Told in the order it happened, from what I wrote at the time and what I said on tape. Every sentence in quotation marks links to the post or the minute of video it comes from.
Draft in the founder’s voice, built from his 2022–2024 writing and the tape. Under review by Maceo; sentences in quotation marks are his, verbatim, and link to where he said them.
I was a senior at Franklin & Marshall studying moral psychology, “scraping by with financial aid and student loans covering my rent,” working as a busser and rapping since January of that year. My roommate was deep into PFPs. He “took the time to help me create a wallet, showed me web3 videos on YouTube, and introduced me to my first DAO, SharkDao.” I picked up wethemniggas.eth, got the ENS airdrop, and “with that money, I started my podcast, buying my first professional microphone and webcam.” The podcast was We Them Niggas, and it was supposed to be my contribution to the music industry.
That summer I was in Water & Music, a research DAO, doing user interviews with NFT collectors in the music industry. In September I wrote the first post, Welcome to We Them Niggas, a community: “Originally conceived as a podcast, things have shifted-- as my journey into the realm of Web 3.0 has taught me the importance of prioritizing community over content creation.” And: “I’m embarking on this journey as a community architect, and I’d love your insights.”
By the end of the year We Them Niggas had about forty interviews, recorded one at a time, with people in web3 and beyond. Episode 18 was Amaya Langaigne on Grenadian culture and Black maternal health. In December I took my girlfriend Gabrielle and my brother Genero to Art Basel “to promote my media company,” and Friends With Benefits ended up being the throughline of the trip. I wrote it up like a journal: “I do aspire to merge the world of web3 with the world I live in here in Philadelphia.”
ETH Denver, February 2024. Friends With Benefits put thousands of dollars behind the We Them Niggas IRL interview series, twelve interviews with founders and creatives of color, and Julian, Sirsu and I made it together. “It’s my first in-person interview series, my first time securing DAO funding in Web3, and my first time interviewing several people of color whom I’ve admired in this space for years.” That funding, and the people it came from, is how the network got built. The funding also bought cameras. “It feels like a full circle just over three years later.”
By then the company was We Them Media, “a community-driven media company,” and the podcast was still We Them Niggas. One of those interviews, with Leo Pastel, is on the channel under that name.
Contributors started filing from Nigeria and Kenya; Creative Alchemy in Abuja became a partner, and SuperBio the production partner. In September the team covered Web3 Lagos, the ETH Accra hackathon, and ETH Safari in Kenya, with Aziz on the ground (the team’s roundup). That autumn a talk by SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce at the Black Blockchain Summit at Howard went on tape. Along the way the podcast became Let’s Talk About ETH: Around The World; it ran one season of six episodes and then the money to keep producing it ran out. It is archived, not hidden.
January to March, Denver, alone with one camera and no budget: more than a hundred street interviews on Colfax, in Purple Haze, at protests. In March the weekly bounty started, with poidh, “pics or it didn’t happen”: “we put up a $100 bounty every week” and people around the world go out and ask the question of the week. On April 3, at Purple Haze, I said the goal out loud: “by June 1st, I want to have 10 people. I want to have people from 10 countries, at least doing it with me.”
Philadelphia in the spring: Mr. P on Haines Street, Germantown Avenue, the 23 bus. Bitcoin Pizza Day in May, fifteen videos from Philly to Abuja, off a $500 bounty. Season 01 opened June 1. ETH Global in New York in June, shot solo. The Channel 5 carnival in Denver in July, where I said the thing this page is built on: “I think it’s critical that we kind of document this moment from as many perspectives as possible. Because I say the victors are the history books.” By August, fourteen monthly supporters and a newsletter with Kamal.
What this site is: 115 pieces with full transcripts, a question page for every question we have asked the world, a glossary written from the tape, a places page, and the founder’s own explanations of the project collected as they were said. What is not done yet: 225 videos on the channel still have no transcript, 77 have been transcribed but not read, and the shorts are untouched. That is the work, and it is listed so you can see it.
Everything above is what We Them Media is positioned to leverage: a network, a community and an archive that We Them Niggas paid for and built, now with a name that can travel anywhere. Season 01 runs to November 30. The goal is the one from the Purple Haze tape, scaled: a contributor in every country where we have a supporter, paid for the work, with the archive kept on the open web where anyone can check a claim against a face. If this is the media you want to exist, the supporter page is where that happens.
