From Deep Worth: Notes on Creativity, Labor, and Value by Danica Swanson

18 January 2025

In a thriving private group chat in Warpcast DCs (Creative Labor + Value Flow), 35 curious people are discussing some thorny systemic problems — and doing so in an ongoing, slowcore-friendly, deep-dive way. Here’s the most pressing of the problems we’re thinking about, as expressed by @aaronrferguson. It’s also the one that interests me most, since it’s relevant both personally and collectively:

“I feel like we’re just recreating the same issues in web3 that we’re trying to escape from web2, but worse — the focus is on creating a system for AI to thrive… where the hell is an online space for actual people to thrive? Who’s solving the need to make a living for actual, living breathing people?”

If there are crypto teams working in this problem space — which spans multiple domains, including economics, philosophy, psychology, and culture change — I haven’t found them yet. But the group chat has helped me find my groove, so maybe I have to be the “team” for now and see where it leads. We need this kind of wholesome work in crypto. But immediately I’m faced with a catch-22 — my own situation as a self-employed solo freelancer is a microcosm of the larger problem space:

The problem of humans needing to make a living gets right to the heart of what I care about as a writer, editor, reader, and Farcaster contributor who would like to help deep-dive human niche-maxxing flourish in the Farconomy as AI continues to proliferate. So here are some thoughts to help map out the problem space from where I sit, and imagine what sustainable crypto funding might look like for those who practice art forms.

Questioning the Extant Models

• I’m not a fan of bounties for funding deep-dive writing and editorial work. For one thing, mispricing is a problem. Deep-dive writing is inherently hard to value, and structural factors (including public perception of writing as "free," and the dynamics of creative labor markets) exert downward pressure on prices. So the endgame is a race to the bottom ("web3 Fiverr"), just like other forms of gig work.
• Business models that rely primarily or exclusively on revenues from fans voluntarily supporting an individual writer (or even groups of writers) through subscriptions or crowdfunding campaigns are unlikely to be sustainable long-term. Most of those who make it work are receiving some sort of subsidy elsewhere, but that reality is often concealed.
  • One limiting factor is human labor. For most writers, I'm not convinced that the long-term returns will ever be sufficient to justify taking on the side-hustle labor (e.g., design, marketing, audience-building, and admin support for the crowdfund or subscription as a thing in itself) on top of creative work. Some do pull it off, but at what cost?
  • So should we publish deep dives "free" and monetize elsewhere? That's an open question I think about often.

Toward Arts Reciprocity Commons Models

• “Free” Writing (But With Reciprocity): What if we drop the effort to get writers compensated for individual units of their finished work or for their labor time — i.e., selling, minting, or paying them for “billable hours” — but unlike the extractive patterns the status quo defaults to, we build network models with true reciprocity patterns for creative labor? If the public perceives writing as “free” anyway, and it’s part of the cultural commons, it makes sense to consider network-level ways to help provide for writers’ basic needs.
• Network or Non Quid Pro Quo Rewards: What if contributors were to receive network rewards or non quid pro quo rewards for something nebulous and unquantifiable, like a demonstrated commitment to serving a long-term slowcore vision, or service work as a curator-preserver of impactful discussions on how the Farconomy affects writers? This could be approached as a way of recognizing that, as Tom Beck points out in Curator Economy, Not Creator Economy, value is not created solely by individual writers. Multiple roles in the network should be recognized and rewarded as contributors — including curators, moderators, preservers, and readers.
• Onstage + Offstage: In Why the Community is Not the Product, Mark Beylin takes an unflinching look at how introducing token incentives to communities crowds out intrinsic motivation. Since I’ve come to similar conclusions after watching several once-thriving online communities slowly and painfully die, I’m reluctant to proceed with tokenization of any kind for the core community that’s slowly taking shape in our group chat. However, if we don’t find a suitable and sustainable way to fund the maintenance labor over the long term, the community will likely die another way, because members whose labor is insufficiently subsidized elsewhere — myself included — will be forced to turn the bulk of their time and attention away from the group and toward day jobs (“earning a living”). But what if our group had two separate branches: onstage + offstage?
  • Onstage Branch: a public online space (a public network good?) to carry on deep-dive discussions on our own terms, in ways that preserve context and can benefit the Farcaster ecosystem. For this to be feasible, we’d need a sustainable way to fund this branch that offers a fair Return on our Attention (ROA).**
  • Offstage Branch: a private online space with a commitment to a slowcore ethos: deliberately small (50 people max), sustained with “free” labor (i.e., labor that’s valued but subsidized elsewhere), and intentionally hidden behind multiple filters to help screen out non-aligned people.
  • Slowcore Culture Norms: For both branches, hustle culture norms like audience-building and courting paid subscribers would ideally be abandoned in favor of devoting more time and attention to the quality of the work itself. This means respecting the indwelling intelligence and pace of the creative process on its own terms — even if that means disappearing from public view for awhile — rather than relying on normative monetization models that shift costs and risks onto writers.
• Unconditionality: What if we were to decouple extrinsic token rewards from all performance metrics and productivity standards, and follow a gift economy model for our offstage branch only? Could we programmatically encode*** a basic default level of unconditional rewards (”unconditional” as per Oshan Jarow) within our offstage branch, and manage the onstage branch as a revenue driver?
• Post-Cognitive Income: To provide for human needs as AI increasingly exceeds human cognitive abilities, Matt Prewitt and Jack Henderson propose “post-cognitive income” (PCI) as a pragmatic alternative to UBI and a way of cushioning the economic shock of human “mental obsolescence.” They suggest several ways PCI might be implemented, with an emphasis on mutualizing returns. “If set up for individuals,” they argue, “PCI will deepen inequality and erode the social fabric. But if the returns are mutualized — shared within communities — PCI could contribute to rich and meaningful lives.”

This is all in the ideation stage, and it’s unclear where it will lead. But I wonder: could small nodes of trusted humans in the Farconomy somehow morph into labs teams “in the arena, trying things” to move us toward better reciprocity for those who practice art forms, and sustainable-livelihood-for-humans patterns?

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