What Happens When You’re the Investment

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.

The recent history of the Internet, however, warns that we shouldn’t necessarily expect the endearingly homegrown nature of these 1,000 True Fans communities to persist. When viable new economic niches emerge online, venture-backed businesses, looking to extract their cut, are typically not far behind. Services such as Patreon and Kickstarter are j... See more

We may balk at having “personal market caps,” but many of us already do – it is simply denominated in the currency of followers. As social media platforms have increased in importance, the blue-chip entities of this exchange – influencers – have found ways to transmute social capital into financial capital.