By now, I hope everyone got the memo that we have entered a new phase of the creator economy - community governance is accelerating, and it poses a threat to the marketing paradigms of the 2010s, not in some distant future, but immediately. Another part of the message that should be coming through loud and clear is that we can only sustain this community first model through precise attention to ethics, integrity and accountability. (Many web3 organizations still don’t wan’t to sacrifice profit, despite the focus in rhetoric on building a more equitable ecosystem than web2. I wonder if they will start to catch up when manufactured brand drops don’t yield the same long term value that organic artist communities do?)

As a musician, I was an “early adopter” to the creator economy. In 2012, I organized Tumblog community kits and took them directly to our mods in Union Square Park, laying the foundation for Tumblr’s grass-roots community playbook. In 2014 while scaling a Gen-Z mobile first short form video app I amplified the individual earning capability of each creator on my platform. I also attempted to build truly diverse, inclusive and safe communities to balance the points of view lending consciousness in the space. As one core concept, I proposed that we cannot think of value solely in terms of of money. In the context of creators it’s not just about money it’s about agency and autonomy and having the opportunity to participate in decisions that directly impact their livelihood - a vision that has carried into the collective web3 imagination, that directs people towards some new frontier or fabulous cutting-edge of creative possibility. 

In “The Soul of Man Under Social,” Oscar Wilde wrote that people always need a next frontier - something beyond the known, a fantastic dream - to galvanize them to act. He wrote: “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of utopias.” Telling people they are building the future of a more equitable creator economy, then pulling that away from them due to traditional financial models that govern web2 - is deeply demotivating. It can’t work. For this to work there must be a willingness for leaders to innovate beyond the framework of the last decade. Leaders in the ecosystem today sit in a space of delicate privilege, holding the power to affect the trajectories of entire communities and the future of web3.