Virtually every object suggests a time and place. The Monobloc is one of the few objects I can think of that is free of any specific context. Seeing a white plastic chair in a photograph offers you no clues about where or when you are. I have a hard time thinking of other objects that are equally independent of context.

How to stop wasting time

Web3 promises rewards — maybe even a kind of justice — for “users”, but Ethereum doesn’t know anything about users, only wallets. One user can control many wallets; one bot can con­trol many wallets; Ethereum can’t tell the difference, doesn’t par­tic­u­larly care. Therefore, Web3’s gov­er­nance tools are appro­pri­ate for decision-making processes that approx­i­mate those of an LLC, but not for anything truly democratic, which is to say, any­thing that respects the uniform, unearned — unearned!—value of per­son­hood.

Web3 is best under­stood as a game, or a game of games. I don’t intend that as a dig: it’s a really good game! Vast and open-ended, deeply social, with lots of scores to tally … AND you can win real money?? I mean, that’s terrific.

This message was emailed to the Media Lab committee. The assumed audience is subscribers who know roughly what Web3 is supposed to be, but aren’t sure what to think about it. (Here’s more about assumed audiences.)

Does a “Web3” that depends on Twitter for its mar­ket­ing and coor­di­na­tion chan­nel really deserve the name?

Ethereum is the locus of most of this work — hey, who named that client library web3.js, anyway?—so it’s not unrea­son­able to read “Web3” as “Ethereum-powered inter­net”.

The highest revenue NFT project to date, NBA Top Shot, has generated $200M in gross sales in just the past month while spending very little on marketing. It’s been able to grow so efficiently because users feel like owners — they have skin in the game. It’s true peer-to-peer marketing, fueled by community, excitement, and ownership. 

Modern video games like Fortnite contain sophisticated economies that mix fungible tokens like V-Bucks with NFTs/virtual goods like skins. Someday every internet community might have its own micro-economy, including NFTs and fungible tokens that users can use, own, and collect.

Social platforms will continue to be useful for building audiences

Centralized social platforms became the dominant way for creators and fans to connect. The platforms used this power to become the new intermediaries — inserting ads and algorithmic recommendations between creators and users while keeping most of the revenue for themselves.

Incumbent social media platforms sidetracked this vision by locking creators into a bundle of distribution and monetization.

In ad-based models, revenue is generated more or less uniformly regardless of the fan’s enthusiasm level. As with Substack, NFTs allow the creator to “cream skim” the most passionate users by offering them special items which cost more. But NFTs go farther than non-crypto products in that they are easily sliced and diced into a descending series of pricing tiers. NBA Top Shot cards range from over $100K to a few dollars. Fan of Bitcoin? You can buy as much or little as you want, down to 8 decimal points, depending on your level of enthusiasm. Crypto’s fine-grained granularity lets creators capture a much larger area under the demand curve.

(Note that lowering the intermediary fees can have a multiplier effect on creator disposable income. For example, if you make $100K in revenue and have $80K in costs, cutting out a 50% take rate increases your revenue to $200K, multiplying your disposable income 6x, from $20K to $120K.)

removing rent-seeking intermediaries

NFTs have received a lot of attention lately because of high sales volumes. In the past 30 days there has been over $300M in NFT sales:

A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce.

lit­tle plac­ards up top mak­ing it clear they are aimed at dif­fer­ent groups of read­ers. Those groups might overlap! They might also: not.

the way they push back against the “context collapse” of the internet, in which every pub­lic post is, by default, addressed to everyone.

Philanthropy