The Internet is the new America — the centre of the world’s cultural and economic activity — and it’s currently undergoing something of a revolution. Where the overwhelming majority of the Internet’s activity is currently mediated by a few platforms (you know the ones), a small but steadily increasing portion of its value is flowing to a new class of Internet-native institution: “cryptonetworks”. Enabled by blockchains and smart contracts — and other esoteric concepts besides — what these networks offer is the possibility of a fundamentally improved Internet economy; one that squares the interests of the individual with the Reality of our collectivity, all while more equitably rewarding the contributions of its participants. At least that’s what we’re fighting for.

With Bitcoin, the Internet begot digital gold. With DeFi, we’re seeing the Internet evolve its own full-fledged financial system. And with NFTs, we have on our hands a new standard for content monetisation and ownership. Certainly, this all represents a massive development in the social and economic potential of the Web. However, for all the promise and potential of this new technological paradigm, it will remain largely thus until such time as it finds a way to affect how we interface with the Internet’s ultimate commodity. That is, of course, content.

In the present meta, NFTs have found a fit in digital art and collectibles. While this is already growing the creator economy pie, it’s not in itself about to transform the underlying economics of the Web. To realise the potential of NFTs, as a new rights-based file standard, we’ll need to figure a way to incorporate them into the more mundane, bread and butter brand of content the Web is known for; the kind of material one scrolls through mindlessly much to one’s own self-disgust. What we unironically call “social media”.

Given the speculative nature of the existing NFT space, and the financial bent of the community who gave birth to it, it’s not surprising that digital art and collectibles are the primary use-cases driving the initial adoption of the technology here. But now, it would seem, these initial use-cases are limiting further adoption and new use-cases, having defined — as they have — the primary interfaces that govern our interaction with NFTs. Namely, the wallet and the marketplace.

With the wallet and marketplace as the primary touch-points mediating our relationship to NFTs, we’re stuck in an endless cycle of uninspired PFP projects; “content” that no-one would care for absent the casino that surrounds them. To be clear, the casino is important — our philosophical interest here is in the potential of crypto to reconfigure the economics of the Internet, after all. Thus it’s not that we need to do away with the casino. Rather, we simply need to figure out how to instrument it such that it serves content that would be worthwhile independent of explicit financial incentives.

What I imagined and argued for in the previous essay was an “Internet of NFTs”; that is, an Internet where content were tokenised effectively by default. By definition, this implies a much broader universe of NFTs than what we see at present. In order to make this imagining a reality, however, it will necessarily require new interfaces — for new interfaces define new user behaviours, and new user behaviours means new cryptocontent.

For anyone interested in exploring new possibilities for cryptocontent, the starting point ought to be, Why crypto in the first place? What does crypto — the whole suite of technologies —uniquely enable? What can it do that current social media can’t?

The fundamental unlock of crypto is digital ownership. That is its distinguishing feature, and something “web2” simply can’t compete on. But what exactly is ownership? and what — if anything — is it actually good for? That is to say, what does it functionally provide that existing content platforms don’t?

Ownership is ultimately a social construct, a human abstraction. By some feat of intellectual gymnastics, we perform a kind of geometry between persons and things in the world, and confer certain rights (“property rights”) on the basis thereof. Ownership is more than mere abstraction, however. It’s just as much — and much more importantly, in this context — a felt experience. That is, it feels someway to own something.

People buy things for obvious utilitarian reasons. But we also buy for such deeply personal and uniquely human reasons as Identity and Belonging, for kinship and community. In other words, the way ownership makes us feel.

To own something is to stand in particular relation to a thing, and it’s this relationship, and the way in which it’s distinct from our existing digital relations, that ought to be the guiding principle for anyone interested in the frontier of cryptocontent. What might it mean, we ought to ask, to reconfigure our digital lives — and the world of content, specifically — around this principle of ownership? When we’re no longer mere consumers of content, but rather owners / collectors, how does this change our relationship to the creators of content? And what new interfaces might we imagine that respect and honour this new relationship?

There’s also an interesting set of questions for creators here. For instance, what does it mean to produce “collectible” content — content that people not only want to “consume”, but want to own; content that facilitates this hallowed sense of Identity and Belonging. Additionally, how ought creators to think about this new — far more direct — relationship to their audiences, where they’re no longer passive fans, but more akin to a community of patrons?

One of the exciting possibilities of the cryptoeconomy — or “ownership economy”, as it’s also being called — is the realisation of the so-called “1000 true fans” idea, first presented by Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine fame. What Kelly believed and suggested — with characteristic optimism — was that the Internet would enable an economy wherein artists and creators could sustain a livelihood — and more aspirationally, thrive — without the need for a mass audience, as has traditionally been the case across other mediums. All an artist needs, in Kelly’s imagined Internet economy, was — as you might guess — 1000 true fans.

Alas, this is not how things have played out. In the current context, with advertising the default business model of the Web, only those who are able to garner truly sizeable followings are able to eke out anything like a living. Indeed, the present circumstance amounts to a ruthless winner-takes-all situation, where a tiny slice of creators capture the overwhelming majority of attention, and, by extension, money.

NFTs help facilitate the 1000 true fans vision by enabling more meaningful and direct relationships between creators and their communities of fans, and, thereby, new forms of economic relation. But again, new interfaces — new social infrastructure — will be required to actualise the possibility here. Presently, NFTs are something of a sideshow for creators — something that complements their followings on existing social platforms but hardly alters the basic nature of their interactions with them. What will prove far more interesting, however, is when NFTs — i.e. cryptocontent — becomes the primitive around which our social technologies are constructed. Only then will the promise of cryptocontent be fulfilled.