This small essay is a personal reflexion about the social issues solved by blockchain and how its new generation of media can influence our traditional world.
Finding value in new elements has always been a big concern for humanity.
From minerals as Gold & Silver to monetary value built over trust, we always needed something autonomous, intrinsically full of value in which we would agree as a society in order to improve and create more experiences that we will benefit from.
Do value always need to be correlated to money or purchasing power ?
I don’t think so.
Outside of the financial aspect, value can be found in diverse areas such as social experiences, writings, art, music etc.
But it is true that it also becomes way more difficult to identify and evaluate.
With the arrival of the internet, we became able to correlate some of our physical values into digital values.
And so, a good posture on the internet became as important as a good posture at a physical job.
Tweets, forums and blogs shared into the internet now also got the same value as physical articles, newspapers and reviews.
This is for me, the most revolutionary outcome the digital era.
Everyone can create value digitally. And then make it physical. If they want to.
However one interrogation still remains and has even been emphasized by the digital revolution:
How is value stored and exploited ?
That’s where Blockchain plays a huge role.
The digital revolution with internet already created a new ecosystem, a new way of producing value both technologically and financially.
Through quantum mathematics, algorithms, machine learning …
But even if these technologies are already integrated into our society and financial systems, we, the population still struggle to take advantage from it.
With Blockchain, the value that we have been creating for years digitally can be inlayed into smart contracts that will give us the ownership, the authenticity and the scarcity of what we produce.
And this does not have to be evaluated in a monetary way, as we don’t always evaluate the value produced by a community experience financially.
Although blockchain technology isn’t new anymore, the major part of population still lack of informations and does not have a clue about how to take advantage of it.
The common reasons on why the tech is not yet massively adopted are :
The UX are still awful for the common user
The solutions brought by the tech are still very niche
Our already established system does not able blockchain solutions to be adopted
I personally think that all these assumption are false.
In my opinion, the only reason why blockchain is still not inlayed in our culture is because our culture is still not yet ready for blockchain technology.
Every time our society had to adapt and create new values, it was because we were forced to.
With the new revolution of AI and all the challenges that it may cause to humanity.
One if not the most important challenge is the preservation of our identity.
We are already witnessing how easily an artificial intelligence is able to interpret someone else, adopt a desired way of thinking and replicate physical traits.
And our digital identity is already threatened for years by piracy and cyber-hacking.
Not only we don’t know what our data is used for, but we already witnessed many database leaks of millions of users from big digital companies.
This lead me to believe in a world where blockchain is our only solution to preserve our identity and authenticity, not only in the digital but also by authenticating our careers, certificates and more.
This reality will open our eyes on the benefits of blockchain and the value that can be tapped from it.
One industry in which I am very interested in and I think that will be deeply impacted by blockchain is the media industry.
I always felt saddened by seeing how medias are used by elites to manipulate and influence the information to the masses.
With the revolution of social media, online communities gave the power to more individuals to build new medias and provide informations to their community first and others.
But in order to be scalable and profitable, these “medias” started to leverage their community members as products to attract brands, sponsorships and products placement.
And unfortunately, we can even notice that in the web3 industry.
It is not that this business model is particularly bad, but when community members are just value providers in one and unique way, it comes to the same end as it was in the traditional media industry.
The customer ends up being the product.
But as I said earlier, we need to be forced to in order to change our habits and mindset.
The traditional media business model is already collapsing and we can see previously big companies as Buzzfeed closing due to their unsustainable economic model.
Online medias are also facing accusations about their way of producing contents and emphasizing quantity over quality in order to take advantage from algorithms.
Through blockchain, community members can transparently, internationally and in a decentralized way :
Create content
Curate content
Propose content
Own content
Vote to select new content and much more.
The community member and user is no more just an end user but he is joining the producing and distributing process of the media.
So the community member becomes an important stakeholder, and as any stakeholders he get rewarded for the value provided.
Now it is up to the medias to choose how they want to operate.
And you know what ?
This kind of media already exists.
We call them onchain media.
But what does “onchain” mean ?
Onchain is an expression that I discovered a few years ago, it is defined by Team Onchain as « an object, activity or service available on or performed using Ethereum or other blockchain. »
Since the purpose of this article is not to explain what does onchain means and what are the benefits.
I suggest you to read this article written by Jacob, the co-founder of Zora which perfectly details the topic if you want to learn more about it.
My favorites are UFO, Pattern Recognition, Bankless to list a few.
I strongly believe in the new culture brought by blockchain and it can result in so many wonderful outcomes once adopted at a large scale.
From Hypercultures, to metalabels, DAOs and now parties, they are so many great values and infrastructures that blockchain can offer but the onchain culture need to be faced to the masses as a solution to the end of our existing system, a new chapter and not an alternative to an existing world.
Thank you for reading this small essay about the onchain culture and the new values that come with it.
I will be soon uploading my podcasts on the OurZora blockchain through the community media FAIL.
This article marks the start of a new series of small essays about my personal reflexions on Web3, marketing and onchain media.
You can find my previous articles here & subscribe to this Blog if you want to get updated about our onchain journey.
See you soon for the next one !
Octopus 🐙