“Rebellious Girl” and “Internet-addicted Youth”: 13-year-old DAO Founder Finds Self in Web3

DAO Founder, 13, Discovers Herself Through Web3 as "Rebellious Girl" and "Internet-addicted Youth"

Original article: “13-year-old founder of DAO: Web3 cured my depression.”

Author: Mu Mu

Editor: Wento

“I see everyone looking sluggish, everyone stand up and move around.” In April, at a Web3 carnival in Hong Kong, the orange knitted hat brought a touch of color to the crowded scene, and 13-year-old Carry Zheng took the stage wearing it. Without any greeting, she directly issued instructions to the adults below the stage, “Don’t be an old person, stand up and stretch.”

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She is creating an organization called SBlockingrkrDAO that aggregates young people and was invited to be a guest at this salon. She is probably the youngest entrepreneur participating in the Hong Kong Web3 carnival. DAO is a popular organizational form in the Web3 world, advocating decentralization and openness, and anyone can initiate or join it.

Carry’s SBlockingrkrDAO focuses on the learning and education of young people, “learning knowledge and skills that interest you but are not taught in school or not taught well.” In her normal speech, she held the audience in English, and a listener whispered to the person next to her under the stage, “This is not an ordinary child, she has seen the world.” Someone guessed, “She must be a good student.”

“Middle and upper”, this is Carry’s self-evaluation of her school grades. In her mother’s eyes, she is not a “top student,” but she does not restrain her with grades and even opens the door to Web3 for her, encouraging her to turn her interest in drawing into NFT works.

From her brother being labeled as a “poor student” and marginalized at school, from her thinking of “why don’t I like music class,” from her classmates’ ridicule of “trigonometry will not be used when buying vegetables in the future,” she found that many young people around her have lost their motivation to learn knowledge and skills because of “lack of interest” and “uselessness.”

She wants to use Web3, a non-traditional new technology, and DAO, a non-mainstream organization, to change these situations, and she is gradually being changed as well.

Carry condensed a lot of rebellion of teenagers, and she was also a “Internet-addicted teenager”. They hate that schools judge success or failure based on grades, and labels such as “top student” and “poor student” cover up other brilliance on young people, and even cause secondary harm. However, there are few ways for them to escape these harms, and they need help when they get into trouble.

With the encouragement of her parents, Carry emerged from a difficult situation and regained her confidence in the process of creating SBlockingrkrDAO. Now, she wants to help young people.

Intent: “Remove the ‘poor student’ label from my brother”

If SBlockingrkrDAO must have a mission, I hope it can be a place where teenagers can practice personal interests. Here, you can learn the skills and technologies you are interested in, such as AI, Web3, and NFT. Anyway, learn the skills, technology, or art you want to learn, and find your own “light”. Just like the name of this DAO, SBlockingrk, it allows everyone who joins it to release sparks and be inspired.

Inspiration is really important for teenagers. If a child’s shining point is discovered by someone else and encouraged, it will really change him, at least he will not be entangled in inferiority. This is my experience and my brother’s.

The direct reason for me to do SBlockingrkrDAO was my brother, he was too miserable.

He has ADHD, it is difficult for him to concentrate on things, and his grades are not good. He is a “problem student” that is difficult to manage in his teacher’s class and will be excluded by some classmates. When he was in fifth grade, the class required him to wear a shirt for the teacher and classmates to sign, he cried at home, saying that no one was willing to sign his shirt, not even the teacher.

I finally asked all the classmates in my class to help him sign, even the security guard and neighbors in our community signed, and he got temporary comfort.

Whether it’s a “top student” or a “poor student”, this is a label unique to the school system, and grades cannot represent all of a child. My brother’s academic performance is not good, but his creativity in art has not been discovered by teachers and classmates. He is interested in music, so he learns actively. But my brother is bound by the label of “poor student”.

What else can I do to remove these labels from my brother from school? I thought of the school Ad Astra founded by Elon Musk (editor’s note: a non-profit experimental school located in the SBlockingceX headquarters campus, enrolling 7-14 year old children, Musk’s sons, Some children of SBlockingceX employees and other students in the Los Angeles area study here. The school focuses on mathematics, science, engineering and ethics education, with no music, sports and other subjects, and language courses have become marginalized. There is little homework and no grading system, and students can choose not to study subjects they are not interested in).

I can’t run a school, but I can start an organization where creative young people like my brother can come here to exchange ideas, learn, and gain confidence. My brother is now the creative director of SBlockingrkrDAO, and he has provided the team with many interesting ideas.

SBlockingrkrDAO is also interest-driven, and I believe that interest is the driving force behind learning.

As for me, I’m not a top student, my grades are above average, and I have serious biases in my subjects. I can keep all subjects above the passing line, and I can get full marks in science, art, and physical education. These subjects require me to use my brain and hands, and I am interested in them, so I will invest time in them. But for example, in music and geography, if it weren’t for the teacher who likes to teach and the need to take exams, and the grades are also evaluated for further studies, I might not even want to pass.

Carry draws two sports she likes as NFTs

In addition to interests, I also choose what to learn based on whether certain knowledge or skills are useful to me. Some subjects taught in school may never be used again except for exams. For example, music, I like to listen to music, but do I really need to mark notes on a piece of paper? I don’t plan to be a musician in the future. Even if I want to learn music, can the teacher teach the music theory knowledge and encourage everyone to make a piece, but no, in the end, I still have to take the exam with a piece of paper, which is very boring.

I thought it was just me who thought this way. One time, I heard my classmates complaining about math class, “I won’t use trigonometric functions when I grow up to buy vegetables.” Wow, there are others like me who consider the practicality of knowledge. If you want to do scientific work in the future, math is the foundation, and you have the motivation to learn. But he may not do scientific research, so he will feel useless.

Are there many people who think this way? I’m curious, so I interviewed some of my classmates and found that many people also lack learning motivation for some courses and feel “useless.” They are bored when attending classes they don’t like. I don’t understand why we should waste our time on courses that we are not interested in and may not use in the future?

My school is an international school in Hong Kong, and English is the daily language of communication. To outsiders, it should be very forward-thinking and open-minded. It does strike a balance between openness and tradition, but it cannot escape from the traditional exam-oriented education system. One can only imagine the situation in other local schools.

Of course, I understand the purpose of setting up general education courses during basic education. In addition to teaching basic knowledge, students are expected to discover their interests and strengths in various subjects. However, the setting of exams makes it impossible for us to reject subjects we dislike or are not good at, and we cannot focus on what we are really interested in and have hopes of achieving.

Nowadays, most of the courses are just about sitting in a chair and writing blockingper. If the starting point is to cultivate interests, can schools make the curriculum more interesting and let everyone do more practical work? Moreover, the evolution of school education is still slow. Modern education systems appeared after the industrial revolution. Think about it, what were cars like in the past? What are cars like now? But classrooms have not changed much.

ChatGPT is now available. Shouldn’t schools keep up with the pace and think about how to prevent students from being eliminated by AI when they grow up? As a result, they have developed a set of tools specifically to detect whether students are using ChatGPT to do their homework.

There is no benefit to prohibiting students from using GPT. I think schools should teach students how to use AI well. For example, how to ask ChatGPT questions to get good answers? Can we guide students to think that the answers given by AI are always correct? How to use AI to realize your creativity? Creativity is what humans have that AI does not!

Therefore, my initiation of SBlockingrkrDAO is not a confrontation with school education, but a supplement. It is decentralized and open to all independent-thinking and creative teenagers, allowing creativity to become an application. If what you do has prospects, you can become an independent project, and SBlockingrkrDAO can provide you with resources, funding, and technical support.

Change: “Doing what interests me, I found my own light”

The initial team of SBlockingrkrDAO already has 5 people, in addition to me and my little brother, there is an adult partner who mainly provides technical support, he is my mom’s friend; the other two partners are also teenagers, one is 12 years old, strong in technology and creativity; and the other is 15 years old, who has already created a $2 million fund and is also doing other Web3 projects with a lot of experience.

The process of raising funds for SBlockingrkrDAO has changed me a lot, because it requires me to face and deal with many things on my own. Although my mother is also a Web3 practitioner, she doesn’t give me money, at most she introduces me to some people who are helpful for me to do this.

So if I want funding, I have to figure it out myself. I applied for the Thiel Fellowship, a foundation that specifically funds young people under 22 to start businesses. If my application is approved, I can get about $100,000 to support the early investment in SBlockingrkrDAO within two years. I will also meet with some Web3 investors.

SBlockingrkrDAO needs an operational system, such as organizational rules, development routes, and how to implement governance in blockchain smart contracts. So I have been learning Solidity (editor’s note: the programming language of Ethereum smart contracts) recently. Now there is ChatGPT. If you want to deal with computers, you have to learn their language. This is like going to the United States. It is difficult to quickly understand everything there if you do not understand English.

In order to get more good advice, I also need to collect ideas from experienced people, find more like-minded people to cooperate, which forces me to meet various people and communicate with them. I learned that I can be self-driven by my interests, but communicating with others is actually a big challenge for me.

I am very introverted myself, and if I appear in a photo, I am basically afraid. If it is not necessary, I will not stand there to pose for people because I feel embarrassed. I used to be too shy to talk to others actively. When I had conflicts with my parents, I would only avoid them and never communicate with them directly.

Especially during the epidemic, we were locked at home for online classes, and all communication with teachers and classmates was online, which was very cool and saved a lot of social troubles. But the problem soon appeared. I was addicted to games, playing “Minecraft”, and didn’t study well in online classes.

My mother put two cameras in the room to supervise me. I turned the camera to the wall and continued playing. Because of playing games, my mother and I often quarreled, and my mother smashed my computer.

Later, she changed her strategy and let me play. I don’t know what happened. I gradually lost interest in games and even regretted quarreling with my mother for games. I took the initiative to apologize and communicate with her. That was also the first time I knew the importance of communication.

Now I can’t avoid communication anymore. To do SBlockingrkrDAO, I have to meet potential partners, explain my project to them, and sometimes they are adults. At first, I was very nervous when introducing myself and my project to them, and I was afraid of not performing well. Later, I built up my own confidence: I am still a 13-year-old child, as long as I can express my ideas clearly.

Carry introducing her project SBlockingrkrDAO on stage

I found that entrepreneurship requires a thick skin. Gradually, I became less afraid. I even saw admiration in the eyes of the adults, and my confidence grew. Now I can give speeches in front of many people, which is something I would never do before.

Another change is that I have a stronger sense of urgency, or competitiveness. My mother attaches great importance to time management and requires us to work efficiently. What really made me feel “I don’t have much time left” was in March of this year when my mom took me to a Web3 hackathon held in Denver, USA.

I met a 12-year-old boy there. We formed a team of three children and competed with others to create a project. During the whole collaboration, I found that we had common interests, and his skills and ideas were very impressive. Although we didn’t win in the end, he made me feel a sense of urgency. He is only 12 years old, and I am one year older than him. I will likely be defeated by such people in the future.

Later, I started doing SBlockingrkrDAO, and I “snatched” him over to become my partner. He is now one of the founding members of our team.

Doing SBlockingrkrDAO is something I am interested in. I invest my time in it, learn the knowledge and skills necessary to make it successful, and find my own light. I am more confident than before, and the recognition I have gained is incomparable to any perfect score I have ever received.

You should know that confidence is not something that is “praised” out of you. It comes from the sense of accomplishment you get from investing your time and effort into something.

Expectation: “Not all of Gen Z are Web3 natives, those who contribute are”

SBlockingrkrDAO is currently not open to the public yet, and there are still many framework-level things and products being worked on. We will have an application that serves as an entry point, and the first version should be completed around November.

I don’t know how many people will join when it opens, but I hope my peers join because they truly appreciate its ideas and have creative ideas they want to implement. So I am not planning to actively promote it to my classmates. I want SBlockingrkrDAO to be known on a larger scale, and if my classmates see it and are willing to join, of course, I welcome them.

Also, not actively promoting it is related to the labels attached to Web3.

Personally, I have gained some sense of achievement in Web3, but others may not see its charm. I actually came into contact with Web3 because of my mom, whose work is related to it. As someone who likes drawing, she encouraged me to create my works as NFTs, so I have to learn how to use the Ethereum network, encrypted wallets, and encrypted assets to create NFTs.

NFT avatar designed by Carry

But the Web3 circle is actually very niche. In school, blockchain, Bitcoin, and NFTs are not known to most people, and those who know them will even say they are scams. It is not as easy for the “Z generation” to accept them as some of the propaganda says.

I remember once, my mom’s friend was doing market research on an NFT social platform. Because many NFT applications regard the “Z generation” as the natives of Web3, that friend hoped I could help do a survey at school. Some classmates thought I had fallen into a crypto scam, and even considered me a “fraudster.”

I explained that “Web3 is not a scam,” but few classmates were willing to really study it. I will use my pocket money to invest in Bitcoin. In addition to my mom’s reasons, it is also because my brother and I are allowed to invest in stocks at home. Whether it is stocks or Bitcoin, I don’t like to speculate on them. I tend to buy them when they are cheap.

If you know what inflation is, you will find that saving money is definitely not the best choice.

But these are not things that my peers must get, and most of our time should still be spent on schoolwork. SBlockingrkrDAO itself is different from tradition. It requires young people in Web2 and Web3 who can break existing thinking. They are more willing to try new things and are more receptive to self-driven organizations like SBlockingrkrDAO.

I also wonder why so many people think Web3 is a scam. I think it’s because it’s too close to money.

So, I will keep SBlockingrkrDAO away from money. It will definitely not issue any tokens in the early and middle stages. My partners and I have reached a consensus that money is not the purpose of our work in SBlockingrkrDAO. It was originally a way for me to help my brother, and later I hoped it could help more young people like me and my brother.

If you have to say the actual benefits to me personally, my older friends have reminded me that doing SBlockingrkrDAO is a good “story” and will help me increase my resume when applying for college. I think that’s not bad, but the premise is not to be “beautiful”, right? This requires SBlockingrkrDAO to really become a DAO with people joining, building and even producing results.

Many people say that the “00s” and “10s” are the natives of Web3, but I think that the Z generation that has not contributed to Web3 is not the real natives. Just like now, I can use various applications of Web2, but I have not developed a product or underlying technology. I am just a user of Web2, one of the 99% using the Internet, not the 1% mastering it.

Web3 is different. It allows you to realize your creativity on a public network. You can make paintings and music, and turn them into NFTs; you can write programs, and you can try them out. There is still a lot of room for innovation and good opportunities. If you want to change something with Web3, then you have a great opportunity to be in that 1%. For example, Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, I think he is the native of Web3.

So I really want to say to some young people who have heard of Web3 but have not yet come into contact with it, don’t just get in touch with Web3 because of the hype around cryptocurrency. If you are curious about it, then try to get in touch with it, use it, and develop the skills you have. You will discover its true charm. If you are not curious about anything, then life is really boring.

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