We’re (in) the money

So what creators need, then, is the opposite of a cult: they need a decentralized collective, a DAO. With proper coordination, DAOs actually offer a far more compelling model for distribution than centralized models of either corporate conglomerates or, yes, cults. In fully decentralized creator communities, fans can actively become creators themse... See more

An NFT may not be worth much as a jpeg, but it is worth quite a bit more as social capital, as a demarcation of tribal identity, a wink that rewards the viewer for decoding its meaning—not even for anything it says, necessarily, but for signaling that the viewer is “in the know,” operating in the same cultural code.

Social tokens, Lambda School, Pipe: all of these capitalize potential money-makers upfront based on expected future earnings, and in doing so, actually increase the probability of financial success by giving them money to invest.

Three cases for why social tokens offer a whole new possibility for collectives to succeed in ways they never have historically:

As the workforce is increasingly atomized into a freelancer economy of solopreneurs, social tokens seem to offer a way for any individual to become a creator by printing themselves a kind of upfront loan, as discussed above.

Eliot Couvat suggested recently, social tokens enable crowdfunding-as-an-investment

Chase Chapman and Brian Flynn have spoken about a web3 Tinder: one that could cross-check social tokens across different communities to match two people based on their shared interests.

YouTube can only recommend us videos based on what it knows about our habits on YouTube, just as Spotify can only recommend us music based on what it knows about our habits on Spotify. But with web3 protocols, we could choose to reveal more abstract data about our taste to match with content we might like.

But for most creators, it will likely be a challenge to build an individual community around their singular presence... most fans would probably prefer to join a community around multiple artists, rather than to have separate Discord channels and low-liquidity tokens for each of the 500 creators they love.