In our obsession with finding ourselves, we’ve lost sight of who we are.

Fragmented individualism

Fragmented individualism is a cultural k-hole. You feel like you’re deep into something but you’re disassociated from the context that gives it meaning.

Throughout most of human history, community has provided that context.

Being part of many communities is a fairly new phenomenon. We enjoy the freedom and expansion and experimentation that comes with not being locked into the village we were born into.

But we’ve moved so far from the collective in pursuit of individual identity, we don’t have enough weight to anchor it.

We are also pitted against each other. Battling to earn from the same creator programs, battling to be earliest or funniest or hottest, battling for the attention of the gatekeepers to whatever new part of our identity we’re chasing.

The prize is survival. We tell ourselves it’s belonging.

We are unwilling to step “backward” into working with others. It feels dangerous. And we continue to search for what’s missing by ourselves, which guarantees never finding it.

Collective individualism

Where fragmented individualism is a set of fragile, isolated versions of ourselves, collective individualism is where we fully understand and express each version through a set of communities.

Gen Alpha already understands collective individualism through gaming.

When you socialise via a feed, you are performing for an audience. There are too many rules and risks to be truly vulnerable. Through an alt (a pseudonymous account), you can be bolder, but your identity is a one-way interaction, no one knows it’s you.

In an open world game, you can socialise as the person your friends know, and explore new parts of yourself through a character. The character makes it safe to experiment and grow in front of your friends. Your friends get to recognise, celebrate and reflect that growth as you all work towards a common goal.

You aren’t a hive mind or even a team, you are co-conspirators: you come together for the main campaign while still conducting your own side-quests.

Collective individualism puts other people in the mirror. You see yourself alone and within the collective. Your own individual self and your participation in something greater is reflected back at you.

Your identity now has an anchor.

Playing a system vs creating a system

Rather than a shallow scattering of self, fragmentation is often misdirected depth. You go after an identity because you believe it will make you more cool or more desirable or more successful.

It feels productive because you’ve been sold that it’s productive but it’s detached from who YOU are and you feel that lack of anchor without understanding what it actually is.

So you try harder to become an insider and to feel like ‘yourself’ without realising you haven’t chosen the right community or the real you.

When I had my fashion brand, I bounced between London and Paris and New York, forever trying to win the approval of the British fashion council and the press and the stockists that I thought would solve everything. I watched myself get it all and felt nothing. I was still an outsider, burned out and lonely.

Then I started working with local artists. They’d pull their cool friends into our shoots, which were a whirlwind of energy. Some were emerging musicians we’d style for shows and festivals. We made music videos. We made fashion for video games.

Everyone was working towards this collective come-up, while still serving their individual goals and it finally felt real. I finally felt real. And by turning my back on status, opportunities (and real status) flowed in.

The difference between playing a system and creating a new one.

Conditions for self actualisation

Often in our quest for self actualisation we remove ourself from the context needed to self actualise. Your uniqueness has more weight in a collective, even if it’s a three-person groupchat.

For a community to show you yourself, it needs to meet certain criteria:

You contribute towards a collective goal, and have that contribution recognised. The community is measurably better with you in it.

The collective goal aligns with your individual goal. You assume roles that suit your unique talents and world view.

Even if it’s all conversation and no tangible “build”, that conversation contributes to everyone’s learning and development. The group is collectively inspired by what’s being discussed.

Our plural selves

No one is just one thing and most of us believe we are more things than we actually are (I’m sure I could be a skateboarder if I ever got around to learning).

We are too self aware for one role in one community to be fulfilling. The village can’t exist in the way it did. The desire to be more is evolution, agency, a good thing. We just need better conditions.

The difference between fragmented and plural selves is quality of participation. For most of us that means integrating more deeply into fewer, richer communities, with a real answer to:

What am I building with others that I couldn’t build alone and how is my piece of it still independently mine?

What are the slow layers (the things that are too hard to fake, that require immersion x time) that make this community rich and meaningful?

Exiting the casino

The lure of the cultural k-hole is everywhere, fake depth masquerading as a sense of self.

You have to believe the risk of following the popular path or of chasing the Next Big Thing is greater than the risk of going all in on the wrong community.

The latter forces you to form your own conviction. In the worst case scenario you leave that community with new self-knowledge. The former means you might never have any.

The hollowness of my “success” in the fashion industry repelled me into an aligned community, who taught me that fashion wasn’t actually the right container for the building I wanted to do. I could perhaps have skipped the first part, but the second was life-changing.

Hard reset

Find ways to create empty space for yourself like your life depends on it. Get into nature if you can, do not listen to anything on your headphones, just think or write.

Write every morning before you pick up your phone.

Sit in the discomfort of not being able to think or write properly until you can and then sit in the discomfort of your thoughts to extract the next layer. You need to tap your subconscious, your instincts, that get buried deeper every day by the way we live our lives. It might take a while.

Commit until you start breaking through and then keep committing to daily writing and a fixed period of daily empty space.

Retreating is important but solo self-reflection is incomplete. Put community in the mirror. Publish your writing. Have vulnerable conversations about what you’ve learned. This will help you find the people you’re supposed to build with. These are the people who will show you who you are.

Then Elon introduced paid verification, Meta followed suit, and none of it mattered anymore.

Reputation was always considered the “sticky” part of status, the least fakeable, but the metrics we’ve been measuring it by for the past century have lost their muscle mass (insert Ozempic quip here).

OUT: A huge follower count

IN: Niche creators (73% of Gen Z and Millennials trust smaller creators more than big influencers. YPulse 2026)

OUT: Big VC funding rounds

IN: Bootstrapping

OUT: Brand sponsorships

IN: Your own brand

OUT: Losing weight

IN: Becoming an athlete

OUT: Press coverage

IN: 10k Substack subscribers

Anything you can buy or network or GLP-1 your way into compresses the perceived cost of achieving those things. Even if you’ve got there through relentless hard work, the fact that others have been able to shortcut it cheapens your achievement and lowers your status.

For something to have far-reaching meaning, it needs to have come at an incompressible cost.

The ultra-marathon version of something, where you can’t shortcut a single part of the process, and even completing the process doesn’t guarantee the result.

Becoming a thought leader rather than a face. Mastering a highly specialised craft. Succeeding as an artist without famous friends or parents. Bootstrapping to a level of success where you can build whatever you want (see Midjourney’s pivot from AI image generation into medicine and spirituality). You cannot convincingly fake an incompressible cost.

These aren’t just hard things, but hard things not just anyone can do.

Status lives and dies on layers, and cost only becomes incompressible when time is one of the layers.

Geeks, mops, sociopaths and LARPability

AI researcher David Chapman described the lifecycle of subculture through three types of participant: geeks, mops and sociopaths. The geeks are the insiders who create the culture, the mops are later adopters who dilute the culture but provide an audience, and the sociopaths are the extractors who exploit the culture for money and power, until it’s dead.

The sociopaths’ ability to manipulate themselves into positions of high status has always been a skill, an art in itself.

But now, anything that’s fakeable has become easy for anyone to fake.

The more the playing field is levelled with tools to speedrun, shortcut and fake, the more cynical we become about what is LARPable and more trust we demand before handing someone power.

This makes it hard for sociopaths to function. You can’t impress someone with a trick they can also do.

“Geek” is an endurance sport

Geeks are defined by their cultural intelligence (CQ). CQ is slippery and subjective. Gaining it doesn’t guarantee keeping it, and to even find out where you sit on the scale, you have to risk humiliation. You can’t check against a textbook or a LLM, you have to put yourself in a public forum and be perceived.

Being a geek in one context doesn’t give you an automatic advantage in another. The requirements change from one geography to another, from social group to social group. And the rules, which were unwritten to start with, keep evolving.

To earn cultural intelligence you need a self-aware willingness to invite ridicule.

“Bad taste” is synonymous with CQ. You’re doing a bit and only people with the highest cultural intelligence will recognise it.

To have meaning, CQ must be niche enough that the references are only unlocked through immersion over time, but still recognisable enough that occasionally a random stranger salutes you.

Once the references become easily researchable, the geeks must change the rules to preserve status. In Charli XCX terms, this is following Brat with Music, Fashion, Film.

Subculture used to peak at mop adoption and slowly dilute as its references got widely known, giving the sociopaths ample chance to exploit late adopters. But in a post-algorithm world, dilution happens much faster.

Gen Z have taken subculture further underground than it’s ever had to be before, into tiny micro-scenes. The groupchatification of subculture.

If it hits social media, in most cases it only goes viral within a small pocket of the algorithm, so although it feels like saturation to those inside the pocket, the average person still has no idea.

This gives the geeks much more control if they want to earn from the culture themselves, before the sociopaths have an in. They can incubate AND scale at the same time, which is new.

Courtney Love talked about this back in 2000, the power the internet would give to artists, although it’s taken longer than she’d hoped:

“Maybe each fan will spend less money, but maybe each artist will have a better chance of making a living. Maybe our culture will get more interesting than the one currently owned by Time Warner.”

Geeks now have so much control over their own distribution that if their subculture does hit real mainstream, they can kill it and make new rules, with a new barrier to entry. In Charli XCX terms this is following Brat with Music, Fashion, Film.

Geeks are endurance athletes.

By the time they’ve made marathons cool, they’re already running ultra-marathons. Sociopaths used to get away with faking their distance on Strava but the mops have learned how this trick works. If no one’s seen you in an actual race you don’t get handed power. Even if the sociopaths start training, they’ll never catch up in time to sell to the mops before the geeks can.

The new rules of status

We are currently in a status hangover. Achievements that were once heavy markers of status have been losing weight for a while. We haven’t quite reorganised our value system yet, so we fall back on to old rules, despite their growing irrelevance.

Borrowing Stewart Brand’s Pace Layer framework, which categorises systems by their fastest to slowest moving layers, I’ve laid out the new rules of status into its own 6 layers, from most compressible to least compressible.

• Aesthetic: money. Fully compressible, cultural status dissolves once enough people can buy the optics of the slow layers.

• Accreditation: talent × network. Network is compressible, talent compresses as the accreditor scales and/or starts to value Aesthetic over Barrier to entry e.g. Forbes 30 under 30, Y-Combinator, Soho House.

• Influence: attention x time. Attention becomes less compressible the longer its sustained.

• Cultural intelligence: immersion × time. Less compressible the deeper the references are.

• Barrier to entry: learning curve × risk. Incompressible, the tolerance to fail or be an outsider over time.

• Meaning: earned belonging × earned reward. Incompressible, the foundation everything re-forms on.

The blue check got bumped from Accreditation to Aesthetic overnight. Accreditation itself is a much faster layer than it once was. Soho House accelerated from Cultural intelligence to Aesthetic, along with Margiela tabis, which used to be a Barrier to entry.

We mostly see AI as a compressor, but as a medium it has its own set of layers. An artist who fine-tunes a model with their own original work is cooler than one who just prompts, because of the Barrier to entry. Both take the social battering of being an “AI artist” but the first has mastered a steeper learning curve.

True status ceases to exist outside of the slow layers and that means most people won’t understand it.

There is no longer a generic marker of true status. Fame and fortune aren’t cool without the slow layers, and by design only a certain number of people will understand a particular set of slow layers as cool.

Society is still playing catch up, but I believe these new rules are where we go next. When the alternative is everyone falling irretrievably into a brainrot coma, I choose to put my faith in humanity’s long-standing search for meaning.

For the best part of a decade the number one dream job for teens has been YouTuber. This used to mean brand deals, publishing deals and getting comped with all the trappings of a luxury lifestyle. But increasingly, for Gen Z and Alpha, it’s a route to launching their own company.

In 2020, being invited to join a creator house was the pinnacle of status. Creators were given free board and a platform, in return for aggressive exclusivity clauses and an equally aggressive cut. The most famous of these, Hype House, sold in 2024 after losing most of its big names.

Even faster than the Creator House’s fall from grace, has been the Tech Accelerator’s meteoric come up. Y-Combinator applications have doubled since 2022, up to 40,000 applications per cycle. As exclusive as invite-only Hype House, YC’s acceptance rate is just 0.6%.

An accelerator takes equity in your company in return for mentoring, network and hard cash. But at the end of it, the company is still yours.

The creator economy is a rent model. You rent a platform. You rent and rent out an audience.

The founder economy needs an ownership model. You own your platform, your audience, and the thing you’re selling to them.

Companies are content

You can now vibe code an app in less time than it takes to edit a TikTok. Lovable has 200,000 new projects a day. App Store submissions are up 84% year on year. The app strategy is a content strategy: spot trends, ship daily, do more of what works, move on from what doesn’t.

A company no longer has to be your life’s work, or to even have a significant lifespan: you can build a portfolio of micro-companies. Every micro-company builds your status as a founder until the people with money are watching to see what you do next.

It’s a native playbook for teenage founders. 19 year old Zach Yadegari sold calorie tracking app, Cal AI, to MyFitnessPal, having reached $50M annual recurring revenue. 3 years earlier he sold a gaming site for $100,000. He then tried and failed with several apps before the success of Cal AI.

The new meaning of Founder

Safer than getting a job

Gen Z watched their parents struggle through a recession we never really recovered from. Gen Alpha have a front row seat to the AI fallout. A job is no longer the safe choice over self employment.

Even their perception of self-employment is different. They’ve learned from their parents’ generation that putting all your eggs in one career basket doesn’t pay out the way it used to. It’s safer to hedge your bets with multiple revenue streams from a portfolio of projects.

Gen Z are seen as risk averse when the real fear is being witnessed making a mistake. As a founder, failing fast is a celebrated part of the process. You can even test things out pseudonymously until you’re definitely on to something (younger gens have been doing this in games for years). You can craft your public image and keep your learning curve entirely private. For the stakes to be high enough for a public failure, you have to succeed first.

Meanwhile, the tools to build something of your own and to get it in front of people are at an all time high. A levelled playing field makes the competition more intense, but does it really feel that much more difficult than finding and retaining a good job? You have to get used to rejection either way.

At least as a founder, what you have at the end of the struggle is yours.

Cooler than being an influencer

If you once dreamed of being an influencer, being a founder promises to give you more, for a similar level of effort.

“Influencer” has become a loaded term; it’s gauche to self-identify as one. “Founder” feels higher value, it implies you’re building something greater than yourself, and it’s still an acceptable way to label yourself.

You can achieve high-level founder status without a highly successful company: get into an accelerator, raise a pre-seed round, sign up partners. All these happen long before tangible success does. Other people believing in your potential for success is enough.

To be considered successful as an influencer, you need to have already built your following as a content creator. The brand deals need to have actually materialised beyond an announcement. Your own product lines need to have launched and sold out. Your status is retroactive.

Practically, the founder and influencer paths are very similar, so why wouldn’t you choose the label that gives you greater status, faster. 10 years ago that label was influencer. In 2026 it’s founder.

The creator economy hangover

The current influencer to founder trajectory is more of a label change than a culture change. Founders borrowing their strategy from the creator economy are also inheriting its pain points. Like the content creators before them, content companies are over-reliant on external platforms and algorithms.

This creates two major weaknesses:

A platform as a single point of failure for the company

Cal AI’s growth came via 150+ TikTok ambassadors, paid a monthly retainer, 12 of its own TikTok accounts, with paid ads and affiliates layered on top. Cal AI has no real community of its own: once they’re subscribed, their interaction is with the app, not with other users.

What happens if Cal AI’s TikTok presence is compromised? Say they link it to eating disorder content and start penalising any mention of it. Or introduce age verification measures that kill the audience. Though Cal AI’s subscribers wouldn’t be directly affected, its growth engine would be wiped out and it would have to rebuild its distribution somewhere else.

If having to rebuild a paid community of ambassadors and affiliates is hard, being forced to rebuild an organic community can be catastrophic.

You may remember the 2019 Mixer exodus. Microsoft paid prolific Twitch streamers Ninja and Shroud tens of millions to move to their competing platform. Most of the audience didn’t follow and Mixer shut down within a year.

What Microsoft didn’t factor: the status attached to being part of Ninja and Shroud’s community was intrinsically linked to being part of the Twitch community; sub badges, emotes and all.

A founder with no community of their own

If today’s founder treats companies like content, the things that should compound longterm, as they move from idea to idea, are their worldview, their professional network and their community. But a community that’s tied to a specific platform and a specific project are unlikely to follow a founder to their next idea. The effort of switching platform, and getting excited about something new that might be totally unrelated to the first company, needs a disproportionately high incentive.

For the Roblox builders, what happens when they (or their community) age out of the platform? For the TikTok brands, what’s next once the trend cycle moves on?

Your platform > your community > your company

Any founder who wants real agency, real security, needs their own platform. The platform is separate from any one company, but acts as distribution for all of them. It’s where each company’s community lives, and where a Venn diagram of community overlap is able to compound from project to project. The main purpose of building in public should be to grow this core community, people who feel as connected to the founder as to the companies being built.

For a founder-owned platform to be viable, it needs its own status and its own network effects. There are two ways to approach this:

1. Building a local offline community or a private, invite-only online community to become the first adopters of your platform (the status of being part of the community is already established).

2. Leveraging the incumbent social media platforms for initial reach, then funnelling community to your platform with incentives (the community needs to perceive your platform as meaningfully higher status).

Different archetypes of founder will suit one approach better than the other, e.g. option 1 for an artist in Brooklyn vs option 2 for a software developer in rural Indiana. Most can benefit from combining the two.

Fans, users, or a secret third thing?

Whether paid, organic or mutual back-scratching, collaboration is how you get your company out there.

As a content creator, you’re limited in how you can collaborate with others, and who those others are, because your output is a direct extension of your image. A founder might feel like their company is an extension of them, but it’s also its own separate entity, which makes it much easier to leverage collaboration as a distribution strategy.

In the creator economy, you have creators and fans, but there’s also a significant community of fan-creators. This middle group is either labouring out of love for their favourite creator, or strategically aligning themselves to build their own creator status. Both subsets provide important distribution, and both help a creator retain mindshare.

The founder economy’s middle group will be even more multi-hyphenate. User-fan-founders will join a product community, progress into the founder’s core community, and use that as a launchpad for growing their own founder community. Their efforts, in turn, continue to build the original founder’s community and their product’s distribution.

Rethinking “economy”

A founder-owned platform is the only efficient way to serve this middle group and the only real way to leverage them without exploiting them. The creator economy has a linear value chain: the platform extracts from the creator, the creator (perhaps unintentionally but by design) extracts from their community, and the community are bottom of the pile. When a community member, through fan-creation, rises to the top of their group, they are better off breaking away and starting a new value chain that they can at least sit higher up on.

When a founder owns their platform, they can introduce circular and compounding flows of value that reward user-fan-founders for staying in their ecosystem and through that, amplify the platform’s success. These UFFs can co-own the platform with the original founder.

When someone adds value to the project portfolio, they can earn a share of the portfolio’s overall revenue that correlates to that value. For example, someone makes a spin-off app, earning the bulk of their own app sales and paying a small royalty back to the ecosystem. Based on the overall value the app is adding, income, attention, new users, community approval, its founder earns a bonus revenue share from the collective portfolio.

I wrote here about building post-institutions: instead of fighting a broken establishment, we need to replace it with viable new systems. The creator economy is the institution: the illusion of agency at the expense of other people’s agency. The founder economy, done right, is the post-institution: real agency that enables other people’s agency.

The internet is less cool than it used to be because commodification is the antithesis of cool. Someone with taste isn’t able to do anything with it when there’s nowhere left online for taste to matter more than engagement.

Cool is not efficient, convenient or easily measurable. Where the old internet used to celebrate that, today the algorithm buries it, by design.

We’ve lost the human algorithm

Remember when every new brand, artist or idea that you discovered came from someone directly recommending it? Curators were the real influencers. With their hard-won insight and deep cultural context, they could tell communities what to like, what to buy and what to believe. They earned that right by being repeatedly right. They were always early to what would later become community consensus.

Then, slowly, insidiously, we replaced those critical personal insights with algorithms.

A machine cannot curate like a human, because intuition isn’t logical. I like Pomeranians. My Instagram feed is therefore full of Pomeranians. But there’s no art to how this has been curated for me; it’s just pattern matching. The most popular patterns get amplified, and we’re presented with a selection of lowest common denominator slop that loosely relates to something we once clicked on. In my case, it’s Pomslop.

As discovery starts to happen through LLMs, there won’t even be an opportunity to discover slop. It’ll be handpicked for us directly, no doomscrolling required.

Cool is an anti-pattern

Curation takes as much work as creation: to develop the skill, acquire the thick cultural context and to build a reputation on it. It takes equal risk. The greater your influence, the more you put at stake with every call on what’s going to matter next.

What isn’t equal, is the need for curation vs creation. With AI, everyone is now empowered to create. Whether it’s good or not, their output has gone from zero to infinite. But AI is bad at curation, because to do it well means defying patterns. Cool is an anti-pattern. It’s anti-viral.

Creation is hypercommodified. It’s incentivised by algorithms that reward posting volume, and creator rewards programs that pay out on number of views. We desperately need curators to provide an alternative to algoslop, but they have no financial incentive. There are no curator rewards programs.

Tastemaxxing is an oxymoron

Every subculture, movement or niche interest group has its own average taste. This average remains cool and specific and weird for as long as that community remains high context. This curated collective taste has value. But as soon as you strip out even a bit of that specificity, the average of niche quickly becomes the average of average.

Once something becomes a trend, it stops being taste. Trends are great for corporations because they’re easy to commodify. We have replaced our own taste with trends, because it’s the only way to get attention. And every time the algos ramp up competition for attention, to force more paid reach, the trend cycle and its corresponding pointlessness accelerates again.

The role of tastemaker has been downgraded to trend enabler. As soon as a magazine editor is pandering to advertisers, or an A&R scout is prioritising commercial safety over experimental newness, cool is dead.

Everything is stacked against integrity

The Tumblr girl who willed into existence an aesthetic phenomenon understood the difference between taste and engagement. Posting into the void with the integrity of sticking to your certain something until people got it was a winning strategy. If you were cool and consistent you’d make it. But now everything is stacked against integrity.

By replacing human curation with engagement metrics, platforms have a cheap way to keep you on their apps, and to ensure anything you might click away on is a paid ad. The last thing they want is someone’s esoteric small business to lure you off the For You page, or worse, someone’s well-researched take on a topic you care deeply about to make you put down your phone and critically think about something.

Can you monetise cool without killing it

If we want a weird and magical internet, we need to resurrect real collective taste, and new spaces where it can thrive. It can’t exist in the same way as it did before, because we don’t exist in the same way. Everything is hyperfinancialised now. It feels like we’re haemorrhaging our time left to Make It. Every click is either into or out of the permanent underclass.

If we want any meaningful discourse about anything niche, or counter-culture, or deeper than surface level, ever again, then the behaviours that build real culture need to financialised.

This can’t function in a player vs player economy. Culture can only be built collectively.

So we have two challenges: monetising cool without killing it, and incentivising collective gain over individual gain.

But I think they actually solve each other.

How do you measure taste

We established in part one that building a post-AI company means building a world. Curation is what gives the world meaning. This is central to WEB’s system design.

To recap: a Web is a shared project that your community fund, build on, earn from and own, alongside you. Contributors can add whatever makes sense to the Web as new “Threads”: media, mods, merchandise, code, datasets, physical and digital products. And importantly, contributors are also incentivised to curate.

With creator rewards programs, InfoFi, affiliate campaigns, all that matters is reach and volume. Not only is this infinitely farmable but even in the best case scenario, there just isn’t much incentive to keep up a high standard of content when it’s a numbers game. WEB inverts the incentive: create one thing that really resonates and you’ll be far more handsomely rewarded than for 100 low effort contributions.

To assess whether something resonates, there are two main factors:

1. Is it generating revenue?

2. How has the community rated it?

Community peer review is key to how a Web’s cash rewards are distributed each month. Each Web member needs to conduct a minimum amount of curation to be able to claim rewards, and those who are good at it can make it their primary earning strategy. The best curators consistently spot the exceptional, the good and the slop early, with their calls validated by community consensus over time. Rather than being determined by engagement, consensus is reached as the community rate contributions specifically on their relevance to the Web: does this contribution advance and deepen the project?

Threads are randomly allocated for rating, which means you can’t just seek out your friend’s contributions, or build a reputation by only weighing in on things you’re already confident about. You have to be genuinely good at curation.

This is curation as proof of work. The reputation you build (which you can take with you across as many Webs as you want to contribute to) is your public, economically weighted record of taste.

And as a Web’s founder, you have a living map of the community’s collective taste.

An algorithm for cool

In a high-context community, built around specific IP, a specific creator, a specific niche, the collective judgment of people who are deeply embedded in that world is the most important signal. There is no higher authority. The community’s consensus is the truth, because the community is the world.

Distributed curation is structurally different from both the algorithm and the individual tastemaker. The algorithm optimises for the average of everyone. The tastemaker can too easily be bought. Distributed curation is the collective judgment of people who are invested deeply enough to care about getting it right. It can’t be manipulated by a platform or broken by one weak link.

Who curates the world?

Who curates the world? The same people who always have done: the ones who live and breathe that world.

In the post-institution, their work can be economically recognised, without coming at the expense of their integrity. Their track record can be measured against their actual discernment over time, without being flattened into likes and views.

Like subculture, the post-institution scales sideways, through networks of people who are each holding a small piece of the world. The curators, not the algorithm, determine what shape that world takes.

This essay is part two of Who Owns The World. Part one explored why worlds outlast products and why we need to stop fighting the establishment and start building “post-institutions”.

WEB is currently in its first phase of world-building. If you want to understand what that looks like in practice or build a world of your own: betterasaweb.com

“You can’t do it alone” is the story of every extractive deal ever signed. But a new generation of entrepreneurs are realising that not alone doesn’t have to mean selling out.

With non-traditional funding, DIY distribution and more tools at their disposal than ever, the household names of our future have already decided they don’t want institutions. They want to be the institution.

The counter-culture paradox

Extraction triggers a counter-culture movement to “take back the power”. The movement goes mainstream and triggers more extraction. The creator’s dilemma: build something cool and watch it get commercialised by someone with more capital and less soul. The fan’s paradox: invest emotional, cultural and economic energy into something you can never actually own. The culture death: meaning is created through grassroots, repackaged by industry and diluted by scale, with minimal value returning to those grassroots participants.

We’ve been stuck in this cycle forever. Every counter-culture movement trying to fix it eventually becomes part of it. It might seem hopeless, but maybe we’ve just been solving the right problem from the wrong angle. We’ve been building anti-institutions when we need to build new institutions.

Anti-institutions are defined by what they’re against and that’s their fatal flaw. ‘Against’ is a position that the incumbent can simply wait out, buy out, or absorb.

A new institution - or a post-institution - is defined by a different set of rules, ones that make extraction structurally harder than participation and protect the world and the community, alongside the product.

The world contains the product, the product doesn’t contain the world

No cultural movement has started with a PowerPoint. We’ve tried to make a science out of community building: define who they are, how to attract them, how to keep them engaged. When you treat community as a product metric rather than as the builders of your product’s world, you optimise for the wrong things.

K-pop artists understand that nothing matters more to their success than their fans, and that nothing matters more to their fans than being recognised. Fan service is a huge part of their day to day work. The fans, galvanised by personalised care, take it upon themselves to build worlds around their favourite artists. The world becomes the culture, the economy and the moat.

The community, the product and the world are three different things. The community are the people, the product serves the community, the world defines what the community stand for. If another product that could theoretically serve the community better comes along, the world makes the social and emotional cost of switching impossibly high. If all your friends hang out in Fortnite and you’ve bought and earned years worth of skins, it would take a lot for you to delete your account and start playing Call of Duty instead.

So why is it, when it’s pretty obvious the product and the world should be treated as separate entities, that only the product has a clear legal ownership structure? The world doesn’t, and so ownership usually defaults to the product owners rather than the world-builders. This becomes extractive, the world-builders leave and the world collapses.

The architecture of world ownership

We often think about worlds in the Disney sense, community driven lore and fan creations; or the Roblox sense, immersive, virtual environments. But a world can also be a codebase (Linux), distributed research (Wikipedia), a collection of datasets (community AI models).

So what does world ownership actually need to look like? When world-builders lose out, the value extraction usually falls into one of four categories:

1. The distribution platform gets too powerful and worlds are controlled by algorithms not participants (YouTube, X, Instagram)

2. The platform or IP is a walled garden from the start, limiting meaningful community ownership (Roblox, Disney)

3. The community gets co-opted and the value extracted through acquisition (Tumblr, Reddit) or appropriation (streetwear, rave)

4. The community are incentivised to speculate rather than build, with early participants extracting from later ones (NFTs, creator coins)

But if someone wanted to prioritise the world-builders, the solutions are pretty simple.

1. Quality should be measurable without being centrally defined. Rather than measuring engagement (algorithms) or usually a narrowly centralised criteria (walled gardens), we need distributed curation, where evaluators have actual skin in the game. Their reputation and equity depend on surfacing quality. This preserves thick culture: cultural gatekeepers earn their position by demonstrating judgment over time, they aren’t appointed.

2. The world should be extensible without being ownable by any single party. Institutions can still appropriate but they can’t buy out the world or the rights of its builders. The value of a world isn’t in its defensibility but its extensibility: how much can be built on top of it and how incentivised are people to attribute rather than imitate. Participating in the world should always offer more opportunity than ripping it off.

3. Early participation should be rewarded without enabling extraction. Speculation models encourage extraction: buy early and cheap, wait for others to build value, sell. This is a quick fix: set vesting periods before assets are tradable, and only reward being early when that person has also been meaningfully contributing to the project. This might make raising short-term capital harder, but wins on long-term community participation and brand reputation.

The post-institution

Traditional institutions rely on sunk cost: university fees, mortgages, pensions, health insurance tied to employment. The longer you’re in the system, the harder it is to leave.

Post-institutions use layered stakes: financial, social, emotional and operational. Each layer compounds the last. Financial investment, on top of social status, on top of emotional investment, on top of labour, isn’t something you can simulate or shortcut (I’ve written more about this here). Leaving means leaving a world and a community you co-created.

In post-institutions, the system continually resets to ensure fairness. Ongoing world-building matters significantly more than when you joined or how many shares you hold. You’ll keep getting rewarded for as long as your contributions are generative. There are no passive dividends.

Gen Z knows the current systems are broken. They are actively rejecting them while looking for and building alternatives. For Gen Alpha, these systems won’t even form part of their template for how the world works (see Michael Dempsey’s excellent essay on how this plays out in venture capital). The post-institution is hard for us to conceptualise right now, but it’ll be second nature to them.

Webs, worldwide

WEB is a system for the post-institution: community-owned networks (“Webs”). These are collaborative companies, where contribution determines ownership. A Web is the collective intelligence of a product and its world: everything that’s been built and iterated on, its cultural evolution, its community, with detailed attribution for who did what.

To make this work, we need a tangible way to measure value in a distributed system. How do you ensure rewards are fair, proportionate and driven by community consensus rather than farmable numbers? How do you score something as subjective as value? We need a new approach to the algorithm.

Part 2: Why aren’t you being paid to curate?

WEB is in its first phase of world-building. See it in action or build a world of your own at betterasaweb.com

This essay is part of an ongoing series. Previous essays explored why open source IP wins in the attention economy, how culture actually survives the internet, the infrastructure of authentic movements, why slop isn’t an AI problem, and how we can use AI to preserve human creativity.

Trillions of dollars are flowing into AI. Who’s investing in the humans it needs?

Call it a Human Offset. Every time AI is used to replace human creativity, an offset is paid to directly fund human creators. The goal is to preserve creative instinct: the unlearnable skill that makes meaningful human-AI collaboration possible.

We’ve launched an experiment to put the Human Offset into practice. But first let’s explore why it matters.

1. Transparency vs blanket bans

Committing to never use AI is becoming an unrealistic promise. Transparency is far more important for a sustainable future.

We’ve seen this with carbon emissions. Most of us don’t live perfectly eco-friendly lives, but we expect enough transparency to make informed choices. We can spot greenwashing from a mile away. We distrust a company that claims to save the planet without proof, while we trust the one that says “we’re doing our best and here is exactly what that looks like.”

Passing off AI work as human is what muddies the waters around meaningful AI collaboration. With transparency, we can start to have more nuanced conversations. We can differentiate AI slop from AI-assisted human creativity, and identify new forms of human craft that can only exist through AI collaboration.

Soundcloud’s blanket AI ban misses this nuance. What if AI assistance is the only way a talented artist can self-publish without going into debt? What about completely new genres born through skilled human-AI collaboration? Musicians should get to experiment with this medium like any other new instrument.

Transparency is a two-way street. We need corporations to be honest about how they use these tools to scale, but we also need artists to be honest about their process. This builds a system where we can make informed choices.

2. The unlearnable skill

To collaborate with AI in a meaningful way, we need to preserve creative instinct: the ability to turn something felt into art, words or code. We need to preserve a willingness for happy accidents, the ability to join seemingly unconnectable dots. This is the skilled human part of human-AI collaboration. It’s not something you can learn from a YouTube tutorial. It’s an innate quality, honed through weird and specific lived experience.

We’re great at bringing back obsolete crafts. Now digital photography is the go-to for efficient documentation, film photography has been allowed to become an even more expressive art form. And it’s been easy for the digital native generation to learn those skills. Even if cameras and film were no longer produced, we’d have the blueprint to start again.

But creative instinct is intangible and personal. If that atrophies for a whole generation, it’s not a step by step method we can just relearn.

What made Alexander McQueen a great artist wasn’t just his skill, but the particular way he interpreted beauty and violence. Even with half a million videos and several seminal biographies, no one has learned how to see the world like Alexander McQueen. If he’d grown up with AI to rationalise everything for him, would he have developed the same creative instinct? Would Miyazaki, or David Lynch, or Björk?

Human innovation thrives in empty space - sitting with our thoughts, noticing what goes unnoticed, embracing discomfort and following it where it leads. The more we lean on AI to co-think, the more the empty space becomes intolerably uncomfortable - we automate away the breakthrough until we unlearn the ability to have one.

The Experiment

So how do we actually fund the preservation of this creative instinct? Can we make it culturally expected for companies to transparently measure and offset their AI use, the way they do their carbon emissions?

We’ve launched an experiment to test this. Two parallel brand universes, identical starting conditions, divergent creative constraints - one entirely human-made, one AI-assisted. Both built collaboratively, both earning contributors a share of each brand’s total revenue.

The difference: an additional 5% of revenue from the AI-assisted brand directly funds creators in the human-made one, as a Human Offset.

Brand 1: Care About Something Again

Join Care About Something Again to win the GPU sweatshirt and earn cash rewards.

Submit your human-made take on the theme I AM THE COMPUTER. Any medium welcome as long as it’s AI-free: photography, crochet, writing, videos, mini games, anything you like.

Win a GPU Sweatshirt

Winning submissions are chosen each week by the community.

Earn Rewards

Submit your creations to share or sell within the Care About Something Again network and rate submissions from other members.

Your creation and curation earns you a share of all Care About Something Again revenue.

As a member, you also have an unlimited licence to use and earn from the GPU graphic and Care About Something Again IP.

Brand 2: Compute Something Again

Join Compute Something Again to buy the GPU sweatshirt and earn cash rewards.

Buy the GPU Sweatshirt

You can buy the GPU Sweatshirt here. 5% of every purchase is paid to human artists as a Human Offset. A further 5% funds Rewards for Compute Something Again creators, which you can earn!

Earn Rewards

Submit AI-assisted responses to the theme I LOVE MY COMPUTER. Share or sell them within the Compute Something Again network and rate submissions from other members. The community decides how to value AI collaboration vs AI slop.

Your creation and curation earns you a share of all Compute Something Again revenue.

As a member, you also have an unlimited licence to use and earn from the GPU graphic and Compute About Something Again IP.

Pick a side or participate in both.

The GPU sweatshirt contest operates on a 30-day rolling submission period - the community curates entries in real-time, with our team and media partners reviewing top-rated work weekly. Approximately 10 sweatshirts can be earned each week through public voting, up to 50 total over the challenge period.

Both universes are built on WEB: a system for collaborative creation. WEB enables the best performing work and curation within each brand to earn ongoing revenue share, as well as transparently facilitating the Human Offset.

The Human Offset works through social pressure, not moral conviction. This experiment tests whether enough people care about preserving creative instinct to make transparency the baseline expectation. Or maybe they just want a really good sweatshirt.

Let’s find out.

It’s curious that most of us perceive our evolutionary history as the process of becoming more human, yet anticipate our evolutionary future as becoming less human.

Were we more or less human before the introduction of agriculture - when hunting and gathering became needlessly inefficient? Were we more or less human before the Industrial Revolution, when machines made handcraft semi-redundant? Were we more or less human before the Internet Age, when digital convenience made in-person contact optional?

At each of these moments, traits considered pivotal to our human experience were eventually phased out from our understanding of humanness.

Now we enter the AI age, when outsourcing reason makes thinking our own thoughts a choice. We panic about AI making us less authentic - but we’ve been allowing algorithms to think for us since the launch of Instagram. Perhaps, as in these previous monumental shifts, our humanity can evolve with integrity. But we’ve already been choosing to give it up for years.

The thought partner trap

This story started in 2010, but let’s begin at the end. Many of us, myself included, justify our AI use by describing that chatbot as a thought partner. I’m still pushing my brain through discomfort, I’m still responsible for the real, lived, non-regurgitated insights. AI is just a means to organise my pinballing thoughts, to make them legible to anyone not living inside my brain, to challenge me until I have something that feels defensible.

But I wonder - did I not used to do that by myself, on a walk in the woods with my notes app open? Is it possible that I’m dulling my insights by not challenging them to the limits by myself? They are after all, my insights, ultimately what gives me value as a founder, or a writer, or a thought partner to someone else. Am I making them defensible against the wrong arguments by letting AI determine what those are?

And this is all with what’s considered the most productive use of AI, a sparring partner, employed only for collaboration, never for completion.

Although I’m not outsourcing my most important thoughts, the real work - is it inevitable that one day I’ll start thinking them in a way that’s pre-packaged for the chatbot, optimising for the prompt rather than the problem?

I’ve caught myself thinking in meme format, pre-digested for Twitter - the current meta embedded deeply enough in my psyche that I order my iced pistachio latte wondering what “the iced pistachio latte we have at home” would look like.

I know I’m not alone. It’s natural that the language of our inner world starts to reflect the ways we spend most time outwardly communicating. AI takes this to a new level - it’s not some passive meta we’re engaging with - every time we correct our prompt to get the output we’re looking for, AI is actively training us how to think our thoughts. Where we now spend 5 minutes critically thinking, soon we might spend 4 of those minutes critically formatting. The thoughts are still ours, but become gradually less authentic.

Living to document

To get a real sense of how this might radically alter our day-to-day human experience, we can look at the past 15 years of social media.

Instagram launched in 2010, transitioning from a fun photo sharing app, to the window through which we observe the lives of friends, celebrities and anyone else deemed interesting enough. The window through which we are observed.

By the time Instagram Stories launched in Coachella summer of 2016, we had already optimised our lives for documentation. More than that, we had optimised our aspirations. We were willing participants in a lie about everyone’s beautiful life, often forgetting that it was in fact a lie. The number one dream job was to be an influencer - to be one of the flower-crowned, Reformation-clad Coachella girls, with their pristine white-walled lofts, house plants that somehow never died despite their endless five star travel, breathing the rarified air of fashion front rows, film premieres and beauty launches. And if that wasn’t to be, we did what we could to present a life less ordinary.

Today, we have enough self awareness to resent this, but we still do it. Today, it’s less about performance and more about obligation - I must keep doing this to remain relevant. If I’m not perceived I don’t exist.

Phone bans are becoming a norm at concerts and raves, and I wonder, will people’s music tastes change when they’re there for the experience and not the receipts? Optimising for documentation is so deeply entrenched, there is zero chance it hasn’t, to varying extent, affected everyone’s tastes. The same way you can pretend you’re immune to advertising but if you’re engaging with modern society in a way that’s enabled you to read this, I have disturbing news for you.

Master baiters

If living our lives to document it later isn’t enough, we now also optimise for virality. Rather than sharing the thought or the idea, we share the diluted, lowest common denominator version of it, shoehorned into this week’s micro trend and framed for maximum reaction.

Negative reaction tends to drive more views than positive reaction, and so our feeds get darker and more dystopian, seeding division and pushing us into safe little echo chambers, where optimising for the viral lowest common denominator is even more inane. Our thoughts become progressively limited as we shape our output for what we hope might “hit” with a set of progressively limited thinkers.

Optimising for nothing

What does all this have in common, other than looking damning for human intelligence? We still somehow believe it will make our lives better. We will almost invariably take the most convenient path to what we think self actualisation looks like - wanting to believe we’re one viral video away from becoming the person we’re told we want to be - because it’s a lot more comfortable than the slow, tedious and rejection filled grind that is the alternate route to success. Posting into the void takes far less resilience than taking real and specific steps towards what you want for your life, painfully failing, and trying again.

It’s therefore unsurprising that in the age of AI, would-be founders are the new would-be influencers. The cosy delusion that one TikTok might change your life is replaced by the belief that you’re only one vibe-coded website and one yes from an accelerator away from…becoming the person you’re told you want to be.

We’re arriving to the AI era at a huge disadvantage. We’ve already traded autonomy for convenience. Convenience of action and convenience of thought. We’ve compromised our ability to form our own beliefs and insights and taste. What even is our authentic self anymore? That self is who we desperately need to reclaim to hold on to our humanity, so human-AI collaboration is possible and so our pointlessness isn’t inevitable.

The infrastructure of authenticity

Our human condition has mostly wired us to choose the easy option over the best option, and the belief that we might achieve a goal one day over the practical steps of actually doing it. The people with the discipline to counter these instincts are currently a minority. A move away from technology is an unrealistic solution - we can’t pretend everyone is going to put away their phones, touch grass and be fine.

Modern technology isn’t just inevitable, we’re already decades into human-machine symbiosis. So whilst disconnecting certainly addresses all the issues discussed here, no amount of fear mongering makes it a viable strategy if we’re also to participate in society.

To reclaim our last, essential, piece of humanness - our consciousness - we must design technology and systems to reward the behaviours that separate us from the machines.

We need infrastructure where authenticity is profitable - not just in clout, but in actual equity and access. Systems where early authentic belief is rewarded before something goes viral, where you can’t fake your way into ownership because you need provable skin in the game. Time-locked commitments that reward patience over instant gratification, where the person who sits with an idea for months earns more than the person who writes the hit tweet. Economic mechanisms that make the convenient path cost you, and the meaningful path pay you.

We also need platforms with deliberate friction. Mandatory waiting periods before you can share, community commitments you must fulfil to earn reciprocal value, AI that asks “did you think about this yourself first?” and tests you on it before agreeing to collaborate.

To accelerate this, we need a top-down societal shift to make friction high-status. Take our Western ideal of the perfect body. However you feel about this, it’s a powerful enough driver to push many people into disciplined habits that are genuinely positive and healthy, these being a side effect of the visible aesthetic goal. High friction behaviour will be adopted by the masses if it’s in pursuit of visible status. If that status comes from choosing high-friction technologies, resisting convenience, countering algorithmic brainwashing, then we’re more likely to do the hard work - even if we’re just in it for the visible status symbol, the side effect is rediscovering our authentic selves.

We also need metacognitive infrastructure - tools that help you notice when you’re formatting instead of thinking. AI is built for pattern recognition - we can have dashboards showing time spent in shallow versus deep engagement, prompts that reveal your optimisation patterns, systems that flag when you’re on autopilot. AI can become the medium through which we strengthen our thinking process, rather than a replacement for it.

In the physical world, we need experiences designed to be undocumentable - protected spaces that enforce living in the moment, where we can fully connect with our own private taste vs our public personas.

Choose your own adventure (evolution edition)

We may be fixated on AI as the final boss for authenticity - but really we’ve been post-authentic since 2010. To protect our authentic selves, we need to reclaim the agency we’ve been unconsciously giving away for decades. To unpick the algorithmic conditioning, reconnect with our own values, challenge our thoughts all by ourselves before we think about roping in a chatbot. This is what we should be doing today, every day, in preparation for the revolution. Like every other time in history, we will adapt to new technology. The question is whether we’ll have the most powerful sense of self humanity has ever seen, or if self gets eradicated. Personally, I’m optimistic.

It was the 00s and the media had already taught me women should stay as small as possible - figuratively and literally. There were few celebrated women whose image hadn’t been constructed by men, and who weren’t still being torn down for everything at every opportunity. “Girl Power” was a tagline created to sell records. So when I stumbled across Riot Grrrl (did you know Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna gave Kurt the name Smells Like Teen Spirit?) I was quickly besotted.

Riot Grrrl was more than a feminist punk movement. It was an uprising against the rampant misogyny of the early 90s, a call to take up space. Like hardcore, it was heavily rooted in music, grassroots, DIY and somewhere to finally feel at home, but it forced far less acceptable, far more uncomfortable realities into the open. It was dangerous to be a frontwoman in a way it would never be for a frontman.

Its success depends on who you ask: it was a true revolution, but discriminatory and marginalising in its own ways. As we’ll explore, Riot Grrrl was nearly a shining example of a decentralised movement, but in rejecting institutional gatekeepers, it became bottlenecked by its own.

Technology won’t solve everything, but we do finally have tools capable of amplifying our humanity rather than erasing it; a way to incubate what made movements like Riot Grrrl radical and to address their limitations.

Zines vs. smart contracts

Zines were the backbone of Riot Grrrl: fast to make, cheap to distribute and radically permissionless. You could cut, paste and Xerox a manifesto straight into the ecosystem. Self-publishing was a political act, a generation setting their own terms without waiting for The Industry to validate them.

Riot Grrrl spent four years in media blackout, to distance itself from reductive stereotyping, and to control its own narrative. But controlling the narrative didn’t necessarily protect its contributors. Despite its radical intentions, the movement was predominantly white and middle-class. Many women of colour and women who had to work to support themselves, were quietly shut out.

Onchain publishing doesn’t fix social exclusion but it can fix erasure. Every contribution is transparent and immutable. Once the movement has faded from human memory, the primary sources are preserved in their entirety for anyone who cares to look.

Zines were inherently collective. A single issue was a collage of voices, and new issues often built on existing ideas by responding to, cutting up and remixing previous work.

Smart contracts are a way to automatically handle agreements without intermediaries - and they can act as a neutral publisher. They are shared, transparent containers. When you mint a poem, an artwork, a sound on an open protocol, you are pasting your page into a collective zine. But here, the contribution is timestamped and discoverable in perpetuity. The scene is able to build on top of itself and outwards, infinite and permissionless.

A paper zine is fragile; who knows how much history is rotting away right now, forgotten, in an Olympia basement. But with onchain artefacts, you can see exactly where a project started, who contributed, how it evolved. The paper trail is replaced by a cryptographic one that can’t be misplaced or censored into an incomplete biography.

Code cannot replace the tactile soul of the zine, or what it meant to be there, but it can protect it, form armour around it, so decades into the future it can be rediscovered, whole.

“I was there”

Riot Grrrl spread through small rooms: shows, meetings and workspaces both incubating and amplifying the message. Your reputation was directly correlated to your contribution, it wasn’t an aesthetic you could just adopt. Effort, care and practical support glued the scene together. The record of who was there lives in the memory of those who were also there. It’s romantic, but fallible - such memories are vulnerable when only a handful of narrators write the history books.

In crypto, every participating individual is represented by a wallet (their account address). Wallet clusters and transaction history build a picture of a scene that‘s not only a memory, but a living web. We can measure individual impact, tracing any contribution that’s produced an onchain action. Publishing, funding, collecting, adding to a project, supporting a shared ideology, these all weave their own threads in the web. We can live-track who contributes, who supports, who returns.

This builds a social graph. Certain groups of people support the same creators, fund the same projects, and move through the same networks. Certain people are the creators, the core of the movement and the message. These graphs are digital scenes, unbound by geography, based on collective participation: layers of emotional, social, practical and financial investment. People get to know each other in the digital ecosystem, before meeting in person and evolving the physical scene.

Wallet activity obviously can’t recreate the feeling of a room full of people, but it can lead to one. It graphs the ethos that defines those rooms: show up, contribute, support, commit, and makes it programmable.

Officially bootlegged

Riot Grrrl was open source before the term existed, with fans invited to use lyrics, art, and slogans freely. You could scrawl “Girls to the front” on your arm, print it on a shirt, or cut it into a new zine. This was not viewed as copyright infringement, but as amplification, letting the message spread as far and as fast as possible.

We can now hardcode this instinct. We have CC0 (complete freedom of use) or permissive licensing (that allows remixing and reuse) but now it has built-in attribution.

A bootleg has always been proof of the original’s resonance. Now we can prove its origin and its most impactful iterations. The girls screaming lyrics in the front row, in their homemade merch, with their spin-off zine, don’t cease to exist when the show ends. Their contribution is measured and they can hold a proper stake in the culture they’re helping to propagate.

Today, a band could release a symbol, a slogan or a song as a digital primitive that anyone can use, while the ledger tracks who did what with it. When that symbol takes off, when someone’s remix goes viral or the original gets licensed, there’s a record of who built that momentum and the ability to give credit and route royalties accordingly. Everyone who did the cultural work can benefit from it, socially and financially.

Financialisation is already here

We’re living in the age of hyperfinancialisation, and counter-culture is no exception. Every subculture that gains traction eventually becomes commodified. This is unavoidable.

What can be rewritten is how that happens and who benefits when it does. The traditional path is extraction. A scene builds momentum in basements and DIY spaces. Someone with capital notices and packages it up into something scalable. The profits flow out of the scene and the people who built it get priced out. What made the scene jagged and real is sanded down to make it marketable.

Culture needs physical spaces for people and ideas to collide but this needs resources, especially now. Gone are the days of art squats, food co-ops and a hacked electricity meter. The cities where youth culture has always thrived now price out both youth and culture. Space costs money. Time costs money. Organising a scene while working three jobs to pay rent isn’t sustainable. The ideological purity of “making money = selling out” is a privilege most can’t afford.

Technology, up until now, has made things even harder. Social media lets subcultures spread faster but also rapidly dilutes them down to an empty aesthetic. The physical rooms, where counter-culture actually happens, have been left empty, in favour of online signalling.

We now have something different: a way for technology to reinforce physical collision instead of replacing it.

Riot Grrrl relied on merch tables, donations, fundraisers. Cash passed hand to hand at shows, whatever could be scraped together to print the next zine or fund the next tour. We can put this same DIY ethos on cryptographic rails. A venue can issue tokens that give early supporters a stake in keeping it alive. Fans can profit from their own merch designs, whilst routing royalties back to the artists and the scene. The punk spirit of self-funding remains, but there’s a new opportunity to scale it, meaningfully enough that even the artists without rich parents can afford to keep creating.

The financialisation happens, but the terms are set by the subculture itself, not the institutions that show up later. The money circulates within the network instead of flowing up and out. Incentives are designed to keep the scene rich and alive and meaningful.

The shows still happen in basements. The work is still physical, messy, sometimes dangerous. But the people doing it can afford to keep showing up. Rather than hollowing out the scene, technology and money become the things that help it survive.

Anonymous and accountable

Pseudonyms are about more than hiding. They enable freedom of expression. In the Riot Grrrl era, they allowed women to speak freely about abuse, politics and anger without risking their safety. Alter-egos also separate the art from the celebrity of the artist - the focus remains on the message, not the personality. But anonymity can also be a hindrance, making it hard to build lasting trust or coordinate on a large scale.

A wallet address offers a radical upgrade - it gives the pseudonym a permanent home. In Web2, an anon account is precarious. It can be banned, shadowbanned, or deleted at the whim of a platform, taking its audience and history with it. A pseudonymous handle connected to a wallet is owned by the user. It cannot be revoked.

This solves the paradox of trust. Traditionally, we trust people because we know who they are. With blockchain, we trust the history. We can see what a wallet has created, what it has supported and how it has behaved over time. An artist can remain completely anonymous while building an ironclad reputation. They are accountable not to a legal system or a platform policy, but to their own onchain record - and by extension, to the culture.

The art of forking

The Riot Grrrl movement was a sprawling, messy network of local chapters. Olympia had a scene, D.C. had a scene, the UK had a scene; and each operated by its own local rules. To the media, internal arguments and splinter groups looked like failure but really these were adaptations. When a scene became too rigid or exclusionary, it mutated. People took the core ethos, walked away, and started a new branch that better served their reality. Unlike grunge, which was institutionalised into corporate rock, or hip-hop, which was centralised into a commercial machine, the movement did not scale up into a monolith. It scaled out into hundreds of connected micro-scenes and when the Riot Grrrl label eventually became baggage, the scenes continued without it.

In code, we call this survival mechanism forking. “Forkability” is a feature. If a community disagrees with the direction of a protocol, or if a platform ignores the needs of its users, the code is open source. Anyone can spin it out into a version that better serves them without burning down what’s already been built. You can’t expect a global community to remain fully unified. This model allows for nuance within a shared ethos, which helps it remain future-proof.

Growth happens through participation rather than centralisation. It allows for a Darwinian evolution of ideas, where the strongest variations survive and the mistakes are visible for the next generation to learn from.

Riot Grrrl survived because it refused to become a single, easy-to-digest brand (once it did, it was already over). Onchain movements can stay distributed while coordinating at scale, too decentralized to kill, but a collective force when needed.

The memory machine

When we talk about bringing counter-culture to the blockchain, the sceptical jaw-tightening is palpable. To be clear: this is not about a DAO voting on a band’s lyrics. It’s not about turning all the raw energy of the underground into a series of financial transactions. It’s certainly not about feeding human creativity into an AI remix pipeline to generate content.

The goal is simply infrastructure: a memory machine. We lay down rails that preserve attribution, agency, and participation. We create a system where the incentives are aligned so that the people building the value, the fans, the archivists and the creators, are the ones who retain it. We build a container for the culture, not a substitute for it.

These tools are amplifiers, not saviours; they make the invisible visible, whether that’s credit and contribution, or bias and discrimination. They offer a way to protect the work from being co-opted or erased, but they cannot dictate the soul of the movement. That part is still up to us.

The immutable underground

I made it to the top of the gates at the Navy base. The hazmat suit went back into the wardrobe, and eventually, the teenage nostalgia faded into adulthood. I realised that trying to recreate the energy of 1993 was futile. You cannot copy paste a moment in time. But the principles? Yes.

For decades, we’ve accepted that subcultures are destined to be temporary. They burst into life, get co-opted by the industry and the mainstream, and fade away. The history gets written by the winners, and the participants are left with nothing but memories.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

We now have the tools to keep the culture alive. We can ensure that the people who do the work are recognised and rewarded. The next generational counter-culture movement could still be made of paper and glue but also of cryptographic proofs and shared code.

The technology is ready, if we’re brave enough to use it for something more than speculation. If we are, we might just build something worthy of the (provably accurate) history books.

In our obsession with removing friction, the internet has become homogeneous, and online culture along with it.

But pockets of that weird, messy, experimental world live on, some even managing to scale outside the group chat or the side room. What actually keeps culture alive on the new internet?

Thin vs Thick Culture

Going viral used to require creativity. Early Vine was an art form. Memes were born of deep, niche context. Today, it’s about quantity over quality, saying the right thing about the right 24 hour trend and adversity for adversity’s sake. Just enough pseudo-meaning that doesn’t really mean anything but it’s easy to understand.

We doomscroll this thin culture, a compulsive escapism that ends up feeling like the opposite of escape. But what we actually crave is thick culture: inside jokes, shared history, the inexplicable you had to be there.

This thick culture still thrives in the quiet corners of the internet. It lives in the side Discords, finstas, nichetoks and r/rabbitholes. It’s the closest we can get, in the digital, to sweaty underground club nights, dimly lit basement LAN parties and backroom poker lock-ins. This is known as the cozy web.

If you’ve found your way to this Substack, you’re probably already participating in the cozy web one way or another.

The most prolific of cozy corners is the group chat. The purest form of social media lives on in WhatsApp, iMessage and Telegram; everyone knows everyone, context is inherent, filters are off and no one’s going to screenshot your pseudo-profound psilocybin ramble.

Sometimes the corner, whilst still cozy, is made up of strangers, bonded over a common interest. Much like the forum threads of the 00s (hi to anyone who remembers the bodybuilding.com journals section), many social platforms have side rooms, usually housing an even smaller niche that’s splintered off from an already niche topic: modders who’ve spun up their own server outside the main game Discord, music fans with a finsta devoted solely to lyric conspiracy theories, a locked Pinterest board for the rarest vaporwave deepcuts or just a dedicated no-rules channel for the weirdos to get weirder.

Some corners, like Patreon and Substack, are paywalled, with an extended group chat living in the comments section. These paid rooms are often social levellers, the creator sits at the top and everyone else shares equal status, even if there’s a significant clout disparity on other platforms.

In all these cases, virality is irrelevant. The precision of what you contribute matters, the more IYKYK the better. Only this small group of people will get it and that’s the point.

Context collapse

The cozy web relies on friction, mechanisms that filter for shared purpose and literacy. This might be an invite code, a buy-in, or a pre-requisite that you’ve physically met members of the group before joining. More than that, friction comes from the grind of adding value and earning status, within an established set of rules. If the rules change, or cease to matter, the context rapidly collapses.

Often, this is triggered by a sudden influx of new blood.

Before it went mainstream in 2021, Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets was a nine-year-old forum with around two million members and a culture forged in an environment that valued risk, humour and degenerate counter-culture.

It had almost perfect incubation conditions: one contained room, visible archives, a decade of shared rituals and slang, a voting system for community to surface value and bury slop. And yet, when millions arrived during the GameStop short, the culture quickly diluted. The jokes, memes and tone survived but the deep shared context that made them matter was lost - the new majority may have learned about it, but they’d never lived it.

This subculture to mainstream arc plays out in pop culture all the time. Once an artist, a brand, an idea blows up, the grassroots get stomped on by the clumsy and excitable masses, and never grows back.

The influx doesn’t even need to be sudden. Soho House began as a members’ space for artists and media in 1995. The barrier was cultural, not just financial. You had to be a respected part of the ecosystem (ie cool enough) to get in. Over time, as the brand expanded globally and the memberships became easier to buy with looser vetting, the friction shifted from a cultural barrier to a financial one. What was once the refuge of the creative elite has progressively morphed into a tastefully furnished WeWork with picantes. A great membership to have, but no longer the creator-class status symbol it once was.

No one can reasonably get upset at a business seeking profitability, the point here is not to vilify mainstream adoption, but to look at when and why thick culture breaks down, and whether there are solutions. The main challenge is the types of friction that commonly incubate culture don’t scale it. Time, familiarity, inside knowledge, these filter well for subcultural intimacy, but break down fast when the culture gets too popular.

In some cases, the erosion comes from the inside.

For a decade, crypto twitter (CT) has been home to a community bonded over futurist ideals, insider shorthand, shared wins and losses and a stacked in-person conference calendar. On paper, there’s enough here to preserve a thick culture. But much of CT would agree it has progressively diluted with each market cycle. Not just from a surge in new participants, but because the incentive structure fundamentally shifted.

Belonging now matters less than blowing up. Traders who once shared alpha privately now farm engagement by publicly fading each other’s calls. Builders who once championed each other’s projects now undermine competitors for post impressions. Even friendly disagreements get performed with theatrical hostility because conflict drives reach.

It’s easy to blame the dilution on X’s sloptimised algorithm. But even in Discord servers and Telegram groups, the energy of striving towards something together is tarnished. The magic, the nerdy love of the technology, can still be found in small physical rooms. But online, the culture has already learned to favour quick personal wins over longterm shared ones.

Somewhat social networks

A single cozy space is easy to protect while it’s small, but it’s structurally fragile. The room is the container, and once the room breaks, the culture inside it usually dilutes with it. Once that happens, it’s almost impossible to capture the original essence, even in a new, restricted room.

A distributed cozy web works differently. Instead of one room holding everything, many rooms hold different pieces and the culture is the glue that connects them. That matters, because it means the culture doesn’t live inside a single platform or channel. It lives in the relationships between spaces. It doesn’t rise and fall on an algorithm change, or a moderation failure, or a sudden flood of outsiders. If one room collapses, the network routes around it.

Friction holds up better under a distributed structure, and there are certain types of friction that have proved especially resilient.

Distribution + Stake

Despite being one of the biggest bands in history, BTS has managed to retain thick culture. ARMY was never one secret forum or private chat but a web of Tumblr gifsets, fan translators, Twitter streaming campaigns, KakaoTalk merch trading, Weverse posts, charity drives and spreadsheet logistics. And as is common in K-pop fandoms, the participation was very hands-on. Fans crowdfunded birthday billboards, bankrolled UNICEF campaigns in BTS’s name, bulk-bought albums to drive chart placement and organised group orders large enough to impact shipment supply chains. Money reinforced the culture but rather than material financial upside, the ROI was a shared sense of ownership, having participated meaningfully in each campaign’s success.

Throughout the band’s supernova ascent, fans have continued to form new pockets, retaining the small room dynamic at scale even within one of the world’s largest fandoms. It’s not a perfect case, there’s certainly still dilution and fractures within the community. But the combination of meaningful participation (practical, financial and communal) and networked cozy corners, has allowed the ARMY subculture to hold up at phenomenal scale.

Distribution + Taste

Aesthetic subcultures, rather than forming around shared interests, form around specific, highly coded tastes. Taste is a powerful filter. Vaporwave, dark academia, scene revival, Y2K style have all survived their mainstream trend cycles. These communities celebrate curation as much as creation, which means even at scale, the language stays cohesive. Taste gives these communities an internal standard that newcomers can’t easily fake. Commercialisation always centres on the look, but the context is carried in the deep references, the spin that only someone who really understands can put on it. The difference between fashion and style. Anyone inside the subculture can tell an OG from a poser and that’s enough. You’re in it for yourself, and for the people who get it.

Formed in Tumblr threads, Pinterest boards and micro-blogs long before it hit TikTok and Etsy, Cottagecore takes taste a step further, embodying it in an entire way of life. By the time you could buy a mushroom-shaped mug in the Aldi specials aisle, the aesthetic already had its accompanying lifestyle: slow-craft, cottage gardens, paperback poetry and an escapist longing for rural life. This hybrid of taste, values and practice is something you either embody or you don’t, and so the core community has remained strong, even after the masses co-opted it for a while.

Distribution + Effort

Another type of friction that survives at scale is hard work. Long distance running is an easy example. The recent New York marathon might have been a 26.2 mile Bandit campaign, but none of that replaces the actual suffering. You can buy the shorts, but you can’t shortcut the identity. Many runners are frustrated by the commodification of their sport, but they don’t stop running. They continue to reorganise around real effort rather than performative style.

Running culture is also distributed across small pockets and cliques. It’s in the local clubs, the Strava segments, Reddit training logs, runtok injury confessionals, carbon-plated shoe comparison videos and niche substacks. The context that connects all these spaces is unaffected by new adoption. It’s the proof of work, the pride in each other’s achievements and the commonly shared backstories that lead many people to the sport.

A distributed structure keeps culture resilient to platform shifts, but it doesn’t solve everything. Once a network grows, new pressures appear. Surviving this comes down to how many of the core participants are invested in keeping the culture alive, and how meaningful that investment is.

Skin in the game

For online culture to survive, people need something at stake. Enough people need to have put enough in that walking away feels like a loss. The internet makes it easy to fake almost every surface signal. Every man and his AI agent can fake the cues of taste, language, enthusiasm, even presence if they want to. LARPing sustained investment is a lot harder.

Investment comes in different forms and it usually builds slowly. You show up every day. You contribute with time and effort. You care deeply about the outcome. You make friends. You front hard cash. None of these things can hold a culture on their own, but together they create a real, embodied commitment. Skin in the game.

Financial stake doesn’t need to be large and it should never be the only thing that counts (see every failed memecoin), but it adds material weight. Even a small contribution changes the dynamic. Anyone who has ever published an online course will tell you that completion rates for the paid version far outweigh those of the free one. Even a ten dollar paywall changes the perceived value. Paying means paying attention. You take things personally. You take responsibility for helping the project or the community to succeed. Money by itself does nothing, but money layered on top of effort and emotional investment is one of the strongest anchors a culture can have.

You see this in the communities that scale successfully. BTS ARMY worked because emotional conviction was crystallised by time-consuming labour and coordinated spending. Running culture holds because the effort, time, race fees, gear choices and friendships are woven together as one identity. Aesthetic subcultures work because taste becomes practice and practice becomes lifestyle, one you spend time and money on. What makes these cultures resilient is not any single investment but the combination. Something that gets exponentially harder to fake with each required layer. It’s why a real fan can spot a plastic one a mile off. These aren’t hobbies; they’re fully formed identities.

Thick culture also needs sustained alignment, even when groups within groups don’t get on. Every big community fractures. Fracturing is not the problem. The problem is when the incentives reward the fracture more than the culture. Once engagement becomes the main currency, self-promotion by any means becomes more important than protecting the shared culture and slop prevails.

Individual incentives need to align with collective incentives, an overarching mentality of being in it together. The community celebrates breakout successes of its members, and these individual wins strengthen the collective, without extracting from or exploiting it. And when there is fracturing and small groups splinter off, the culture holds because the shared big picture still channels everyone’s efforts in the same direction.

The human algorithm

If skin in the game keeps culture aligned, curators keep it legible. They are the human algorithm, the ones with actual judgement, memory and taste. They decide what strengthens the culture, what weakens it and how new people enter without steamrolling it.

Curators are the hard side of a culture. They are the ones keeping the meaning while everything else explodes. If a community wants to survive growth, it has to keep them incentivised. Sometimes that means financial recognition. Sometimes authority. Mostly it means preserving the status that makes their work meaningful. Left unchecked, their status doesn’t rise with scale; it usually evaporates as reach starts to outrank context.

As of today, social platforms don’t recognise curators in the same way they recognise creators. There are no curator funds. With so much emphasis on content and little on quality control, it’s no wonder we’re in a slop epidemic. If a subculture is to avoid the same fate, their curators need to be elevated and rewarded, progressively more so as the room (and their job) gets bigger. Culture might begin with artists but it only scales with curators.

Scaling the groupchat

The new internet didn’t kill culture, but it has messed with its value system. When participation costs nothing and context doesn’t matter, everything collapses into thin, forgettable slop. AI has exacerbated it but it’s a human problem.

But culture still thrives wherever people collectively invest in something bigger than themselves. In places where effort, money, care and history stack together. We know small rooms can incubate thick culture. And that a networked culture can lose one of its room without losing itself.

Growth is often the goal, but almost no one plans for the hollowing that comes with it. Once the soul is gone, recapturing it is almost impossible. Lasting culture requires layered emotional, practical and material investment, and it requires talented, incentivised curators. Skin in the game keeps participants committed and aligned. Curators do what algorithms cannot, surfacing what actually matters. Together they create a structure strong enough to grow without losing itself.

Culture scales sideways. Building something big means building small over and over again.

Today is the quietest the internet will ever be.

At no point in history has it been this easy to create and build, with so little technical skill. But with faster production comes a lack of process, the reflection point where you realise it’s a bad idea and don’t ship it. Meanwhile, talented creators are gambling away their time and creativity for the jackpot of a viral hit.

TikTok is a pyramid scheme. The algorithm rewards constant output, so creators, lured by the promise that anything could go viral, compete on volume, not value - investing hours of labour for ever-diminishing returns.

Friction to create, once a benchmark of quality, is dying. We are entering the era of friction to curate. This requires systems that allow quality to surface and that prevent context collapse.

Creation is no longer the problem. Distribution is. It doesn’t matter how efficiently AI helps you build it if they don’t come.

The next wave of innovation needs to focus less on creation itself, and more on the systems that help it reach and resonate. This innovation needs to happen in three key areas:

1. Staying (algorithmically) relevant

   To remain discoverable, creators need to distribute continuously across multiple platforms, staying relevant to their communities. On top of that, they’re expected to research and hop on every trend, making it “theirs”. Burnout is inevitable. Creators are fighting an uphill battle against the algorithm, bleeding out their best ideas just to stay visible. Saturation will only increase from here, so we need solutions that reduce the load on creators and that filter for quality. If there was any doubt, 2025’s InfoFi experiment has proven the solution isn’t an army of NPC bots.

2. Loyalty through ownership

   As holding attention is now a much greater challenge than even a year ago, new formats and incentives are needed to reshape the relationship between creator and fans. Loyalty isn’t just earned once, especially with a new generation that knows its worth and invoices accordingly. It’s maintained through fans feeling recognised as co-owners in a project’s success and given meaningful ways to participate. There’s widespread rejection of extractive models but new infrastructure is needed for reciprocity to work at scale.

3. Making authenticity measurable

   If creators are to offer their communities greater ownership, they need a reliable way to distinguish those adding value from those detracting from it. In a sea of slop, social status derives from authenticity - and authenticity must be provable. Real social contribution (value) and cultural curation (taste) should be transparent, measurable, and rewarded accordingly. When linked verifiably to reputation, participation turns into its own form of capital.

NPCs become players

Cultural participation has replaced pure consumption as the driver of economic value.

With traditional consumption, the transaction ends when you buy. In participatory culture, it begins there. Every remix, repost, mod or meme extends the life of the original idea and authentically spreads the word.

Participatory systems outperform traditional models because:

1. They scale organically.
   When people contribute, they share it, turning the community itself into the distribution.

2. They build network effects.
   The more people participate, the more valuable the project becomes.

3. They turn audiences into stakeholders.
   Fans are less likely to churn when they hold creative or emotional equity.

4. They generate secondary economies.
   Modding, derivative works, UGC marketplaces, resale and licensing add layers of value.

Despite these advantages, contributors have generally lacked compensation. Top down systems scalp the value fans create, selling it back to them as “community”. We’re reaching the end of an era where fans will (or can) work purely for the love of the IP. The new generation is much more sensitive to extraction, with a much higher expectation of reciprocity. Whether you agree with it or not, increasing economic pressure means hobbies need to be monetised or dropped.

We’re already seeing what this shift looks like in practice. Minecraft’s modding scene has spawned an entire shadow economy of builders and developers, with some earning more from their add-ons than they’d receive in salary from traditional game studios.

The next generation of brands will build in attribution and upside from the start, rewarding the people who actually make the brand matter. Traditional ad spend will be redirected into sustainable, community-led distribution.

Henry Jenkins, godfather of participatory culture, said: “If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.”
In the attention economy, I’d add: If it doesn’t reward, it’s ignored.

Replacing the institution

The collapse of traditional institutions is both economic and ideological.

Millennials were the last generation raised to believe the old system of education, career and property could deliver stability. Gen Z have already rejected it. Gen Alpha is growing up inside their own new economy built on participation and shared creation, the Roblox blueprint. For these generations raised on precarity, entrepreneurialism is both a creative outlet and a survival mechanism. When systems fail, people start building their own.

Side hustles are a necessary safety net. Fandom involves active production. The internet made it possible to turn the most niche interest into a revenue stream. Now, with AI accelerating creation and competition, the line between community and economy is rapidly disappearing.

The collapse runs deeper than income. It’s a collapse of belonging. People want to believe in something better, in each other, in collective progress, in the idea that their contributions matter. Once, this would have catalysed religions and cults. Today, it’s a business strategy. The cleverest companies no longer sell products but belief systems (with merch).

Influencer movements, crypto communities, fandoms: each one promises meaning, identity and shared purpose in a world that feels increasingly atomised.

Where churches once offered community on Sundays, Discord servers now offer it every day.

With the old systems eroding, culture becomes the institution. Collaboration replaces hierarchy, loyalty replaces employment, and the collective replaces the company.

Building to be built on

If participation is the foundation of culture, extensibility is the economy.

Control, once a measure of strength is now a limit on growth. The next generation of companies will need to operate like subcultures: openly collaborative and designed to be built on.

The internet exists because thousands of individuals and institutions contributed to open-source infrastructure. A meme isn’t a meme until it’s community-owned. A story becomes a universe when others build on it. Every successful fandom, franchise, and open protocol runs on extensibility, ideas built for participation.

For decades, we’ve treated IP protection as the holy grail of value. But we’ve been thinking about it the wrong way. Defensiveness isn’t the same as defensibility. Disney’s fortress IP strategy worked when distribution was scarce. Now that it’s infinite, the real opportunity is in leveraging derivation, not fighting a losing battle against it.

Attribution is what keeps an idea relevant, not the absence of imitation. If the idea is any good, people will reference it. A brand’s value is equal to how incentivised someone is to credit rather than just copy, the amount of social or literal capital that attribution can earn them.

Every company now operates under the same conditions as a creator, measured on banger tweets and relatability. Your identity is public, your voice needs to feel personal, trust is earned through participation in the community. Companies compete for relevance in the same cultural economy as artists and influencers. Founders need to be tastemakers, defining a language that others can evolve and expand, and a world it can live in. The language needs to be strong enough to remain recognisable through every iteration. The world needs to offer enough status and belonging for others to want to participate within it.

We’ve already seen this approach evolve in gaming. Over 70% of Fortnite playtime now occurs in community-built experiences. Its success now relies less on its own updates than on what its community builds inside it.

The most enduring brands of the future will be networks, growing stronger with every contribution and rewarding participants with ownership and influence.

The future of brand culture

In the new economy, participation is both the proof and the protection of value.

Attention can be faked. Influence can be bought. Authentic participation is the only thing you can’t automate. The best companies will have systems to recognise and reward it.

GitHub, Wikipedia, and open-source AI models all show that when contribution is tied to reputation, it becomes collateral.

Ownership still matters, but only when it’s collective. To achieve meaningful growth, creators and communities must share in both the work and the upside. Attribution is driven by reciprocity rather than a fear of legal repercussion.

Value will come from enabling your community, not controlling your IP. The strongest brands will design ideas to be built upon, and to belong to.