Note : this piece of fiction was created as part of an experiment on Farcaster, in which I asked people to tip me in exchange for words to write. I received 10,000 degens from the community, which amounted to a total of 2,000 words to write.

***

I’ve just been robbed of three months' worth of pay.

600 hours!

600 hours of labor vanished in a minute, for a reason so stupid I can barely write it down without screaming in anger.

Apparently, my content didn’t adhere to the community guidelines. To which I say a resounding ‘bullshit’. My videos were legit, okay? I appealed, and got a response in ten seconds: request denied. No way a human ever laid eyes on my detailed, swear-free, insult-free report.

I'm so furious it's hard to find the words to describe how I feel. I could have literally spent all season staring at a wall from morning to night and I would have ended up with the same result as today, which is not a penny to pay my rent.

This morning I heard someone knocking at the door. I didn't dare open it; it was probably the landlord coming to collect. I hope he didn’t see the speck of weed on the table, I wasn’t in the mood to justify that on top of not being able to pay. Anyway, what could I have told him besides, ‘Hi, I'm Mikaela Bourbon, 29, with a useless degree in political science and I work in a Tundra warehouse sorting crap that those with management degrees return after their boozy networking events on Friday nights'.

I think that might have moved him, but not enough for him to let the rent slide this month.

He has bills to pay too, I guess.

Every fifteen minutes, I reread the message that just ruined my life. 'Your content has been demonetized because it violates our community guidelines.' I feel like punching a wall.

How can a foreign company, managed by three techies and an accountant, decide what's moral or not? What exactly is their problem?

I'm overthinking it. The company doesn’t give a damn about morality. It just decided to keep more revenue for itself. It acts in its own interest, just like me when I took the job at Tundra, even though it embodies everything I hate about this shitty economic system that just robbed me of three months’ salary.

I can’t let go. Three months of hard work tossed in the trash by an opaque algorithm over which I have no control!

Kings have been beheaded for less.

I just got a private message from one of my followers. He saw that my content was demonetized and mentioned a new platform I’d never heard of. My first instinct was to delete the message: he talked about blockchain, and I want nothing to do with a crypto bro. Probably another scammer trying to steal my money!

But I decided to see what it was about. Just curious, and anyway, I’ve got nothing left to lose. Maybe it’s real, and maybe I could make a quick buck with Bitcoin or some other nonsense.

I was absolutely floored by what I discovered.

The crypto bro isn’t a fraudster: he’s a pioneer. And the social network he talked about seems extraordinary for a creator like me. I’m eager to really try it out and update you.

But let’s just say, it’s promising enough that I no longer feel like punching a wall.

*

It’s been five days since I joined this new social network, and I have to restrain myself from stopping people on the street to tell them about it.

It’s called Farcaster, it’s decentralized, and it's the fucking future of my profession.

Seriously… It's incredible! I can’t take my eyes off it, it’s like the solar eclipse last week, I was counting the seconds, and even though I knew I’d eventually burn my retinas, I just couldn’t look away. Okay, it’s not exactly the same, an eclipse is still more interesting than a computer protocol, but you get my drift.

Farcaster is everything other social networks are not. A nearly total freedom space, where I can create whatever I want, without middlemen fattening on my labor.

It’s hard to describe if you haven’t tried it. I’ll use a metaphor that my buddy Marx would appreciate.

Current social networks are the coal mines of the 19th century, and creators are the exploited miners. The means of production belong to billionaires who leverage their economic, political, and judicial connections to nip any potentially disruptive initiatives in the bud. If a miner is dissatisfied, his only option is to stop working, which leads to destitution.

And destitution is a fucking steep price to pay for anyone. Even I refuse it.

Conversely, Farcaster belongs to no one and everyone at the same time. It's an open-source protocol on which anyone can build, with the assurance that the rules of the game won't be changed by a whimsical CEO under pressure from shareholders.

Revising my thoughts, I realize I've been too abstract. That's a flaw of someone who spent three years in university. Let me be clearer.

The day before yesterday, I posted the video that got me demonetized from my regular social network. Okay, the viewership numbers weren’t extraordinary—I just got there, I haven’t been building a rapport with the audience for four years.

But the video stayed online. It was shown to those who wanted to see it. No one had to pass moral judgment on my work: the video exists just as much as a painting I might have done in my living room.

Even better: I’ve already started earning royalties for my work. Advertisers—there are few of them now, it’s true—are buying ads on the network, and the network redistributes this money to creators based on their activity. The protocol only keeps a 0.3% cut, a sum that goes to server and developer costs.

That means 99.7% of the revenue generated by creators goes back to them. I don’t know if you realize how huge a difference that is. Centralized networks keep between 45% and 100% of the revenues!

All this is made possible thanks to blockchain. I’ve never coded a line in my life, so I’m not the one to explain how it works under the hood.

For me, blockchain is akin to magic.

But I now realize that I’ve been too close-minded about this technology. In my mind, it was only for unbearable crypto bros. I read that in the media… I was way off, and I admit that now.

Beyond the money, the feeling of not working to fatten billionaires is extraordinary.

*

Okay, it's official: a month later, I think I've found El Dorado.

Thanks to Farcaster, I can literally sell my content! Not just broadcast it to earn ad revenue, no, no, I mean actually sell the content itself.

Why did no one tell me about this before?

It's quite simple to do. Say I have a particularly popular video. I can attach a non-fungible token to it that represents its ownership. Whoever owns the token owns the video. They can do with it as they please, just as if they had a physical object in their hands.

I've started selling my content this way. And it's absolutely wonderful.

The only costs are those associated with using the blockchain, and they are minimal, under ten dollars. There are markets that showcase digital objects for sale in exchange for a commission, but I don’t use them. That’s the beauty of it: I’m 100% in control of my business. No manager in a California office tower can make decisions for me.

It’s not perfect, of course. There aren’t a ton of users on this new network yet, the client I use has bugs that need fixing, and the onboarding can be intimidating at first. Even I, when I first heard 'blockchain', my instinct was to dismiss it. Crypto? Gross!

I was wrong. My god, was I wrong. Yes, it’s true, there’s a lot of junk in this universe, fraud, and unbearable hyper-capitalists ready to do anything to make a buck. But I realize now that it’s simply a tool. If I have a hammer, I can either smash a wall (definitely, the walls of my apartment aren’t safe with me) or build a birdhouse. The hammer itself is neutral.

I'm glad to have understood that blockchain is a tool, and that with this tool, we can build things with real utility for people like me, who aren’t in tech and who are genuinely trying to connect with people through their art.

It's just a shame I lost four years of my life on a centralized platform. Couldn't I have been born just a bit later?

*

Six months since I discovered Farcaster. My landlord just left. I not only paid the rent, but I also told him I'd be moving out at the end of the lease. He didn’t react much, didn’t even ask where I was going.

Typical petty bourgeois reaction.

But I don’t care. Today I'm in a good mood. I’ve built an incredible community on Farcaster, and I feel confident enough to have permanently closed my old account on the centralized network. I know that Farcaster won’t change the rules overnight, that its boss can’t just make my content disappear if it offends him—even if he wanted to, it’s literally impossible.

Some of my followers didn’t want to come with me, and that’s okay. I don’t think we should insist or market too hard; this isn’t a cult. It’s just a tool I use to make a living and change the world in my own way.

Everyone is free to do as they please.

Oh, for those wondering: I didn’t find a new apartment that’s cheaper, or more spacious, or in better condition.

I bought a house.

I make enough money on Farcaster to afford it.

And today, I can guarantee that I will never again wake up to an algorithm telling me that my creations don’t really belong to me.

I have finally seized the means of production.