THE TRANSFORMATION ECONOMY (PART 1)

Crypto's new era. From content to culture, and information to transformation.

By Devin BakerJune 27, 2024

As you may well know, I’m a big believer in web3.

I’m particularly interested in how crypto is changing culture - how it’s facilitating new ways of organizing communities, aligning interests, and creating, merging, and sharing cultural and financial value.

There’s a reason that Comma didn’t hit your inbox last week.

It’s because I was deeeeeep in the web3 rabbit hole - and along the way, I found some interesting ideas that I want to share with you.

I’m excited, because I may have just found some answers to some of the questions I’ve been asking about how web3 can actually bring this vision to life. Less theory, more practice.

As I’ve been writing this, I’m seeing that there’s a lot here. So, I’m splitting this exploration up into what I think will be three pieces.

My goal is to help wrangle some of the chaos of the web3 world and bring it down to earth - to explain what I’m learning, why it excites me, and then make things more concrete by showing how web3 makes other projects out there (as well as my vision for Comma) work better.

This is part one, where we’ll cover the evolution of today and tomorrow’s media landscape, the shift of value from content to culture, and why I believe we’re entering a new era: the Transformation Economy.

In part two, we’ll delve into how web3 fuels the Transformation Economy by aligning incentives between users and owners, creating human-centric systems that better catalyze personal and societal transformations.

In part three, we’ll explore specific web3 technology ushering in this new era. We’ll look at how it works in practice and use examples of how these innovations enable us to coordinate people, missions, and value in new ways.

Let’s dive in.

From content to culture

In this rabbit-holing expedition, I found an essay that explores the future of media more succinctly than I ever have.

I loved it. I finally felt less crazy for the way I imagine and speak about Comma.

I think you should read it.

Here are some key ideas:

We no longer lack tools for creating content.
When content production and distribution is infinite, the important aspect is its primary function in crafting and proliferating culture.
In other words, the value of content today comes primarily from its use in cultural production.

When content production is infinite, we’re left asking, “What is this all for?”
An abundance of content leaves us with a dearth of context and meaning.

The longstanding struggles of digital media businesses drive home the fact that internet-native media requires a fundamentally different business approach.
Monetizing content assumes that the value is held in the content itself. Under the physics of infinity – frictionless content creation and distribution – the marginal value of every additional article, tweet, meme, podcast, post, book, painting, etc. asymptotically approaches zero.
Instead, value accrues to the layer of cultural production – to the community. Internet native business models must be designed for this reality.
An internet-native media business allows content to be freely accessed and distributed while leaning into the value of the community’s sense-making, context, and cultural production.

This has been an intuition, a preference, a dream of mine - and seeing the author, Jihad Esmail, wrangle it into a clear narrative has brought my intuition to ground. I feel more convinced of this than ever.

I see three stages of this dynamic’s evolution. Let’s take a look.

Yesterday’s era: the Information Economy

VALUE EXCHANGED FOR CONTENT John/Jane Smith (person) pays XYZ (company on a mission) money in exchange for access to scarce content that meets a desire (like insightful information or entertainment).

Yesterday, in a world lacking quality content (particularly the insightful or entertaining kind), that’s where the need lies. Value lies in the content.

Today’s era: the Connection Economy

VALUE EXCHANGED FOR COMMUNITY AND CONNECTION John/Jane Smith (person) pays XYZ (community on a mission) money in exchange for membership in a community of like-minded people with whom they want to be connected.

As part of these memberships, we often get access to scarce content as well. There’s some value there, but as we explored earlier, its value is approaching zero as:

i) the cost of distribution approaches zero

and

ii) the amount of content is approaching infinity, supercharged by the proliferation of AI.

The real value is in the community, and how it makes content (information, ideas, insights, etc.) manifest in “crafting and proliferating [its] culture” as Jihad would say. This is especially the case as our connections and community ties become more and more shallow as life and work become increasingly digital and remote.

Today, content is nearly infinite, while its cost and value are approaching zero. The need for community and connection, and their value, is increasing. Value has shifted from content to community and connection.

Tomorrow’s era: the Transformation Economy

Yesterday, we bought access to scarce content. We used that content in our attempts to transform our lives for the better, with insight, information, or entertainment.

Today, we join communities of like-minded people. There’s plenty of great content, so the issue is no longer having insight or entertainment at our fingertips. Instead, we desire connections with people who have or seek what we desire, and put insight and information into action.

After all, people change people. Even the information, ideas, and insights that change us do so through our engagement and relationships with others.

In an increasingly digital and remote world, our anchors of community and connection seem to be suffering.

Then what? What comes next? What matters beyond community and connection?

Well, I believe it’s transformation.

In fact, I believe transformation is what we’ve been seeking and building for all along. It’s always been this desire for evolution - for transforming our lives for the better - even in the Information and Connection Economy eras of yesterday and today.

I believe we’re entering the dawn of a new era that I’m calling the Transformation Economy.

I believe this new era will improve our lives by enhancing the value we get from interacting with our communities, projects, and companies. That we’ll get more human systems, delivering more human values. That it will better help us catalyze the transformations we seek to improve our lives.

And I believe it will reshape how we build our communities, projects, and companies.

How?