Trey Anastasio on Dumbles, Broadway, and 40-Plus Years of Phish

Listen to this episode from Wong Notes on Spotify. Imagine being in a band with your best friends for over 40 years, and each night you step on stage you get to play one more show. That's exactly what guitarist Trey Anastasio and his bandmates in Phish think about right before every sold-out arena or amphitheater show.

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Technology keeps getting louder, sharper, more insistent. Every few months, a new tool promises a new edge, better tone, better polish, better reach, better output. But the strange thing about this moment is that the more perfect the tools become, the more we risk losing our sound. The internet turned everyone into a broadcaster, a performer, an always on communicator. We define ourselves through what we publish and how it’s received. Yet underneath all that machinery is the one variable no tool can replace: the voice itself. And the more uniformity the system produces, the more valuable the unique sound of a real human becomes.

Trey tells a story that maps this perfectly. He spent decades playing through a rig he built in 1986, shaping the sound fans know as him and his band, Phish. In 2016 he went on a wild tone optimization pilgrimage, testing every permutation he could find in search of something sharper. But all that experimenting only pushed him deeper into wanting to sound more like himself. After all the searching and tweaking, he circled right back to the rig he started with. The hero’s journey wasn’t about finding new tools, but about appreciating the originality that made him Trey. 

That’s the trap I worry many will fall into now, thinking the tool gives you an identity, when your identity is the only thing that gives the tool any power.

The real work is not beating the machine. It’s beating the part of you that thinks you need the machine to begin with. “You are Cory Wong, so you have to play a Fender”, Trey told Cory. “That’s your sound. You’re Cory Wong”. Trey tried to outrun that myth with 10,000 hours of tinkering, only to find that the tech wasn’t the constraint. Your style is the one thing technology cannot clone. Tools can enhance it, distort it, amplify it, but they can’t generate it. And if they try, the result only exposes the void: perfection without personality.

This is why Jack White still sounds like Jack White on gear that’s mostly plastic and ranges from pristine to broken. Why Ray Brown made the shittiest upright bass in the club sound like gold in one second. Why every attempt to “sound better” through technology eventually collapses back into the truth that the sound is not the instrument, it’s the person. Part of your voice is the sum of everything that built you: the mistakes, the obsessions, the taste you stole from your heroes, the moments you thought you weren’t good enough, the experiences you lived through that no one else did. That’s the tone no system can simulate.

And so the actionable insight is simple. Use the tools, but don’t chase them. Experiment, but don’t second guess your sound, your identity.  Technology will keep getting better, faster, more precise, but your job is not to match its perfection. Your job is to return to the thing that made you worth listening to in the first place. 

Your voice can’t be beaten because it’s yours.

I listened to Mike Gordon on Rick Rubin this morning. You all should absolutely listen to this.

One thing he told Rick is that the magic of Phish is that you as the fan never know what’s coming. The setlist is never the same, you miss songs, you chase songs, sounds combat and converge in the open air and the whole thing could collapse or become transcendent at any moment. “It’s like a herd of buffalo running full speed and then turning left together.”

In business, risk is the price of potential. And that’s the point above. With Phish, you don’t go to hear what you expect; you go to chase what you can’t predict. That principle, uncertainty as value, is what I believe is the foundation of every modern experience economy.

A market of goods has a price floor and a price ceiling. A market of experiences has neither. Goods operate within cost, distribution, and supply. Experiences operate within emotion, participation, and meaning. You can replicate the product, but never the perception, and the network effects of this being done right transcend any actual physical product. Everyone at a concert hears the same song but no one leaves with the same memory. The elasticity of value in experiences, how much someone feels something, is what defines their worth.

The past decades optimized goods through logistics, pricing, efficiency. The next years are about optimizing experience through feedback loops that convert feeling into equity. Disney, Nike, and Taylor Swift understand this better than most. Disney sells narrative immersion that bilaterally feeds its rides. Nike sells the data and achievement around every run. The Eras Tour turned a concert into an economy, ticketing, friendship bracelets, livestreams, an entire market powered by participation, not product.

Technology is the scaffolding that lets experience scale. Media gives it form, things like crypto give it ownership, and AI now gives it personalization. TikTok shows how discovery becomes creation, audiences remixing culture in real time. Peloton built its business on interaction, not instruction. Even Starbucks uses routine as a loyalty loop, turning coffee into daily ritual. These are not just companies selling things, they’re systems that monetize repetition and belonging.

There are challenges. Emotion doesn’t scale in unison like manufacturing. Ownership alone doesn’t create meaning. But the best systems solve this through structure. Disney, Fortnite, and Spotify Wrapped use managed surprise, the framework stays constant, the variables evolve. Soho House and LEGO IDEAS prove that participation deepens attachment. AI tools like Midjourney or Runway scale with interaction, not just automation. The constant across all of them is rhythm, rituals that make emotion renewable.

The market of goods runs on limits. The market of experiences runs on belief. There’s no floor to meaning, no ceiling to memory. The more people participate, the more valuable the network becomes, not because the thing is rare, but because the feeling is. Value now compounds through resonance. I'm excited about an economy that doesn't just trade objects, but structure markets can "trade" on moments as well.

Honestly, I barely notice ads anymore. On platforms like Instagram, they’re half the reason I linger. They mirror what I like, what I want, what I might want to buy next. On YouTube, I pay for Premium, but not to eliminate ads,  just to stream music offline. The idea that advertising ruined the internet was never a universal truth. It was a professional grievance that feels like it's now calcified into memory. For most users, ads are invisible infrastructure, a silent exchange that keeps the web creative, open and free.

For decades, designers, journalists, and VCs framed advertising as the internet’s original sin. They turned that argument into religion, with conferences, manifestos, and essays all orbiting the belief that “good” meant ad-free. The outrage was always aesthetic and philosophical, not behavioral. And while critics mourned purity, audiences chose access. Advertising, more than any subscription or micropayment system, democratized information by externalizing the cost of creation and distribution.

The numbers prove it. Nearly 80% of global digital media revenue still comes from advertising. YouTube generated $36.1 billion in 2024, enabling billions of free hours of viewing and paying creators 55 cents of every dollar. TikTok, Instagram, and a thousand other creator platforms built entire economies around ad markets, letting millions earn without charging audiences. Even Netflix, once the face of ad-free purity,  said it had its best ad sales quarter ever in 2024, projecting a doubling of ad revenue in 2025 (via MDM):

What critics call “ad fatigue” now looks more like equilibrium. Yes, it was ugly for a while,  flashing banners, pop-ups, autoplay chaos, but the system evolved. You can always block them, by the way. All the while, most subscription churns keep climbing. The real exhaustion isn’t with ads, it’s with exclusion. People don’t want to be priced out of participation.

Advertising widened the field. It allowed anyone to reach a global audience without permission or paywalls by way of massive distribution platforms. It made creation scalable. This open layer of culture, education, and entertainment runs on ad markets, not the handful of users willing to pay $10 a month for access.

The “ads are bad” belief persists because it flatters taste. It lets critics appear principled, above commerce, nostalgic for a purity that doesn’t equate with scale. But ads are the scaffolding of a free, global web. Imperfect, yes, but still the fairest system we’ve found for distributing cost, value, and opportunity. The next era of media shouldn’t erase them. It should evolve them, make them intelligent, transparent, and worthy of the attention they command. Maybe even more beautiful, too.

Last night, I lost my shadow. It was both one of the saddest and most beautiful days of my life so far. After 14 years together, and 16 years of life, she finally told us it was time to rest. We’ve been preparing for this day for probably three years now. Every time we thought she was getting too old, she’d turn back time. Even though she was slower and calmer, she still followed me everywhere. She was the shadow at my side. Last night, when it became obvious, I told my son Knox that we could all sleep together tonight. He said, “Good, because we’re saying goodbye to the greatest person in our family today.” He was right.

This is the saddest our family has been in a long time. But Cassidy was a gift. I am not religious, but if anything was spiritual or divine, it was our relationship with her. Instead of being sad, I am going to tell you all about how incredible she was. And even though dogs can’t read (or speak English, though I believe Cassidy understood me fluently), I’m hoping that in doggy heaven there’s a translator who can share these thoughts with her. We loved her so much, and she deserves all recognition.

We adopted Cassidy on August 15th, 2011. Chelsea was walking around SoHo one morning when she saw an Animal Haven Dog Shelter volunteer walking what looked like a white wolf. She asked the volunteer about her, and the volunteer said that she had just been rescued. Cassidy was a mama dog who had been found by the organization while pregnant. She gave birth to her litter at the shelter. They were called “The Pirate Pups,” and she was their mom, “Treasure.” The puppies were adopted, but the shelter was still trying to find her a home. Chelsea called me, and we decided instantly that we wanted to be the people who gave mom a home.

For context, Chelsea and I met in January of 2011. So Cassidy had been with us since basically day one of our lives together. She was the ultimate dog and the most loyal friend. I never used a leash with Cassidy because she would never leave our side. She was insanely athletic. We would take her on hikes and adventures to the beach, where she would swim in the lake and obsess over tennis balls. Summers in Dewey meant Cassidy would run the beaches at sunrise and sunset, and at night walk with us to the bars to listen to live music and eat fried chicken and crab.

Everyone would always stop us and tell us how beautiful she was. I was so proud of that, as if she were our daughter. Yes, the looks come from us! But really, it was non-stop compliments about her. Everyone was amazed by her demeanor and beauty, and everyone knew she was my best friend. My brother-in-law texted us yesterday after learning the news and said, “She was the sweetest dog and a big part of the family. Always saw her as Jarrod’s loyal sidekick.” Everyone knew that. She was my sidekick. We were inseparable until her last day. I will forever have a gap in my heart where she laid, and I never want that to be filled. It’s only for her.

Cassidy was definitely crazy, though. She couldn’t be contained. Whenever we’d visit somewhere and had to leave the house, we knew she’d get out. Whether that was breaking out of the car at the Trader Joe’s parking lot or greeting us at the elevator when we’d be getting back from a night out in New York City, she ran by her own rules. But that’s what made her special. Cassidy and I had a spiritual deal when we adopted her—that we’d always be together. And she never wanted a situation where that wasn’t the case. I hope everyone has something in their life that loves them like that because it’s the greatest feeling a person can ever have.

Cassidy was there through our lives' biggest moments. Three months after Chelsea and I moved in together, we adopted Cassidy. She lived in the city with us and was the photo on our Save the Date when we got engaged. Once we found out we were having twins and moved out of the city, she rolled with us through the tunnel into Jersey and was there the day Knox and Nash were born. Her responsibility to Chelsea and me was immediately assumed onto the boys as well. She protected them, slept alongside them, and showed them what it was like to be part of the gang. We wanted the boys to feel the love that Cassidy gave us, and they did.

What was crazy is that we had Cassidy for six years before the boys were born. Doing the math, and knowing she was a mom, that would make her eight years old at the time. We fully expected these to be her later years. Little did we know that she would be riding along with us through our sons’ biggest life moments for the next eight years.

We moved to Westfield and built our family here. Cassidy was here for every one of their birthdays. She sat outside with them for hours while they learned how to potty train. She woke up with them every morning and ate breakfast. They’d let her out in the backyard so she could go to the bathroom. They would throw her tennis balls. It’s hard to appreciate this repetition at the time, but now that it’s gone, you realize that just like brushing your teeth and taking a shower, petting and saying good morning to your dog is a constant. We’re confused, but we’re okay, because she made every one of our moments better, and we’re thankful for that.

Her favorite thing was us. She would do anything for us. I’m convinced she lived so long because she felt it was her duty not to give up on us. Cassidy never showed pain. She never cried or whimpered. She showed up for work every day and made sure our days were fulfilled in any way she could contribute. She loved dog things too, of course—loved treats, loved running around with Frank and Chief—but she was human above all.

I never thought I’d have to say goodbye to her. I feel like I owe her so much more. Last night, when we said goodbye, I left the vet and my shadow wasn’t there anymore. I clutched her empty leash and collar—the leash that was the exact one we got the day we adopted her—and I heard the jingle of her dog tag. And I realized that shadows only happen in the light. And that wasn’t just when Cassidy was behind me. She was always behind me. The sound of her collar, or the loose pieces of hair that now sit next to my office chair, are her. The scratches she made on the door when I’d have to leave her alone used to make me mad, and now they give me peace.

So my shadow isn’t really gone—it’s still following me, just a little further away. I won’t be able to say “C’mon, Cassidy” anymore, though I’m sure I will accidentally from time to time. And I really hope I do.

Everyone who knew us knew Cassidy. She was someone we didn’t take for granted, and we realized how special she was every waking day we had with her. We got extremely lucky that Chelsea was walking down Orchard Street that day. We gave her a new life, and I truly believe it was an amazing life. And she gave us more than a dog can ever realize. She defined us and will live with me forever.

I’m really proud she was my dog. I miss you and love you. Thank you for giving me the greatest 14 years I could ever ask for.

For decades, publishing was organized by time. We had the daily paper, the evening broadcast, the weekly issue. We had the option to binge, but on a set schedule. And discourse consisted of coffee shop talk, meeting in real life. Had to give real effort. That effort structured how we related to media, until distribution moved online, when that logic collapsed.

When distribution moved online, that logic collapsed. Publishers tried to recreate it literally, through mechanical loops like navigation bars, homepages, and right rails, assuming readers still wanted to move through content linearly. But we realized pretty early on that web users don’t consume that way.

Once content became infinite, time stopped being the organizing layer for distribution. It still matters for discourse, being able to have collective conversations that form around an event, a release, a breaking story. But that’s way different from using time as a tool to capture and retain audience attention. Conversations can happen in pockets, through various means like text, email, twitter, whatever. The internet world is huge. What matters now isn’t when something was published, but whether it’s relevant at the moment of discovery.

My buddy Garrett made the point that we haven’t nailed the time and place within this new world. We went from rigid schedules to total on demand freedom, and obvious changes happened in between. Appointment television and print deadlines created moments of shared anticipation where people showed up together. Infinite availability, meanwhile, removed friction but also dissolved the rhythm that gave media its social gravity. There’s likely a middle ground in a system that preserves accessibility yet reintroduces shared time, context, or ritual. We sort of live in that in our own pockets of interest today through platforms and group chats. 

This shift from chronological to conversational also redefined recurrence. People don’t return to articles but rather return to systems that help them orient around someone they’re comfortable with. Knowing that, a modern day publication’s value isn’t in its archive, but in its ability to maintain context with the readers over time. That’s why modern subscriptions behave like feeds, not libraries. You subscribe to a worldview or a tone, something that updates as fast as your attention does alongside people like you.

So what’s the business opportunity for media brands to maintain its edge? Understanding why people return is key. And weirdly it’s been ignored and paved over by emerging media companies, platforms and individuals. To oversimplify, we can say audiences subscribe to media for three reasons: to inform, to identify, and to invest. People pay for information that gives them clarity, edge, or confidence like professional utility, intellectual curiosity, or FOMO avoidance. Examples include The Information for industry insight, Punchbowl for The Hill, Axios Pro for deal flow, etc. Others return to media to identify, to belong, signal cultural taste, or align with a community. Barstool Sports and niche Substacks show how publications build tribal affiliation through humor, values, and language. Finally, readers invest in media that represents a mission or worldview they want to support, from The Free Press independent journalism to Puck’s reclamation of media power, or creators on Patreon. Understanding these drivers is the foundation for building interfaces, and businesses, that matter.

The problem is that the feed itself has already been captured. Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok became the default interfaces for news, commentary, and culture. Spotify did the same for audio and YouTube for video and Reddit for discourse. Each built environments that organize content by behavior and state, not by chronology. They allow you to seek and then leverage that to recommend more. They turned consumption into a continuous loop which has now become extremely personalized, real time, and self reinforcing.

Media, meanwhile, remains stuck in capture mode. It creates content, pushes it into someone else’s system, and monetizes the residual attention through ads, subscriptions, or sponsorships. The architecture is super static as well, picking scraps on a CMS or newsletter tool. There’s no differentiated interface layer and  no native environment that builds participation or identity. As long as that remains true, publishers will continue to react, producing for platforms they don’t own and audiences they can’t retain.

The next step isn’t more content or smarter targeting, it’s integration of the value hooks mentioned above within its interface – the means by which they communicate with their people. Media must build around conversation, not chronology, where users can engage, annotate, and reframe information together. This means creating threaded discussions, personalized orientation feeds, live datasets, and community aligned pathways that entertain, spark conversation, and reinforce identity. The opportunity is to design systems that function less like distribution channels and more like operating systems for discourse. Like Google did to advertising, the iPhone did to mobile and apps, and OpenAI is to conversational UI, traditional media is in response mode. Deciding whether you will be wholesale or retail will depend on the ability to shift the interface by which you engage readers, and the experiences you offer to them.

Many of the largest shifts in business stem from taking practices that were once private and moving them into the public domain. 

The internet’s impact on media illustrates this clearly. Before digital distribution, newspapers, television networks, and film studios controlled both the production and the distribution of content. Decisions about what reached audiences were made behind closed doors. As were the costs advertisers and subscribers were willing to pay for their products.

The web opened those processes to a broader set of participants. Now anyone could publish, share, and distribute content. This transparency undermined existing gatekeepers and created opportunities for entirely new business models, from YouTube creators monetizing views to independent writers using Substack to reach paying audiences directly. What was previously a private, centralized system became a public, participatory one, and the value creation followed.

Finance is now experiencing the same dynamic. Traditional banking and capital markets operate with processes largely invisible to everyday users. Settlement, lending, custody, and trading were all private mechanisms controlled by intermediaries. Crypto and decentralized finance make those processes observable and interactive. Platforms like Uniswap, Compound, and Polymarket expose users to transactions, interest accrual, and predictive markets that were once the domain of professionals and analysts. Users can act directly, see outcomes in real time, and influence system behavior. Making these previously private mechanisms public has catalyzed adoption and value creation in ways that incremental improvements to old systems could never achieve. 

The opportunity is especially evident in sectors that are assumed rigid or inaccessible like healthcare, insurance, energy,  where transparency and access open entirely new avenues for innovation. The shift exists in the transition of making the previously impossible suddenly possible. 

Web2 platforms offer a historical precedent for how public exposure changes business dynamics. Companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter leveraged the public behaviors of their users to extract insights and optimize engagement. Notifications, the newsfeed, and algorithmic recommendations turned private attention into public, measurable activity. These platforms then selectively opened APIs, developer tools, or monetization pathways, allowing participants to create value within the system. The control remained centralized, but the exposure of formerly private behaviors of likes, shares, follows became the raw material for business growth. Mobile devices accelerated this process, making user behavior constant, observable, and scalable across geographies, and amplifying the feedback loop between public activity and network value.

This principle extends beyond media and finance. In open source software, development that was once internal and proprietary became public with projects like Linux, Kubernetes, and TensorFlow. Transparency allowed anyone to contribute, inspect, or fork code, accelerating innovation and creating entirely new commercial markets for cloud services, support, and analytics. 

In logistics and supply chains, platforms like Amazon and Alibaba made inventory, order tracking, and seller performance visible to partners and consumers. Scientific research offers a similar case. Preprint servers such as arXiv and bioRxiv moved work that was previously gated by journals into the public domain, accelerating collaboration, peer review, and funding decisions. And in labor and service markets, companies like Uber and DoorDash transformed private scheduling and allocation into publicly observable systems, creating dynamic, competitive markets where efficiency and performance are measurable in real time. 

In all of these cases, what was once private, whether code, inventory, knowledge, or labor, became public, changing behavior and creating new value. Observability is the driver while adoption and market growth follow.

The same principle underpins the promise of Web3 and decentralized systems. Technology alone is insufficient as a course change. What drives change is the alignment of system visibility with user behavior. Crypto native systems make previously private operations like ownership of assets, transaction histories, and incentive structures, public and programmable. Users respond predictably, as they participate, experiment, and interact because they can see and influence the outcomes. Stablecoins normalize immediate, cross border payments, DeFi platforms allow direct lending and borrowing, and NFTs embed ownership and status publicly into social and financial networks. Each case demonstrates that opening private systems to public observation and participation doesn’t just create transparency, it creates markets, drives engagement, and reallocates value toward participants rather than gatekeepers.

This lesson extends beyond any single sector. Every industry that appears immovable is subject to similar forces. When processes, decisions, or transactions that were once private are made public, the potential for innovation, competition, and value creation expands. Businesses that recognize this don’t simply layer new technology on old structures; they design for the behaviors that transparency enables. Those that resist exposure may preserve the short-term comfort of control, but in doing so they fail to engage the broader market forces now visible to everyone. 

In modern business, the movement from private to public is less a strategy choice than a structural imperative: markets evolve because behavior becomes observable, and value shifts to those who can participate in the open system.

In 2017 I was part of a team building a protocol called Po.et. The idea back then was simple in that if the first path to publish content was on a blockchain there would be a ton of opportunities to leverage that public data in unique ways to better the media ecosystem. Some early ideas for applications were ways to see the provenance of information answering whether or not the source should be trusted. Another was new models by which creators and media companies could make money like transacting on tweets or introducing better forms of content licensing that extend beyond just institutional models. We weren’t alone there were others working towards the same objective like Civil at Consensys. There are many reasons why it didn’t work, in crypto we say we were early, but also the market wasn’t there, the threat wasn’t obvious and it wasn’t important enough to prioritize over the legacy day to day operations at the media companies and platforms.
But we’re in a new world now.

The internet is becoming completely programmable. I worked on the ad side for years and whenever I heard programmable I thought of programmatic and it was just a means by which to use data, target ads and make it as efficient as possible through machines. But now that’s on both sides. You would think we just end up in a hellscape of content everywhere but I’d argue that with this, inventory actually gains dimension. A tweet, a video clip, even AI slop content once serving as pure artifacts of attention are becoming active participants in an economic loop. Tokenized formats, embedded attribution and instant micropayments transform content from a consumable into a financial primitive.

I was listening to Matthew Prince on the USV podcast the other day and he presented an idea similar to one I had as well in that in this new environment we now know through AI the questions we have answered and ones we do not. And that creates a dynamic new marketplace for consumers to move beyond passive and become active in their participation and value contributions to the internet.

Platforms like Cloudflare’s NET Dollar and Coinbase’s x402 Foundation are building some unique rails for this, enabling content objects to transact autonomously. The internet that once priced impressions in fractions of a cent is now engineering a system where those same interactions clear value instantly and on-chain in a bilateral way.

This evolution reframes inventory not as a symptom of the attention economy but as its next infrastructure layer. Content when indexed through open payment standards becomes a programmable endpoint. Each article, image or data feed can host a wallet, route royalties and contribute to an ecosystem of composable media. Instead of being harvested for views, inventory becomes the raw material for algorithmic trade with fragments of cultural value circulating through autonomous agents, APIs and digital wallets. What was once ephemera and for the moment can now be yield bearing.

In this example the underlying logic is industrial not sentimental. The feed is sort of a factory line building a more robust content engine to better inform and insight either machines or humans. Each creative output embedded with metadata and payment rails produces traceable flow. This turns platforms into supply chains for digital labor where attention metrics are replaced by transaction graphs. The economics of contribution emerge from the infrastructure itself not by curating communities but by strengthening the source of information to build the most viable landscape in this next era of seeking. The most scalable form of participation isn’t social, it’s financial.

Cloudflare’s entry into payments signals a broader inversion of the stack, infrastructure providers are becoming financial platforms and the assets flowing through them are no longer websites or apps but could also be microtransactions tied to content units. This collapses the distance between network effect and monetary effect. It also feels to be on the right side of history if you’re in the business of what could be best for the media at large.

The programmable internet doesn’t end the age of inventory. Whereas much of content today has been anchored on social capital and much going off the rails in being a proxy for attention, we can see it become a new atomic unit of value exchange. Not to say it’s binary, it definitely isn’t. But when compensation is tied to positive contributions rather than just the number of followers or likes, it creates a competitive environment around what counts as 'good'.. And in a world where digital objects can own wallets, pay contributors and negotiate usage autonomously the line between media and money dissolves. This has been the biggest issue with microtransactions to date and forever. It’s a mind fuck and too much work for most consumers or creators to think through. These systems hopefully offer a simpler way to see what that can be.

The next cultural economy won’t be built by abandoning inventory but by letting it transact in a way that adheres to convenience and human speed.

One reality that we can all admit today is that crypto needs to establish its value beyond cyclical trends. This happens by focusing on specific crypto use cases that captivate niches and are eventually normalized. From a developer perspective, this means concentrating less on broader market trends and more towards establishing vectors – actions catalyzed by your product that create unique pathways. The goal here is to build habits that transcend, and eventually drive market rhythms.

To induce this, you can’t just slap or integrate blockchains into something and expect it to be compelling. Simply, this presumes that the role of this technology is just to support existing behaviors versus shepherd new ones. But that is not the case. The action driven by this technology is the hook, and thus influences how we behave in relation to these experiences.

This pathway isn’t unique to crypto. For example, two major platforms of the 21st century sparked a behavioral change, leveraging on demand offerings to shift an entire programmable market–

• Netflix: We don’t want episodic media, we binge

• Spotify: We don’t buy records. Heck, we don’t buy music.

In these cases, the new means of consumption weren’t going to be pioneered by the incumbents– the incentive to experiment wasn’t worth cannibalizing their existing business. And technically, you weren’t able to integrate a Netflix experience in linear television or Spotify in the record store. But by capturing user attention within its environment, these two companies were able to showcase why this new behavior is desirable and soon, the eventual status quo. To be fair, ideas work in an instant, and the development of technologies are necessary before other technologies could take flight. But I believe infra technologies are creating new vectors in crypto, we just need to be mindful of where our attention goes today.

This is why for crypto, especially applications, founders need to cultivate behaviors within their own platform to prove that these experiences are undeniable. Unfortunately, for most crypto today, these habits have become too anchored on existing market cycles. Just look at NFTs in 2021 and Memecoins in 2024. This technology absolutely drives new consumer behaviors (NFTs for digital ownership, Memecoins for capital formation), but the attention gets gravity pulled towards an ephemeral social trend. Mainly because the existing platforms where these innovations are developed are actively doubling down on capturing the cycle versus being long term (see: OpenSea and Pump.fun). Being mindful of the habit (action) versus the trend (market) should enable founders to discover what else can be built off this emerging behavior. The faster a trend explodes, the faster it also dies. And thus opportunity lost.

Today, crypto puts a heavy emphasis on social copying versus forming habits. We can’t help admiring things that other people admire. And we’ve seen a disproportionate advantage as it relates to the awareness that certain protocols or applications can generate based on financial momentum versus merit. Tony Sheng wrote a great piece years back on turning speculators into users. But taking it a step further, the relationship between buyers and users today is a feature, not a bug. And one which founders can select whom they want to target and how. While tokens are a draw, and a critical component of crypto networks, the unlocking of behaviors is also a catalyst to drive usage further than ever before.

Crypto products overly benefit from network effects more than traditional products due to their permissionless nature. And to leverage the power of a network, you first need to acknowledge why your customers are there in the first place. Forming habits through crypto native behaviors enables you to control your customer value, whereas copying brings you into environments with an audience you have little or no control.

Habits Formed

In 2021, I wrote that crypto has the ability to drive 24/7 markets for everything. Just as Coinbase turned crypto financial markets into a 24/7 industry for the masses, I believed this behavioral influence would spill over into other industries where consumers were on the forefront. By removing spatial confines, more individuals would be able to contribute to the passions and products they love most, whenever they want. While many crypto projects are anchored on this belief, the real impact is how this evolves industries that felt impenetrable. Low and behold, last week the Nasdaq announced that they plan to launch 24 hour trading for US Stocks.

In 2023, I wrote that for crypto to cross the chasm, it needs to be a familiar "place to be", similar to the web and being online.  It will need to become an information-place where everybody has to be. But what are the unique and beneficial properties of this place? How does it differ from 'online.' What can you do there that you cannot do anywhere else? I argued that the simple answer is buying and selling. The blockchain is the only place where you can buy, sell and collect information objects. While we’re still on our way to proving this at scale, momentum has moved beyond digital currencies into tokenized real estate, environmental assets and commodities. This past January, Larry Fink of Blackrock urged the SEC to rapidly approve asset tokenization.

Just as crypto broke through the intangible confines of 9-5 versus 24/7,  the same goes for presumed geographical limitations. By servicing customers in need of options for payments, credit and lending, companies are showcasing that leveraging crypto primitives can provide solutions for faster payments and working capital today. In a similar formula, I believe these new behaviors will drive network effects outside of those geographies and revolutionize how these businesses are conducted globally. Through this, we see that crypto behaviors can catalyze new standards and raise the bar of what people are willing to accept. We saw this recently with the acquisition of Bridge by Stripe, and Iron by Moonpay.

Prediction markets are another strong example of crypto’s ability to catalyze entirely new consumer behaviors. Earlier this year, Polymarket secured an investment from 1789 Capital, which is backed by Donald Trump Jr., and was greenlit last month to launch in the U.S. The deal came as prediction markets become more mainstream, rival Kalshi has seen surging trading volumes through sports-related contracts, with the sector projected to reach $8 billion in revenue by 2030 as it takes share from sports gambling. Today, NYSE-owner Intercontinental Exchange took a $2 billion stake in Polymarket.

Looking at the TCG Crypto portfolio (disclosure, TCG Crypto led investments in both Sphere and Jia) companies like Sphere and Jia chose to first introduce their platforms to businesses and consumers who weren’t able to service basic financial needs. Sphere starting in LatAm and Jia in Kenya and the Philippines.

While I believe crypto can eventually scale by enhancing existing consumer behaviors, the opportunity at hand is to remain focused on catalyzing new ones. Yes, crypto can be integrated within our existing apps and platforms, but then we’re left with the question “why are our customers here today?”.  And though many of these behaviors are niche at the moment, I believe the consumer unlock potential is so large that many will become the norm. As that continues to play out, integrating these behaviors will become more obvious just as we saw with oAuth and social share. But the platforms need to be proven out first.

So to understand crypto’s impact, don’t focus on how crypto can fit into the broad use platforms of today. Focus on the behaviors catalyzed by blockchain, that can become so habitual that it forces others to react and respond to how they manage their business tomorrow. This is how crypto scales.

Thanks to Garrett and JMo for their eyes and ears.

Everything is moving so fast nowadays. In finance they warn you to not catch falling knives. Don’t buy something whose price is declining rapidly. We’re told to avoid them. Cut losses. Don’t try to buy your way into a reality that isn’t there. Don’t be the last one holding the bag.

But what happens when the whole market cycle feels like a knife storm? When it’s not just markets but society itself? That’s where we are.

This isn’t really about money, as plenty of it is being made (for now). It’s a criticism of ideas, attention, and contribution. Our feeds are tickers. Blinking lights. We tell ourselves to look away, but we always come back. And every time we do, we’re reshaped by people we don’t know, with intentions we can’t see.

Most creators on these platforms don’t create what they want anymore. They create for the moment. Keep the lights blinking. Feed the ticker. Milk whatever attention spike they can, and squeeze the dollars out of it. Sure, “influencers are the new distributors” and blah. It’s a model. But lately it seems like that’s it. Nothing else matters.

Our feeds aren’t expressions. “Taste” as personalization is bullshit. The For You feed isn’t about taste, it’s about impulse. Click once and that single moment rewires your whole feed. The sender dictates more than the receiver. We forfeit control and let others dictate not only what they recommend, but what is fed to us soon after.

So we get shit we never asked for. I didn’t want to watch the Charlie Kirk video. I didn’t want to watch the Charlotte train attack. But people who I don’t follow are sharing videos through my feed. The internet is a firehose, and we’re forced to drink from it. We’ve lost the ability to pause, to seek, to decide where the fuck we actually want to go next. That’s weirdly become a grind for most.

Unlike money, though, what’s the equivalent of moral bankruptcy? Of consumption bankruptcy? Are we even self-aware enough to know what it’s doing to us? No fucking way. We’re addicts, and the game is rigged to keep us hooked. “These platforms are the future.” “Shit or get off the pot.” If you want to be someone, you have to play. 

Worse, the game bends people into shapes they’re not. Because that’s what the machine rewards.

I see it everywhere in crypto. “This is the new meta. This is where the energy is.” Until it isn’t. They say crypto moves fast, but really it just mirrors the internet’s whiplash cycle. And crypto lets you monetize it. Authenticity doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is the moment. No apologies. Just reactions. If it works, run it back. If it flops, spin up a new alias and try again.

So who’s left to take the opposing view? Who’s willing to build what they actually want to see in the world, not just what will spike in the feed?

Those are the people I want to find.

One of the gods I worship is Springsteen, who taught me I’d learn more from a record than I’d ever learn in school. He was right. Not that it’s a better education, but it’s where I chose to spend my time. Lennon, another god of mine, said “Time worth wasting is not wasted time.” It was actually my yearbook quote. My mom thought that was hilarious. But these were the threads of my life, all learned through countless hours in record stores, listening to music, and soaking up as much advice from these heroes as I could. I carry those lessons with me to this day.

There’s an awesome Red Hot Chili Peppers documentary called Funky Monks. I strongly recommend watching it. It’s free on YouTube, you can check it out here. It’s a behind the scenes doc on the making of Blood Sugar Sex Magik, which seems like an impossible album to create, but gods can do crazy things. Rick Rubin is with the boys, going through the creation of the record from beginning to end. They were kids. A good reminder of how genius our youth is.

Anyway, the point of this piece is the beauty of what we learn and apply to things that don’t seem linear. That’s always been my way of thinking. I think the most interesting people are inspired by things outside of their profession and are able to apply those passions to their personal and professional work. That’s cool. Makes you different.

Ok, back to Funky Monks. John Frusciante, one of the greatest guitarists on planet fucking earth, has a quote in it that’s stuck with me forever. He says that when he plays guitar, he considers it important to always think of the space between notes when playing. He regards silence and music as completely equal. When he plays a note, he changes the silence that was there before. For John, silence is taken for granted, but one really has to see how it’s used to understand a song.

To his point: in music, silence gives meaning to sound. A note only resonates because of the space that surrounds it. Without pauses, songs collapse into noise, an undifferentiated stream with no contour or emotion. Frusciante’s point is that silence isn’t absence but an active force, shaping how we perceive and feel music. So what does this have to do with media?

The internet has convinced us that media needs to be 24/7. Our feed has to keep feeding us, regardless of whether we’re thirsty or not. The mechanics keep us engaged and addicted. We have little time to think or consider what we consume before going on to the next thing. Just like music, media benefits from silence. But in today’s world, that’s hard to get.

For media, it’s not just the presence of information that matters, but the absence, the gaps, the moments of stillness where discovery and meaning can form. Platforms today have eliminated those gaps. Infinite feeds, autoplay, algorithmic loops are all designed to erase silence, to collapse every pause into the next unit of content. The result is a constant drone. Attention is flattened into uninterrupted consumption, where the act of seeking is replaced by passive reception. We rarely feel the tension of waiting, the excitement of stumbling across something, or the pleasure of choosing, because the platforms fill every empty space on our behalf.

This shift doesn’t just change how we consume media, but how we value it. Just as music without silence becomes noise, media without moments of absence becomes indistinguishable filler. The richness of discovery—through friends, serendipity, or curiosity—is replaced by a predictable flow engineered for monetization. Our feeds optimize for time, not depth or resonance, so content often feels disposable. In this sense, the “music” of media is robbed of dynamics. I can’t get no relief.

The cost is cultural as much as personal. When everyone consumes the same algorithmic diet, cultural patterns flatten. Shared moments are less about discovery and more about synchronized consumption of whatever the machine surfaces. But true cultural moments, like powerful songs, depend on dynamics: tension and release, silence and sound, scarcity and abundance. We need the pauses, the unfilled spaces that invite us to search, stumble, and share in order for culture to breathe.

To reclaim that, we might think of media more like Frusciante thinks of music, not just in terms of what fills our time, but what frames it. The silence of not knowing, of not scrolling, of waiting for a friend’s recommendation or stumbling across something off the beaten path is not wasted time, but essential structure. Without it, we’re left with a flat hum of endless notes. With it, the media we choose and the meaning we attach to it has room to echo.

We can’t go back in time. Again, old dude here. But we can consider how to shape the means by which we create and consume moving forward. We want to be different. We want to (hopefully) be fucking cool again. I’m obsessing over this lately and should have more ideas on what to do and how to do it soon.

Media 2025 is pulling us further apart. But the most frustrating part isn’t polarization, it’s the symptom: everyone becoming an orator, broadcasting thoughts that are less authentic and more rage bait. Apologies are meaningless as people forget. It’s about lighting fires and walking away. That taste of chaos teaches you how to make the next one even louder.

There are countless examples of this today, mainly around news events like Charlie Kirk, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Trump at the Yankees game. For example, a video shared on X commented that fans were booing Trump at the Yankees game and another claiming that they were cheering. It's the same fucking video, two tweets, 15,000 views each, each reinforcing opposite truths. No one evens try to listen and discern for themselves, the message just has to align with the tribe.

This is a form of the Orator’s Dilemma, inspired by Michael C. Hawley’s Light or Fire? Frederick Douglass and the Orator’s Dilemma. Hawley explores how an orator, when persuasion fails, must choose the form of speech that motivates an already convinced audience. Today, when everyone is an orator, the game is to feed preconceived notions. It’s not about right or wrong, truth or accuracy, it’s about capturing tribes and amplifying their beliefs. Platforms designed for engagement farming and rewarding cult followings only exacerbate this.

I keep thinking about how to solve this, and will continue to. It's hard. We can’t just blame platforms, business models, or AI because in this case, people seem to enjoy it. And that’s the sad part.

The problem is, content as inventory creates one-off spikes which then fuel churn. It doesn’t focus on authenticity, in the sense that creators are putting out what they believe is good. They put out what they believe can cause a reaction. And that burns everyone out and trains audiences to skim and discard. That’s why so much of today’s web media feels cheap and disposable. It is engineered to be.

Media was never supposed to be inventory. Media has always been infrastructure. Its true role is to orchestrate community, to provide experiences, to build the scaffolding of culture others can fit into. When media is infrastructure, it compounds, creates network effects, recurring engagement, and cultural capital. It turns an audience into a tribe, a ritual, a market. I wrote about this a while ago as Media as Subcultures:

“The relationship between creator and consumers is more valuable than its transactional currency (ie. content). In this era of media, the content is not the only product. The content is a key part of the value in that it’s the tool for consistency but the creator and the community are the product. The true value is the connection between consumer and creator acquired through a variety of access points that eventually develop a consumer benefit. As the business moves from content is value to creator is value we should shift the business opportunities that support it as well.”

Rolling Stone in the ’70s wasn’t just selling magazines, it was constructing an identity for a generation. It was fucking cool. MTV in the ’80s wasn’t just broadcasting music videos, it was building a ritual, a shared language for youth culture. Again, it was fucking cool. When you monetize inventory, you optimize for the unit. When you build infrastructure, you optimize for the network. One path creates noise, the other creates gravity. Barstool Sports doesn’t win because of any single podcast episode or blog post, it wins because “Stoolies” are a tribe. K-pop labels don’t extract value from one video view, they mobilize entire fandoms, turning each release into a global campaign. Reddit threads die in a day, but r/wallstreetbets or r/kpop persist as cultural engines because the infrastructure is the community.

Experiences are where this becomes undeniable. Supreme’s lookbooks are forgettable inventory, but the drop ritual, lines around the block, and coordinated scarcity became infrastructure, transforming consumption into culture. That’s why the brand still has gravitational pull decades later.

The tweet, the article, the video were never the point. They’re just portals. What matters is what they convene, which is the conversation, the ritual, the shared experience. That’s where the value is. That’s where the business is. Media thrives when it’s built as infrastructure for belonging, not just assets to monetize. Until the industry stops treating media like inventory, it will keep collapsing under the weight of its own short-term extraction.

In 2021, many asked what would happen if finance colonized everything.

The fear was hypothetical: a world where relationships, expression, even desire itself would be packaged and priced. That future was always framed as something ahead of us, a horizon we might still divert. But the more honest answer is simpler in that, it had already happened. Social became capital in that a follower is collateral, attention is yield, expression is indistinguishable from advertising. Platforms trained us to live as instruments of exchange. Every gesture compounds. Every post is a derivative.

From there, inevitability takes hold. You can’t opt out without disappearing, and disappearance is a kind of bankruptcy. The question is no longer whether to participate, but what form of participation you choose. Many choose to sell themselves directly on these “social” platforms,  or can sell something else, a product, a skill, an abstraction. But even then the self bleeds into it. Selling the product means selling the maker. The line between who you are and what you market dissolves in these digital worlds.

The implications are heavier than economics in that identity becomes strategy and value systems reorganize around what can be tallied, not what can be lived. The same liquidity that animates markets floods into intimacy, friendship, trust. A few capture the flows, the rest tread water. 

Which leaves us here. We’re not debating what might be lost, but asking whether anything remains that cannot be priced. Finance didn’t just eat the world. It ate meaning. And what’s left is the uneasy work of remembering what once stood outside the market, before we all boarded the train that had already left.

Crypto often tries to invert that sequence: lead with money, and hope community and distribution show up after. But distribution is not a given, it’s earned through cultural resonance, consistency, and network effects that social capital greatly accelerates.

This tension is especially visible in crypto creative circles. There’s a thin line between empowering creators through revenue-sharing, and assuming creators are owed payment regardless of market demand. The popular social refrain—“I make nothing on Spotify, we deserve better”—often reflects a moral claim that ignores the market signal. Spotify, while flawed, reflects real listener behavior. If no one’s paying attention, the issue may not be payouts, it may be product-market fit, or just the brutal mechanics of attention economies. Crypto tooling can’t override that. As Stripe’s Patrick McKenzie put it: “The market doesn’t care how hard you worked.”

The most durable consumer platforms tend to start with distribution and cultural affinity, not direct monetization. Farcaster is growing not by out-paying competitors, but by building social value through community support, exclusivity, and creator identity. Bitcoin and Ethereum didn’t gain traction because of token incentives alone, they became movements before they became markets.

Financial capital is a lagging indicator of belief. Social capital often comes first, and when invested wisely, it converts.

If you were a GenX kid with even a small amount of tech familiarity, you almost certainly had the following experience: Sometime around 1995, an older relative or friend would come to you and ask for help ‘getting online.’ They would explain that they had heard about this amazing new technology called e-mail (or gopher, message boards, or if they were a little too honest, chat). And they had suddenly realized they needed to be there. There was a place where you could do these specific amazing things with information, without which they would be at a disadvantage. They needed to be 'online.'

This was the moment, in retrospect, that the Internet became inevitable. Not because of the people interested in the technology because it was interesting or cool, like us, but because it had become specifically useful to the ones that weren't, and in a way they could understand. With this understanding in mind, they embraced an invented metaphor ("online") and were willing to overcome the friction to adopt it. It became a place to be. This is the famous juncture of crossing the chasm. It occurred because they grasped the significance of the place on the other side of that chasm. 

A similar thing happened a few years later with the notion of the World Wide Web. That same older relative or friend had now heard of a place where amazing content was available, almost always for free, that was essential for his professional success or personal happiness. How had he heard of it? Because people he knew at work or  his pickup basketball game told him about stuff they had found there. 'On the Web' had soon become a shorthand for the source of all sorts of hard-to-get information. "Where did you see that?" "Oh, I saw it on the Web." It was a new place where you could get content, and if you weren't there, you were missing out.

The business community went through this same recognition with the rise of software-as-a-service products. Driven by relentless marketing from these companies, but grounded in genuine and significant utility, people everywhere began to speak colloquially about a place known as 'the cloud.' Within a few years, almost everyone who used these systems spoke about the location of their data or files using this phrase. CIOs and CTOs were given budgets to get their enterprises 'on the cloud.' What did it mean? Simply put, the cloud was a place where software could run and information could be stored, and they could be accessed from anywhere. From potentially scary ("um, where exactly IS my file?") to simple and essential, once you understood it.

For crypto to cross this chasm -- and we must be honest that it has not yet-- the blockchain will need to become the next similarly understood notion. It will need to become an information-place where everybody has to be. But what are the unique and beneficial properties of this place? How does it differ from 'online,' 'The Web,' and 'The cloud.' What can you do there that you cannot do anywhere else? 

We would argue that the simple answer is buying and selling. The blockchain is the only place where you can buy, sell and collect information objects. And that is massive. Blockchain enables things to become Things in the sense that everything on-chain is now unique, tradeable and sellable.  Anybody who wants to sell anything that can be represented digitally needs to put them 'on the blockchain.' Anybody who wants to buy those things needs to have access to it. "Where'd you get these tickets?" "On the blockchain." "How did you sell your handbag?" "On the blockchain."

So you ask, is that big enough? Should I care? Well, we will argue that commerce absolutely can be the entire thing. The current eCommerce market alone forecasts 1.2T in 2023, and like advertising and other transactional businesses online, is pretty absolute in its ability to continue to grow in a positive trajectory. And because the blockchain makes not only first purchases but reselling vastly easier, the market size will grow. 

The truth is the blockchain space has a knack for wanting to constantly spin itself beyond where it currently sits. You can argue this is the achilles heel of the industry today, a resilient focus to find product market fit but also the inability to be satisfied and pay attention to the areas that already show real promise. We know people want to transact on the web. We know blockchains serve as a unique foundational layer to expand this passion. We have an arena to really play in. However, before making that an absolute, we move to immediately spin beyond it to argue against “Facebook holding our data”, “the problem with the existing gig economy” and “protection against authoritarian regimes”. The desire to find more use cases instead of capitalizing on the obvious one has led to additional friction totally brought on by ourselves. And to be clear, we’re not advocating against this energy– the more arenas blockchain can evolve in passion areas, the better. But we shouldn’t do that at the expense of the obvious use cases of today. Just look at OpenSea, Coinbase and Uniswap– people are buying, selling and collecting digital goods en masse in a way that was previously impossible. That’s something!

Can blockchains do more than this? Of course they can. Vitalik has offered a long list of uses from identity to governance. But almost all of these are functions that can be solved by existing technologies, and in any case, primarily exist to serve and take advantage of the blockchain's transactional nature. We all know about using tokens for voting. But that can be done in other ways. What can't be done any other way is selling your right to vote or buying it from someone else. Similarly to how online catalyzed interest of the new, and “the web” showcased how the internet can be built into something completely bigger and useful than what was originally imagined, the notion of blockchains as a vehicle for digital objects will shepherd this new wave of utilities that over time, because obvious as they become a part of what we do.

Isn't focusing on the transactional accepting a pejorative framing? Wouldn't it lead inevitably to the wild speculation that has been so distracting and destructive to crypto? Absolutely not. Speculation was a result of specific tokenomic design choices, the inevitable result of the lack of utility that real transactions provide. If and when the blockchain becomes the place to buy and sell things, speculation will be a small percentage of the transactions rather than the raison d'etre of the entire system.

We’re currently at an interesting crossroads as it relates to what it means to do things on “the blockchain”. The broader understanding is it’s a place where you can get rich… or get scammed. To be fair, that’s the result of “permissionless” but it’s also lacking the context of the good. It’s purely a reflection of how it’s been used to date, postured by hyperbolic takes of unique situations that have happened through the course of the past decade. This is in the absence of a directional purpose, which we believe, already exists in buying, selling and collecting. As of this second, Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana have ~$20T, $6B and $369M 24 hour trade volume respectively. OpenSea peaked at nearly $5B monthly volume, and still sits around $500M today. This is what people should care about.

We spend a lot of time talking about how early it is, and finding product-market-fit, but really we may be closer than we think. And that may mean staying focused and convicted on what we know blockchain does well and building towards a framing. Then, we can make blockchain a place that everyone knows useful things can happen, just like going online, storing in the cloud and surfing the web.

For the past decade, companies mistook audience for community. They optimized for scale, gamed distribution, and locked users into products under the guise of addiction (or ransom?). But the real stickiness wasn’t in the feed, it was in the feel. In 2025, brands that matter will be those that generate subcultural gravity. Not solely by going viral, but by creating a consumer orbit. Here, devotion not distribution is the moat. And if you're not building for that, you're replaceable.

We moved away from this because we were sold a false binary in that we either scale or die. Advertising models rewarded reach. Product roadmaps prioritized frictionless loops over meaningful ones. Companies got addicted to dashboards and faded on dialogue. And somewhere in there, we forgot the internet was the prime medium for emergent behavior. Companies became the sole authors of the product, the experience, the narrative. But the most potent systems, the ones that endure, are the ones you let go of, just enough to see what others do with them.

Look at The Free Press. On the surface, it’s a publication. Underneath, it’s a network protocol for independent thinking. Its subscribers aren’t just reading, they’re gathering, debating, and contributing signals back into the system. It’s a form of civic architecture facilitated by media. Then there’s Farcaster: a protocol-layer social network that invites you to build on it, not just scroll through it. Developer communities shape it. Culture emerges through it. The playbook is to design the scaffolding. Subcultures don’t want products, they want infrastructure and spaces to deepen identity through collaboration and community.

This shift is structural-- in media, in consumer software, in finance, in physical goods, subculture is the strategic unlock. Today’s network effects don't come from product features, they come from identity formation. So the question isn't "How do we retain users?" It's "How do we build systems people will defend, fork, and ritualize?" When you start there, you stop writing stories for people and start building the stories they want to live in.

To build cultural infrastructure at scale, start by clearly articulating values that invite participation and create belonging. When people see and resonate with your worldview, they self select into your community. But values alone aren’t enough, design your product and brand as a platform for participation, not just consumption. Enable your users to contribute, remix, and co create through modular tools, open APIs, or member led initiatives. Cultivate rituals and recurring moments, whether virtual or IRL, that reinforce identity and social bonds. Measuring success means shifting away from simple engagement metrics toward signals of cultural vitality like user-led events, organic advocacy, creative remixing, and peer networks. This emergent, decentralized approach transforms passive users into active stewards, creating a resilient, self-scaling subculture that becomes your true moat.

The move now is clear: Open the surface area. Build participatory layers. Give your users tools, not tasks. Design systems where your community can see themselves, shape the product, and extend the narrative on their own terms. Devotion scales when ownership is shared. When your people become the engine, not the endpoint, you don’t need more engagement. You need more allegiance. That’s how companies become infrastructure. That’s how subculture becomes the business

What comes next is always shaped by how people want to engage, not how companies wish they would.

The same arc is repeating with today’s digital media. Every time the industry falls on its sword, it searches for a way to underwrite the loss, and retrofit strategy to survival. Craigslist gutted classifieds, Search commoditized information, Social fragmented attention, and Creators pulled power to the edges. Still, publishers adapted by retooling SEO, building brands on platforms they didn’t own, learning to meet users “where they are.” But AI presents a different kind of challenge. Platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity don’t just shift distribution, they erase the path home. No one is clicking the source links. There is no user journey to optimize. The very model of media as a destination is cooked (for most).

This is the slow death of the link economy which was a foundational shift in how content was surfaced, consumed, and valued. I believe ChatGPT resembles Wikipedia in its structure in that it synthesizes answers, gives context in citations, and even produces an original tone. But like Wikipedia, I believe it’s going to generate minimal outbound traffic. Now scale that 100x. The difference? The online publisher business was built on monetizing traffic. But what if traffic is no longer the asset? What if provenance, not reach, becomes the metric of value? We’re moving from a world of distribution to one of extraction. The platform doesn’t need to send the reader to you, it only needs to reference you.

The media business has always been forced to adapt to new forms: print to web, web to social, social to mobile. But the AI wave isn’t just a new medium. It’s a new mode of consumption. The under-discussed truth is that AI isn’t just changing how we create, it’s changing how and where people consume. It’s not just less traffic. It’s fewer interfaces, fewer clicks, fewer moments of active engagement. In this, you can imagine that the future of news may not be a homepage, but rather an agent you speak to, that you prompt, that knows your context and helps you reason through what matters. Not passive scrolling, but active conversation. A UI shift that can be considered as big as the browser or mobile. 

So what now? The short-term win is figuring out monetization in this new environment like licensing deals, API integrations, maybe even embedding agents within publisher products. But the long-term win? That comes from leaning into the new consumer behavior. Maybe it looks like a Spotify for text based media: a subscription layer that pays writers and publishers by the amount they are consumed (see: stablecoins). Maybe it’s a new form of embedded provenance, where value accrues to original reporting in ways we haven’t yet built. I firmly believe the next frontier of consumption enables users to choose their own adventure. No longer having publishers recommend and navigate for them, but agency for them to dig deeper and get informed in any direction they so choose. The hard truth is that most publishers won’t make this leap. They’ll go from destinations to distributors to wholesale content providers, whether they choose to or not.

But for those willing to experiment, to build past the link, I really believe a new media blueprint is emerging. One rooted not in traffic or pages, but utility. The next revolution isn’t just about what gets created. It’s about who provides the experience that consumers are asking for, and acting on.

Brute force changes occur when disruptive technologies and extreme determination hit existing systems head-on, overwhelming them with sheer scale, utility, or momentum. It’s uninvited. It kicks in the door. Napster and other early peer-to-peer file-sharing platforms exemplify by blowing up the music industry and making digital music freely and widely available, regardless of legality. Piracy wasn’t a glitch, it was gravity. Over time, this disruption paved the way for services like iTunes and Spotify, which restructured how music was distributed and monetized, albeit on very different terms. Similar brute force tactics were seen in the rise of Uber, which ignored taxi regulations and forced cities to reconsider long standing transportation policies.

Trojan horse innovations, by contrast, move quietly. They embed themselves within user habits under the guise of convenience or utility, only later revealing deeper, often more disruptive, consequences. Web 2.0 platforms like Google, Facebook, and Instagram started as tools that helped users connect, search, and share. Over time, these companies quietly built infrastructures for data collection and advertising, shifting the internet’s economic model from purely information to attention. Few users initially understood that their behavior was being monetized with such precision. Another example is Amazon, which began as an online bookstore and eventually transformed into an all-encompassing retail and cloud computing empire, reshaping global supply chains and labor markets.

Crypto exhibits early signs of both dynamics. On the brute force front, it challenges traditional finance through direct confrontation—offering alternatives to fiat currency, banking, and cross-border transactions. Bitcoin, for example, has persisted in the face of bans, regulation, and criticism, while DeFi platforms replicate core banking services without centralized intermediaries. In 2024, crypto lobbying campaigns topped ~$130M. The sitting president has put through two executive orders related to crypto. The SEC has 180’d its tone. Even Apple has been told to open the gates. It’s taken a lot of time and determination, but it’s working.

At the same time, crypto leverages Trojan horse strategies to quietly infiltrate mainstream systems. Stablecoins, such as USDC or USDT, are a prime example: by pairing the stability of fiat currency while operating on blockchain infrastructure, they allow users to transact globally with minimal friction. It’s the largest natural distribution for crypto this industry could ask for. Users don’t need to embrace crypto ideology or volatility. Payment integrations with platforms like PayPal, Stripe, and Visa bring crypto functionality into environments users already trust, further blurring the line between traditional and decentralized finance.

So in short, crypto isn’t waiting for permission or mass adoption. It’s already inside, rewriting the rules in languages the legacy system doesn’t speak.

Distribution is the most important thing on the internet. Without it, you are not seen. Today we battle the weight of distribution versus ownership, the ability to monetize directly or through others. Everything feels binary. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that while distribution is preferred over all else, the missing link is both knowing and having the ability to engage your customers at scale. Sure you can have an email or a relationship with customers on the platform… but how do you build a connection in a more cohesive way? How do you meet your customers where they’re at, but also bring them together?

I think NFTs can solve this. 

In a world of NFTs, all someone needs to do to connect meaningfully with their customer is get their wallet address (drop your ENS) and the connection is made. What I like about this is that the NFT itself serves as your key to any experience the seller, creator, whomever wants to provide. This can be discounted merchandise, or the ability to buy tickets, or the ability to join a community of like minded people. On the flip side, it gives the seller, creator, whomever a universal connection to their customer, any information they want to provide (or publicly provide) in an experience that doesn’t spam your email, or phone, or venue that’s meant for something else.

As you can see, the emphasis here for me is not about making more money, but building a better, tighter experience between a seller and a buyer. And because of that, I think it’s most powerful when the NFT itself is free. Any individual or brand can just ask their fan or customer to provide their wallet address and boom, the key to various experiences and relationships are dropped immediately in your pocket. Easy. 

This will take time to flesh out and will undoubtedly be set backs and issues as we identify the right model. But if we are looking to bridge the desire of distribution and ownership, and where and when and how to engage or monetize, this seems like an exciting function to shepherd the next wave of innovation.

As with the ‘real world,’ the things we own enable important connections to other people. If we own related things, we may share similar personalities, interests or life situations. We may have a common vested interest in preserving or increasing their ongoing value. We may also be engaged in a kind of game with each other, competing to purchase more or more special versions of the item. We are bound together by economic commitments. 

The archetypal example in the physical world is real estate. Where we live is a huge part of our identity and, usually, our net worth. By owning property in the same neighborhood, we have committed, at least to some extent, to a shared destiny. When we volunteer, for example, for an event or organization that makes the block a nicer place to live, when we organize or sponsor services that enrich the area, it enhances the value of everyone’s home. As the value of the neighborhood increases, we benefit together, both in terms of status as well as financially. As our relationships and sense of self become more embedded in the neighborhood, we become more attached to the property, deepening the connection and spurring active engagement. In healthy neighborhoods, all residents benefit from this ‘virtuous circle.’ Ownership leads to meaningful engagement which leads to increased desirability.. 

NFT collections, and especially the latest wave of ‘avatar communities’ aka PFP collections, have the potential to mirror this healthy dynamic. When we own a SupDuck or Cryptoad, we have a motivation to engage in behavior that makes everyone’s ownership more significant. As ‘residents’ of that virtual neighborhood, we all have an interest in broadening the list of ‘stuff you get’ as part of your NFT. And yet, the vast majority of these projects pay only lip service to that potential. The vast majority of projects offer only hand-waving assurances of future amenities. Rather than investing in genuinely valuable services for its community, the focus tends rather to be on shilling and stunts to generate FOMO. 

Let’s take a stroll down memory lane. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the mortgage bubble made home ownership more affordable. Builders responded by investing a lot of money to purchase land in areas that allowed for mass development of residential neighborhoods. There was so much money that developers built entire neighborhoods in the middle of nowhere with hopes of driving individual interest and eventual communities. Twenty five years later, some people still live there, some projects are completely torn down and one thing is for certain; none of them were built to last. These homes weren’t built in places that were convenient or around major metropolitan cities or downtowns driven by existing communities and culture, they were built where land was cheap. But people were like whatever. And eventually there was a huge market flippening in these spaces. 

Most of today’s Web3 virtual neighborhoods are following the history of the physical world’s McMansions; building 10,000 ‘homes’ in the middle of nowhere hoping people move in. The awareness that needs to take place in order to avoid a mass flippening is the approach Web3 takes to constructing neighborhoods. Instead of just finding land, developing homes and hoping community fosters through a shared space, developers need to invest in making sure individual buyers get value out of their experience. This means making sure that every single day, there is something happening in the community. NFTs communities can be awesome, we just need to start building shit inside of them. 

A community first approach to neighborhoods. 

In order for virtual neighborhoods to be long lasting, attention needs to move from owning space and land to developing robust services  within the areas where people live. If NFTs get you into the club, what happens once you’re in it? One likely way this question will be answered is to focus the collection community on a particular shared interest. When members share values, it becomes vastly easier to determine and develop the benefits that they will consider valuable. 

What sort of shared interests might be well-suited to token-communities? Unlike Web media, NFT communities are participatory environments. It’s not about passively consuming but actively participating with the content and community directly. Content takes on an entirely new role of creating virtual space, like physical space is a venue for cooperation and collaboration. So they can be smaller in total audience size than those required to support an ad-based business, provided the members’ commitment is sufficiently intense. So there’s no shortage of potential interests that might be addressed. 

Communities can be built around professional networks, for example. Picture an NFT collection celebrating and welcoming designers or teachers or security experts. Another possible focus could be causes, like the climate crisis or free speech. We might also see cohesive communities around hobbies (fashion! surfing! hunting!) or fitness/wellness activities (crossfit! fasting! meditation!) 

But we need to be realistic about the effort needed to create compelling experiences with these ‘neighborhoods.’.  Web3 communities need programming. In an era where NFT drops serve as a catalyst for community building, there is a tendency to hope that  individuals will  build the culture and activities of their collection This does happen but is probably insufficient for lasting value. The reason why traditional media has done a good job for decades of readership is that there is a content cadence that drives discussion, consumption and community engagement. But the real opportunity for Web3 to break out is the reverse incentive of the contribution of work. Today’s creators deal with a sort of volunteerism where the small percentage of individuals who do break through actually make money. Authenticity is lost in exchange for trying to grasp an audience, and free labor often results in… free content. But looking outside of the media to build Web3 communities is a catalyst for innovation, where content becomes the space for activities, participation and relationships. For example, in the physical world, SoulCycle has built an entire culture around physically working out but then digitally learning how to eat better and meet like minded individuals who want to live a similar lifestyle. Individuals reside in these “neighborhoods” because there is constant programming to keep them engaged and incentives to build the community up to better themselves and those around them. Purpose is driven through the development of content, and Web3 communities must proactively work to make the places where people reside a daily habit. It is important to invest in the ability for individuals to get value out of their experience, that every single day there is something happening. 

Good things cost money, and you can’t get valuable experiences without investing in the community to build them. A worthy investment for NFT projects is around education. A key value of communities and neighborhoods is that individuals are able to teach one another. We are starting to see this foster in Web3 through community driven discords, telegrams and WhatsApps but oftentimes, this is happening outside of the project owners themselves. Arguably, this is a feature not a bug as the community is free to build on top of the IP distributed by the origin creators but as we think about lasting value, there needs to be an incentive to cultivate contribution through shared learning from one another. This means that it should be instilled at a foundational level that then bubbles up through the community regardless of which platforms they are spending time with one another one. 

Putting interests at the forefront of infrastructure. 

Today’s Web3 neighborhoods are mostly being built around financial interests. And the promise of getting rich does lure people to these neighborhoods---the 10,000 houses may well be occupied, at least for a while. But we’ve seen this play out IRL, with gold-rush Boomtowns from the 1800s becoming today’s Ghost Towns, having failed to attract real residents and establish a culture. Visit one of these places today and you’ll see they didn’t get much built beyond a saloon, a place to meet up and talk about finding gold. Visit the discord of a forgotten PFP project from July and you’ll see something similar--a now abandoned general chat, containing little but a discussion of prices and sales. \n \n But there were exceptions--- some Boomtowns attracted families and developed a thriving culture, becoming San Francisco, Chicago, Denver. The great HBO show Deadwood is the story of how a historical Boomtown developed a culture and transcended the speculative interests that drew people to it in the first place. Its creator David Milch felt that a true society often starts with a “symbol agreed upon”. For Milch this can be a cross, but it can also be gold (or perhaps even drawings of apes.) And it’s that agreement that liberates individuals to participate and find their “identity in the collective.” For Milch, you can start with speculation but you can’t stop there. 

Deadwood posits that if a lasting culture is to form, it will be aided by spaces, artifacts, rituals, and symbols. And with NFTs and DAOs we might be seeing the emergence of the digitally native forms of these essential human primitives. But it’s up to these nascent Boomtowns to use them, with success being observed with the deepening the group’s interactions and the expansion of their interests and reach. Certainly beyond the narrow motives that drew people to them in the first place, but beyond crypto as well. 

On the flipside, building for interest groups has its challenges that will need to be met. By building neighborhoods around a particular interest, we are deliberately constraining the market size which will slow down value and decrease speculation. It becomes a stabler, yet less exciting investment. Why it’s critical to incorporate both financial and societal interests to maintain the right balance.

New communities are emerging on the internet by way of NFTs, giving individuals an opportunity to stake land and foster community in designated spaces constructed through residential avatars. But the approach of building communities this way is fragile. With unlimited space online and a gold rush to occupy mass areas, builders are overlooking the need for community in exchange for ownership. And that method, while momentarily successful when individuals have money to spend, deconstructs in the long run. 

NFT communities today are rewarding individuals for buying land and naming the sub-development versus what should be the true promise of crypto which is rewarding individuals that make the neighborhood flourish. It’s not the local mortgage services or banks that make a strong community, it’s the artists, restaurants and families that do. Today’s Web3 communities are building neighborhoods to attract community versus building communities to foster neighborhoods. This needs to change.