Money for Everything: A Future Where Every Inch of Culture Is Monetized

“Everyone’s already a creator,” said Li Jin, a general partner at Variant Fund and an ex-partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “We’re all creating content on the internet. I think this binary divide between who’s a creator versus who’s a consumer – it doesn’t really exist. Everyone is creating something of value on the internet.”

Using the so-called “platform internet” isn’t always an investment, in an explicit monetary sense. Crypto can turn some of those passive efforts – scrolling, exploring, socializing – into financial transactions. What would it mean to live in a world where every single image, song, health record, Twitter “like” and blog post has a discrete token att... See more

“Individual creators have the option of either tokenizing their work or not – if people feel uncomfortable with that, they can continue carrying on with their current behaviors,” Jin said. “But even though it’s not explicit today, there is already this implicit financialization of your work.”

The other side of that idea – that everyone’s a creator – is that everyone’s also an investor. Time and energy are investments, even if they’re not always monetized. With an explicit financial layer in the form of tokens, users get a material stake in the platforms they use the most. The recent ENS airdrop is a good example of how this could work, ... See more

One of the things cryptocurrencies do extremely well – for better or worse – is ascribe monetary value to things we didn’t previously understand as being “worth money.”