Author's note: This piece was first posted as an unlisted draft on Dec. 16, 2024, and shared privately in Warpcast DCs. It spawned an ongoing group chat lively enough to convince me that it should be made public so it can "belong" to the Farcaster community as a whole. So here it is.
Prelude
In order to write this journal-style post authentically and in the first person, I first had to stop clinging to my long-standing hope that I'd find a sustainable livelihood through the "Farconomy" that would fund enough time for me to work full time on what I've always wanted to do most: creative writing + editing as an art form (as distinguished from "content creation").
Because I love Farcaster and the Farconomy does offer real economic opportunities, letting go of this hope proved to be challenging. Participating in the Farconomy has brought me short-term gig work, several client inquiries about my editorial services, an editor-in-chief job offer, connections with people I highly respect, a Moxie ecosystem contributor grant, several airdrops, tips, daily Moxie rewards for casting, collectibles revenue on Paragraph and Zora, and more. I even got airdropped a Farcaster OG NFT that currently has a floor price of 1.7 ETH. Participating in the Farconomy has made a material difference for me. Of that there is no doubt.
But as long as I held onto the hope of turning my creative writing into a steady, reliable livelihood through the Farconomy, there was some part of me that hedged my bets, resisted, and held back some of the things that wanted to be written through me. What if I "put myself out there" and then the economic opportunities vanished? It wouldn't be the first time that's happened.
[The following is a cast I made in the /slowcore-hq channel on Farcaster on Dec. 12, 2024.]
Recently I had a slowcore breakthough of sorts.
I decided to just relax and not stress at all about building an audience or attracting engagement to my work as a writer.
(NB: I've made that same decision many times before, but it's harder to make it stick when I'm deeply ensconced in a cultural milieu that rewards people for capturing attention and engagement).
Truth be told, I'm content with quietly working in the shadows anyway. That's where I do my best writing.
But it happens slowly. On its own timetable.
If this means I'll never make a sustainable living doing the writing I want to do — because even in web3 the financial rewards go only to those who put in extra time on top of their creative work to build sizable audiences — then it's time to make my peace with it and return to day jobs.
@manansh responded to my cast with two evocative questions.
1) What is your relationship to being seen by others?
2) Do you feel safe when others see you?
In Farcaster contexts, my relationship to "being seen" is complicated.
I love Farcaster. I love many of the people. I love the nerdy, earnest vibe. I've been an active user for almost two years. It's my online home base. So I feel safe enough for that, at least.
I'm also convinced that if the Farconomy is ever to leave behind some of the less visible "hostile value capture"** patterns normalized by web2 platforms, it will need to find better ways to reward writers/artists that:
1) ...are sufficient to support a livelihood in the arts;
2) ...help counter the extractive reliance on presumed "free" labor (e.g., Warpcast channel moderation); and
3) ...rely less on rewarding casters for engagement. (More on this later).
On my relationship to being seen by others: I approach writing as an art form. So I want my work — the writing itself — to be seen and received. I don’t want the focus to be on me as an individual, except to the extent that it helps the work itself reach more of those who need it. I don't have any interest in internet fame, nor in "building an audience" as a means toward an end. If that's the only viable path to a livelihood for writers in my position, then I'm out.
I do have an interest in connecting with actual humans who read and enjoy my work, but that's a different category. There are hard limits to the number of humans I can connect with that way. Once the audience numbers exceed my capacity and desire to respond in kind, it's reached a point of diminishing returns for the art form, because the more time I spend on responses ("engagement"), the less time I have to devote to the writing that attracted their attention in the first place.
Do I feel safe being seen? Well, let's start here: there is being seen, and then there is being witnessed. These are two different (though often conflated) experiences.
Being witnessed is something that typically happens in social contexts that have built trust over time, and when that trust is present, it increases psychological safety and allows room for risky disclosures of the sort that need witnessing. Farcaster has some of this, fortunately. That's one of the reasons I call it my home base, and it's part of why I feel safe enough to share this post.
Being seen can be a mixed bag, especially when one is perceived as vulnerable by randos on the internet. Most women, myself included, know intimately what it's like to be seen primarily as a target, a trophy, a set of body parts for the use of men, a representative for an entire gender, etc. Saying anything at all in public means there's always a nonzero risk of being exploited, harassed, abused, cut off from income streams, or dragged through the emotional wringer. And as anyone who's gone viral knows, that risk increases with popularity ("exposure"), especially if there's drama and controversy involved. So my deep-seated protective instinct, which has kept me safe many times, leans toward "it's probably best to just stay out of public view most of the time."
Also, I just enjoy behind-the-scenes work and tend to avoid the spotlight anyway, so there's that aspect too. Building sanctuary spaces in the shadows is instinct-driven behavior for me.
Being seen can also be about belonging, recognition, affirmation, and respect. It can be about developing a reputation as a person of integrity, and as a relatable human being who has interesting things to say. I appreciate it when I'm seen that way on Farcaster.
* * *
Elsewhere in the thread that spawned the questions from @manansh, I wrote: “Hope is a powerful drug, I've been overdosing on it for most of the time I've been in crypto, and it's time to sober up.”
In other words: my psychological Achilles heel is that I want so much to believe that crypto rails + web3 business models can mitigate decades of extractive financial harm toward writers (and art labor in general) that I’m more likely than not to overemphasize positives and downplay shortcomings. (This wish-fulfillment tendency shows up in my popular essay Free + Valuable: Why I'm Excited About Zora Protocol Rewards, for example).
What niche writers will need to thrive — but still don’t have — is durable, robust, community-owned, non-extractive spaces to gather. We need places where our work can be valued and rewarded for its quality, situated within an appropriate cultural milieu (i.e., literary and cultural scenes, not just "crypto,") and curated by trusted and respected pros with deep roots in their respective scenes.
We need places where we can:
Post our work and organize it as we see fit (topic, keyword, curated directories, private and public layers, micro-blogs, themed collections, cultural contexts, etc.)
Build searchable, organized bodies of work over time.
Start and manage professional-level print and digital publications, hire editorial talent, and develop mission-driven, non-extractive business models that enable contributors to earn a sustainable livelihood and avoid burnout from overwork.
Carry on conversations in slowcore fashion with other writers and readers: i.e., in ongoing ways that permit leisurely reading and preservation of relevant context. Interested commenters should be able to return their attention to the conversation later on, as time permits. Newcomers should be able to easily resurface good discussions and revive them in ways that can help attract more participation. (Semi-related: I miss reply-bumping on Warpcast).
Trust that we won’t fall prey to enshittification patterns or random de-platforming, especially after we've put in untold amounts of "free" labor to make the spaces attractive to readers and other writers.
Support sustainable livelihoods, a robust intellectual and cultural commons, and economic patterns that follow the logic of the gift.***
Creative people — and here I’m not talking about "creators" in a general sense, but people who practice art forms in emergent ways driven by their muses or deep mind — are service providers. We serve as conduits or channels for raw material to shape into work that (we hope) will speak to people who need it. Often we do our best work within specific scenes and contexts that are small enough to build trust and community cohesion (enabling the work to be witnessed), yet large enough to also become recognized nodes of larger networks.
As long as most of the economic rewards in the Farconomy continue to go to those who do content creation — creative work intended for the "creator economy" or for marketing reasons such as branding and building an audience — the economic interests of writers who write primarily as an art form in service of communities will continue to be underserved.
This is poorly understood in web3 spaces. It's all too easy to gloss over or blur the distinction between writing as art form and writing as content creation.
Despite our best intentions, what we actually have in much of web3 — including in the Farcaster ecosystem — is lip service paid to "positive-sum design" and "funding creators" plus several ways to feed their hope (tips, airdrops, one-off grants, etc.), while many creative people get covertly strung along in the hopes of turning their work into a sustainable livelihood one day.
To be clear, in most cases I don't think there's intentional deception going on. But the extractive value capture patterns I'm pointing out still have an effect. They don't rely on individual intent at all. That's why they're so powerful.
People will provide a lot of unpaid or low-paid content creation and maintenance labor as long as the hope of eventually being recognized and sustainably rewarded for the creative work they want to do actually seems within reach. Success stories can be extremely seductive in that context.
But for many (most?) long-form writers in the Farconomy — particularly those covering niche topics and working in literary contexts — the promise of a sustainable livelihood seems to be a mirage. So sooner or later these writers will likely return the bulk of their attention to day jobs or web2 platforms, and the Farcaster content machine will march on without them. Memory of their work will quickly fade, because algorithms will bury it. And there are always more earn-a-living hopefuls who will take their place in the content creation grind without complaint (until they, too, burn out).
It's hard to raise questions in public about how these underlying patterns continue to impact writers like me. There's a risk of being seen as a complainer, because unless you're a big influencer, your take is probably much better in the Farconomy than it's ever been on most web2 platforms. That's definitely true for me. And that is an improvement over the web2 status quo.
There's also the risk that sharing personal stories that invite questioning of the Farconomy status quo will be interpreted narrowly as a personal problem ("skill issue", etc.), rather than a call to "think in systems" and critically evaluate a pattern that disadvantages many writers and artists in similar positions.
To the extent that the Farconomy is subsidized by presumed free or low-paid labor from writers, artists, channel mods, etc., who hope to turn their creative and maintenance work into a sustainable livelihood, I see these patterns continuing to play out as hidden forms of “hostile value capture" that web3 has inherited from web2.
That's why hope is such a powerful drug. As long as hope is kept alive and there's enough contextual ambiguity to make the possibility of succeeding seem within reach, subtle extractive value capture patterns can continue largely unchallenged.
To be fair, there are people earnestly trying to address these patterns in deeply positive-sum ways. Too often their work is unfairly marginalized.
Mike Natanzon of Abundance Protocol and Impact, for example, has written many excellent articles. He rightly points out the need to move beyond rewarding people for engagement and the insufficient focus on incentivizing quality and impact in the Farcaster network.
In a conversation with Mike, I wrote a bit about what that "insufficient focus on incentivizing quality" looks like through my eyes:
I've been casting since January 2023. My essays get good feedback from readers. I've curated content others appreciate. I've started + modded 2 channels. I've been boosted by Warpcast. I've received the 5 USDC top caster reward several times.
I love Farcaster. I know we need more interesting content. Happy to contribute what I can.
Yet like most writers, I still can't make ends meet sustainably through my creative writing. Nor through channel mod work. Tips + minting are supplemental revenue at best, and unreliable.
Thus far I've been subsidizing the time I spend on Farcaster through other means. That won't be possible for me much longer, so with no clear path to a sustainable livelihood there may soon be a big drop in the time I'm able to spend on Farcaster (and thus, the content I contribute) since I'll need to turn my focus to paid work elsewhere.
How could Farcaster retain contributors in similar positions?
If the main path to a sustainable livelihood for writers in the Farconomy is through "building an engaged audience" web2-style, then I suspect most writers in similar positions to mine will always need day jobs (and/or other non-Farconomy income sources). This hustle-culture standard is already the norm, so many people don't even perceive the risk of writer attrition as an issue for the Farconomy. As mentioned above, struggles with overwork and burnout often get narrowly framed as personal issues rather than harbingers of structural problems.
But consider that if these writers don't build and monetize an audience, their work will remain obscure, and the Farcaster ecosystem will miss out on whatever additional contributions they could have made to its success if they'd had realistic paths to a sustainable livelihood.
As I've written before, that's a collective loss that should be cause for concern to all who respect the writer's craft.
At some level, I still believe the Farconomy can do better. Eventually. At the same time, I'm weary of watching many of the same extractive patterns play out time and again. And as far as I can tell, long-term retention of contributors in positions like mine doesn't seem to be a high priority for the ecosystem as a whole.
This line from Anne Helen Petersen's newsletter hit a nerve:
"People seem to be grappling with a more fundamental question: Does posting add more to my life than it extracts?"
Is me. Yes. I'm grappling with that question.
Much as I still love Farcaster and genuinely appreciate the social and economic benefits that have come my way, from a business perspective the opportunity cost of spending so much of my time there for the past two years is sobering — especially since I'm a self-employed solo freelancer who relies on "billable hours." Any work time, including casting time, that I give at below-market rates affects my bottom line directly.
In January I plan to start looking elsewhere for a sustainable income, so it's anyone's guess how much time I'll have to spend on the purple app in 2025.
So my relationship to being seen on Farcaster is... complicated.
Notes
** h/t to Yuri for the apt phrase "hostile value capture."
*** As I wrote in Free + Valuable: "In healthy arts networks, normative patterns of value flow follow positive-sum logic, in which "free" creative work includes obligations of reciprocity to the commons. Extractive forces prey on these norms of gift economics by capturing this "free" value and financializing it in zero-sum ways that shift risks and costs onto artists."
Image by Ian Schneider via Unsplash.
Finally got around to reading this one over the weekend. I also read a post on dirt dealing with the topic of freelance writers at the same time and discovered themes that overlap. Such as the dream of writing about what interests you without financial worries, which often remains unattainable for 90%. I, too, had a dream like that, but I realized that in crypto, it is not feasible without a huge audience. Apparently this is called "content capital" and something you need to build as a writer to succeed in web2/3 or the creator economy at large. Especially the point about how reward structures encourage one form of writing vs another. Having been in crypto for years, I'm disillusioned in regards to real positive-sum thinking, or genuine aspiration to enable human flourishing. All too often, these lofty promises just turned out empty. Take NFTs and the promise of royalties. Much of it is not a question of technology, but one of the social layer in my view. And unfortunately, we don't have the best track record there. In a sense, I've given up. I have a job that pays, it includes writing and fortunately leaves room for me to use my voice - but writing about the things that move me, it's something I do entirely for free. A luxury I can afford as long as I have sufficient other work. It also means I am more free of thinking about how this contributes to my "personal brand" (a framing I find problematic anyway) or market value.
Thanks for taking time to read and comment, Naomi. I’d add that it’s not always feasible to make content creation into a livelihood in web3 even when you DO have a huge audience. Plenty of people have gone viral with nothing to show for it in return but heaps of unexpected labor and stress. Not much of an improvement over web2 by that measure. I can relate to what you wrote about disillusionment, and I think you’re right on target about the need for improvements at the social layer too. I think Farcaster is the best we've seen so far on that account, but nonetheless we've still got a long way to go, even on the purple app. Since I have neither the skills nor the desire to build a huge audience (let alone build a “personal brand”), I’ll be looking in the direction you describe: a job (or client retainer agreement, or whatever) that pays and affords me time and energy to do the writing-as-art-form work in my off hours. But AI has already taken away my previous job (copyediting call transcripts for DAOs), so it's anyone's guess where I'll end up this time. In any event, I’ve always believed it is fundamentally wrong that people who’ve achieved professional-level skills in an art form are structurally coerced into selling the best hours of their day to “earn a living” instead of using that time for their own creative work. That's a huge collective loss to everyone who appreciates art, writing, music, etc.
Exploring the tension between public visibility and artistic authenticity, @danicaswanson shares struggles within the evolving Farconomy in the latest blog post. The realities of turning art into a consistent livelihood are sobering amid the extractive patterns that persist.