Tom Beck

@tombeck.eth

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Build in public. Create in private.

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Cool idea! I'm honored to see one of my essays included!

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What’s your experience with poems on Zora? Especially since the coin pivot. Good? Bad? Neutral? Too soon to tell?

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Tech solutionism fundamentally misunderstands creativity. It approaches art as a distribution problem to be optimized when art is a method for self actualization (the top of Maslow’s pyramid). Once our basic needs are met—food, shelter, safety, community—we create. Not because we're seeking financial reward, but because creation is how we become fully human. We need to make art, and we need to be seen making it. This is why platforms that try to "fix" art with financialization are using the wrong tools for the wrong problem. It's like trying to measure love with a ruler or weigh curiosity on a scale. Content coins apply efficiency metrics to something that gains its value precisely from inefficiency, from human labor, from context, from the messy business of being alive and seen by others within a community that cares.

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Content coins will only benefit established and entrenched creatives. They can post pictures of their lunch and watch speculators pump its value within hours, while talented (but unknown) creatives watch their coins crash to zero repeatedly. But the platform benefits regardless of who wins or loses. The individual creator bears all the psychological cost.

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Platforms always want maximum users—that’s how they become valuable. But scenes create value differently: through curation, community, and context. Platforms must overcome the Dunbar number; scenes work within it, prioritizing meaningful social relationships. The two are necessarily at odds. When platforms try to create scene-like dynamics at platform scale, it’s like trying to use a flamethrower to put out a fire. They amplify the very dynamics that devalue individual creative work, namely winner-take-all. On platforms, single creators can satisfy almost all of the demand.

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Nobody needs to see so starkly how little the world values their output. Nobody needs to see their creative expressions go to zero over and over again. It’s hard enough to put your stuff online and see zero likes. Now you get to see yourself, your friends, and your few fans lose money over it, too. Nice!

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For content coins to be successful, they will need to find a way to reward scene-building (and maintenance) over speculation. Because otherwise, putting a ticker next to a single creative expression is like installing a giant spotlight on a rundown house. Instead of rolling up your sleeves and actually fixing anything you’re saying, “hey everyone, check out this dump!” Content coins will only spread awareness. Awareness that your art is useless. As if creating isn’t hard enough already.

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Content coins are a bad idea because any individual piece of art is already (and always has been) worth nothing. The primary value that art possesses is in the aggregate. Individual pieces are (mostly) useless. This is why the only times artists have been able to capture even a tiny sliver of the value they create is in creating scenes. Impressionism, punk, the factory, bloomsbury, the beats.

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No. Trust is a prerequisite to love.

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I am proud to announce the start of my founder journey with my new startup FRIENDS. Where friendship meets liquidity. FRIENDS allows you to tokenize yourself and then auto blocks you from messaging anyone who does not buy enough of your friend-hours With FRIENDS, you no longer have to waste emotional energy on people who don’t adequately invest in you If you are going through a tough time you can buy all the emotional neediness you want. Need a shoulder to cry on during your break up? Just buy more FRIENDS. If you are against this you are an anti-trader moralist and also anti-progress. Reconsider. Buy FRIENDS and take advantage of the new economic primitive. I know once you try it, you will love it and never go back to the old world of free FRIENDS

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Excellent. Just like nature tends to make crabs, corporate logos tend to make buttholes.

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Yes, but it was diluted with water.

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Yes, writing is usually like that. One of the delights of writing is when you discover something about the work—when a character does something surprising or speaks to you in their own voice. But with AI, these moments are stronger and more frequent. Because there literally is another voice speaking to you. It's not quite "you do this half and I'll do this half" because both of us are doing the same work, but from different angles. It's like a dialogue, but since it's happening in text, it feels like reading and writing at the same time.

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I don't think I would necessarily keep it as my writing. There's no real standard at the moment, but my goal is to be transparent on what writing was AI-collaborated and what wasn't. Plus, I think people can tell (for now...)

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I mean that when an AI is writing alongside you, they are generating new prose that you read and then write (or edit) in response to. Writing has always been in dialogue with other writing, through the act of reading. Writing with AI collapses that distance into the text itself. You are both writing it and reading it at the same time. Not only is this cognitively easier than "pure" writing, its pleasure is akin to the pleasure of reading. Plus, I've found it opens new time in the day for writing when I would otherwise be too tired. At night for instance. Usually I read before bed. But now I can also write, because it's less taxing with AI, increasing my daily output.

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Haha I know exactly what song this is because I’ve read that very comment doing the same thing.

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I'm not sure what you mean.

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I'm swiping these ideas for horror sci-fi stories.

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I write more with AI because it makes writing the same as reading.

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