Important prelude: The just-announced Moxie Protocol ("Empowering the Farcaster Economy") stirs a kind of hope I thought I’d never see in my lifetime. I’ll likely write a lot more about it when the time is right. Don't think I’ve ever been this excited about anything else I've seen in my 3+ years in crypto.

There's now reason to believe that the Farcaster ecosystem may be on the verge of breakthroughs in collective intelligence that could, if successful, eventually loosen the death grip of chokepoint capitalism and spark a true creative renaissance. Dare I hope that this tectonic shift is already underway? Feels audacious. Creative people have heard this sort of pep talk before, only to realize later that we'd been sold a bill of goods. But if I'm right, Farcaster may soon serve as a seedbed for the kind of social flow and financial reciprocity cycles that can support creative work sustainably.

Farcaster channel owners now have the option to develop community-owned channels, including positive-sum ways of rewarding creative contributions, channel moderation, and all sorts of behind-the-scenes maintenance work. That's a pretty big deal. Extractive patterns have long deprived creatives of full reciprocity for the value they create… some have resigned themselves to a "starving artist" fate and given up on finding an oasis in the parched desert of the creative industries. Who can blame them when all previously promised "oases" turned out to be mirages of the "creator economy" and its equally extractive predecessors?

Imagine how you'd feel if you'd been overworked and underpaid for decades, but even after you'd reached a high level of mastery of your craft and received high praise from top-ranked peers, your earnings were still just a trickle. Meanwhile, you were told it was your own fault, and "exposure" was the key. You just need to hustle harder! Imagine that in addition to this frequent gaslighting you had to navigate a social climate that glorified the starving artist archetype, making it risky to speak openly about financial matters in the arts lest social ostracism dry up your meager income streams completely. This is a labor of love, right? You're not in it just for the money, are you? Sellout!

Creatives don't have to imagine, because this is the norm. To most people, though, value flows in creative industries are pretty opaque. As Tom Beck writes:

"Twenty years of the social-media-powered web has trained everyone to accept creative work for free. But it was never free. The costs were hidden, and the value did not flow to the creators."

Creatives are fed up with empty platitudes. If momentum continues to build in the right direction on Farcaster, I predict they'll eventually arrive en masse for a better chance at something that's long been out of reach everywhere else. Contrary to the stereotype, few creatives seek fame and fortune. For most, what's missing is straightforward: a livelihood that sustainably supports the creative work they're here to do. Yet the vast majority have been shut out from even that modest goal at every turn. Has the time finally come for the real creative renaissance crypto has long promised?

(Excerpt adapted from “Slowcore Nerd Notes: Creative Renaissance?” by Danica Swanson. Originally published at A Digital Incubation Space on Paragraph, June 30, 2024).