When electricity was harnessed in the late 1700s, and early 1800s, many were hesitant to adopt it as a source of power. People were afraid they'd be electrocuted by simply flipping a switch; that their houses would burn down from electrical fires; that a whole working class would be eradicated.

Fear of electricity spread and deepened when a Western Union lineman, John Feeks, was electrocuted and instantly killed by a live wire he worked on. The above image was a cartoon in response to that gruesome event.

In the same vain, many years after the first long-distance telephone call was made in 1877, the sentiment surrounding it still hovered on the borders of fear and skepticism. Public sentiment deemed it a technology of atrocious nature.

Additionally, people were uncomfortable with the possibility that anyone with enough technical skills could tap in and listen to any long-distance call they saw fit.

These were valid concerns.

However, looking back, it seems almost silly to have feared these things given the applications we benefit from every second in the 21st century. So to that, I ask this: Have we forgotten the improvements of the early systems we once ridiculed? Are we not living in a world of advanced and secure telecommunication systems? Do you not read this from an advanced telephone, in a home powered by electricity that runs through properly insulated and installed wires?

Today, I see the same public sentiments surrounding the early stages of blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and more recently, NFTs. I will use this article to highlight why once again the fear of these 'JPEGs' comes from a place of misunderstanding and a lack of innovative optimism.

Speculation-as-a-Service

During the 2020-2021 NFT market craze, the public saw unfathomable price tags for NFT collections and projects. Pictures of Bored Apes, pixelated CryptoPunks, and Generative Art soared to hundreds of thousands of dollars. When Beeple, a well-known digital artist, auctioned off a collage of his Everdays art series as an NFT for $69 million in March 2021, people began to notice.

But many saw NFTs as merely speculative drivers with no real utility or value. To me, speculation is the price to pay toward mass adoption. However, they saw the emissions the underlying system produced and called out its supporters for utilizing a technology that played its own part in damaging the environment.

NFTs aren't real art!! - they screamed.

And their concerns were somewhat valid. If they are just another speculative tool, and another contributor to climate change, and not real art, then...

What are NFTs?

To me, NFTs, or Non-Fungible Tokens, act as digital certificates to prove ownership over anything. Let me explain using the analogy of a piece of clay.

I want you to imagine you have molded this piece of clay into a unique structure. Something truly one-of-a-kind that can't be replicated completely even when attempted because it is:

Non-Fungible - an item that is not interchangeable with another of the same type due to its distinct set of characteristics.

You decide to create a digital token/certificate to represent this clay figure. An NFT. How? Well, you find out that NFTs are created or "minted" using:

Smart Contracts - a self-executing piece of code whereby the terms of the agreement between the buyers and sellers are directly written and forever etched into the contracts program.

When minted, this NFT will contain an ID and Metadata which provides additional information about the figure. In this example, this metadata can include:

• Sculptor/Sculpture name

• Date of creation

• Type of Clay

• Height

• Width

• etc.

You now ask the question, "where is this digital certificate of my sculpture being stored?" Well, it's on the:

Blockchain - a public and global network of computers working independently yet in tandem to validate and reach an agreement on the execution of the created smart contract.

On the blockchain, anyone can verify who created the clay figure, what it was sold for, who it was sold to and when that sale occurred. The buyer and seller will always have a record of that transaction regardless of the availability of the platform used. This is the beauty of the underlying technology. More information on this can be seen here.

Now I want you to replace that piece of clay with:

• Art

• Music

• Essays

• Podcasts

• Gaming assets

• Real-world items

• and the list goes on -> ∞

It is no surprise that the applications of this technology are near limitless. Yes, there have been numerous instances of people losing their digital assets due to targeted phishing attacks.

https://twitter.com/rooftacular/status/1605725241744900097?s=20

Yes, there have been numerous instances of collectors having their accounts drained from NFT scams.

https://twitter.com/Hydraze420/status/1531356909206482947?s=20

However, to paint the future of this technology with the brush strokes of its previous failures puts a dampener on its strides toward adoption & innovation.

It's not all scams

After the first iteration of the web, we saw everything, and I mean everything, move into the digital space at an unprecedented rate. Communication, commerce, entertainment, and even money all become accessible at the click of a button.

With the invention of blockchain, cryptocurrency, and NFTs, these interactions not only became more solidified in the digital space but allowed us to partake in them on our terms.

Many already partake in digital ownership without realizing it. If you have ever bought an E-book, an online album, or have a collection of photos you've taken online, you own them in the digital space. The same idea exists for NFTs; however, the only caveat is that if Audible, Google, or Apple disappeared tomorrow, the things you own on those platforms would evaporate with them. Why? Because of centralization; a single point of failure.

The Creator Economy

With NFTs, creatives have been able to reach a decentralized and global market of collectors without being gridlocked by their location, the terms and conditions of extractive centralized platforms, or by having to sacrifice their creative process for said platforms.

There is complete autonomy and ownership over a creator’s process, revenue, and intellectual property. Allow me to use myself as an example. When I wrote The Read-Write-Own Economy:

• I created a collection of 500 articles

• Set a fixed price

• Minted it on the Optimism Blockchain

Not only was I able to get some collectors, but I also received close to a 100% of the money they paid for my article. A feature that is not available in existing traditional content-creator marketplaces.

However, If Quix was ever to disappear, my article would still exist on another, such as OpenSea.

You see, during that 2021 craze, people dared to test out this new technology. So much so that, we saw the masses generate about $5 billion in NFT sales on OpenSea in January alone!

Although primarily driven by degenerate speculation, we proved that the system did in fact work. Artists were able to focus on creating for their 1000 True Fans; projects were able to crowdsource their ideas with no barriers; and all-in-all, communities sprouted and organized to further test the boundaries of this technology.

Token-gated Communities

The phrase, "Not just JPEGs" became more of a reality when projects began to expand the features of the NFT their collectors owned. By allowing holders to gain access to exclusive content, discounts, or holder-only private spaces, people began to see the value of purchasing these tokens.

One such example of a token-gated community powered by NFTs was the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC):

The additional perks varied from project to project but one thing remained the same, you needed to hold the NFT. It is no surprise how the artists of today can use this to their advantage:

• Free Merch

• Exclusive parties

• Exclusive fan hubs

• Discounted concert tickets

• Early-Access to unreleased tracks

• and the list goes on -> ∞

Funding Public Goods

When NFT communities organize to achieve a common goal, they usually do so under the umbrella of a DAO, a Decentralized Autonomous Organization. Simply put, this describes an organization governed by a group of people who use smart contracts to make decisions on the funds received from their NFT sales.

Some features of DAOs are that:

• They are not controlled by a single authority but by every member who owns the NFT (Decentralized).

• They rely on the instructions coded into the smart contracts; thereby, allowing the execution of ideas without the need for intermediaries (Autonomous)

• They allow transparency of funds and decision-making, as everything exists on a public blockchain (Transparent)

• They allow each member of the DAO to have an equal say in the decision-making governing the organization (Inclusivity).

As stated, these organizations are usually built to support a common vision, and a favorite of mine is that of monetizing:

Public Goods - an object that is non-excludable (used freely, often actually free) and non-rivalrous (used without depletion) - @noun40__

I will explain this with a working example:

Nouns

Nouns is a generative-art NFT project that auctions 32x32 pixelated characters that depict:

a person, a place, or a thing.

One Noun is generated, and auctioned off every day, forever, and the proceeds of the auction are placed into the community treasury for the members of the Nouns DAO to use as they see fit.

As of writing this, the treasury contains 28,219 ETH (~$34 million) and the members of the DAO have voted on 200 proposals as seen in the image below:

The great thing is that they have actually executed on their original vision; to be an open-sourced brand that funds ideas. Although they have funded several ideas already, here are my favorites:

• Nouns X Fitz Frames, providing prescription glasses to kids.

• Gnars, attempting to build the Red Bull of Web3 by funding extreme athletes.

https://twitter.com/gnars_dao/status/1569854782902509569?s=20

Nouns are not the only ones executing on this. Many NFT communities are coming together to fund public goods, and in my opinion, this trend will continue as the adoption of the technology increases.

The Limit Does Not Exist

Envisioning the road ahead is often difficult when you don't understand the journey you're on. I say this for those who call this technology everything it's not; a tool for speculation, a scam, and a danger to the climate (at least not since The Merge). In my opinion, I believe NFTs will continue to play a huge part in this era of social and digital interactions. So now that you understand, indulge me as I make a few predictions for the future:

• Our digital avatars will become more interactive as developers continue to integrate Dynamic NFTs.

• More centralized corporations will adopt DAO methodologies.

• Multi-billion dollar open-sourced brands will emerge and have a cultural impact across the globe.

• The technical jargon & underlying infrastructure will be abstracted away to onboard the next billion owners.

  • As seen with Reddit's Digital Collectibles Collection.

• We will play NFT-powered games without realizing it.

• Digital communities will explode on decentralized social media platforms.

People are often fearful of change because they hold on to the desire of returning to a time and a way of life they perceive as lost. However, we must all practice a little bravery and dip our toes into the unknown, especially when it shows such promise. This is the only way, we as a society can continue innovating -> ∞ and beyond.

If you enjoyed reading this, you would enjoy the resources I got inspiration and information from. Check them out below!

• BAYC

• Gnars

• Nounish

• NounsDAO

• Afraid of What?

• Non-Fungible Tokens

• Image by indiGOKidsNFT

• The Read-Write-Own Economy

• Answering Concerns about NFTs

• When the Telephone Was Dangerous

• Continuous Auction of NFTs used to Monetize Public Goods

• 
  

• Reddit is releasing blockchain-based avatars - just don’t call them NFTs.

The Early Internet

The earliest iteration of what we call the internet today was known as the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). A network developed by the United States Department of Defense (DoD) in the late 1960s as a way to protect critical infrastructures such as telecommunications and nuclear weaponry from possible Soviet Union attacks during the Cold War. Having a single point of failure meant that the nation's defenses were vulnerable during times of disaster. With this, the design decisions for this communication layer had to be:

• Decentralized: spreading processes across several points instead of concentrating them in one.

• Open-Sourced: making code of software freely available for redistribution, modification, and auditing.

To get this network off the ground, the agency funded numerous research facilities and universities across the country; allotting each of them computers connected to ARPANET. Over the decades, this network grew larger, encompassing not only institutions in the United States, but ones in Europe as well. Although its initial function was to serve military purposes, the bright minds of the past saw the possibilities this network presented and worked to make it accessible for everyone. That visionary lens is what brought us to this point.

Read-Only

In the early 1990s, a British scientist working at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web (WWW). He saw the increased popularity of decentralized network usage among research institutions and thought of a way to meet its growing demands. The fundamental element of Berners-Lee's vision was to merge the emerging fields of computers, networking, and hypertext into a robust information system.

He took this vision further and invented the programming language, Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), to create the first-ever WWW website. This ushered in the Read-Only era of the internet, because it was completely static and non-interactive. Most people hosting websites during this era had the technical expertise to do so, simply because the existing infrastructures were not easy to build on. There were no advertisements, content creators, or social media for that matter. In fact, trying to sell things online during this era was frowned upon. People simply read.

By 1993, WWW accounted for 1% of all traffic on the internet. We tapped into a collective network that spanned the globe and the stars in mere seconds; and with it, brought new ways of expression, storytelling, communication, and commerce we had yet to imagine. And boy did we imagine.

Read-Write

By the early 2000s, a new era of the internet had emerged; the Social Web, or Web 2.0. One that shifted from the static read-only landscape to a more dynamic and interactive one. For the first time, user-generated content became commonplace and expanded our 1-way communications over the internet to N-way. We could not only read the content, but write them as well. Sharing and consuming media became much more convenient and accessible.

Users no longer needed technical expertise to participate online, because developers focused more on the users ability to share their experiences. With the introduction of programming languages like CSS, PHP, AJAX, and SQL, they created a myriad of web applications that met our growing demand for media creation and consumption:

• Social Media: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

• Wikis/Blogging: Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger, Wikipedia.

Social media companies recognized that to scale their systems and businesses, they would need to design centralized systems to house and process all this information. This offered them the means to:

1. Increase data processing speeds

2. Reduce data collection conflicts

3. Reduce costs.

To enjoy the speed and convenience of social media, we neglected the terms & conditions and willingly gave up control over our digital privacy and information. Every kilobyte (KB) of the content we uploaded was logged, analyzed, and sold to third-party corporations for a profit. Profit users rarely got to benefit from.

The era of the Social Web was an enormous step in human interaction and commerce; however, the convenience of these interactions came at a cost. The systems were extractive, evasive, closed-sourced, censorship-heavy, insecure, and not private. Our data, confined within single entities and their data centers, formed patterns about our behaviors, spending habits, fears, insecurities, likes, and so on. I mean, just look at what happened with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.

We imagined a world where we could communicate across continents in near-instant time. We imagined a world where we could commercialize our talents, ideas, and experiences. And now, we are imagining one where the content we provide does not belong to an Inc, a Co., or an org, but us.

Read-Write-Own

To talk about the next era of the internet, the Decentralized Web, or Web 3.0, I feel it's important we talk about why it first became a topic of discussion.

Until about a decade ago, it was widely accepted that global financial conglomerates' strength and superb management made them exceedingly difficult to fail. More significantly, these institutions were considered too large to fail. If they did collapse, they could count on the government's monetary policies to keep them solvent. During the Global financial crisis of 2008, people quickly realized that the money they stored in banks, was never theirs. They could neither withdraw, transfer nor spend their hard-earned currency. It was an alarming wake-up call.

What rose from this mistrust was Bitcoin; a digital currency that promised to deliver us from the controlling clutches of financial institutions.

Bitcoin was not only revolutionary for the conversations it sparked about money, but for popularizing a technology that would fundamentally change how we would exchange information and transact online. That technology was Blockchain.

Now, WTF is a blockchain?

To me, a blockchain can be explained as a global network of computers not owned by a single entity. This network can either store, exchange, and secure information such as media, or even digital currency. To ensure that the information exchanged maintains its integrity, each transfer/transaction is verified and cemented by every computer expending energy, i.e., network validators, to keep that network running. As long as >51% of these validators maintain an accurate record of every submitted transaction, those with malicious intent cannot corrupt or shut down the network. This is what makes blockchains decentralized, immutable, and secure.

Since these are essentially global computers, the types of applications that can be built on top of them are near limitless. Almost all the applications we currently use to communicate & transact can be re-imagined on blockchains, but with one key feature; ownership.

Ownership of Data

Today, the Big Data age is compromising consumer privacy in various digital contexts. Large third-party companies gain from data management by collecting, analyzing, correlating, and managing large volumes of our data. We simply have no control over whom this information is given to, how much, or what is shared.

To illustrate how blockchain technology improves on previous models, I will use Lens Protocol as an example.

At its basic level, Lens Protocol is an open-source tool that allows developers to build social media applications on top of it. It is a system that allows a modular social graph, meaning that any data and connections contributed to applications built on top of Lens, can be ported over to another with ease and at your discretion.

Today, there are over 50 application built on this protocol. A few notable ones are:

• Lenster

• Phaver

• Iris

Autonomy over Revenue

As discussed earlier, the media companies of today control almost every byte of the content we consume. However, for those creators, only a small percentage are properly compensated for the value they add to these networks. According to a 2021 survey conducted by Musictech, most of the top 1% of artists on Spotify, made less than $50,000 in streaming revenue. If these are the numbers for the heaviest hitters on the platform, then what about the remaining 99%?

Within this new decentralized era, content creators would interface directly with their audience. No middlemen dictating how much more or little you earn, so they meet their quarterly profit margins. Fans can invest in your vision and journey as a content creator; and in turn, they can earn special privileges for their continued support. Of course, that is up to the artist. Each sale would go directly to the creator's wallet. If they set up secondary market royalties, they could dictate what percentage they would receive if their art was resold. A feature unavailable to traditional art sales.

To see this for yourself, check out a few marketplaces to discover how creators are monetizing their work in this new era:

Art

• Foundation

• OpenSea

• Zora

Music

• Sound

• MintSongs

Articles

• Mirror

Mirror's Writing NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) allow people who enjoy reading your work to show their support by collecting it digitally for the fee you, the writer, set. If said writer has others contributing to their work, they could automatically set up revenue sharing using 0xSplits.

The beauty is that it works for art and music as well.

Conclusion

We continuously innovated on the internet so we could share our stories in a much more seamless manner. From just reading, to then writing, we exchanged and consumed experiences across continents. However, we never owned them in the way that we should have. With emerging technologies like blockchain, we are beginning to re-imagine our current social models. From data to content, we are beginning to re-imagine our current ownership models. This technology has evolved greatly over the decade, and in my opinion, it will continue to do so. However, it is up to us to steer it in the direction that encourages openness, fairness, security, and community.

If you enjoyed reading this, you would enjoy the resources I got inspiration and information from. Check them out below!

• A Short History of the Web

• What is Web 2.0?

• Blockchain technology is shaping the future of Internet

• What Problem Does Web3 Solve, Anyway?

• What Is a Self-Sovereign Identity?

• Who will own the creator economy? A web2 vs. web3 showdown

I am using this medium to do a little bit of storytelling. I am enjoying the intersection between web3 culture, nature, and coordination, amongst other things. I am learning as I write, so this is the outpouring of my research & interests. It’s going to be a rollercoaster, so if you don’t mind an out-of-body experience, step out of yours and explore the wild west of innovation with me.

-- sb0d7