Using cutting edge technology lowers barriers and forms a rift between people who choose the new way over the old way. Musicians that use instruments looked down on the first electronic musicians and then those analog digital musicians looked down on people who use laptops and software. It’s the same with film and digital cameras. It’s simply newer technology displacing older technology and optimizing for different variables.

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     The scale of human society has been built through labor, using people as tools to accomplish things we couldn’t achieve alone. The tools and technology developed over time have been human-operated and optimized towards making it easier for fewer humans to do more work. The current financial systems we live under are optimizing toward capital efficiency which is a seemingly, aligned goal. The next wave of tools being built are to replace people in ways that most never believed would come true. As we face the wave of unemployment that will rise from artificial intelligence and robotics we have to ask ourselves, what quality of human life are we optimizing for?

Good Enough

     We just jumped right into the deep end, but let’s take a look back to see how we got here. The free market is the default of human trading (whenever it’s not violence.) Two parties come to terms in a trade or barter, and there is usually no need for a third party. The various financial systems across the globe have mostly optimized for marginal growth. First on the corporate level and then in the form of each nation’s Gross Domestic Product. That thirst for profit margin creates a lack of compassion as it slowly permeates through each layer of society and commerce looking for every nook and cranny to drain for more marginal growth.

     According to Merriam-Webster intelligence is defined as the ability to learn, or understand, or to deal with new or trying situations, the skilled use of reason, the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment, or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (such as tests).

     I would define intelligence as the ability to solve problems with ingenuity.

     Ideas around creativity, quality, and originality are hard subjective discussions, but even more difficult equations to solve. On the other hand, solving for profit margin is easy especially when compassion is not a factor. Thinking about the value of a creative work is placed in the emotional context of where the buyer and seller are in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. All of my present ideas around the creator economy stem from the necessity of creators to make art to survive. Imagine what people would make without the constraint of measuring value on top of the philosophical questions the art was already addressing. 

     Artificial Intelligence does not require any physiological or psychological considerations in order to achieve results. Of course, at this stage, it requires human input and an artist can easily say that they can do better than AI, but for how long? If the results you need are “good enough” then the bottom just dropped out of the illustrator market with music, copywriting, and a few others following closely behind. AI will likely lead to the creative equivalent of the “just-in-time” market strategy in less than a year.

     If global finance is just a large game of Monopoly and capital efficiency is the goal then humans are the weakest link and AI will easily solve the optimization issues. If social consensus can so easily be swayed by social media algorithms then AI can also be easily swayed by the information it is fed and the assumptions and biases we build into it. The art, writing, and ability to fool us will get better, and so will the emotional impact, and influence that art has on us. If the goal is content creation to sell ad space the two will become inseparable and marketing will be irresistibly powerful. Our priorities are what our code will end up optimizing towards and the other things will suffer. The immeasurable things like creativity, quality, originality, understanding, and compassion.

Quality with a Capital Q

     Humans requiring jobs for basic survival is a logical fallacy, even more so, in the face of AI and automation. Farms and food prep are becoming automated, robots are becoming more agile every day, and AI will get exponentially smarter making the machines they control better. Go far enough down that path and the only jobs that will exist are developers, prompt writers, and some repair people. A little bit further and even those are gone, quicker than you think. As more and more jobs become obsolete there is no reason you need bureaucratic or physical labor to achieve the next level of human coordination. According to Alan Watts, “The purpose of the machine is to make drudgery unnecessary and if we don’t allow it to achieve its purpose we live in a constant state of self-frustration.” We are all feeling this state of self-frustration as we watch the state of global finance and the institutions we’re supposed to trust erode that visage day by day as the problems stack as high as their profits and debts while the quality of life and environment decreases. When we allow machines to make ALL of human life easier, we will see the originality and ingenuity of human randomness be set free to explode into a renaissance of thoughts not achievable under the current constraints of measuring value. 

     What will art, film, music, writing, code, architecture, and every other form of creativity evolve into without the need to please producers, benefactors, investors, advertisers, or anonymous crowds for basic survival? What styles and fashions may emerge? What unknown fields of thought and activity might be born from the freedom of humans from mindless labor?

     We will still labor but it will be out of love for the media we have unlocked through years of human toil and sacrifice. That is the future we all want to live in. So looking at the present situation and the tools we’re building, if we measure all human value(s) by the ability to survive based on ever-increasing needs for capital efficiency then what quality of life and intelligence are we optimizing for?

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     As the digital age emerged with a promise of lowering that barrier, artists are able to start building communities- and grow in popularity via social media and streaming services. As artists’ exposure has increased, the work has been repackaged to sell ad space for other products but the compensation and consent have been almost completely removed from the process. Creators are limited to very few ways to connect and interact with the audience and almost no way to retain them if they lose access to the account. The creations, while technically not property of the platform, may as well be, because the uploader loses all access to it if they are flagged for any reason, even fraudulent claims.  As the engagement algorithms have evolved over the last decade social media feeds optimize towards continuous scrolling, and whatever can grab attention in the shortest amount of time. It has become even more detrimental to art itself as everyone focuses on making “content” that will be boosted and rewarded by the algorithm rather than focusing on what brought artists to these platforms in the first place; the ability to share the work with a much larger audience. These are all the hidden costs of free services: censorship, not having true ownership of the work, the ability to control its use, how it is displayed, or transparency and consent into how the data is being used.

     Enter NFTs (non-fungible tokens); these begin to address some of these issues with a focus on  peer-to-peer, trustless transactions that smart contracts unlock. NFTs allow for cryptographic digital ownership by unique token identifiers and metadata differentiating digital assets from each other. Smart contracts are cryptographic programs that only run when predetermined conditions are met such as a reserve price plus other transaction fees. These allow for trustless transactions on Web 3 and NFT marketplaces. Suddenly, no intermediary is taking 8% or more simply to process payments on digital transactions. Artists can also code royalties on their work to retain revenue on future art sales. This is a huge potential as creators in most fields are only able to profit from their work one time. Even if the value of that work increases exponentially the artist is systemically and contractually removed from the ability to capture those profits. With NFTs, there are still platform fees of 3% or less and the royalty can be a deterrent to some buyers but overall these financial tools allow a collector to know with confidence they are supporting the artist or project directly. Of course, there is still a high barrier to entry of getting into Web 3 at all. A whole new set of apps, programs, jargon, blockchains, and security practices. Just the beginning stage of choosing a centralized exchange, connecting a bank account to buy the correct gas and currency, and transferring to the proper chain is enough to confuse anyone. So now creators are trying to teach the audience to use a new technology when they should be making the art, music, films, and writing that they set out to create in the first place.

     NFTs are a great financial and programmatic unlock for digital assets, long-term community, and building project history, but creators still have to rely upon traditional social media and marketing avenues. Links that ask users to click away from an app are discouraged on most platforms, so getting attention for NFTs is still gated behind the will of the ever-changing algorithms and the ability to use them to your advantage. It still means making content for exposure to sell art. Where NFTs meet social media is where things get interesting. Lens protocol is a decentralized social graph that was created by the Decentralized Finance protocol Aave. A user’s profile is an NFT that grants access to various social media dapps (decentralized applications). Lens has an open API (application programming interface) allowing any developers to build on it. Several early dapps function like traditional web 2 counterparts such as Lenstube and Lenster. The big difference is that all of the posts and activities become NFTs which have granular permissions for how that content is allowed to be collected and owned by the audience. A profile can be set to private but can also set a fee for people to follow the account. Each post can be set with or without a fee to collect; setting currency, time available, and the number of editions. A post can be set to be uncollectible and more features are being developed across multiple dapps. All of these features allow a creator’s audience to connect with them directly. They can collect artwork as it is released with trustless, peer-to-peer transactions landing directly in a browser wallet and soon directly in an Aave account. They can comment and connect under the art itself which leads to a greater understanding of what the artist and audience provide each other. The greatest feature may be the referral. When creating a post, it can be set with a referral fee based on percentage. When someone mirrors (shares) the post and someone else collects from that mirror, the person who shared it receives a percentage of the transaction. This incentivizes curation and sharing of your favorite works. Being right about your favorite underground artist has never been more beneficial than it is in this new world of decentralized social media, and it is only just beginning.

     This doesn’t mean that creators stop pursuing other avenues rather that they have better ways of understanding and contacting the audience before making big financial decisions on a project. Character design, sketches, plot points, teasers, trailers, photos, and everything people already use to gauge interest in a larger project is now wrapped up with incentivized audience participation, fundraising, price discovery, and always being able to see who the early and most sustained supporters are. There will also be new forms of media that grow out of these tools as they evolve into the next wave of ways to interact with an audience, and change how artists work with each other to form new types of collaboration. The platforms being developed are built with the idea of personal control and privacy of user data, with transparency around what is being agreed to, and trustless, seamless access between audience support and ownership of artists’ creations. The barrier to entry was lowered by the digital and social tools built yesterday. But the tools of today and tomorrow allow even the smallest artist to connect with their closest supporters, helping their growth in a sustainable ecosystem of mutually beneficial social interactions while also retaining ownership of their digital intellectual property.**