Web3.0 offers creatives new ways to engage their audience and monetise their work. But how is it different to crowdfunding? And what needs to change to make the most of it?

For many people, hearing about a product or service’s plan to ‘move to the blockchain’ is perplexing. When the touted benefits don’t appear to change how people use those products and services, scepticism - if not outright hostility - is understandable. Crowdfunding platforms are one business exploring web3.0 technology. The ability to accept cryptocurrency payments or to offer NFT rewards may smack of hubris to the sceptic, but a deeper technical exploration of what crowdfunding as a protocol might look like requires something else to change for it - and many other lauded benefits of web3.0 - to work. And that change is us.

Making the tools that make us

New technology often takes the shape of what came before it. Take plastics. Many of their early mainstream applications emulated the form and function of the timber or metal materials that they replaced. Think faux wood grain or highly polished painted metal. When DVDs first appeared, their case design was the same size as a VHS video tape case, reminding consumers that the shiny disc inside was for playing moving images rather than music. Even the early internet advertising harked back to the only other screen based advertising it knew, television, and interrupted people’s ‘surfing’ to deliver messages from site sponsors. Why this incrementalism? Mental models.

Mental models can be thought of as a kind of short hand in our brain that allows us to understand the world around us and how it works. Product people care about their customers’ mental model of their product. The more aligned a product or service is to how a person thinks it should work, the more quickly and seamlessly can those people use it. The skeuomorphic design of Apple’s first generation iPhone featuring mechanical buttons and textured backgrounds was a deliberate design choice that directed how people should interact with an otherwise featureless piece of glass. Crowdfunding platforms tap investment mental models: contribute funds towards a project for a specified reward to enable the project to happen. Their innovation to this mental model was automating the timing of the contribution: only if the project reaches its fundraising target are the contributions realised.

Didactic vs. emergent creativity

From a creator perspective, crowdfunded projects need to be a one-off proposition with a tangible outcome. Film projects are a natural fit for this model and for film producer Chris Kamen, crowdfunding the feature length documentary, Franklin, enabled his team to tell the story of the fight to save Tasmania’s Franklin River from damming in the 1980s. With its singular project mission we might imagine the entire mental model of the project as: raise money, deliver the project, share the final project. I’d like to call this a web2.0 mental model for delivering a project, one where consumers (or supporters or audiences) are siloed between each project. Of course reality is never so simplistic and while supporters may choose to contribute to another project, that choice is contingent on there being another project pitched. In other words, it’s a top down model where the idea comes first, or in web2.0 speak, is centralised.

What would a more web3.0 approach look like? On the mechanics of crowdfunding itself, it is probably not too different. Rewards might be delivered as NFTs instead of physical items and contributions would be transparent on the blockchain itself. It’s here that sceptics may wonder what the point is. Perhaps by being tokenised, projects can be owned by its supporters - not unlike a shareholder - and perhaps they receive ongoing benefits for having supported it. Perhaps. What changes in a web3.0 approach is how we think about building audiences and communities into the formation of the idea for a project.

Franklin was not the only significant story of activism that could have been told by Chris and his team, but it was the one that was pitched to their supporters. What if the supporters themselves were contributing to a group of storytellers and filmmakers and that being part of that group afforded them ways to participate in choosing those stories? What if those supporters contributed in other ways? And what if they could be compensated for their efforts through either greater participation rights, credits or royalties? In other words, a web3.0 approach to crowdfunding is less about a fundraising mechanism for a specific project and more an incentive based organising structure that allows people to coordinate around a whole series of decisions that ultimately create a project. Sure, right now, this may sound like the fanciful optimism of a web3.0 shill, but if there is cognitive dissonance from these provocations it’s because they are two steps ahead of where we are. Before web3.0 changes how we do things, we need to change how we think about how we do things.

Managing the human, the physical, the digital and other questions

One project that rode both a web2.0 and web3.0 mental model was Constitution DAO. A DAO is a ‘Distributed Autonomous Organisation’ that uses the blockchain to permanently record decisions of a large and disparate group of members. These members may be anonymous and their financial contribution to the group earns them a certain number of voting rights represented as DAO tokens. Constitution DAO was a crowdfunding drive that promised status and future revenue from the fractional ownership of an historically significant artefact - the constitution of the United States of America. Subsequent governance - such as where to loan and display it, how to store it or when to sell it - would be administered through the DAO. Ultimately, Constitution DAO was outbid and most of the money was returned to members (Ethereum gas fees ate into the money that was returned).

Had it been successful in its initial goal, Constitution DAO would have quickly become a grand experiment testing the limits of speculation vs genuine financial support for cultural preservation; how the virtual - aka the meta - interfaces with the physical, and the role of ownership vs membership (that is, temporary ownership). In this sense, crowdfunding in a web3.0 context goes beyond a chat room connected to a wallet. Projects can have a life of their own, since creators don’t “own” their audience (owners of wallets have agency and can leave). Creators should be cognisant and design their campaign with that in mind. It may turn out that the initial pitch was just the rallying point and that something else emerges from that community.

Another similar project is Spice DAO. Spice DAO successfully raised funds to buy the script bible to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune. A physical artefact, the script bible was used to pitch movie studios to back Jodorowsky’s adaptation of the Frank Hubert novel, but ultimately, the film was never made. Spice DAO has a small team that manages the logistics of properly storing the book and managing the thousands of members who, as Spice token holders, can make and vote on proposals on how the group can leverage the book. While the group owns the artefact, they do not own the intellectual property rights to its contents, making initial proposals to digitise it or to create an animated series based on it, impossible for now. Despite volatility in the value of Ethereum (the cryptocurrency that Spice tokens are based on), the group is persisting and has ambitions to establish itself as a DAO backed studio developing crowdsourced ideas. Making films is hard. Having solved for one problem (building a potential audience for something that backers have a shared interest in), it remains to be seen if Spice DAO can solve for the other problems that arise from that: maintaining the engagement and commitment from that group while actualising something in the physical world.

For many years in the early naughts, the wisdom of crowds was held up as an opportunity to leverage, if there were an efficient way of doing so. Even more than web2.0’s social media, web3.0 provides tools to leverage and record the crowd’s decision. None of this is without shortcomings. In its simplest implementation, those with the most money will end up with the greatest voice, so how might these groups be more equitable? What mechanisms can be designed for people to participate without reducing their effort to menial tasks, aka grinding? How do we protect against governance for its own sake and elevate the people involved instead of the machine? What does community mean in an age of provable membership? And when it comes to actually doing something in the physical world, who does it and how are they accountable?

There are so many more questions to ask of the seemingly inevitable web3.0 future. What is hopefully recognisable when we zoom out from a project itself, is that without trying “old” models on new technology, we won’t be able to try new models at all.

Credits and Thanks

NFT

This piece was created as an NFT edition which means that you can collect it. Think of it as a tip jar. Any tips are split between Sarah Bunting and Hey Pixels. If you are interested in republishing this piece, please contact Hey Pixels.

Special thanks

Thank you to Sarah Bunting for the image design and proofreading and to Sam de Silva and Chris Kamen for their comments and ongoing discussion on how incumbents in the creative industries might engage with web3.0. Also to Frank Chimero whose 2013 essay ‘What Screens Want’ provided the inspiration for my thinking about the evolution plastics (and screens): “when something can be anything, it becomes everything.”

About Hey Pixels

Hey Pixels’ core principle is: participants travel to the future.

Part of the challenge for creatives looking to explore blockchain related technology is that it can feel so new and overwhelming. It's reasonable to wait and see where it goes, to wait for simpler tools or greater acceptance, but by the time that happens, the next thing has arrived.

‍Struggling to make sense of technology, to make a mess with it, is part of being technologically literate. Knowing just enough to critically engage and interrogate Web3 will shape it as much as it will shape us.

Hey Pixels exists to help people learn ‘just enough’ to enable its community of participants to travel to the future.

About Tim Webster

Tim Webster works at the nexus of art, technology and business.

He started his career as a filmmaker then video artist, ran a gallery in Melbourne before a year spent in Brazil set him on a course of working with early stage technology companies. He was part of the founding team that established Uber in Melbourne, Australia and worked as a product designer and manager at other Australian startups. You can find him on LinkedIn.