As some of you may know, I was given the extreme honour of giving a talk at Steemfest 3. Let me tell you that the pride I felt beforehand, was multiplied many times over when I realised just how splendiforous Steemfest is!

If you watched me at Steemfest, or on the livestream, you may know that I really whacked my head just before I was due to give my speech.

It didn't stop me, however I was slightly out of sorts as I gave it, and forgot a couple of key elements.

That, and the fact that the live stream feed unfortunately went down during my talk, is why I wanted to print the transcript here for all those who missed it.

The theme was stories and it was titled; Forever On The Blockchain. If it's too long for you to read, hopefully @tts the great text-to-voice service has commented below, and you can simply listen.

Not all of the gags, especially the slide ones work in text format, so hope that doesn't spoil it too much and you still enjoy it!

Forever On The Blockchain - Cryptogee Steemfest Presentation

Hello Steemfest!
It’s amazing to be here, it feels like this is a major stopping off point along an onward journey that started around two and a half years ago!

I just want to thank Roeland for allowing me to come up here and waffle on, and of course for organising the third Steemfest and putting up with all of the hassle that that organisation entails.

When I got asked to speak at Steemfest I was like, yeah great! I’ll give a talk, why not? I enjoy talking, I like engaging with people and I like the sound of my own voice …

Then I thought to myself; well, what am I going to talk about? So I thought well I should talk about the things I talk about in my blog, I should speak about all of those things and how they relate to me standing right here, right now.

It may come as a surprise to some people, that even though I'm an established Steemian with hundreds of posts, I don’t really know how to define myself on Steemit. When someone asks me what my blog is about, I usually say something like.

I write about psychology and self help:

Oh right, they answer

And also A.I. and science fiction and robots

Okay that’s cool

And cyborgs and crypto currency and I write fiction

Mmm hmm

Plus I do like general social commentary, which I kind of mix in with my interest in cognitive bias.

Right.

Yeah so I guess you could say I’ve really narrowed my niche down.

Or maybe not.

So at first I was going to call my talk this:

Or perhaps this

Then I realised that everything on my blog represents a story, my story, intertwined via the comment section with other stories.

So I decided on the much more snappy.

“Forever on the blockchain.”

Such an easy phrase to repeat, but what does it really mean? First of all, it means that our stories that we lay down on Steemit everyday, cannot be erased or changed by Steemit incorporated or by any other company.

On the blockchain for as long as we have computers, our stories are available.

However it hasn’t always been like that, I grew up in, as my 8 year old daughter likes to call it, the olden days. Back then media was a one way street, with entertainment and news coming down from one end and us standing at the other.

We still had stories to share though, so how did we do so in the days before the internet?

This is speaker’s corner in central London.

People go down there on a Sunday, and they stand on a box and they just shout their ideas to passers by. If your ideas catch the imagination of the public, then you’ll get many people gathering around you to listen to what you have to say.

If you’re really good, or maybe really bad, you will have people come up to you and debate with you.

This is how we rolled back in the days before the internet. Instead of finding a message board or blogging site, like Reddit, Medium, Facebook, or Steemit, we simply stood on street corners and shouted our views.

We gained followers and likes.

Sometimes our messages were confused

Just like the internet really. Actually I'd love to talk to this guy and find out exactly what a Christian atheist is!

Of course not everybody wants to give a huge speech, some people want to say what they want in about 140 characters or less.

However we didn’t have Twitter then, so we had to create our own version

The sandwich board. A nice clear succinct message. I wish I was walking past him that day!

However this highlights some of the problems with blogging without the aid of the internet. First of all, in order to save yourself from repeating the same thing over and over again, it’s much better to have your message written down.

That way everyone can get your whole message regardless of when they you come across them. – Right?

But then if you save your voice by writing it down, there’s only so much you can write in order that the reader gets the message in one hit.

I mean, you might have a subtly nuanced message that needs finesse, delicate use of prose, along with clever use of analogy in order to spark the kind of stimulating discourse that you feel the subject needs.

However you have limited space and time to grab your audience, so you end up walking around with a board that looks like this.

OK, so this guy is obviously pretty funny, and if I’m honest this is the kind of character that I tend to be attracted to.

Not necessarily because I enjoy talking about penises, more so that anyone who goes to those lengths to get a laugh is just my kind of people.

Although maybe it’s not a joke! Maybe he has some really serious stuff to reveal to the world about, not just his penis, but all penises!

Maybe there is some kind of penis plague epidemic on its way and he needs to tell us about it. But because he only has limited space and time in which to use to grab his audience, his serious message comes across as a frivolous attempt at humour.

What about this guy?

This message isn’t so catchy and to be honest doesn’t make me want to approach him. He seems a bit of a killjoy.

What I don’t get here is, what’s his end game?

Does he want people to approach him and talk about the fall of Babylon in the bible? Or perhaps he is making a reference to how the modern world is just like the ancient biblical city.

Or is he saying that we can do something about the fall of Babylon?

I MEAN, WHAT DO YOU WANT BUDDY!?!

I know what this guy wants

His end game is clear, he wants to talk to me about penises.

There’s no ambiguity there, I know what I’m going to get from him.

What about this guy?

Okay this is fairly obvious who his message is for.

Wealthy ladies.

Presumably ones with such low self-esteem that they are prepared to stop, and instead of talking to him right there and then, they bend to take down those details and get back to him with the words

“… Yeah hi is this Robert Darling? I saw you on the street with your sandwich board and …”

“…I think we should meet.”

For me though he hasn’t been very economical with his very limited space. He tells us information that we really could have guessed for ourselves.

Single? Yeah, well, I kinda worked that one out.

Never married?! Wha- Surely you have been married before?!

I mean call me old fashioned, but I’m imagining a “wealthy lady” would need information more along the lines of

At least that guy has conviction behind his message. He had a simple goal, he wanted wealthy ladies, and he thought to himself; by Jove I’m going to communicate that message to the general public in as clear and concise manner as I can muster.

Because of that we get a glimpse at the collection of facts and events that go to make up his story.

You have to have some kind of conviction with your own message, if people don’t believe that you believe your own message, then what chance have you got?
Like this guy

As we can see the end is nigh...

...but not before this guy books his cheap holiday.

So our stories are simply the facts and events that we experience, that contribute to who we are. They are not fixed, they constantly evolve, we make new chapters every day, adding to our overarching story line.

Stories are powerful things and it’s not just in the movies we exercise our thirst for stories, we do it in all sorts of places.

A few years ago I had a small business filming corporate videos for people, so that they could tell the story of their products and services. One of the jobs I had was filming a conference for companies who made forms for the banking industry.

And before you ask; yes it is as big an adrenaline fuelled rush as it sounds.

So there I am filming this conference for the banking form industry, and on the stage there was this Scottish guy, he was one of the high up directors for one of the companies there, and he was telling his story.

However he was telling it in a complete an utter monotone, with zero inflection in his voice, I remember thinking that he would make a great sleep aid for my then two year old daughter.

As I stood there looking at him through my camera, I nodded off. My feet did a quick slide and shuffle on the hard floor, making a sudden scraping sound at the back of the auditorium, causing several people in the back row to turn around.

I managed to regain my composure fairly quickly and pretended to be adjusting something on my camera.

After that I stood there with one hand in my pocket, so that I could pinch my leg through my trousers to keep me awake.

The thing is, is if you work in the banking form industry, you probably are fairly aware that your fellow banking industry colleagues will probably not set the world on fire when it comes to public speaking. Hence you hire someone like this guy

Ben Hunt Davis is an ex-Olympic rower who won a gold medal in the Sydney Olympics. Him and seven others rowed their way to glory in a little over 2 minutes.

Hunt Davis’s story took us on a four year journey from the point of winning silver in the Atlanta games of 96, to Sydney. He and his team mates decided that they would only embark on activities that ‘made the boat go faster.’

So they prequalified everything they wanted to do with the question; Will it make the boat go faster?

This incident taught me a couple of things.

First, it showed me that it is actually possible, to fall asleep while standing up, and second, the importance of stories.

You see, those people worked in a boring industry, however that didn’t stop them from wanting to share in great stories, even if they felt they had none of their own.

Storytelling is unique to humans, we all want to tell a story, some of us want to tell our own personal stories.

So we all have stories to tell, it’s just that some of our stories should really be kept to ourselves and some are worth telling. So how do you define what a worthwhile story is?

Does it have to be funny?

Maybe.

Does it have to be short?

Perhaps.

Does it have to be long?

Sometimes.

Can I use pictures instead of words?

Yeah, sure why not?

Can it be a piece of news? A fictional story? A meme?

Yes, yes and yes. Your story is exactly that, it is the story you decide to tell. It may be an observation on an event that has already happened, an anecdote that happened to you or a friend. Or it could be one that you have completely made up. What makes it your story is the fact that it is coming through the unique channel of you.

Should I make my story about the legal requirements for statutory forms?

Probably not.

Nobody else on this planet knows what it is like to be you. Even if you have a twin, they may know what it’s like to look like you, but they can never fully appreciate what it is to be you.

Therefore any story you tell is coming through the lens of, you.

I think I can still log on to my Myspace account, however last time I did so all of my pictures, blogs and saved songs had been wiped.

However my story on Steemit is preserved in a living time capsule. Only I have the ability to change and add to it, I and I alone have the sole right to tell my story and have it preserved for all to see.

Maybe one day we’ll look back on the days of internet social media in much the same way we look at the sandwich board today. The difference is, unlike words spoken on a rainy day in a London park, or ones printed on a soggy sandwich board, our stories will last forever.

Forever on the blockchain.

WHAT'S YOUR STORY AND HOW WILL YOU TELL IT? AS EVER, LET ME KNOW BELOW!

Cryptogee