We Are So Early.. as Creatives
Nothing written is financial or even general life advice. These essays are for entertainment purposes only --- Godspeed.
The wheel has thoroughly enjoyed the laws of compounding hasn’t it? Driving sports cars 220 mph around the track is only enabled by the advent of stone circles ages ago.
So what of blockchains, language models, image generators, VR, AR, and all the rest? What of creativity; in a world turbocharged by ai agents, with undisputed records in a tokenized web?
I used to conceptualize tech as fuel. My model approximated something like:
exponentiated software is the life force to media, entertainment, labor, etc.. with the human’s job turning into a guiding force (curation)
And while I’m not at the stage of full refutation, I think my current model more accurately marks human creativity as the fuel. With choice of tech as curation.
Wild Wild Web
One strength of old guard webonomics is combining job boards with credentialism. We had state issued ids, resumes, references, and multiple in-person meetings. Laborious as it was, the economy has scaled off of this model.
Enter Ethereum. Throw in numerous L2s. Finish it off with a bunch of non KYC’d addresses, pixelated cartoon avatars discussing six figure trades, multimillion dollar infrastructure (in beta), and plans to overhaul nation states.
Decentralized Coordination
Crypto is the wild wild web. Gold’s a plenty. Cowboys and bandits too. And the ‘dream’ is very real.
Questions on how to coordinate, efficiently onramp, etc remain at the top of the queue:
How do you identify high agency individuals in a psuedo-anon environment?
How do you coordinate across multiple time zones, capital ranges, languages, and skill sets without a ‘governing-authority’ or centralized location?
With ai rapidly developing what becomes of creators, developers, and general human context inputoooors?
What roles must remain in-house and which are available to an open market?
With infrastructure being the priority for years, these questions laid dormant, mainly for the *thinkbois (*h/t 0xd). Now with Base, Zora, Optimism, Arbitrum, Solana, and more, the human part of the tech can no longer be ignored.
Creative Direction
It should be stated clearly that most layer 2s are centralized in terms of sequencer revenue, control of the chain, etc. I do believe the ‘winning’ chains will successfully relinquish control however.
While working towards that end, these chains need individuals to build protocols, proliferate art and media, and help define the culture. In this context, the creative direction of these layer 2s are quite permissionless.
Here are some brief examples of permissionless creative direction and its affect on the culture of these layer 2s:
0xdesigner → designeverdays → 1155 collection meta on zora
0xen → salon 0xen → hypersub meta for creators (new but on horizon)
0xen → farcats → protocol specific nft collections (also new but coming)
Trying to remain objective, I could also argue that Based going viral at the start of protocol rewards helped push conviction in the .000777 meta for creators.
These examples are ones I’m familiar with and need not spend time researching. I’m sure there are a handful of others I’m unaware of. As the title says, we are so early.
The core intent here is to illustrate a model for creative direction that is entirely novel to this new tech. As Vitalik put in his birthday paper, creating meaning is a vital role in crypto. Creatives are uniquely positioned to experiment with emergent tech, derive personal meaning from its use cases, and help proliferate the overlapping bits through crafted context, media, art, etc.
This behavior, embolden by ai and/or tokenized via blockchains, provides creatives with technology that removes middlemen, captures real time value, and utilizes compounding laws unlike any other tech stack. It makes chaos harmonious.
Early
You know what the Billboard Top 5 Songs were in 2008?
"Low" by Flo Rida featuring T-Pain
"Bleeding Love" by Leona Lewis
"No One" by Alicia Keys
"Lollipop" by Lil Wayne featuring Static Major
"Apologize" by Timbaland featuring OneRepublic
The e/acc crowd is 100% right about one thing - everything is accelerating. Years look less and less like there predecessors. And blockchains and artificial intelligence will only increase that reality.
We, as an industry, are so young in the game. 2008 was not even two decades ago. We just got away from $100 mainnet gas fees as the only option.
The next wheel is here. Creatives, developers, speculators, pragmatic users, you name it - this is a once in our lifetime kind of opportunity.