It Could Happen Here - The Financialization of Human Beings

Episode Date: December 8, 2021

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google Search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. welcome to the chud cast this is a crypto podcast where we talk about the best nft investments and how you can get rich too bro if you just accept the wave of the future and decentralize your

finance and invest in a bank that can take all of your money overnight and disappear because it was really just being run by a guy in Macedonia. And it was just a rug pull the entire time. And you lose your life savings and you have no recourse. And that's the fucking future of investments, bro. Hey, bro, you're fired. Yeah, that's fair. This is it could happen here. podcast about how things are bad. Sometimes a podcast about how to make them less bad.

Today, we're talking about the former, how things are bad. And we're talking about financialization and specifically the financialization of human beings and the endeavor to create art. Well, art is a broad broad term i mean i said the endeavor to okay i'm sure they all want to be creating art well this won't make any sense to people yet so i'm gonna i'm gonna give a brief overview there's an article in the atlantic that dropped on november 29th called what happens when you're the investment. It's by Rex Woodbury, who I hate. So as a note, okay,

let me just get the, the, the, the nut of the article is, and there've been a couple of other articles on this guy. His name is Alex Mass. And he is a French kid, I think,

who decided to tokenize himself. And what that means is so like you've got the Ethereum blockchain, right? Basically, he's he's putting he's carving up aspects of his like potential future earnings. And he's putting those on the Ethereum blockchain as like tokens that people can buy. And the idea is that this kid had wanted to like start a business and be an entrepreneur, but he didn't have any money. So using like on the Ether blockchain, he turned himself into tokens, basically, like his potential future earnings and his time. And basically, people are able to buy up

coins effectively. I mean, not coins, but tokens shares of the yeah yeah dollar sign alex is like the name of the token which are basically shares they're buying he's turned himself essentially into a publicly traded company kind of um and holders of uh his coins are like he's splitting up 15 of his income for the next three years, basically among people who like hold his coins. And he raised like 20 grand this way. And it's not just like it's not just his future earnings that are being kind of tokenized. You can also use tokens to like buy retweets from him or one on one conversations or. And here's a line I love an introduction to someone in his network.

And it's the overall idea because you can find some other good articles. Good is an interesting word to use. You can find other interesting, fascinating articles about this idea, which is like human beings tokenizing their future earning potential in order to raise money. raise money. And it's the way this is usually sold is a good thing. In fact, I should probably just read a quote from this Atlantic article to give you an idea of how Masmesh is, or of how the author of the article,

Rex Woodbury, is trying to sell this shit. We all have the slightly annoying friend who insists that she knew about so-and-so before they were even famous. When it comes to Taylor Swift, I'm that friend, and I'm more than slightly annoying about it. I was a Taylor fan in her pre-Fearless full-on country days, years before Conway interrupted her on stage at the VMAs. But in our current construct of fandom, I'm treated

no differently than a fan who discovered Swift on SNL a few weeks back. This would be different, though, if Taylor had done what Masmesh did and turned herself into an investment. She could have issued a social token. Whereas non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, are so-called because of the uniqueness of a digital asset, social tokens are fungible. In other words, each Alex token

is interchangeable with every other Alex token, just like a dollar bill can be traded for any other dollar bill. Say Taylor had issued her own token. Let's call it $Swift. And say she had. Say Taylor had issued her own token. Let's call it dollar sign Swift and say she had sold dollar sign Swift to her biggest fans. Yeah. Say I was one such fan. Over time, as Taylor's popularity grew, the value of the Swift token would have appreciated. As an early believer, I would have shared in the financial upside of her

growing fame. The Swift token I had brought for $100 in 2007 might be worth $100,000 today. The Taylor Swift mini-economy would serve both the singer and early fans like me. As an artist, Taylor could have funded her work by selling Swift tokens. She might not have needed to sell ownership of her masters, and she might not have been forced to re-record her albums to take back control over her art. Taylor's fans, for their part, would have been rewarded for a decade of patronage. We're all evangelists for our favorite artists, yet we capture little of the value

that we help create. And there's a lot that, like, I find unsettling there. One of them is the idea that, like, yeah, the fact that I was a fan of someone earlier means I should get some sort of reward for it.

Like, I should be treated differently because I liked it earlier, which you might recognize, like, the thing that everybody has been shitting on for like a fandoms for years now. Like it's been it's been a huge thing with like, yeah, you're being an asshole if you're if you're talking about like if you think you have some additional ownership of Star Wars because you watched it 10 years before the fans today. And so you like different stuff in it like that's we all recognize that is like toxic. But the whole argument of this article is that like, no, this is how the entire future of creativity should work.

Yeah. Which I find unsettling. And it also, it also ties into like a really concerning development in parasocial relationships of like being able to invest in someone to buy a conversation with them in like this really weird way. And the fact that young artists are going to be pressured into this kind of thing is really scary. Yeah, because there's like one of the things MassMesh did as like an experiment was like allow people who had bought his tokens to make life decisions for him. Like tell him when to wake up in the morning and whether or not to eat red meat and stuff like that.

And he stated that, like, well, none of this is binding, right? Like, I might do what they say, but like, I'm not going to do anything crazy or whatever. But also, this is like the first iteration of this. And I like this Atlantic article, which I think is unhinged for reasons we'll get into. But it's purely talking about, like, look at this incredibly successful person. Imagine if they'd gotten to be incredibly successful using this method instead, and it might've like spared them this thing. But what I keep thinking about is like, okay, well, the vast majority of people, like there's

no reason to invest in them. Like, yeah, maybe if you come out with a great song or a great video, like, yeah, you could get investments. And I'm sure that could work out. I'm sure like Taylor Swift is a successful enough person. I'm sure she could have found a way to succeed under that system, too. But what I think will be much more common, because there's no real reason to anticipate that the average person will have an earnings potential if you give them 20 grand that's

greater than 20 grand. The most likely thing is that people just buy shares in poor people to make them do fucked up shit. Yeah, it's going to be used. How would that not be where it goes? Yeah, that's the only way that this is going to get used on a large scale

is these young people just selling themselves in this weird way way people are going to use the ether blockchain to like crowdfund and crowd uh cast a new jackass basically like it's going it's not going to be like a thousand taylor swifts all tokenizing themselves it's going to be like millions of people in the global south issuing tokens to like vote on whether they roll down the hill in a barrel or in like a fucking porta potty. Like, it's just it's a nightmare to me to contemplate people actually adopting this. You know, there's there's a lot of really the thing I think is the most incredible part about this is that like. incredible part about this is that like okay so like it basically doesn't matter what like economic theory you use to look at it it's like every single one of them tells you something just

like absolutely fucked about it and like you know because because i mean there's there's there's some extent to which i look at this and it's like this isn't that much different than the fact you know it's like okay so you're paying different than the fact you know it's like okay so you're paying someone to do whatever you want but like okay like that's not that much different than just a job right like it's it's not it's not inherently that much different than the fact that everyone is forced to just do wage labor but also like there's i one of the most interesting things to me that I thought about this when I was

reading this was do you guys know what capitalization is? Yeah. So this is just capitalizing a person, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's literally, yeah. Taking a person public, effectively. Turning them into like a tradable

share that's like an investment. Yeah. I mean, this is all one of the things that like a Forbes article I found pointed out is like this is another kind of unregulated securities trading.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what's interesting to me about it is that like, okay, so, you know, this is also already how accounting-wise every corporation

sees a person, right? Like every person in the asset book is, you know, like a wage is just capitalization right so how much will you pay now for this much money later you could but it's like people are doing it to themselves now yeah which is like this yeah you could argue that like elements of this are how like banks treat you when you get a mortgage right um like

but but also that's much more rigorous and limited. Like, the limit is that, like, it has, like, regulations

and it has rules for how those things work. It's not some, like, 12-year-old getting, like, going onto Coinbase and buying part of you

as a joke with, like, his dad's money, right? Yes. Because it's like, yeah,

because what if it's like, there's no law against a 17 year old i guess if that maybe their parents may need to consent but there's no law against a 17 year old getting a facial tattoo of like the doors of a concentration camp on their face but what if some kid tokenizes himself for 40 grand so he can drop an ep and that's what like a bunch of four channers who buy up his his shares want him to do um and maybe the fucking kid does that because he knows it's going to get him because his brain's not done and he knows it's going to get him a bunch of fucking social media

uh clouds and like it's there's a lot of and there's no way to regulate that like it's just an inherently toxic proposition that i don't think the government would i don't know what side of this the government would even step in on like what is the regulation of people deciding i'm letting random strangers who pay me money vote on what i do with my life what do you ever think it reminds me of a lot is like the the micro lending stuff from the 90s where it was like oh we'll we'll like empower these people but we'll go in and uh we're gonna give them like a small amount of money and they have to pay it back it was like you know and all of the same stuff that you were reading all the arguments about why this is a good thing are

exactly the same as the micro lending ones and that stuff you know there were two ways it turned out one was basically you get the scenario where both sides are scamming each other. Yeah. Where, you know, all the people who are getting these micro loans are just taking the money and walking. Right. Like that's, you know, their thing is, oh, this is I can just get money like this and we can just keep I just keep not paying it back. And so this is I'm scamming them. But then on the other side, you have these people who are like, oh, cool, I can give this person this loan and turn them into a debt peon.

Yeah. other side you have these people who are like oh cool i can give this person this loan and turn them into a debt peon yeah and it and you know and the the the really depressing side about it is so the people who couldn't get away like i mean we're literally reduced to debt peons and you know i mean there's a huge wave of suicides in like india's probably don't say mcnapple's wave of suicides people drinking pesticide because they couldn't pay off these loans and so and the thing that's different about this is that like i mean a you're doing it to yourself but then b again there's no regulation but that also means there isn't any way to force someone to do what you yeah you're gonna do yet it's unclear how it's going to be enforced and the other thing is unclear is like what does losses look like like what what happens when someone like cannot make back on it like an

investment but if the investment is a person how does that work and if someone's like contractually obligated to give a certain share of their income what happens when there's not enough income for that like like you know so those types of things. Yeah. I mean, there's no answer to that. And there's nobody like the money that's going to be whatever made in this is going to be made before anyone steps in to try to answer that. If anyone ever does like it's it's going to be the next because I think we're I think we're heading for a crash with with NFTs. Because I think we're heading for a crash with NFTs. There was just an article today about how, what is it, 97% of NFT trading is done by 10% of people, which further back, because the allegations of other internet money that they already have. So it's these whales who have like a bunch of crypto gaming the system. And we've seen some of it. And the biggest NFT sale ever was like half a billion dollars. And it was a guy selling it to himself and then transferring it back into another wallet to try to make it look like it was worth half a billion dollars, even though no one had actually really paid that for it um so i i and i think you know that and kind of what we've seen with the the regulations the government's announced

for nfts i think that's a problem for them in the near future and i wouldn't be surprised to see this take off next especially given like the creator economy that we're seeing on like the kind of that tiktck specifically yeah tick tock like i wouldn't be surprised if you saw a rash of big tick tock stars tokenizing themselves and like i'm not even sure i'm i'm sure it would be a mix of the person making the tokens being the one doing the scam and the person receiving or the people buying the tokens being the one doing like i'm sure it would be a mix of different kinds of exploitation but it's not going to be good i mean and just like nfts it's gonna make like i don't know 50 people super rich when they when they first start trying it right like that

that is that is like when this happens like when a tiktok star with 25 million followers when they do this they will make boatloads of money. It's just unclear what happens after that. Yeah. Well, flee to Mexico. Yeah, I mean, that would be the smart thing to do. That would be the smart thing to do. Yeah. Welcome.

I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnne Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions.

Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. In this Forbes article I found, which is a thousand times better than the Atlanta Chronicle, even though it's written by someone I think who's also into crypto, it actually asks some of these questions we've been talking about.

And it cites David Hoffman, who's the COO of a tokenized real estate platform, on what he sees as some of the problems. Like what he, as a guy who supports aspects of this kind of thing seizes the problems uh with this and uh it's yeah one sec um hoffman re-in uh returning to his core problem with the personal token model model hoffman re-emphasized that the assurances and utility that come uh with some of these tokens don't exist for – with certain kinds of tokens don't exist for like these personal tokens. How risky this investment is is completely defined by the individual. In his disclaimer, he's talking about one of the guys who's token himself, this guy named Kerman. In his disclaimer, he says this is a highly risky investment and that you could lose all your money, which is a terrible thing to say because with personal tokens, the issuer is in complete control over exactly how risky the investment actually is.

It's largely up to them whether there are risks or not, which is like a kind of illegal securities trading that I don't think anyone's ever done. It's this fascinating new con where you're literally the you're doing securities trading, but instead of it being over a company, it's just you. And technically, there's no consequences if you just take the money and run. Like, I don't know what kind of contract like you couldn't have a contract that says that you could say there that you're obligated to pay out your future earnings, but you couldn't have to work. That's not enforceable. You can't contractually obligate someone to work. You're allowed to quit a job. I guess you could put penalties in it, but none of the current ones have any kind of penalty. I mean, or they could go to jail for... The other option is that they could go to jail for fraud if they try to not follow through on the investment.

If you say like, yeah, I invested in you and you said that you would do these things, you didn't do them, now you can go to prison. That is the other thing. And I think that'll, at some point, like there will be scams and some of that will come in. But like none of these current ones, none of them are saying, here's my specific I'm going to make this. It's not like like if you like with a Patreon, right, you're you're paying a little bit at a time on an ongoing basis for a very clear product.

Generally, this is so far. These aren't that they're just like, I'm going to try to do something that makes money. And if it does, you get a cut of it and that's it's so much like there's nothing that's stopping mass from saying like hey my my and my attempt didn't work uh so we're done no no money for anybody like that and i i you're not there's no accounting requirements there's no there's a bunch of ways in which it's fucked up from a financial side except it it's not his – you're not investing in his business. You're investing in him. So even if he takes another job, they're still – it seems to be contractually obligated to still get that 15% of his income.

And I think that's the area in which I think it would be abusive for the person being tokenized because most people aren't gonna like most people don't make that much money so they raise someone manages to like raise five or ten grand and then just winds up for years giving a cut of their income that winds up being more than they got initially to a bunch of like it's almost like a like a payday loan that you've yeah blockchain yeah you know okay so this is the thing this is the thing i'm thinking about because so there's i don't know if i've talked about this on the show but there's a thing in china where they've been kind of cracking down on it now for but starting like 2019 like literally every single app like had a uh like

had a payday loan thing in it so like like your flashlight app would have would offer you a payday loan and it was basically it was yeah it was they were they were originally tied in with like people who buy um you know it was originally tied in with like like uh the the the services that let you like their version of amazon for example would like oh hey we'll give you a loan so you can buy this you can order fried chicken and i was always wondering when this would come to the u.s and i think it might never hope i mean hopefully it never chicken and i was always wondering when this would come to the us and i think it might never hope i mean hopefully it never does and i think it might not just because of how like powerful our payday loan industry is but it's like we've we've now invented it seems

like it's gonna happen but like dumber like our version of it is like this thing which is just you know it's oh what what if what if payday loans but on the blockchain except you know everyone i guess this is the other thing you know that we've been getting at is is that the difference between this being a payday loan and this being you scammed a bunch of people is what the enforcement mechanism looks like and you know this this comes back to some other things i think are interesting about this one is that you know so the whole the hotline nft grift right is is is based on convincing people that there's value in ownership right they're like ownership itself has inherently has value. Yeah. And yeah, but, but this, this is not that this is, this is,

you know, this is going back to know your value. Value is built on labor, right? Well, yeah, it's like sort of labor and like, like personhood,

like, like you as a personal brand is, is the thing that they're trying to get at. But the thing, the thing that's missing here though, is that in order for like, you know, in order for like labor to produce value, right. produce value in this way, there has to be a way for you to force them to pay you.

You need coercion for it. And if there's no coercion, then you just take a bunch of money and leave. And that I think is like, this is going to be the battle over like, if this becomes a thing, it's going to be, you know, the people who buy these things are going to wind up like trying to, you know, I think they're going to be the ones who try to push a regulation because they're going to, you know, they're going to go in, they're going to be, I want to get my money back. And that could end really, really, really badly. Right. I mean, it probably i like i don't know how popular i think this will be because i think that i hope it dies this is a maybe if there'd never been like patreon or something but the actual use case of this seems to already be well served by the existing capitalist infrastructure like people i think more people wanted back a creator's Patreon than they want to like own pieces of a person's time and earning potential like that.

That seems like a more niche and weird desire to people than just like, oh, yeah, these guys make a video I like every week. So I'll throw him three dollars. Well, I think I think the difference, though though is that patreon money gets you money from normal people this gets you money from like tech bros and that yeah that's always with yeah it's a grift designed to get money from those people i want to dive back into this atlantic article because it's so bad in such a comprehensive way that i think it deserves analysis that's what put a pin in what you said but I want to start with like how the person writing this, this Rex motherfucker,

like his, his concept of the, the history of the internet. Um, cause it's completely wrong. Quote, we're on the precipice of the third era of the web. The web's first era was about information flowing freely.

Thank Google giving you access to the world's knowledge. Most of us were passive consumers in this era. The second era was the social web, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. People began to create their own content, and that content became the lifeblood of the big platforms. We became active participants, but the platforms devoured all the profits. The promise of the internet was to erase the gatekeepers. Instead of waiting for a record label to sign you,

you could share your music on Spotify. Instead of asking a publication to share your words, you could tweet. Instead of being tapped by a studio exec, you could become a YouTuber. But what happened is that these platforms became the new gatekeepers. The third era of the web is about righting the ship. Social capital becomes economic capital. Value no longer accumulates to brokers and intermediaries. That's number one, completely wrong.

For one thing, the first era of the internet, I would say was about the idea that information should flow freely. And Google came in like a decade or more into that period. Like I had been on the internet five years before Google hopped into that shit. And Google was actually the start of the end of that period. And it's the idea that like the social web was people

creating their own content. Most of the social web's initial capital and like all of its initial money came from taking content that people were being paid to make on legacy platforms that had existed before social media, taking that content, putting it on social media, and then monetizing that without paying money back to the people who had made the content. The money in social media did not initially come from people making their own content in the way that they mean it. Like, yeah, you at College Humor or whatever were making your own content and sharing it

on social media, but you'd been doing that before social media. Social media just actually made it less profitable eventually. Like the way he summarizes this is so wrong because what the social web actually did. And the other thing I'd argue is that the first era of the internet, the like early days when things are happening on like forums and weird little angel fire websites and like even MySpace, which I think is MySpace kind of straddles the first and second eras. That was fundamentally much more an era of people creating their own content because the lifeblood of social media today isn't people really making their own content. It's people reacting to content that other people made.

content. It's people reacting to content that other people made. And again, it just shows the fact that he's summarizing it this way in a way that I think is so wrong and inaccurate to how things actually developed is characteristic of his attitude towards this stuff, where he's kind of seeing the only real meaningful evolutions in the internet through the corporations that monetized it, which is just telling of how this guy actually sees the way the internet has developed. And you will not be surprised to know this motherfucker is an investor at Index Ventures. Yeah. Yeah, like he's a guy whose business is capitalizing things.

And so that's the only way he sees the development of the internet even though that's not the accurate way of looking at how the internet evolved and i think i think that there's one more really important thing that he leaves out here which is that because you know we're talking oh this is the third age of the internet like no the third day the internet started like i don't know the mid to early mid 2010s when i would say when gamergate hit is when i would i would yeah i mean it's going to be a little off it depends what you it depends what you mean by age so one of my friends works in advertising and he was talking about this where you know we can we

can talk about like like gamergate and sort of fascist models but there was something else happening back end which was the internet of things stuff the internet of things stuff like you know like nobody it's kind of things stuff like you know like nobody it's kind of a i don't know like i think we mostly think about it as like it's kind of a joke or it's like it just sucks but really what it was was that that that was the period in which people figured out that the thing the the actual money to be made on the internet was from selling people's personal information yeah and that and the internet of things like just dramatic like just indescribably increased the amount of data that you could extract from people.

And that was the actual change. That's the third day of the internet. And that era of the internet will who you are where you go like what you buy who you talk to that just being sold off to to advertisers is you know the thing that he's very very carefully not talking about and instead focusing on oh it was users creating content it's like no they the internet's like just they they sold spying on the entire world. And if that's the case, it's going to start with it was not at all. It was an entirely public project and everybody on it was on it through like a university and like people did not pay to access it. Other than that, you had to be at an institution or a university.

And then like we get to the kind of the era before the dot-com boom and of the dot-com boom and then like the early pre-social internet stuff like something awful and like having stumbled upon and whatnot. And like those sending traffic to sites like where I used to work cracked and, um, and then kind of the social media, which is the start of, as you said, like the data being monitored, monetized, like individuals data being the thing either that's being directly monetized or it's being used to deliver like targeted ads to you. Um, and then then there's like if you think about it in terms of content it's it starts like the first era wouldn't even involve google because it would be like the start of usenet up to eternal september in 1993 and then you know on from there um but either way this guy doesn't like everything he says about the history of the internet is is dumb

it's just a very simplified version and you don't actually look at like the interlocking systems um because i mean yeah i i don't know why he describes it this way because it is it is like it's accurate if you squint and don't think about it yeah but it's weird because like this article is like it's for tech bros so i i don't know why he describes it this way because i feel like he could describe it a lot more accurately um if he if he wanted to well it's something i'm going to get into i'm going to say this probably like twice this episode i'm going to get into in the neoliberalism episodes that i'm writing but the one of the key features of neoliberalism is

that they lie is that they're the neoliberals have to have two versions of what they believe they have the version that they tell everyone else which is completely a lie and is not what they believe at all and then it has they have the version that they tell everyone else which is completely a lie and is not what they believe at all and then it has they have the version that they tell to each other which is what they actually believe and they're they completely they contradict each other completely they mostly believe thing everything they say in public is just a complete lie and that i think that's what he's doing here which is that this that like that history of the internet is the one you sell to public consumption yes because yeah that that's that's that's the lie you tell people to take money from them and then he has a thing that he believes but which he will not ever tell you because

you know if if he tells you what like he actually wanted to do you would run screaming from the room and i think this is the you can you can read between what he wants you to believe i think is made very clear by how he divides by the fact that when he starts like dividing up the ages of the internet he says the first one is the time in which people wanted information to be free. And what he's kind of saying by doing that is saying that was an infant stage of the internet. And obviously the natural evolution of the internet is for every single thing on it to become monetized. And because I also believe the internet should be every aspect of our lives, like this is a metaverse guy, like I think the internet should be involved aspect of our lives like this is a megaverse guy or a metaverse guy like i think the internet should should be involved in every aspect of life that means every

aspect of life should be financialized um and that's extremely radical but it does not sound that way when you describe it that way people's heads go over it but like what he's saying is deeply radical and i think also like again you want to talk about like the first the and not invented the personal computer, had a background as a phone freaker, literally robbing phone companies to get free phone calls and stuff. Most of the early internet pioneers were some kind of criminal.

And the early ages of internet content being monetized mostly started with people doing shit for free. That was how the people who made money on it. That's how all of my bosses and that's how fucking I got started was like, you would just start making shit and you would put it out for free. And eventually like that would get enough traffic that you,

you, you, you draw ads to you and whatnot and you'd make money. But it was always like all of the content that, that made the internet and all of the content creators who were huge now mostly started doing... Even it was just like throwing up videos on YouTube, right? Or like going

on... And that's less the case with the Zoomers now because a lot of them got started on things like Twitch where the idea is to, from the beginning, be trying to monetize yourself. And while you're like building a brand you're constantly monetized. But that's a really recent change. And I actually actually i find it kind of unsettling because that was i don't know it's a

mix because i'm certainly not of the i'm not of the of the mind that like if someone is asking you to do work you should be getting paid for it but if you are trying to if you are trying to like build a life as a creator the best way to do that creatively is to just make the things that you think are cool and then make like if other people like it, you make money like better things get made than that. Yeah. Like that is the way the best art gets made. I think there's a few things going on here because like the way I think like I think actually the reason why he frames it this way is because he's trying to get back to his idea of freedom. He describes the golden age of the internet being information flowing freely.

He thinks that the blockchain is a new version of that. So that's why he's framing it in this way. The second thing is in terms of artists and creators. If you think about when the early age of what he calls, we've kind of all been referring to it as the second era of when social media and content creation sites are a thing. Let's just use YouTube as an example. Because there was a low saturation in content, it was easier for someone to rise up and gain a platform. Let's say someone like Bo Burnham, right, who started as just a kid and now is a very popular comedian.

Yeah. burnham right who started as just a kid and now is like a very popular comedian yeah um but then youtube instead of backing creators like that um which they did a little bit but they did not as much they instead started uh like the thing that happened was like uh youtube really incentivizing sharing like late night content and sharing like like tv like clips of tv shows and like using like doing using legacy media on their platform and that's the things they really backed that's the things they really pushed into your feed it's like tonight show clips um so a lot of those original original content creators kind of got left behind and now are now like just their own are running on their

own personal brands some of them use patreon for example but it's also it's impossible to do this now because there's an oversaturation of content. The only thing that's done this recently is TikTok because it was a brand new platform. There was, again, a new opportunity for a lot of kids to gain a lot of audiences really quickly. I mean, I just, based on what you're saying, I think that TikTok is the closest to how

cool shit happened on the internet before everything got fucked it because it is like you're not starting from like everyone starts i guess knowing you could make money but that was the same way you start because you're like you're doing a thing yeah and if that thing takes off then there's ways to monetize and like that yeah i think that's probably why it's part of why it's so popular generally growth on tiktok is pretty uh it's pretty organic it's not it organic. It's not boosted by big brands the same way stuff like YouTube is. Now, it's probably

going to be edging in that direction, but it's not there yet. And his argument in this is to get back to just being a small content creator, getting your stuff seen. His solution to this problem of YouTube and stuff backing these large late night shows and backing these large corporately funded things, his solution is that if you're a small content creator, you should sell yourself as an asset to other people on the internet, right?

So his whole idea is that he wants to get rid of the gatekeepers of the internet and go back to how the internet was, but his solution for doing that is just by selling you as a person brand to other people on the internet who are like tech bro investors. So that's why it's framed this specific way. So I think when we're all like talking about like, why does he describe it this way? What's all this weird stuff going on? It's because that's how he's rationalized it in his brain

is for how what he thinks being a free artist is. And he thinks this is going to be the new method to get there. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. There's another important sort of macro thing to think about this year, which is that the underlying basis of all of this, right, is the assumption that everyone is an entrepreneur is that you know like everyone is doing all of their stuff at all times because they want you know in order to be a business owner and this has been like you know this this has been the great ideological victory of the right in the last 50 years is that they convinced everyone that like every single person is you know like you're i mean it's

not even temporary embarrassed millionaire syndrome it's like even people who like are working jobs right like working wage labor jobs think of themselves as you know content creators and a content creator you know is is is a small business owner and this has an immensely coercive well i'll be coercive too but corrosive effect on you know anyone working together to do something because you know oh you're not you're not you you're not, you're not a worker. You're just like, you're a content creator. You're, you know, you're a small business owner. You're like, you know, you, what, and, and that's, you know, this, this is a very long running thing that a bunch of incredibly powerful people have been trying to do

really since like, I mean, arguably like the th mean arguably like the 30s but the the complete success of that and the way that you know they're they're selling exactly the same thing that they were selling in like the 80s but now it's this like you know you're trying to get people to do it to themselves and also they throw all of this like sort of nonsense tech jargon at you to get you to sort of like stop looking at the fact that this is just sort of you know this is this is this is just the the new even worse version of everyone being a worker who thinks that they're like you know also going to be a small business owner someday yeah i don't i don't have anything else really to say about it other than this, but like, I mean,

this was a good amount to say, I just think this is so, I think it's such an example of kind of the way in which the worst people in the world are trying to steer the internet. Um, and by steering the internet steer the soul of like the human race. Um, like this is a vision of the future.

This guy's sharing in this article that I isn't, isn't positioning itself as radical, but includes some like deeply radical ideas about how the world should go. And by the way, I should also note that he's also just like blatantly wrong. Every time he brings up a number, like he taught, he points out in this article that 46 million Americans own cryptocurrency.

The real number is more likely about 21 million kind of at most, like by every credible, I have no idea where he's getting 46 million Americans own cryptocurrency. And again, this the stat just came out. And that's part of his argument is that like, obviously, people love the blockchain and these tokens and like this is this is inevitably going to get more and more popular. And when when again the reality is that every real thing that's happening on the on the blockchain is pretty much versions of a security scam that the government has just announced they're going to finally start regulating but yeah i want to so the the stat the study that just came out today was that uh analysis of 6.1 million trades of like 4.7 million NFTs. It shows that the top 10% of

traders were responsible for 97% of trading, which again is more evidence that all that's happening is people boosting prices. Also the average, the vast majority, like more than 90% of NFT sales are for less than $200. Some of them are for just pennies. The stuff that you're hearing about is all ridiculous outliers and it's outliers specifically because people are pumping stuff up in order to try to is based entirely upon like numbers that are either bad or he's or he's deliberately using he's deliberately lying about the numbers because there is no credible number evidence i've ever heard that 46 million americans currently own cryptocurrency or even have ever owned cryptocurrency yeah and i think the other kind of nail in the coffin for this idea and why I don't think it's going to catch on the same way these guys think it does.

And this is something he acknowledges in the article, is like, not a lot of people know how the stock exchange works. Like, very, like, he says, I think it's like, I don't know, like, I forget what number he says, but he says, like, not tons of people actually use or know what the stock exchange is. And the reason why Patreon was so successful and why it's so useful for content creators is because it's a very intuitive system. It's very clear how it works.

It's clear what you're doing. There's no really questions about where your money is going or what's happening. I don't think this whole personal investment thing is ever going to actually go off because people don't understand what the blockchain is, and it's too much work to explain it to them um yep and just because of how much work it is to wrap your mind around like so where is my money going what do i have to set up how does that work that's way too much of a headache because in order for this to actually work you need this to break out of the tech bro bubble or else this is just going to be this small tech bro thing of people handing over the same $100 to all their friends in a circle,

which is what it is currently. And in order to break out of that circle, they need to get, you know, your grandmother to learn what crypto is and how blockchains work. And that's not going to happen. So I think that is the one other nail in the coffin for this type of idea. It's like, Patreon

is easy. Patreon makes sense. This thing, it is not nearly as intuitive for supporting a youtuber you like yeah oh okay cool i actually found evidence on where that 46 million americans number comes from yeah so basically number one i found like a fucking crypto news source pointing out that like when uh people started tweeting that 46 million americans is based on a study which we'll talk about in a second but like when people started tweeting that 46 million Americans is based on a study, which we'll talk about in a second. But like when people started tweeting about this, like the immediate response in the Bitcoin subreddit was like, well, that's not fucking possible. Like one of the people in the

Bitcoin subreddit said sounds very high. I don't know a single person who owns it. And this says one in six or seven people own it. Yeah. And and it comes from a study conducted in january by the new york digital investment group uh surveying a thousand participants with incomes over fifty thousand dollars so that that seems valid wait they just said it's over 50 this okay this method yeah this this you'll get a few like pew released a study suggesting that like 16% of Americans have used cryptocurrency at some point. And like all of what's coming out is kind of sketchy. All of the data, there's like reasons to be kind of unsettled about it. But also like one of the things that Pew study showed is that the vast majority of Americans have heard of cryptocurrency and most haven't used it.

Like the vast majority have not chosen to get involved. Like however accurate you think this is. Like there's another article coming out that came out in I guess May of this year that's based on a Gemini study, which is Gemini is a crypto exchange, that over 50 million Americans are likely to buy crypto in the next year, which doesn't seem to have happened. Like, I just don't see there's all sorts of like weird little studies commissioned by weird little groups. But it it it really doesn't. It seems like it's it's, again, kind of part of the grift. Like, I'm not seeing a lot of rigor in any of this.

Anyway, whatever. We've talked enough about this shit i just i think we all as soon as we read the article we're so like appalled by it that well we should probably talk about lights on for nocturnal tales from the shadow join me danny trails and step into the flames of right an anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso

as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking.

It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards.