Who does the victory belong to—the man, or the machine? Is it even “art” when you use technology? Wait, is that cheating? And why did the judges’ selection trigger furious backlash and allegations of cheating against both themselves and Jason Allen, the winning (human) artist? These are complicated questions with complicated answers that can only be found in the murky no-mans-land where technology ends and creativity begins. Mainstream interest in creative A.I. tools is building fast, and that’s exactly the wave we’re about to ride. 

In this ‘sletter

✋ Wait, what happened at this art show?
🤖 + 🖼️ = 🤬 From A.I. art, human anger
🤠 The A.I. creative process, explored
🤖 🤝 A creative co-pilot, not a replacement
👩‍🎨 But what happens to real artists?
👋 Conclusion: Art’s future is human

Wait, what happened at this art show?

Kevin Roose, The New York Times’ tech columnist, covered this story in-depth in the immediate aftermath of Allen’s controversial victory. But the abbreviated version goes like this:

• Allen, a game designer, had been experimenting all summer with Midjourney, which is generative artificial-intelligence software that generates illustrations according to text-based1 prompts.

• He entered one of these illustrations in the fair, in part to showcase the power of the technology, but also to compete. 

• He made it clear his entry had been made with Midjourney, listing its provenance as “Jason Allen via Midjourney”, and explaining his process on Twitter.

• The judges awarded the piece first place (in category) and Allen the corresponding $300 prize.

• People flipped out at the result, angrily accusing him of cheating due to the (disclosed, not prohibited) use of A.I. 

“You can’t use an art-robot in a human-contest, you rascal!”, they rage-tweeted (more or less.) “Hear us out, fellow humans!,” the judges pleaded in defense. “Sure, we didn’t realize that Allen’s art was generated by a computer, but we still would’ve picked it if we had! After all, how is this any different using Photoshop and a digital camera?!” Touché, judges… you have a point. Kind of.

From A.I. art, human anger

The chaotic debate in Colorado is a microcosm of a much larger conversation (shouting match?) online right now; it began with the rapid advancement of A.I. art generators earlier this year, and has been fueled by anecdotes similar to Allen’s. It’s a tough gray area to navigate. Generative A.I. is a relatively new frontier that incites deeper debate about what art actually is and what tools a digital artist can fairly use to create it. Is it unfair for digital artists to use A.I. tools to create art? Or is A.I. simply a very powerful new “paint brush” that lets more artists produce more art?

In a competitive context, the debate is mostly focused on whether the playing field is level. If it isn’t, well, we tend to call that “cheating.” Moral judgements like this are a quagmire all their own. Consider baseball’s ongoing steroids dilemma: are they inherently bad, or are they bad because players that do them compete against players that don’t? And besides, do we care—didn’t we all love homer-loaded ‘90s? 

It’s an imperfect analogy, sure, but it’s also not the point I want to focus on. While the core cheating debate is interesting and important, deeper existential questions lurk under the surface. Why was everyone so upset about Allen’s victory? Were they just sore losers? Did it trigger a reflexive fear of change? Or did they feel threatened because Allen and his fancy robot tool were actually producing better art than they were capable of making on their own?

If it’s the latter, can the rest of us sympathize with their artisanal anxiety? Previously, we thought tech-induced mass job destruction would be confined to blue-collar workplaces like factories, fast-food kitchens, and retail checkouts2 but most of us never considered that the “no-collar” jobs (TM?) of the so-called "passion economy" could fall to the machines, too. We’ve become cool with robots schlepping boxes around a warehouse, but we’re way less cool with them stealing our god-given right to crochet. (More on that in a second.)

Look, I get it. We’ve always been the sole creators and creatives - it’s something we treasure as uniquely human (or godlike, if you want to go there). Worse versions of these A.I. illustrating tools have been around for years, and they sucked. We could laugh at them from the safety of our studios, office jobs, and group chats (we ain’t never scared!) But now they’re winning awards… human awards. That’s existentially unnerving (OK, we’re kinda scared!) So much of the human experience is organized around purposeful creation. We illustrate, we cook, we build, we sing. A machine (nudged by a person, sure, but more and more gently) that can match or exceed our creative faculties can be disorienting, alarming—even enraging. What makes us humans special if our creative crowns are so easily usurped by the machines?

Share

These are the life-crisis-inducing questions we love to panic about. I felt some of that anxiety when first wandering into the generative A.I. world. The media’s hot takes and tech grifters’ lazy creations didn’t help: the mostly sensational and superficial coverage didn’t satisfy my curiosity about the future of art and the role we might play in it. So, I decided to dive in and use some of these tools myself. I wanted to understand firsthand whether they amplify or deter creativity; whether they undermine the creative prowess of existing artists; and whether they stand to affect, or even eliminate, humanity’s role in creative endeavors.

The A.I. creative process, explored

I began my exploration of AI art by creating the crocheted Rick Sanchez graphic above using the A.I. illustration tool DALL-E, by OpenAI. Instead of spending hours crocheting, I used a software program. You might be thinking that it’s a stretch to call that “art,” which, fair enough. But take a second to appreciate how real it looks. To be clear, that’s not a photo that someone posted online; rather, it’s a photorealistic image created by the A.I. based on my text input. If you’re not impressed by one example of meme art, well… who are you to police art, maaaannnnn??? But also, I spent significantly more effort on the following pieces, this time with Midjourney:

Sure, they look solid. But the whole point in opposition (i.e. against AI art) is that looks can be deceiving; the products, trained on the works of real artists, are just enabling mimicry. Thus, the visual quality of the outputs alone doesn’t legitimize them as artistry. We need to understand the process by which they came to be. So, in search of answers, I dove deeper into my own process, deconstructing and analyzing each quick-and-dirty step as I went. Here are the basics of how the crocheted Rick Sanchez was born:

1. Get inspired: Above, I made a joke about how the ability to create makes people feel godlike, tempering that with crochet as an obscure/funny medium for creation that is decidedly not heavenly. That made me think of my favorite cartoon character with a god complex, Rick Sanchez (of Rick and Morty). So, “Rick Sanchez + crochet” became my dim artistic vision. No machine was involved.

2. Choose a tool: With my creative ingredients in hand, it was time to visually express myself, but first I needed to choose my “brush”. I ended up logging into the web app for DALL-E. The other two popular ones — if you’re curious — are Midjourney (my tool of choice for the second set of examples, as well as Allen’s out in Colorado) and Stable Diffusion (also very impressive).

3. Craft a prompt: As mentioned, generative AI tools work a lot like a Google search (to the user, at least.). When using Google, you simply type in a text phrase and out pops what you’re looking for; when using these tools, you type in a text phrase and out pops images that it “thinks” best match the phrase that you entered. However, unlike Google, which finds best-matching images from around the Web, generative AI creates images that best match your results (albeit from images it finds). So, crafting a good prompt is key to creating good outputs. (This is known as ”prompt engineering,” and it’s a thing now).

4. Refine prompt: My initial prompt didn’t match my vision. So, based on each set results, I had to make adjustments to the inputs, iterating until I found a final result. Those final results were generated by the artistically brave phrase “rick sanchez says if there’s a god it's me in crochet”. Note: while my prompt was relatively simple, these phrases can become exceedingly complex, incorporating sample images, styles, genres, artists, resolutions, lighting, media, etc.

5. Generate an image: For the last phrase, it only took around 10 seconds to produce the below 4 images. I curated the last one for this article.

   

6. Create the final piece: I had to make a few alterations and finishing touches. Interestingly, the AI tools seem to be bad with creating illustrations of text phrases and human hands. So, I made some minor adjustments to my selected image using a digital editing tool, added the text, and nailed the final result. (Naturally.)

7. Share it with the world: I shared it on social media, and now in this newsletter. For what it’s worth, sharing the art seemed very human to me too. Isn’t art, like, communication, or something?

A creative co-pilot, not a replacement

I was a skeptic prior to using these tools. I defaulted to the common critique that it seemed “too easy”. But, that didn’t ring true to my experience actually using the tools. Primarily, the creative process still does feel, well, creative. It’s like you have an artistic copilot, of sorts, while you’re still very much flying the plane. You’re setting the vision and iteratively chiseling away at the inputs until your final output emerges; you’re editing and merging outputs into a final piece. Creation is greatly accelerated, and skill with traditional tools isn’t required, but it’s certainly not just pressing a button.

The process of creating an initial idea, iterating on the prompts and outputs, and selecting the final output all felt like steps a sculptor, painter, or photographer might take to create their art. The tools don’t seem (to me, at least) all that different than a photographer’s camera or a DJ’s laptop, and both taking photos and mixing music are respected artistic disciplines these days.

Further, it was apparent that my own lack of knowledge regarding art (e.g. styles, genres, lighting techniques, etc.) left me less capable of tapping the full potential of these tools. They let me dip my toe into the creative pool, but also revealed a depth that I imagine only extremely talented artists could reach. Just as a DSLR can’t make you Ansel Adams and a MacBook can’t make you Avicii (R.I.P.), simply using an A.I. art tool doesn’t make somebody an elite artist. I found my own lack of skill comforting and humbling in this regard.

While A.I. art tools make art more accessible, they aren’t a substitute for real talent. Nobody has ever needed a degree from RISD, expensive software, or a blessing from art world gatekeepers to be an artist; and these tools don’t make artists by default; however, they will allow those with creative talent/passion to more easily overcome barriers to entry and ultimately succeed. (The rest of us can have fun creating, too.)

But what happens to “real” artists?

So, more people will be creating art. What happens to the professional-grade artists? The haters will keep chirping, saying that amateurs like me (rude!) will masquerade as artists, leaving all of us confused as to who the true creatives really are; or that artists will be robbed of their livelihood as their work is copied (by human and/or machine) or drowned by the deluge of amateur-spun, anthropomorphized animal art.

Negative effects noted, I disagree. I believe artists will thrive because artists are the best-equipped among us to find creative ways to rise above the noise, and they always have been. Further, if these tools can elevate a non-artist to an artist, imagine what they can do for the true artistic savants out there (beyond just economic survival).

Creatives who embrace these tools can amplify their creative powers and greatly increase their ability to produce works at a speed, size, scale, and depth that was previously unattainable. The realm of what’s possible is expansive, but consider a few possibilities:

• The Artist as Mogul: The tools allow artists to create individual pieces faster, but they can also help artists create many unique pieces at once. Theoretically, an artist could train and tune an A.I. to their unique style, then sell pieces from that A.I. without expending any additional labor. For example, if Monet existed today and hand-painted 50 paintings, he could then train an A.I. to base its outputs on his style. The newly trained A.I. could produce more unique paintings, expending a fraction of the effort, and Monet sell personalized paintings to anyone at scale based on a few inputs relevant to that person. If everyone wanted their own unique, personalized Monet, they could buy it (if the price was right). That scaleable production greatly increases the capacity and earning potential of a single artist. One could argue that this would decrease rarity and subsequently price; however, supply and price is entirely up to the artists and higher volume almost always means more money (e.g. if 100M people all bought a $100 Monet original, that’s a lot of money). We’re already seeing this to a degree in the crypto space with artists like Beeple, who sold a collage of his daily digital art for $69M. In short, these tools break down limitations to production and create a ramp for future artists to easily become billionaires.

• One-(Wo)man Marvel Universe: An already-emerging trend in the space is “A.I. cinema”—people are using generative AI to create short video clips and/or storyboards. Someone is currently selling a A.I.-made comic book on Amazon. People are creating characters for their stories and games using AI. Projecting those trends forward, it’s easy to imagine how one person, or a small team, could use these tools to create a blockbuster movie or the next Marvel Universe (which generated $27.6B). These tools will allow artists to embark on ambitious world-building projects; there will be a new generation of Tolkein’s, C.S. Lewis’s, Stan Lee’s, Rowling’s, Lucas's etc. to capture our imaginations; but, they’ll have the tools to do more than just write.

• Personalized Animation: A.I. has the ability to bring old stories to life through illustrations (today), or full movies (if future computing allows). Imagine if the newish Dune movie was made by an A.I. that simply read the original text. Ignoring intellectual property laws3, further imagine if you could create different versions of the movie Dune using the styles of different screenwriters and directors. Or, if you don’t like any of the Dune movies, imagine being able to produce your own custom version. The ability to activate, remix, and personalize old content into new forms could become a new, impactful art form entirely.

It’s on artists to leverage these new tools accordingly—and some of them are already doing it with great success. The financial and creative opportunity is immense. Whether it’s creating the next Marvel, selling unique paintings to a billion people, or creating a virtual world, artists have a lot of power to push creative boundaries and be well-compensated in the process. As a side effect, artists will rise to greater levels of fame and fortune, attracting new would-be artists to the space. Thus, I don’t think A.I. tools will diminish the role of the artist or thin their numbers. Instead, they’ll elevate and empower artists to extend their craft and expand the creative universe as we know it. I look forward to seeing what they create.

Conclusion: Art’s future is human

Believe it or not, this year’s Colorado State Fair is a small event in a long history of us overreacting to stuff like this. (That’s so us). For example, musicians, who once made their money almost exclusively from live performances, sung their objections loudly against record players; recorded music proved to greatly increase their reach and earning potential.4 Photography was received as a blasphemous alternative to paint and canvas; it proved to be an impactful, differentiated new art genre. Before DJs became some of the most famous musicians on the planet, they were looked at by many as not “real artists” because of their use of computers.

We typically adapt, creatively, to these threats to creativity. That being said, and despite my focus on the more optimistic outlooks, there are some harsh realities to not be flippant about. Corporate creatives will likely be displaced given the new ease in creating high-quality, on-demand graphics and visual assets for marketing. Intellectual property and copycats are already an issue given these tools are trained using the work of other artists—our systems for dealing with this are reactionary, and imperfect, but purposeful in creating new safeguards and solutions. Art competitions will need to add rules and/or new categories to accommodate generative art tools, emphasizing transparency and fairness. I could go on. And while certain workers and societal structures will need to adapt, artists ultimately can choose not to—art isn’t a zero-sum game and the emergence of new creative media has never really eliminated established forms (painting, originated by cavemen, is still very popular). While artists have good reasons to be concerned, I think extinction is unlikely and new opportunities for success are emerging rapidly.

A.I.’s essential value isn’t in replacing humans; it’s empowering them to turn imagination into art much more efficiently. This makes art more accessible to the masses, attracting new artists to creative pursuits; professional artists are granted new superpowers that will allow them to pursue ambitious creative frontiers, breaking limitations imposed by their current creative media of choice. While the “death of art(ists)” narrative might garner clicks, I see a brighter future where human artists aren’t only aplenty, but also continuing to surprise all of us with the depth of human imagination. Art doesn’t need A.I., and humans will continue to create amazing things without it (see below), but I think art’s future with it is more creative than one without.

Earlier this year, right around the time cryptocurrencies began their now-historic slides, somebody stole a bunch of non-fungible tokens “worth” millions of dollars from the actor Seth Green. Then, he tried to get them back in a very public and humiliating fashion, because he’d paid enormous sums of money for these digital assets, and “cast” them in his new TV show. All of a sudden, he didn’t own the intellectual property rights to his cartoon co-stars, see? But then he was able to buy them them back from a guy named Mr. Cheese for like $300,000, demonstrating the limi—actually, you know what? Let me back up a bit.

In this ‘sletter

❓Sorry, what happened to Seth Green?
🎲 Brand-as-meme
🐒 Bored Ape Marketing Exercise
🤦 Litigation recentralization
😮‍💨 Bored Vape vs. Poor’d Vape
🔚 Conclusion

❓Sorry, what happened to Seth Green?

The terminally online freaks reading this already know what I’m talking about here, and can skip ahead to the next section. But for the rest of you, let me try to explain in a bit more depth, because it actually matters for our purposes here:

• An NFT is a blockchain-based digital asset that shows ownership over a unique item, a lot of which has tended to be digital art. (Perhaps you’ve heard of Beeple? No? Congrats, keep living your life.) Anyway, NFTs are often described as “digital receipts” because they prove ownership a given thing.

• During the most recent crypto boom, Seth Green bought (“minted” in the jargon) a bunch of NFTs from then-popular projects you may have heard of, like Bored Ape Yacht Club and Gutter Cats.

• Seth Green was then targeted by a phishing attack, which he fell for, accidentally giving over control of his digital wallet to a hacker.1 This is not uncommon. The hacker immediately sold off the NFTs in the wallet for lots of money—also not uncommon.

• Seth Green wanted his NFTs back because he got fleeced like a rube for art that cost him over half a million dollars. But he needed them back because he used the intellectual property they represented—the cartoons—to create a live action/animated sitcom called White Horse Tavern. Not possessing the “digital receipts” for that I.P. raised some awkward questions about who actually owned it.

• Eventually he re-purchased them from the person who bought them off the hacker.

Assuming you aren’t Seth Green—for whom this was apparently quite traumatic—this fracas was sorta strange and undeniably zany. Like, if you traveled back in time even just like even five years ago, made eye contact with a stranger, and told them “The shortest guy in Without A Paddle spent May 2022 cringeposting about how somebody took the online monkey he bought for the price of a condo,” they would be like “Without A Paddle sucked, man.” Actually they’d probably just sprint in the other direction, because in 2017 every part of that sentence would be absolute gibberish.

Share

Seth Green’s Stolen Ape Saga™️ was just one of dozens of high-profile hacks, exploits, and embarrassing self-owns that unfolded before the heat dissipated on web3 and the current crypto winter set in. But I wanted to file something about this situation because I think it was a good showcase of the potential—and potential pitfalls—of a business/marketing concept that I’ve been curious about: headless brands. Let’s talk about that.

🎲 Brand-as-meme

Unless you are deeply unwell, this next bit is going to read like Shingy doing LinkedIn broetry on ketamine, and I’m sorry about that. But it’s important, so try to bear with me. Deep breath, here we go.

Back in 2019, a group called Other Internet published a blog post arguing that because “the rise of networked media has challenged the coherence of centrally-managed brand identities” and “blockchain-based decentralized organizations… giv[e] users financial incentive to spread brand narratives of their own,” the traditional idea of a “brand” was deficient to describe the growth of things like Bitcoin. They coined the term “headless brand” to describe this shift. From the post (emphasis mine):

A decentralized brand is a meme. It belongs to no one, and can be remixed by anyone. A decentralized brand can only be "designed" in a very limited sense. It is something different than a Coca-Cola, an Uber, or a New York Times. Decentralized brands are self-enforcing, self-incentivized, contagious narratives that emerge and evolve in ways that are unexpected and irrepressible.

This is impenetrably thinkboi blather, I know. The whole post is like that. But the easiest way to think about it is to consider memes themselves. Iconic memes like Soyjak, Pepe the Frog, or Chad (of virgin vs. Chad fame) are brands, in the sense that they’re recognizable expressions of media. But the significance of these memes, like all memes, depends heavily on the context in which they’re deployed, the person deploying them, the tone of the discourse at the moment of deployment… and on and on.

When people edit, redesign, or recontextualize a meme, they layer their own ideas, innuendoes, and references onto underlying object, refracting and subverting and amplifying its original meaning. They recreate and add to the meme’s brand as they see fit, and use it for their own purposes. It’s theirs and it isn’t, no one’s and everyone’s. Apply this thinking to the concept of branding: by issuing tokens and letting people buy into some shared intellectual property—say, Soyjak—you give them an incentive to go out and increase its value in the marketplace of ideas.2 Whether “it” is toothbrushes or SAT prep courses doesn’t really matter. What matters is that a token-holder acting in self-interest to sell Soyjak toothbrushes will benefit other token-holders’ interests, too, because what’s good for Soyjak Toothbrush Co. is good for Soyjak the headless brand (and vice-versa.) Each of these commercial projects, in turn, drafts off the attention generated by the at-large community's cultural exchange around Soyjak, be it in private Discord servers, Twitch streams, Twitter, IRL meet-ups, or something else. The community itself is a commercial project. The brand is everyone’s at once.

Keeping with the brand-as-meme framing, you start to get a sense for why this concept is appealing to some Web3 acolytes. Getting people organized around a shared identity, and giving them a reason to iterate, evangelize, and perpetuate… that’s the hard part of building a brand. The easy part is coming up with ways to monetize it through goods and services. Marketing is hard, costly, and time-consuming. “The ‘headless brand’ concept is basically an attempt at monetizing this process,” wrote Ryan Broderick, publisher of the excellent newsletter Garbage Day. And shortcutting it: if aspiring entrepreneurs can simply buy their way into a community of ready consumers, they don’t have to waste years cultivating it. Theoretically, at least.

🐒 Bored Ape Marketing Exercise

Let’s return now to the curious case of Seth Green’s NFT-based TV show, White Horse Tavern.

To point out the obvious, it looks pretty fucking bad!3 But the watchability of Green’s sitcom is not really the point; I only included the clip because it’s kind of hard for someone whose brain isn’t permanently poisoned by online to conceive of “what if sitcom but NFT” without seeing it. (Now you have, and I apologize.) The point is that Green’s show is an example of a Bored Ape owner deploying the intellectual property of their NFT in an effort to monetize—“exploit,” in the jargon—that property. In other words, White Horse Tavern—corny though it may be—can be understood as a manifestation of Bored Apes’ headless brand.

It’s not the first. Bored Ape Yacht Club (often shorthanded as BAYC) is one of the most prominent NFT projects out there, and unlike many others, it offers holders of the NFTs the ability to exploit the underlying IP for derivative commercial use, so long as those usages do not violate the project’s terms and conditions. So far people have incorporated their Bored Apes into the branding and marketing of:

• Subscription coffee!

• Hard seltzer!

• Rare Scotch!

• Fast food!

• Streetwear!

• Beauty products!

And probably a bunch of other stuff, too. Remember, these businesses are all separate from one another; there’s no one like… coordinating brand standards across the various BAYC hoodies and coffees and candles for sale. The common denominator is simply that they’re all operated by someone who owns an actual Bored Ape, or by someone who has sub-licensed that imagery for commercial use. Ditto White Horse Tavern: Seth Green is exploiting his BAYC IP—an illustration of a monkey he calls “Fred Simian,” no I am not making that up—to monetize the evolving, iterative BAYC brand in the exciting world of… *rewatches trailer* ah… Who Framed Roger Rabbit rip-offs for elder millennials crippled by urban loneliness?

Share

Which, fine, whatever, there are plenty of dumb TV shows out there. But building one around IP that’s “on-chain,” novel though it may be, carries with it the risks of being on-chain—hell, even just online. “[L]ike all blockchain concepts,” Garbage Day’s Broderick writes, the idealized vision of brand-as-meme is “wildly naive and absolutely does not line up with how the internet actually works in practice.” As poor Seth Green learned, while decentralized community brand-building is cool in theory, in practice it uh… tends not to be.

🤦 Litigation recentralization

Green’s road to ruin began last summer, upon purchasing Bored Ape #8398 for around $200,000. As BuzzFeed News reported:

“I bought that ape in July 2021, and have spent the last several months developing and exploiting the IP to make it into the star of this show,” Green told [Gary] Vaynerchuk. “Then days before… he’s set to make his world debut, he’s literally kidnapped.”

The word “literally” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, given that we’re talking about a digital receipt of a digital cartoon. But maybe Seth was just exaggerating because he was upset. After all, depending on how you interpret BAYC’s terms and conditions, when his NFTs got hacked, the ownership of their IP may have transferred from Green to whoever bought them. I.e., if you lose your NFT, and your NFT is a bearer instrument, then whoever gets your NFT next is the rightful owner of its IP. Green clearly disagreed:

“Looking forward to precedent setting debates on IP ownership & exploitation,” Green wrote in a follow-up tweet addressed to Mr. Cheese, cajoling him to return the token. “We can prove the promise of ape community.” This actually happened less than six months ago. I feel like I’m going insane.

Anyway: if a court eventually decided that Green was indeed the victim of theft, and Mr. Cheese hadn’t disappeared into the digital ether (ahem), it’s possible that the actor would’ve been able to claw back his beloved Ape. Because—and this part is key—even though Web3 stuff like NFTs and crypto make bold claims about decentralization, trustlessness, and “code is law,”4 they are still subject to the same centralized, adjudicated actual laws as anyone else.5 The Verge, in a great write-up about the collision between web3 and intellectual property law, identified four potential outcomes for copyright licensing and transferring via NFTs, but as they note:

[T]here is no clear consensus as to which of these is the best solution in general. But everyone who does a project based on an NFT that does not answer these questions [about I.P. ownership] is putting an immense amount of faith in the courts to get things right if the deal goes sour and the parties end up suing each other.

Huh. Let me ask you something, dear reader: doesn’t this seem like an unnecessarily complicated and risky way to produce a bad sitcom, even when you consider the potential built-in audience it might deliver? It sure does to me! And yet, to build a truly headless brand around on-chain IP in the form of NFTs, this is a very real risk you’d have to accept, because oh my god is there a lot of theft in the NFT marketplace! So if/when your NFTs get got, your best shot at getting your NFT-based TV show back on track is to grovel publicly on Twitter, or head to court, neither of which guarantees an outcome in your favor. All of the time and effort required here could be spent simply creating original I.P. off-chain that nobody could easily steal, of course.

😮‍💨 Bored Vape vs. Poor’d Vape

But let’s say your IP doesn’t get ganked from your NFT wallet, and you build a successful brand of, I don’t know… premium vape cartridges around your own Bored Ape. Congratulations, you did it: Bored Vape. Except, wait a second, another BAYC holder just launched their own vape cartridge line called Cloud Apes, and they’re using their very-similar BAYC I.P. to market it. Their cartridges are inexpensive and low-quality, undercutting your market and giving Bored Vape a bad name in the process. That seems like infringement, right? But there’s nothing in the project’s T&Cs about this… so you’re headed back to court, I guess?

OK, maybe that doesn’t happen. But what if something worse happens: another BAYC holder launches, like, a payday loan company called Poor’d Ape Fast Cash. It’s huge. Because they're advertising all the time, everybody knows Poor’d Ape… and many of them assume, reasonably, that Bored Vape and Poor’d Ape are part of the same company. This sucks! You’re trying to build a premium vape cartridge brand, and this sleazy business you have nothing to do with is wrecking your brand equity. But there’s nothing in the project’s T&Cs about this… so you’re headed back to court, I guess?

OK, maybe that doesn’t happen. But what if a lot of people come to believe that the entire BAYC project is actually an enormous and esoteric reference to Nazism? Even if it isn’t, that would probably be bad for Bored Vape. (Unless your target customer is Nazis who vape, I guess?) This is no way to run a business, dammit!

🔚Conclusion

I should note that I am not an intellectual property lawyer, nor do I play one on TV. And on the web3 side, it’s true that there are more sophisticated structures for guarding against these types of pitfalls. But I think the piece of the puzzle I struggle with the most regarding headless brands is just like… why take this on? If you’re going to produce a sitcom, produce a sitcom. If you want to sell vape cartridges, sell vape cartridges.

The best brands in the world, at least as far as I, Consumer am concerned, are the ones that have a cohesive aesthetic, purpose, and strategy, controlled by a centralized owner. Memes are the exact opposite of all of that. This makes them wonderful and vibrant and alive… and ill-suited to the requirements of successful, or at least intelligible, predictable commerce. The “headless brand” concept is very sexy for obvious reasons: it’s infinitely scalable, user-generated, small-d democratic, and maybe even cost-effective. Tapping into an existing community that’s also a customer base is a marketer’s dream; creating complementary, circular, self-sustaining brand lift is the stuff viral Medium thinkpieces are made of. Most importantly, the term itself—”headless brand”—just sounds kinda futuristic, which as anyone on V.C. Twitter can confirm, is key to bamboozling people to throw money at you these days.

I don’t mean to say headless brands are straight-up hokum. It’s conceivable that they could work commercially at some point for their various participants, I think. I think? But like spinning lead into gold or chasing down the Holy Grail, it takes loads of risk and buckets of cash to even try to find out. And as Seth Green found out earlier this year, there’s no guarantee “the promise of ape community” ever gets fulfilled.

Dizzy from the current crypto bear run—or bull run, depending on when you’re reading this—it’s easy to forget how we got to web3. After 30-ish years of the Internet’s evolution, why do we even need the third web and its “magical internet money?” What ignited the movement that mobilized millions of people and trillions of dollars toward a different future for the Internet? Our dysfunctional institutions (e.g. governments, banks, Hollywood and the like) may take the brunt of the blame for inciting the techno-peasantry, but what about web3’s internet forebear? Web3’s outlook on life has largely been shaped by its imperfect parent, web2 (the Internet of the past 20 years); analyzing that relationship, including the dubious history of web2, can tell us a lot about what web3 is and will/can be.

Remember web2’s founding promise? In the early 2000s, web2 heralded a better world, promising that we’d be more connected thanks to social media like Facebook and Twitter; that we’d never have a question unanswered nor a need unmet via omnipotent clearinghouses like Google and Amazon; that endless entertainment from the Spotifys and Netflixes of the world would satiate our cultural appetites; and on, and on. But the wonders of web2 could only distract from its woes for so long.

Web2 broke its promise. As our digital saviors outgrew the benign altruism of their adolescence, the cold realities of a maturing business set in: there are investors to make whole and new growth to be funded. (#Adulting: even unicorns struggle with it!) As the bills came due, Big Tech’s starry-eyed ideals came into direct conflict with the brute force of profit. Guess which won? And there we were, still hoping those world-beating web2 firms would come through, but starting to suspect that maybe—just maybe—there may have been a better path for us and our beloved Internet. Our free delivery and low-cost rides (often to places we easily could have walked) began to disappear; intrusive ads and sold personal data became commonplace. More importantly, with loneliness, political strife, economic inequality, and empathetic bankruptcy are all-time highs, it’s no surprise beleaguered web2 citizens have sought out a better future - a less extractive and corrosive version of digital life.

So now a new silver-tongued suitor, web3 (aka “Mr. Steal Yo’ FAANG”) whispers a familiar promise: the Internet—along with its endless riches and community(?)—can be ours again. Can it? Who knows! sounds cool at least. Whether web3’s vision will come to fruition is a topic of much debate, and a discussion I’ll save for another day. For now, it’s less important to buy into the dogmatic vision of crypto’s self-serving hypemen, and more important to realize that web3 is still a fluid concept - an unrealized future that we are shaping daily. And, to shape it properly, it’s important to learn from our sometimes-toxic relationship with web2.

TL;DR: we kinda got rugged (hoodwinked) by web2. The realities of business forced compromises on web2’s boldest pledges to users, and in the process, eroded the latter’s trust in the former. We became disillusioned with the online status quo and more open-minded towards new ways to experience the Internet. Thus, web3 was borne - a vision for a decentralized, community-driven, unmediated version of the Internet that was at least partially sired by a semi-failed web2. Web3 has clearly told web2 “I don’t want your life”, but what choices will it make differently? Web3 is a possibility of a better future, not a guarantee. To achieve that dream, we’ll need to learn from web2’s mistakes and be intentional in not repeating them.

Facebook: Connect the world, then divide them... for money

Of all the web2 villains, Facebook is one of the more popular punching bags given its litany of well-publicized sins: rage profiteering, election manipulation, non-election manipulation, depressing teens, dividing families, giving birth to what would one day become the influencer race… et cetera. But it didn’t start like that. Facebook’s infancy brimmed with optimism—we aligned ideologically, us and Zuck, on a vision for a more connected, socially lubricated world. Remember when you could just, like... poke people? We had it all...

We were promised a neo-digital social utopia of sorts, where literally anyone could connect with anyone and friends weren’t scarce. But, ultimately, the auto-tuned promises of social bliss were drowned out by investor demands. Division proved more lucrative than connection, misaligning the incentives of Facebook and users. We still wanted connection and friendship, but Facebook needed money. Our relationship status with Facebook became “it’s complicated.” Facebook had broken its primary promise to us: instead of hyper-connection and online community, we were farmed for the engagement that advertisers craved. Facebook quickly realized that fear and fury made the ads click harder, and optimized accordingly; enemies are more profitable than friends… which kinda sucks.

This didn’t happen overnight, though. There were a decade-plus of red flags that we overlooked (classic us). They flew highest around matters of ownership: ownership of mission, features, data, and rewards of the ‘social network.’ And they flew early, particularly when it came to features. Remember when Facebook introduced the newsfeed in 2006 and everyone flipped out? (Gen Z readers: I promise this happened.) In response to the newsfeed controversy, Facebook said:

The Facebook users feel like they have ownership in the company… When they realize that they're not the ones in control, it's a real slap in the face.

It should have been clear notice to users that they didn’t control the platform’s features. (It wasn’t.) But, what about the data? That’s ours, right? Wrong. During the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, we realized that we weren’t in control of that, either. Facebook’s early assurances of privacy….

There are pretty intensive privacy options… You can limit who can see your information, if you only want current students to see your information, or people in your year, in your house, in your classes. You can limit a search so that only a friend or a friend of a friend can look you up. People have very good control over who can see their information.

…came to feel pretty darn flat.

Whatever though. What does control over features matter? So what if they made a little money off of our data? Dog’s gotta eat, right? But, if control and data privacy don’t bother you, maybe the money should. Facebook made $33.4B in revenue in 2021. The people that generated the content and clicked the ads that drove the vast majority of that revenue—rank-and-file Facebook users—made none. And, generally, I think people would be okay with that if things didn’t suck so bad. I.e., if Facebook actually fulfilled its core social promise, then nobody would call it out about how it monetized outrage and handled our data. But, at some point Facebook decided to forgo its mission in order to make more money. That was the “real slap in the face.”

I could hate on Facebook all day, but that’s not the point. The point is that Facebook broke promises to the people around ownership, privacy, and trust, and made a lot of money doing it. What did we get for our hard work? Our diligent “poking” and “friending” of one another since the 2000s? Not so much as a taste of that sweet half-a-trillion dollar market cap. Certainly not the social utopia Facebook sold us on.

Would the Facebook experiment have a better outcome if the incentives of company and users were more aligned? Maybe! Who really knows. The cynics will always ask, Would we have been better without web2? But, a more productive framework for us is, Can we learn and be better with web3? Would a web3 version of a social network fix our problems, and would it resist the same pitfalls? It’s worth a shot.

Leave a comment

Uber: Hailing web3

Uber hit the scene half a decade after Facebook with a straightforward web2 promise all its own. The platform would offer safe, low-cost rides on-demand, in nice cars operated by friendly drivers who a) had GPS and b) were subject to user reviews. They were going to shuttle us from taxi oppression to local-transport bliss. But after over a decade in Uber’s backseat, both literally and figuratively, we have to ask the age-old roadtrip question: are we there yet?

No, we are not.

For one thing, Uber’s conquest of local transit was famously expensive. Pre-IPO, Uber was burning through cash at the super-casual rate of near $2 billion a year. That money wasn’t free either, and investors eventually needed returns (and maybe even—gasp—profits). Those returns could only come from more users, more drivers to drive them, and more money back to Uber on each ride. Cheaper and more convenient ride, the things Uber users were promised, and actually wanted from the platform, wouldn’t get the company where it needed to go.

jessseinfeld

A post shared by Jessica Seinfeld (@jessseinfeld)

The misalignment was set in motion. First, users saw tips introduced: a renege on Uber’s simple, flat-rate pricing model, and an infringement on its commitment to low-cost rides, all made worse by the fact that it was a workaround for the company to avoid paying drivers more. Next came longer wait times and surge-pricing with higher fares, posited as a fair solution to supply and demand issues. But, fair to whom? They didn’t compensate the drivers as much as advertised, and they angered riders to boot (including, famously, Jerry Seinfeld’s wife Jessica back in 2013.) Finally, we got plain-old increased fares. And, as if all that wasn’t enough, the costs were compounded by violations of drivers’ rights, rider safety issues, and corporate culture flaws—ethical and/or moral surge-pricing, if you will.

But, this isn’t about Uber’s fading glory and broken promises (that’s what HBO’s Super-Pumped, based on New York Times journalist Mike Isaac’s same-named book on the company, is for), it’s about how and why it went wrong, and what it can tell us about web2’s role in web3. It happened because Uber’s primary assets, and early allies (riders and drivers), never really had any official control. Their original shared goal was destined to diverge as profit became priority. It means that users felt kinda betrayed; and, while some are back to hailing cabs and ordering pick-up, others are dreaming up new business models that return ownership to the users and force incentive alignment long-term.

While there isn’t a web3 rideshare platform yet, Uber certainly played its part in sowing dissent and inspiring the discord (no pun intended) that drives the current web3 drumbeat. It forced the masses of riders and drivers to question their loyalty to Big Tech. For some, web3’s message of user-owned, incentive-aligned, and people-governed apps started to make a little more sense. And, if there was a web3 Uber that belonged (profits and governance) to the people that rode and drove the most, maybe we wouldn’t have been… well, driven in this direction.

Google: Don’t be evil. Unless...

Google was the poster child for Big Tech’s early altruism. “Don’t be evil!” shouted all the Googlers down in Googleville, while promising users that they would always have the perfect answers to all their little questions. Or, in their words, that they’d “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

*chills*

Google’s impact on the world is undeniable. They’re a pillar of the modern Internet, having indeed made things “universally accessible and useful” for billions of people. And, for a long time, they were the best of Big Tech. They inserted benign ads into our daily routines for money, which kept the innovation flowing, and/or paid for YouTube. And, I don’t think that really bothered us, for a time.

But to grow is to change, and it’s hard to be Big Tech (poor, misunderstood Big Tech.) At some point on the way to $1 trillion market cap, even good Google was forced to compromise and do some evil (or at least some “not-good”). We’re talking about privacy issues, monopolistic practices, dubious dealings with censorship in China, and controversy around its D&I efforts.

Ultimately, a symbolic representation of this transition happened in 2015 when Google quietly removed the famous “don’t be evil” from their code of conduct. The mantra’s watered-down replacement became “do the right thing.” But, do the right thing for whom? Google’s mutated motto became an emblem for the chasm growing between user expectations and business imperatives. “Do the right thing” didn’t (and maybe couldn’t) have a shared definition amongst Google’s users, shareholders, advertisers, etc. The critics have been noticing… and noisy.

Google’s failures, even if relatively minor, nevertheless prompted questions about ownership, privacy and incentives. Ironically, questions are bad for things like Google. More importantly, the company’s metamorphosis made us question why we trust institutions on their word and whether there might be a better way to ensure that the implied contracts between users and companies are honored. As renowned web3 thinker/advocate/investor Chris Dixon likes to remind us:

This is the grand promise of web3: that code can eliminate the need for compromise and keep incentives aligned as companies and markets evolve. Google may not have been able to maintain its mission culturally or economically, but what if it could have been guaranteed programmatically? A web3 Google couldn’t be evil (stated or otherwise) without buy-in from their users. Is that better?

The path forward

If you Google, “what is web3?”, you’ll find plenty of articles that spell out the technical and ideological roadmap. There’s are a few other ways to look at it that better incorporate the history:

• Web3 is an emerging period in the Internet’s history. We are at the very beginning of that period, and how things unfold isn’t predetermined. A lot of what web2 was will persist.

• Web3 is still being shaped. Many people are actively participating in building the future - anyone can jump in and make an impact, not just crypto maxis. Web2 people and companies will help in that shaping.

• Web3 isn’t just all of the new innovations like crypto, blockchain, DAOs, NFTs, etc. It will, inherently, also carry forward a lot of the good constructs that web2 built (yes, web2 created a lot of good stuff).

• Web3 isn’t just online. Web2 showed us that technology has a profound impact on our real word, not just our digital one. As the web evolves, it will further impact our offline lives.

• Web3 is an opportunity. We can choose to patch many of the shortcomings of web2. We can advance concepts around trust, privacy, ownership, government, money and incentives.

Ultimately, we don’t know what web3 will grow up to be. We’ll probably see a lot of web2’s traits apparent in its child; all of its strengths, none of its weaknesses (big Blade energy). And sure, the same capitalistic genes are in there, as Jack likes to remind us:

But new technologies and sources of capital don’t guarantee better outcomes; different often doesn’t mean better. Better is a choice, and while people haven’t always been good at choices, I’m optimistic. Blockchain and crypto can’t force us to make those choices and won’t manifest a better web/world by default; they are powerful, impactful tools, but nothing more than that. Whether we learn from our mistakes, and patch them, is up to us.

Technology. Culture. The future.

SCARY! But also: IMPORTANT? Hmm. If only there was some sort of publication out there to investigate…

Now there is. Hello and welcome to Big Content, the ONLY and therefore BEST independent newsletter about technology and you. (And us, too.) Today is our launch day, and we’re very excited about it. If you haven’t yet, please subscribe for free now:

Subscribe now

Big Content is a project by publisher Ryan Redmann and editor Dave Infante dedicated to fun, intelligent, and unorthodox takes on the future of tech, culture, and everything else. We want to change the direction of current conversations about the companies, concepts, and creators that challenge the status quo, especially if they intrigue/confuse us in the process. With varied points of view and a more accessible, non-expert voice, Big Content strives to bring more people into the conversation and make ideas more pragmatic and tangible. It’s all in service of our ultimate goal: helping our fellow normies sharpen their comprehension and perspective of the powerful forces reshaping the our world, both online and off. And, ideally, having a good time doing it.

Now that we’ve launched, we’ll be publishing semi-regular newsletters on matters that move markets and/or our curiosity. To stay up to date, make sure you subscribe, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn while you’re at it. You can also email us at wearebigcontent@gmail.com (good emails only, thanks.)

Plenty more to come, and soon. For now, thanks for reading Big Content, and remember—no one has EVER done a newsletter like this before.

Ryan Redmann, publisher
Dave Infante, editor