuade people to to actually start eating them the biggest obstacle at that time was that potatoes weren't mentioned in the Bible so they were Devils made and coming back to the fundamental question are there any similarities between the vegan movement and the web

free movement I believe that the biggest one is that for sure the vegan movement knows a lot about trying to persuade people to start using a product that lacks many of the qualities that they love in food and who might that might not be the best substitute of what they love for example meat but we are still trying to persuade them to make this choice because we believe that there are other very strong reasons that they should make the switch um

but thinking more about what I believe um is similar between those two communities I came up with this short list so first of all I believe that both both communities are most of all based on strong values and this is what drives many projects so you are willing to suffer and and use and sometimes use tools that you would rather not use just because you believe that there is some some important um reasoning behind it I think both movements position themselves strongly against status quo so there is this like bad world out

there that we want to change or if we don't want to change it at least we don't want to actively participate in it I believe that both movements need better technology more user friendly um you might not think of vegan movement as technologically driven that much but if you have been observing what's what's going on in this area for the last couple of years the biggest changes uh and and the growth in adoption of plant-based Foods comes from like high-tech startups that produced very good meat alternatives so it's it's not it's not about tofu anymore

um but at the same time I think both both communities have have this problem that to get more adoption you need better technology but also to get better technology you need more excitement more users more people who are willing to put hours into it so um it's it's hard to answer what what will actually come first and somehow you have to you have to solve this problem I believe there is more similarities if someone is interested in this topic I'm definitely willing to to discuss it um but I try to list a couple of lessons that I believe are

um are something that at least the big vegan movement have learned from the past uh and we have to we have to at least acknowledge that the vegans movement started like over a hundred years ago so mistakes have been have been made but also lessons have been learned um and some of them might be controversial I also don't I am also not sure if all of them will work here but at least maybe they might serve as a food for thought so first of all for what we what we have noticed is that even though there were tons of really exciting businesses that started introducing

um very cool plant-based products uh both replacing Dairy and meat in the end the biggest traction and the biggest change in uh users or people's behavior came from actual big companies that started producing their own things and even even though the products weren't perfect sometimes you would you would easily find a cool startup that that would produce something something much better I believe that the fact that people recognize the brands uh that they all already have had many many logistical problems solved

made adoption of some products much easier when it came from the bigger brands it's not always a good thing but but I believe that this is this is what happened and this is this is something that that can be expected here as well on the other hand on the other hand also most plant-based food adoption does not come from purists the fact that we have tons of vegan products nowadays in in shops and supermarkets does not come from the fact that we have more and more vegans every year it mostly comes from the fact that there is more and more people who are trying vegan foods every now and then uh if you if you talk with any type of

vegan business everybody will admit that most of their customers are not fully plant-based they just want to pick and choose and and they are more and more open to to plant-based offer and I think it's extremely important because if you understand that it also influenced it also influences the way you speak to the society um so we have to Target the mainstream if we if we actually willing to if we actually want to get any traction for as long as the products are not perfect um you can always focus on the why and I think it is important and even like

again speaking speaking of the plant-based Movement we are starting to have decent products maybe in the last five years there have been people who um who are trying this diet for 100 for 100 years like I myself am I'm a vegan for almost 20 years I think and for most of this time even if the products weren't that good we were mostly motivated by the why for for many vegans the why is the animal suffering but at some point we had to admit that it doesn't have to be the same why for everybody else so sometimes focusing too much on the

what motivates us without listening to the users or the customers might also be a problem uh actually now there is more and more studies that show that people who are not vegan yet are much more motivated by health or ecological like sustainability reasons um and it was very hard for many animal protection organizations to admit uh most of the vegan movement is very much connected to the animal protection so it was very natural for people to only to not only try to persuade people to become vegan but also for for animal protection or like animal cruelty reasons so it was kind of a change of

Optics that sometimes you really need to also listen to the outside world and maybe change the way um you create messaging and what you focus on in your campaigns to to get bigger adoption another thing I believe is important um I think every movement especially when it's a niche movement easily creates its own subculture and I will never criticize subcultures I actually came to animal rights movement because previously I was a member of like hardcore punk community so I understand subcultures I love them

I I know how cool it is to be in a group of people where um you feel like everybody understands each other to have this feeling that if you just see someone's badge somewhere there in the street you already connect because you're in the same crowd but at the same time again there's tons of studies that most of the people are not into subcultures they want to be like their neighbors they don't want to be different so again in the end as much as events like this are cool and again vegan movement also has its own veggie fests conferences and anything like that it's also good to think of communication

in such a way that will not only emphasize how much we are a part of this like one big thing because it really alienates people I believe that if someone is like a long-term member of web3 community it's it might not be that easy to notice but for me as someone who's who still feels like an outsider really visible like how much of the vocabulary that's being used uh the images that you that you use are 100 subcultural and and for for a lot of people it will be actually a red flag uh something they will not trust uh just because it looks uh like yeah they just

don't want to be a part of something that feels like a Counter Culture they never wanted that and they will probably not uh not do it today and in most cases if social movements grow it's not because the subculture actually grew and took over the society it's just because at some point people decide we to that to to really communicate with people we start to speak like them we have to start to look like them and try to learn their language instead of persuading them to use our own uh although all of the the things that I have said is more like my thinking on

this issue so I will I will not claim that it's any in any way connected with the project I'm representing here which is uh wide land and the gollum Foundation but at the same time when I Was preparing to this talk I thought that there are also some similar similarities in our thinking so just like I believe that if we really want um factory farming to be over in our generation or in the next one we have to focus on people who might not become vegan tomorrow we have to communicate we have to speak about I don't know maybe

decreasing the the misconception and we have to be open to people that will not want to become like ourselves but who might want to pick and choose and become more and more open to some solutions and in the same in the same manner wildlands also thinks about users and tries to create a solution that will allow user to choose any type of infrastructure they want without forcing them to only live in this like web3 ecosystem which I believe might also be a good a good approach to um getting getting adoption uh so we

we're not only thinking about people who are hardcore users but also some someone who might just want to double and try uh something and uh yeah so this is this is a short version of all my thoughts about the similarities and also differences if you would like to know more I'll be happy to talk I'm here I'm here at this event both today and tomorrow and thank you [Applause] okay we have some time for some questions does anyone have some

questions I've got a question from James in the middle um yeah no I thought it was really good talk um a lot of good points um I like the one um like in a similar way with using solar energy in Australia people weren't convinced that they were doing good for the planet that's not what took people over it was knowing that their neighbors were saving money and it's again that social thing that makes people convert and um yeah do you have any thoughts of what that could look like for um in the web 3 space so you know say for solar maybe you were saving money for veganism it can be health reasons people will reduce their meat consumption what is it for web 3 could

it be saving money from platform centralized platforms or have you thought about yeah some ideas there ah this is a very good question I know about this example I would say I'm a huge fan of generally studying like all the other social movements um I think it's hard for me to say now what could be the like yeah I I absolutely agree but uh maybe it will be easier actually to answer maybe actually a person that has more knowledge of technology and who might get some insights into how I know social change Works

they could come up with answers to your question much better but I believe that it's a very important question and or our discussion to be to be had like how to use social proof uh in uh web 3 adoption okay we still have time for some more questions if there are any questions yep we have another one yep so I'm Julian and I have a net because I discussed all those things with double share many times so just as a follow-up question okay take care I have a feeling that while this is all 100 relevant the

problem is that for web 3 it is actually much harder to have that selling point so so the question is and I would like to refer also to Jared hope talk yesterday who claimed that basically that was my understanding we need to build like a pearl Universe in a way so this will be which means I think that it will be hard to go mainstream so so what are your thoughts around that like is it possible to remain like a hardcore at the center and build like a parallel universe and still interface somehow to the like a mainstream to just if not go mainstream yourself then try to drag as many people from mainstream to yourself

if you understand what I mean yeah I understand I believe that there are challenges here that other social movements definitely did not have but at the same time um also from all the knowledge I have for example about like how animal animal rights worked and also knowing from actual research of my husband who studied how um anti-slavery movement looked like I believe that this approach of just creating a niche and trying to build a separate universe and dragging people to it I don't think it ever worked so if this will be our only plan I would rather start thinking

about Plan B because there is no precedent or not not a president that I am aware of or maybe we're just domed here and you know that's like okay then I think I've been given the time signal that's time to wrap up thank you so much [Applause]