We’re (in) the money

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

-Projects that raise money by selling NFTs effectively trade an asset for money that they put into their treasury. Projects that raise money by releasing social tokens, on the other hand, just mint money out of thin air. That means they earn money twice-over, both from the small portion of tokens they sell and from the larger portion of ones that t... See more

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.

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.

But the bigger point is that social tokens turn fleeting fun-and-play communities into long-lasting fun-and-work communities because social tokens turn communities into economies.

A jpeg promises a jpeg, sitting in the static 1s and 0s of the present. But a social token promises whatever opportunity people want it to signify. As Tina He intimates above, a social token is literally the right to a dream.

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.