Lamina1: Building The Future of The Creator Economy

Sci-fi titan Neal Stephenson, whose Snow Crash coined the term 'metaverse' and Cryptonomicon, which foreshadowed crypto in 1999, joins Friederike to discuss his "hard sci-fi" method: building immersive, consistent worlds, not prophecy. He's now co-founder of Lamina1, aiming to restore Web1's ethos and give creators IP sovereignty with direct micropayments, breaking free from Web2's "walled gardens."

Neal unpacks Web3's promise like "intent-casting" flipping ad models while citing its critical traps: abysmal UX, criminal stigma, and the "soul-crushing" risk of just upgrading incumbent systems.

Spotlighting Lamina 1's game "Artifact," he argues Web3's true success will be measured when the technology becomes invisible and safe, proving its value by restoring sovereignty to its users and creators, rather than through speculative hype.

Topics discussed in this episode:

• (00:00) Introduction to Decentralization and Blockchain
• (01:20) The Role of Storytelling in Technology Prediction
• (03:48) The Balance of Optimism and Pessimism in Fiction
• (06:27) Web3: Promises and Pitfalls
• (08:36) The Evolution of the Web: From Decentralization to Centralization
• (13:37) Metrics for a Decentralized Web
• (15:55) Lamina One: A New Vision for the Metaverse
• (23:44) Creating a Financial Layer for the Creator Economy
• (25:08) Legal Implications of Smart Contracts
• (27:38) The Strength of Smart Contracts
• (31:04) Decentralization vs. Centralization in the Creator Economy
• (36:21) The Decline of Centralized Platforms
• (41:23) Financialization and the Creative Economy
• (45:47) The Future of Web3 and User Experience
• (51:17) Potential Failure Modes of Web3

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Neal Stephenson, Co-founder Lamina1: https://x.com/nealstephenson
• Lamina 1: https://lamina1.com/home

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis has been building core decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem since 2015. With the launch of Gnosis Pay last year, we introduced the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Start leveraging its power today at gnosis.io

This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
It's impossible to architect a compelling experience backwards
from a desired financial outcome.
So if you start with let's make a lot of money, and then you try
to work backward from that to make a story or anything
creative, it's not going to work.
Premature financialization is the root of all evil.
You know, if we try to resist that temptation to just

(00:20):
immediately financialize everything and concentrate
instead on the intangible value of of what people are creating,
that there's an opportunity to make something that's going to
be more, more stable. You've made that point again and
again that kind of like we've gotten a lot of things wrong, so
maybe let's talk about the things that you think genuinely

(00:41):
should matter in Web 3. Welcome to Epicenter, the show
which talks about the technologies, projects and
people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution.
I'm Frederica ANZ and today I'm speaking with Neil Stevenson who
is a visionary author who many of you may know and the Co

(01:04):
founder of blockchain project Lamina One.
Few writers have had their fiction mistaken for blueprints
quite like Yuniel. Your cautionary tale somehow
became the instruction manuals for a lot of the digital age.
Super happy to kind of talk withyou about Web 3 and your general
take on the ecosystem. But before we do that, let me

(01:26):
tell you about our sponsors thisweek.
This episode has brought you by NOSES, building the open
Internet one block at a time. NOSES was founded in 2015 and
it's grown from 1 of Ethereum's earliest projects into a
powerful ecosystem for open userowned finance.
Nosis is also the team behind products that had become core to
my business and that are so manyothers like Safe and Cow Swap.

(01:48):
At the center is Nosis Chain. It's a low fee layer one with 0
downtime in seven years and secured by over 300,000
validators. It's the foundation for real
world financial applications like Nosis Pay and Circles.
All of this is governed by NosisDow, a community run
organization where anyone with aGNO token can vote on updates,

(02:09):
fund new projects, and even run a validator from home.
So if you're building in Web 3, or you're just curious about
what financial freedom can look like, start exploring at gnosis
dot IO. Neil, it's a pleasure to have
you on. Good to be here.
Thank you, Friedricha. So you've written so many books,

(02:30):
and they often feel eerily prescient.
You wrote about the metaverse inthe early 90s and about
cryptocurrencies a few years later.
And so, so many of those ideas have since come to pass that
there's even been speculation that you might be Satoshi.
Do do you think of yourself as kind of predicting technology,

(02:52):
or do you just notice what others haven't yet articulated?
I'm a storyteller. And, you know, the primary job
of a storyteller is to tell a good story or a yarn, as we say,
that will keep people turning the pages and keep them engaged.
And in science fiction, you're creating an imaginary world, and

(03:17):
that world has to make sense because readers are very
sensitive. If they see something that
doesn't add up, that doesn't make sense, that's inconsistent,
they immediately lose their interest in the book.
And so, you know, if you're creating an imaginary world that
has some technology in it or that has a business or, you know

(03:43):
something, you know, people who are trying to to do something in
an organized way, that has to make sense, it's going to add
up. And so in science fiction,
particularly what we call hard science fiction, part of the
writer's job is to, is to have fictional technologies that,
that, that make sense, that are plausible.

(04:06):
And so when we're building such a world, we, you know, we try to
think it through. We try to do some research.
We try to learn something about how these technologies actually
work, what is and isn't possible.
And then we make up imaginary rules for our imaginary
technologies. Or if, if we're writing about a
corporation, some kind of business, we need to have some

(04:29):
idea of why that business makes sense.
How do these people make money? You know, would it actually
work? Because if you don't do those
things, eventually the whole logic of the story breaks down
somewhere. So in the case of books like
Snow Crash and The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon, you know, I
tried to to be so careful about creating these imaginary

(04:55):
technologies and, and businessesand so on in that way.
So I think that when engineers, nerds, technologists,
entrepreneurs, when they read a a book like that, they can kind
of see, oh, OK, you know, this sort of makes sense.
You know, this could actually happen.

(05:16):
So some of them may decide that some version of that imaginary
technology or that imaginary business plan is worth actually
trying to bring into the real world.
When you kind of see your ideas come to life that way, I mean
sometimes decades later, does itdo something to your own sense

(05:38):
of reality? Kind of does it feel validating
or creepy or unsettling? Or are you kind of detached from
your ideas by then? I'm pretty detached.
I mean, the typical way it workswhen you're writing a book is
that during the time that you'reworking on it, you're completely
immersed in that world and thinking about all of the

(06:00):
details and doing all kinds of research.
And then as soon as you're done with the book, you move on to
something else and the, your memories start to recede into
the distance and you, you begin to take up all of that space in
your brain with new stuff. And so, you know, by the time a

(06:22):
book is actually out in print, I've already moved on to
something else. And in the case of books like
Snow Crash or The Diamond Age, these are things that I wrote
3035 years ago. And so it's been quite a while.
And I don't, I don't think it would be healthy to just sit
around, you know, decade after decade, you know, paying close

(06:42):
attention to what was happening,you know, with, with such things
because you do have to move on and kind of get on with your,
your life. So it's, you know, it's always
kind of interesting when something emerges that it looks
like it might have been influenced or inspired by
something I wrote. But I don't I don't go out of my

(07:06):
way looking for it. Yeah, I I hear that.
And I think kind of like the thefact that it's it's been so long
and adds to that for sure. A lot of the people in this
space see you as this visionary.And I feel often people don't

(07:26):
appreciate, appreciate that a lot of your stories are actually
at least I read as cautionary tales, right?
So kind of like it's not a techno optimist endorsement of
everything that's going to happen.
How do you feel when kind of like your books are almost
treated like instruction manuals?

(07:47):
Well, I think for the most part they are realistic kind of
balanced treatments of these subjects.
I don't think it would be very interesting to just be very dark
and and pessimistic about everything.
I I don't think it would be interesting either to just

(08:08):
blindly optimistic. And So what is interesting is,
you know, if the characters in the books and the situations in
the books have a realistic degree of complexity and
ambiguity. So in the case, for example, of
the metaverse and Snow Crash, you know, it's a lot of some

(08:28):
people look at it and say, oh, well, it's very dark and
dystopian. And I, I understand why the, the
society that's depicted in the book definitely has some
aspects, you know, that that don't seem all that optimistic.
I don't think that that world ismuch more dark or pessimistic
than the world we actually live in.

(08:49):
And I think it's got a realisticdegree of good and bad.
And if you look at the ways in which the metaverse is actually
used in the pages of the novel, sure, there is some stuff in
there that's kind of sleazy, youknow, pornographic, whatever,
appealing to the lowest common denominator.

(09:11):
But there's also art, you know, the people use it for
communication. They use it to cultivate
relationships. They use it to do business.
And so it can be a, you know, a positive tool as well as as as,
you know, kind of a a sleazy strip mall.
So I think that and you know, the similar statements could be

(09:35):
made about the technology that'sshown in the Diamond Age and in
Krypton Omicon. And again, to do otherwise I
think would would result in a kind of simplistic storyline
that that most intelligent readers would pretty quickly get
bored with. Yeah, you've had a somewhat
complicated relationship with Web 3.

(09:57):
So I mean, there, there are clearly some kind of like some
core promises that appear to youand a lot of other people, but
kind of you've made the point again and again that kind of
like we've gotten a lot of things wrong.
So maybe let's talk about the things that you think kind of
like genuinely should matter in web three, kind of the values we

(10:20):
should we should try to imbue technology with.
And where do you, where do you think kind of we stand with
respect to these values and promises today?
Well, to begin with, I don't claim to be a expert on the
current state of things. It's a very fast moving field,
lots of companies, lots of people trying different things.

(10:40):
And so I don't make any effort to really stay abreast of the
very latest developments. I mean, I'm working on a
specific project that we can talk about in a bit, but it's
for me, it's always more interesting and informative to
actually try to do something rather than attempting to

(11:02):
understand and follow everythingthat's happening in the the
whole universe. So having got that out of the
way, I mean, the general trajectory of Webb over the last
30 years has been that, you know, when it came out and
during the kind of the early phase, the the 90s, basically it

(11:27):
was, you know, if if you want tocall that web one, it was
inherently decentralized. So anyone that mean the the
whole structure of the World Wide Web is such that anyone
could could put up a web page written in HTML and it would be
viewable on any browser that that knew how to parse HTML and

(11:51):
it was on the Internet. And so, you know, people began
to put up simple web pages all over the place.
And in in that era, it was it was truly decentralized and it
was there was a kind of idealistic ethos around it that
was very much kind of, you know,sort of grad student hippie

(12:11):
idealist mindset of, you know, we're going to make all of this
knowledge available. We're going to allow people to
communicate with each other freely in a decentralized way.
And somehow that's automaticallygoing to be a good thing.
But even in the late 90s, you know, I began to hear from
people in the sort of crypto andprivacy worlds who saw that that

(12:35):
this could lead to problems, that not all communication is
good. You know, not everything that
was going up on the Internet wassocially constructive or was
having good, good results. So the I'm being distracted
because a pop up just showed up in my browser saying try Gemini

(12:56):
and Google Chrome. You know, I have to.
This is classic web Web 2 bullshit.
Make it go away. So then Web 2 is the era of
consolidation. It's the era of of various
players figuring out ways to create centralized platforms and

(13:19):
services that turned out to be very popular and very
commercially successful. But that, you know, we're going
in the other direction, going very much in a centralized
direction that that kind of contradicted the original, you
know, Web 1 ethos. And that's what brought us to

(13:41):
where we are today. One hopes.
One would like to think that, you know, with Web three, we
could go back in the direction of a more decentralized approach
to things. And, you know, this has always
been the, the mindset of crypto libertarian tech nerds, the the
kinds of people I was writing about in Cryptonomicon who are

(14:05):
just automatically suspicious ofany kind of centralized power
system. You know, centralization of
power always leads to bad thingshappening.
And so, you know, we're going totry to use technology of various
kinds to fight centralization. I think that's the, if you go to
a conference with us, people from the crypto industry hanging

(14:28):
around, you see a mix today of people who are genuinely driven
by kind of the belief that they're doing something socially
constructive for society by getting us away from centralized
financial institutions and centralized information brokers
and in the direction of of decentralized versions of all

(14:51):
those things. You know, and that's mixed in
with a lot of other attempts to commercialize this that I think
are often driven by less idealistic considerations.
But it's all, you know, it's all, it's a mix of those things.
It's not one of the other. They all, they're all kind of
wrapped together. And so you just have to keep
your wits about you, I guess, and, and, and know how to

(15:15):
distinguish, you know, between those things.
What are the metrics that kind of would become better if the
web became more decentralized again?
I mean, I think it's very easy to kind of make kind of the
criticism of centralization. I mean, it's, it's become much

(15:37):
more efficient in many ways, kind of like, if you look at
kind of like, for instance, how much data kind of YouTube is
able to stream. I mean, kind of like people in
web one, kind of like it would have blown their minds, right?
And kind of, yes, we can say, OK, you can't really do anything
on the Internet without kind of accruing value to kind of the
same 5 corporations and kind of like, and somehow that's bad, I

(16:02):
think. But what are kind of what are
the metrics that we should monitor to see whether whether
lives for actual people actuallyget better?
So kind of because kind of like with with any technology that's
kind of aspirational in that sense, you kind of have to take
it down from kind of this very abstract level of kind of like

(16:23):
centralization is bad and decentralization is good to
concrete value propositions, right?
Well, I mean, one metric we might look look at is, is how
much do the creators of content get paid?
OK, so, so famously musicians aren't making very much money at

(16:45):
all from putting their stuff on Spotify or Pandora or YouTube
or, you know, any of those. And yet, and yet those are
profitable companies, right? So, so somebody's making money.
The value is accruing, as you say, but are the people feeding

(17:06):
that content in? Are they getting their fair
share of, of compensation or even just enough compensation to
make some kind of decent living out of what they do?
And are they getting to maintaincontrol over their data?
You know, do they, they do they have the mailing list of all the
people who are subscribing to their, their service?

(17:29):
You know, can they reach out to their fan base?
Can they talk to their fan base directly without the
intermediation of a company? Can they monetize their
popularity in a way that, you know, compensates them instead
of compensating the, the, the venture capitalists who funded

(17:50):
the, the creation of the, the platform that they're using?
This is also kind of where the the story of Lamina one kind of
begins, right? So for for listeners who might
not be familiar, what what is Lamina 1 and what what was the
motivation behind creating it? So it started out around the end

(18:15):
of I think 2021 when the, when Facebook changed its name to
Meta and announced that they were now the metaverse company.
And then a bunch of other big companies within 48 hours also
jumped in and said, oh, no, no, no, no, we're the metaverse
company also. And then a lot of startups in

(18:36):
the wake of that began styling themselves as metaverse startups
because that was kind of the thehot buzzword of 2022.
I went to South by Southwest in March of March or April of 2022,
and you couldn't look in any direction without seeing the
word metaverse somewhere. But the idea was if there's
going to be a metaverse that's anything like the metaverse

(19:00):
that's described in Snow Crash, what has to be true in order for
such a thing to come into existence, in order to build a
metaverse? The presence, you know, place a
virtual space in the metaverse. Basically, you need to, to use a
game engine as the tool that you're working from.

(19:21):
Because game engines have got all of the apparatus, all of the
code base, all the capabilities that are needed to create 3D
environments that are interactive and that can be
styled to look the way and behave the way that you want.
And if you, if you look at game engines and the companies that
build games on them, you know, it is a, it's a, every, every

(19:43):
game, every experience is a package of many, many different
assets, so-called, so you know, meshes, animations, materials,
textures, sound effects, logic, avatars, and, and each of those,
each of those assets typically is created by a different
category of, of artist. And so, and each one of them,

(20:09):
you know, is, is an expert in using a different kind of tool
chain, whether it's Blender, youknow, 3DS Max or an audio mixing
program. And so you've you've you've got
to create. Sort of set of economic rails

(20:31):
that makes it possible for all those people to collaborate and
for their contributions to be tracked and for compensation to
flow back to them to the extent that they're whatever they did
is is part of a successful project.
And in a traditional game environment, that's all handled

(20:52):
by having the whole game exist as a encapsulated thing unto
itself. And so, you know, gamers buy the
game, they give money to the thepublisher, the publisher gives
money to the developer, the developer has some way of
parceling out compensation to the people who who worked on the
game. And that all works as long as

(21:13):
the game is sort of a freestanding system.
But that starts to break down when you think about how a
metaverse would work. So if I'm running around in the
metaverse, I've got my avatar. I've got the avatar's clothing.
It's got a bunch of cosmetics, hair, makeup, you know, whatever

(21:38):
that they all have to be designed and, you know, and
created by, by artists who know how to do that kind of thing.
I've got props, you know, I might have, you know, a magic
sword that I carry around or what have you.
And those could all come from different places.
So, and every time I step acrossthe boundary from 1 space in the

(22:01):
metaverse to another space, I have to bring all that stuff
with me and it has to be rendered.
It has to appear to, to the people who are in that space
watching me walk in the the door.
And so there's no longer this circumscribed boundary, this
kind of cell wall that encloses the game.

(22:22):
And instead, you know, what you've got is this complicated
economy of assets that are crossing boundaries all over the
place. And there's additional, there's
additional complications and details.
You know, if I take a, you know,I might get a say the magic
sword from someone and then later in my maybe a new version

(22:45):
of that gets created, it gets improved or enhanced somehow.
And in that case, you know, you'd like to see some
royalties, what we used to call royalties flowing back upstream
to the original creator of that that prop.
So when you think about all of these things that have to be
true in order to actually make ametaverse that would work and

(23:09):
kind of make a list of everything that has to be
implemented, there's actually a lot of overlap between that list
and the basic capabilities of blockchain systems.
So, you know, blockchain systems, you know, are, are very
good at things like keeping track of who created a thing at
a particular time. And they're good at handling

(23:31):
transactions in which ownership,you know, changes hands between
different parties. And they're good at, at
distributing funds to, to, to not just to one person, but
potentially to a whole list of people who might have been part

(23:51):
of a particular creative project.
So the idea that that got us going with Lamina one was to to,
you know, create a, a blockchainbased system that would be
optimized to to carry out all ofthose functions.
And the, I would say the only thing that's that's really

(24:15):
changed that much along the way is that it's, it's sort of
occurred to us that there's all kinds of other creators who need
the same stuff. OK.
So if you're a movie maker, if you're a musician, what have
you, that you could benefit fromhaving the kind of system I just

(24:36):
described, even if you're not yet, we're not today building
the metaverse per SE. Even if you're just trying to
release an album or get a movie project financed or you know,
pretty. So in some other way, make a
living as a as a creative artist.

(24:56):
So are we talking about a financial layer for the creator
economy or are we talking about a place where also kind of like
the game engines and so on can live?
Because kind of like I'm, I'm, I'm confused a little bit
because you talked about kind ofthe games and kind of like how

(25:18):
people would crossover from one place to to to another.
And I'm I'm not quite clear whatthe exact specifications here.
Well. I mean, at one level it's just
we need to keep track of who created what, when and how
that's being used, how it's being accessed.
And, and then, you know, we'd like to see people get

(25:39):
compensated for, for, for any ofthat, of that usage.
And the the game engine example is more complicated just cause
games have lots of different types of assets in them all sort
of working together. But a simpler way to think about
it and take sort of an entry point to all of this is to start

(25:59):
with people making sort of simpler and more traditional
forms of creative art, like justa movie or a song.
OK, I get that. Why did you feel you needed to
create a, a new base layer for that?
Because kind of like had you hadyou put it on an existing base

(26:20):
layer, you could have integratedit much more easily with
existing protocols. So for instance, say you want
to, you want to finance an albumor movie, you could, you could
kind of tokenize it ahead of time and already borrow against
it and so on. So kind of having, having these
financial infrastructure tools around is super and kind of like

(26:45):
replicating them on every chain is, is cumbersome and kind of
bridging is difficult. And so you said in the past that
smart contracts on contracts, right.
So how? How do you make on chain rights
legally meaningful for creators and artists?

(27:06):
Yeah. So the, you know, the issue was
this is a couple of years ago that there weren't really
enforceable legally binding contracts in these in these
transactions. And the, there was a guy, the

(27:26):
late getting it, Josh, Josh Kramer.
This is a piece he wrote four years ago.
He's a entertainment lawyer witha technical background who, who
wrote, who wrote code. And he had a company called
Grapevine that was working on this.
And he had come up with a, a system that crossed the, the

(27:48):
boundary between blockchain and,and legally binding contracts.
But sadly, he's, he's no longer with us.
Anyway, this gets into sort of almost metaphysical topics of,
of what a contract is. And it's kind of a deep topic.

(28:09):
You know, if I, if I, if I have a house, say this is my house,
what does it really mean to say it's my house?
Well, it means that there is a bunch of paperwork that got
signed. And according to our legal
conventions, you know, this paperwork has the net effect of
allowing me to say that this is my house.

(28:30):
But at the end of the day, the the ultimate source of authority
is, at least in this country, isan office, a government office
at the county level that maintains a list of deeds to to
property. And basically, if push comes to

(28:51):
shove, if there's a legal dispute, that is the ultimate
source of ground truth. And somebody can go to that
filing cabinet and pull out the drawer and look up the, the file
for a particular piece of property and say, well, OK, the
deed is registered, you know, OK, so and so owns this house.
The world of, of blockchain, there's not necessarily that

(29:12):
kind of ultimate source of, of truth.
And so it raises questions aboutthe, the enforceability of some
of these, these contracts. And so really the, the question
that kind of boils down to is, you know, is it good enough?
You know, is it the smart contract, whatever it says, is
it is it sufficiently strong or sufficiently enforceable that

(29:34):
when push comes to shove for thethe creator is going to get
paid, really get paid money. And so that's what that's what
that was about. OK, I see.
So in the traditional creator economy, you rightfully said
that creators often get squeezedand kind of like they put their
songs on Spotify and they see almost no revenue and so on.

(29:56):
Usually it's because there's some sort of monopoly that
arises and really you can't afford to not put your stuff on
Spotify or similar platforms. How do you prevent kind of the
new creator platforms from simply re centralizing power
under different label? Because kind of like wherever

(30:16):
you kind of have these chokeholds on creators or these
bottlenecks, kind of in principle you could see the same
dynamic, right? Just by virtue of being
decentralized doesn't mean something is morally good.
That's not automatic, but I mean, there's no so if you look
at, if you take the example of music, it used to be that that

(30:40):
the only way for fans to to listen to music was to go to a
store and buy a, you know, pieceof plastic had the, the, the the
album pressed onto it and take it home and play it on their
record player, right. And so the stores could be
somewhat decentralized. Anybody could open a record

(31:03):
store, but the companies that pressed the actual disks and
shipped them to, to those storesdid become highly centralized
over time. And it's because at the end of
the day, there has to be a machine that presses the disk,
you know, and there has to be a distribution network that ships
the prints the album covers and puts them on trucks and ships

(31:26):
them out to the stores. And you could make similar
arguments about movie distribution or the distribution
of books or any other physical media.
There is a kind of a inelectablephysical reason why some degree
of centralization is naturally going to happen in those

(31:47):
situations. You're not going to have people
stamping out LP's, you know, in cottage, in a cottage industry
kind of environment, the now that everything's digital, that
has gone away. There is no physical layer
present that stands between people creating the bits and

(32:08):
people downloading the same bits, you know, off of the
Internet. And so it kind of raises the
question of, you know, what is it that these companies are
doing that adds value that, you know, adds more value than
they're they're taking away. While I would certainly agree
with you that just being decentralized, that doesn't mean

(32:30):
it's automatically good. I think it's it's no longer the
case that that there's a an inherent reason why these
companies need to be centralizedand kind of monopolistic to the
degree that they are. But in some respects, haven't we

(32:51):
seen the opposite? So kind of like if you look at
how many publishing houses we used to have in the 90s and how
many of them perished despite the fact that kind of they had
to have real printing presses and distribution networks and so
on. In principle, I agree that
distributing bits on the Internet should be much lower

(33:12):
barrier to entry. But nevertheless, we've kind of
seen these enormous forces for centralization, right?
I mean, even for something that's completely digital, so
kind of like say I buy a Kindle book from Amazon, in principle,
there's no reason why kind of like I everyone or 90% who of

(33:32):
people who kind of read ebooks should buy them from the same
place, right? So kind of like where do you
think? Kind of like the architecture of
the Internet failed? Well, it's a big question, a
very interesting question. The, you know, a lot has to do
with just the convenience now the, the vertical integration
of, I guess it'd be more like horizontal integration of

(33:55):
different things together. So, you know, Kindle's connected
to Amazon. So if I have an Amazon account
and I'm used to buying things onAmazon, it's very easy to, to
buy things to, to buy an e-book on Kindle or, or what have you.
So the friends with Corey Doctorow, who you know, has, has

(34:23):
got been doing some great writing and thinking about and
shouldification, right, which isa, a term that that Corey
coined. And you know, the, the basic
story of it is that when these companies achieve that level of
market penetration, they start treating their customers badly

(34:45):
and they start treating their business partners badly in an
effort to maximize the amount ofprofit that they're making.
So, so there are very strong forces even in a completely non
physical, purely digital environment like you're saying,
there are these strong forces that lead to centralization.

(35:06):
As time goes on, we see that those centralized platforms
decay and they decay very, very rapidly in the quality of the
the user experience because of the powerful drive towards
ensuredification that they all seem to be susceptible to.

(35:26):
And so while I'll agree that thetrend towards centralization has
been very powerful during the last couple of decades, I think
that we're beginning to see signs that it may, it may have
peaked and may be sort of in a advanced process of decay that

(35:47):
could create some opportunities for for new approaches.
Which signs would you point to that?
I mean, just when I was trying to start this conversation with
you, I got interrupted by an unwanted advertisement that
popped up on my screen, you know, from, from Gemini.

(36:10):
Yeah, I was irritated by that. You know, I, I found that to be
intrusive and unnecessary. And so that's just a, a small
example of it. But you know, another example is
that it's very difficult to findthings on, on Amazon now.

(36:30):
So it used to be that if I needed to, to find something or
to buy something, well, it's very easy.
I go on the Amazon site, I do a search and I, you know,
immediately see a bunch of products that match my, my
search terms. And now that's no longer the
case. It's there's so much sponsored

(36:52):
content that it's extremely difficult to, to actually find
what you want. And so instead I have to sort of
go on, I was going to say Google, but I can't use Google
either because it's also been inshidified.
So I use Kagi. Kagi, which is a service that
you pay for. It's a search thing that

(37:12):
replaces Google. So I go there and I search for
what I want and try to comb out the sponsored things in the AI
slop. And eventually, if I'm lucky, I
actually find, you know, the thing that I'm I'm looking for,
you know, and once I've identified it, then I can sort
of try to go back and find it onAmazon or some other retailer

(37:36):
that'll sell the thing to me. And so that's, I mean, those are
just some small samples of, of this, this trend.
And I think everyone who uses the Internet is, is being
exposed to this every day. So that again, I, I think, I
think we're at the end in the sort of decline of the Roman

(37:58):
Empire stage of, of, of Web 2 and, and that this might create
some opportunities. Yeah, no, that's certainly super
interesting. And I think we also see it in
streaming services, right. So kind of like when when
Netflix came about, it was great.
Kind of you paid $10 a month andkind of like you could see all
this content and now a lot of itis no longer available.

(38:20):
Kind of like you have to subscribe to five other
different platforms. And now, now it's much easier to
just pirate it again, so. Yeah, yes, yeah, yeah.
In a lot of cases. In a lot of cases, I would
happily pay some reasonable amount, you know, to watch a
basketball game or something. But there's no way to do it.

(38:43):
And you're navigating this maze of, you know, do you have an
account here? Do you have the right privileges
there? And at the end of the day, it's
easier to to just find some pirate stream.
Yeah. Yeah, no, I hear that there's
something I kind of just had to think of kind of in in the
Cryptonomicon this this character go to Dango, he says.

(39:05):
I think go it is the corpse of value.
And do you feel there's a parallel here with kind of the
digital, the digital, what they're kind of like things have
been, things have been milked and kind of tried to, to kind of
to turn into this extractive kind of imperatives that kind of

(39:27):
kind of sucks people drive or are they worth and kind of that
this is kind of the digital equivalent of kind of this this
goal you kind of put in your safe and kind of have it forever
more. Yeah, well, I did.
I did a talk at DICE, which is agame developers convention a
couple of years ago. It's up on YouTube, which is

(39:50):
about some of these topics because I was at the time, a lot
of web three people had been trying to persuade game
developers that they should makeweb three games.
And a lot of game developers were becoming very annoyed, very
tired of it and and extremely hostile in a lot of cases
towards blockchain and web threepeople.

(40:11):
So I was trying to have addressed this in my talk and
and one of the quotes that I used is actually a quote from
Rebecca Barkan. Which was that it's impossible
to architect a compelling experience backwards from a
desired financial outcome. So if you start with, let's make

(40:31):
a lot of money and then you try to work backwards from that to
make a story or anything creative, it's not going to
work. And, and one of the things I
said in that talk was the premature financialization is
the root of all evil, which is kind of a twisting a quote from,
from Donald Knuth when I say that.

(40:52):
But there is a tendance, there has been a tendency, I think in
the, in the industry generally to, to try to move to
financialization as as early as possible.
And, and that might work if there was like only one
blockchain, only one cryptocurrency.
But if there's thousands of them, then it tends to make them

(41:15):
all kind of fungible. And so the point that I was
making was that if, you know, ifthere's only one currency in the
world, the dollar or whatever, then the currency sets the value
of things like the potatoes, gasoline, steel, you know,
whatever those things are all denominated in, in dollars.

(41:41):
And but if there's thousands of of currencies, then the
situation is reversed. And now it's the things you can
buy that set the value of the, of the currency.
And in, in some cases, like in World of Warcraft has got an
internal currency, gold pieces, which, you know, actually has a

(42:04):
pretty stable value against the dollar.
It's more stable than some national currencies.
And it's because the the people who play that game are sharing
an experience that means something to them.
It's got sort of intangible value.
And so the, the various items and so on, the property that

(42:24):
they've, that they've acquired during their adventures in
Warcraft are important to them emotionally.
And so they hold their value. And as a result, the, the, the
gold pieces, gold pieces in, in Warcraft hold their value.
So I think that there's a lessonin that for, for what we're

(42:46):
trying to do. And that, you know, if we try to
resist that temptation to just immediately financialize
everything and concentrate instead on the intangible value
of, of what people are creating,that there's an opportunity to,
to make something that's going to be more, more stable.

(43:08):
What are the verticals you're thinking of when you say that?
Because kind of when I think of the creator economy, obviously
there are works of art that are being created.
But kind of like what I see kindof the web three layer being
used for here is kind of the distribution of profits and kind

(43:29):
of the kind of the kind of the creating a fairer monetization
layer to go with it. And in some sense, that's also
financialization, right? I suppose what's your question?
Yeah. So what are the non financial
use cases that kind of you see breakthrough because it kind of

(43:52):
I think my implicit question is a lot of the things that we do
on the Internet today are brokenbecause there is no explicit
financialization. So kind of like if you look at
the advertising models of Googleand so on, kind of the reason
they are resorting to that God offer model for everyone who

(44:15):
uses it, It's because it is the one way that they can monetize
it efficiently. Or kind of like if you look at
social media platforms and how they kind of sell granular data
about users and how to influencethem, it's because the
expectation is that social mediais free, right?
And kind of as someone who kind of also runs a company, I can

(44:37):
tell you kind of all the infrastructure is very much not
free, right? Kind of like you have to pay for
your servers, you have to pay for transaction fees, you have
to pay for all of those things. And because there's this
expectation that things are free, things have kind of users
have to be monetized in some other way.
Do you see use cases that are truly removed from that?

(45:00):
Well, Jaren Lanier has written I'm really well about this and
we actually Co wrote a an editorial on this a few years
ago that got spiked by a major newspaper.
Every time we click on somethingon a social media site, or even
if we look at it for a few moments, we're, we're feeding

(45:21):
data to that site and we're, we're contributing what Jaron
calls micro labor. And so it's a very small, it's
very small increments. So we don't notice that a
company is big enough it can aggregate all of that micro
labor into macro labor. It's something that's really
valuable. And so it's kind of a crazy
situation because like if General Motors came to you and

(45:44):
said, we want you to go into ourcar factory for one hour a year
and assemble cars for us and we won't pay you, of course you
would never do that. That's be a ridiculous kind of
offensive proposition. But it's effectively what we're
doing with the social media platforms.
And so he had an idea that he was working on it.

(46:06):
He might still be working on it,which was to aggregate groups of
people and then sell essentiallyforeign labor unions.
So if you've if you're an enthusiast for photography,
let's say, or bird watching, youcould get together with a bunch
of other bird watchers and say, you know, to a social media

(46:28):
company. If you pay us, you know, we'll
allow you to to data mine our discussion threads about birds
and I can't. He was what they call it meds.
I'll look it up. Mediators of Individual Data to
propose a new framework for managing user generated data.

(46:51):
Union like organizations that would represent individuals in
negotiations with tech platformsregarding the ownership,
monetization, and ethical use oftheir data.
So worth worth checking out if you're interested in this this
topic. Yeah, absolutely.
I wonder though in as how much individual facets of kind of

(47:15):
human behaviour are monetizable that way.
Because kind of a lot of the value kind of comes when when
you know an awful lot about a person, right.
Kind of like whatever they Google, whatever advertisement
is kind of like they, they look at kind of like what, what books
they buy, what media they consume, what kind of they click
on and so on. And kind of the the entirety of

(47:36):
that. It's much more valuable than any
kind of than the pro rater priceof any particular thing.
So kind of like breaking it downlike that.
I'm not sure how effective that would be.
No, it's a good point. It's a good point, but it's that
it's what you just described is exactly what most people find

(47:58):
sinister and and dark and right.You know, right?
Yeah. You know, like this is yeah.
So to me, this is the key value proposition of Web three, kind
of like this idea that kind of like in principle we can have
these platforms where people whocontribute kind of like who
contribute data or whatever elsecan have shared ownership

(48:20):
without these corporate structures that kind of are
forced upon us by states. So kind of if you kind of, yeah.
And you can use, you know 0 knowledge proofs and so on to
you know to you can have a persistent identity that isn't
traceable back. So you can reveal some aspect of
yourself that you choose to reveal, but you don't have these

(48:43):
data brokers sort of knitting all of these things together
and, and you know, learning things about you that you you
might choose to remain private. And you can also do it in a much
more effective way, way, right? So kind of like if I say I'm
interested in booking a safari in Tanzania and kind of in a way
I kind of like I advertise myself as someone who's willing

(49:07):
to buy kind of in principle, thesellers should, should, should,
should be willing to pay for theright to kind of pitch me their,
their, their travel ideas and travel packages.
And in a way, kind of like I can, if, if I am so inclined, I
can monetize myself much more effectively and efficiently than

(49:33):
kind of Google actually can, right.
So, and I think kind of moving, kind of making this monetization
layer more explicit. I think this is something that I
would actually credit web three with, no matter how distasteful
it may sound, kind of like at atfirst glance, because kind of

(49:53):
like, oh, kind of like the art, it's all about the beauty and
and so on. And then kind of like people
talk about the money that kind of accrues and kind of like
typically that's kind of swept under the rug, right?
So kind of people are meant to meant to want to create art
because kind of like they are soinclined and they shouldn't
have, they shouldn't want to think about the money they can
make with it and so on. And I think de stigmatizing that

(50:16):
in some way and saying, look, this is actually what this is.
This is you should, you should, you should get paid for that and
you shouldn't, you shouldn't feel ashamed for wanting to get
compensated for this fairly. I think that that's yeah.
I do think that that kind of stigma has been weaponized in

(50:39):
some cases to, to the detriment of, of artists, you know,
saying, well, if you really cared about your art, you know,
just making the art would be reward enough and, you know, why
should you get paid and all that?
And it's, I mean, that that's a new and very silly idea, I
think. I think if you look at the
history of how artists had been supported back in the day, many

(51:03):
artists had wealthy patrons. You know, that was just
considered a normal. Well, obviously they have to
eat. They have to live somewhere.
And so it's great if some rich, you know, Duke wants to to
subsidize what they're doing. And, you know, it goes all the
way down to, you know, you're inthe subway and someone's playing

(51:24):
music and there's a tin can out in front of them that people are
throwing money into. You know, no one is.
No one's, well, hopefully no one's looking, you know,
stigmatizing an artist, you know, for or questioning their
purity. Yeah.
Just yeah. For wanting to eat.

(51:46):
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, Yeah, I hear that maybe kind of like as a final, as a
final exploration, What do you see as kind of the, the failure
modes of Web 3? So kind of in, in my mind,
there's kind of like 2 that are both bad, but in different ways.
The ones ones instead of kind ofempowering individuals, we're

(52:06):
kind of building rails for an extremely efficient
authoritarian state with kind ofcomplete social credit and
perfect surveillance and so on. Obviously that's, that's
extremely scary. And then there's kind of the
less catastrophic one, which I still, I still worry about more

(52:26):
because I think it's, it's possibly the path we are on and
I hate it. So, and that failure case is
we've kind of, we've built all of this really cool
infrastructure and in the end kind of like it becomes an
infrastructure upgrade for banksand other incumbents and nothing

(52:49):
changes for actual users. Kind of like we've given we've,
we've built China rails for the Amazons and Stripes and
Microsofts and Googles of the world and the the users are
still being squeezed the same way.
What are your thoughts about this?
Well, it's a, it's a great question to ask, say, Joe Lubin,

(53:12):
because there's, it's clear there he's not a fan of, you
know, the incumbents, you know, and that he's motivated by a
powerful passion to, to make sure that this doesn't just turn
into a new, a shiny new feature for, for traditional banks.
The, you know, it's, there's still a, a lot of stigma

(53:40):
attached to, to crypto among people who don't, who don't
follow it, right. And so the, I think a lot of
people who aren't regular users of, of crypto view it as as a
dark, sort of tainted thing and then sort of tend to stay away

(54:01):
from it because they've heard bad stories about it or they,
they associate it with the dark web or, or criminality.
And yeah, I'm, I'm not one of those people, but, but I, I know
a lot of those people who, who, who, you know, get a little
worried or a little skeptical ifI, you know, tell them I'm

(54:23):
involved in a blockchain thing. So I think there's a lot that
has to be done in order to, to overcome that.
And you know, I, I think it willresolve in, in time, but, but
it's definitely a warning, you know, flashing light on the, the
dashboard at the moment. And I don't know, I guess that's

(54:47):
for me the main, main thing that's standing in the way of
broader adoption. How do you see this kind of in
contrast with the user experience that isn't quite
there yet? I feel like as someone who's
been in Web 3 for a long time, kind of we've adjusted to the

(55:09):
terrible user experience that a lot of our products kind of
offer, right? Kind of like if you look at is
this usable for normal person, the answer usually is no, right?
Kind of it's barely usable for us.
And if you look at any, how manypeople actually use Web three
products because they're legitimately better than kind of

(55:30):
what Web 2 has to offer. And they're not just dogfooding
and they're not in it for the technology and because they
think it's cool and kind of likethey want to be at the forefront
of something, it's very close to0, right?
So kind of if we end in some waykind of abstracting a lot of
that technical complexity way and just offering genuinely

(55:53):
better user experiences to actual people that they can't
find in Web 2, I think this is where we'll see mass adoption.
Because I don't think kind of like if you look at the
Internet, for instance, almost no one knows how TCPIP works,
right? And you shouldn't have to.
And I think it's the same for kind of for blockchain.

(56:15):
So kind of I think it'll kind ofwe'll see success when people
don't have to understand that kind of like there's something
blockchain in the background that kind of facilitates what
they do. Yeah, I agree.
I agree. You know, I think one of the big
things that Amazon did was that,you know, up to a certain point,

(56:36):
the Internet was kind of like the way you just described
crypto is kind of mysterious andhard to use.
And people weren't sure if it was OK.
And then somehow when Amazon started, people were fine with
handing over their credit card numbers, you know, to to this

(56:56):
company and and that led to an explosion in the number of
people using it. So suddenly it was safe.
Yeah, it was welcoming. I just had, you know, a, a, a
vibe about it that people found approachable and wholesome.
So, so I, I think that's the next frontier for Web 3.

(57:20):
And we are, we are trying to to to do that with the UI and the
user experience that we're developing for, for lab in Oman.
So when, when you kind of think ahead for Laminar one, say for
the next year or two years, whatdoes success for you guys look
like? Is it more creative creators or

(57:42):
more active users? Or what's the what's the thing
you're hoping for? Well, we're, we're kind of
launching with a, a project called Artifact where where I'm
a creative contributor. It's a game based in a fictional

(58:03):
future world that I'm of concepting.
And so we're trying to make it legitimately interesting, fun
game, interesting world, you know, with we're working with
weather workshop to, to produce concept art that we feel good
about. And so at the end of the day,

(58:23):
that's the only thing I know howto do is try to make cool stuff
and hope that people will like it.
So the what I'd love to see is is more creative work going up
that on our system that isn't just a crypto project or an NFT

(58:43):
project, but it's just a movie or just a game or just a song.
The blockchain, this of it is a minor, you know, background
detail that no one needs to really care about.
So no speculation, just fun. Yeah, yeah, right.

(59:04):
Cool, fantastic. That sounds wonderful.
I've actually seen the trailer for the game and kind of like,
I'm not a gamer myself, but it makes me want to be a gamer.
So we're linked to it in the show notes.
It's not a big video game yet. It's more of a we're starting
small, but we, you know, I like what I've seen so far.

(59:25):
Cool, Neil, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on
the show. We will link to other things
you've referred to in the notes,and we will also link to the new
game that's coming out. Great.