The Invisible Economy - Bea Ramos, Sparrow Read

next up we have the invisible economy how do you make it visible why is it invisible in the first place what's an economy what does that word even mean we're going to get all those answers and more from bay and sparrow how are you all doing today good very good very good awesome awesome really excited to have you all on and uh i'll just let you all take it away thank you all right so let's try to do it in 15 minutes we we don't do deadlines and constraints anymore but we'll try uh so we're dada and tana for those of you who don't know it's a it's a it's a it's a platform that allows people to speak to each other through drawing and everything that you see there is every panel is made by a different person and um and so we are beautiful community of people who are doing everything they're doing on the platform just driven by intrinsic rewards and so um so you have artists making art but we also do all kinds of things outside the platform and it's all intrinsically uh motivated so what we needed to figure out is how do you actually monetize uh a community like this so we got into blockchain of four or four years ago right before all the nfts uh were called nfts and um and then we started really working seriously about how to do this uh so sparrow you wanna you wanna say anything about what is the invisible economy about yeah so i think that the biggest problem that we've tried to solve is we have a community already of people who are operating only through intrinsic motivations and how do you add money into that equation without killing the intrinsic motivations of of the people that are already there um and that's sort of the the the nut that we had to crack um and really understand how all of this stuff works and how it fits together and how we can protect what we already have on data and it's been a really amazing journey because what we found through the working groups is just the way people operate on data drawing through intrinsic motivations and sharing their talents and the value that they create through their drawings has been the same process that has happened in our working groups we'd have three working groups a week some would run hours at a time and yet everyone turned up voluntarily contributing their ideas their insights um yeah we have an amazing group of people now and so so so the thing is that we are leaving the invisible economy so we published a paper uh last year and uh then we decided well we can't just hire people and do this we need to define the invisible economy by living it and this is where the this uh sense making sessions come come into play uh and the the thing is that we realized we thought that the the reason why dada was such a healthy beautiful community so collaborative is because uh people were making art and an environment that was created in data was defined in how people uh was behaving because environments drive behavior but then when we started work with the working groups we realized that it felt the same even in this like zoom links and we felt the same in the chat as well um we in the chat this is a an analysis that massimo did about the the words on our chat which can have 600 messages in a day and it makes sense that the the sentiment is positive that the it's a it's a chat about an economy and yet uh the first uh thing is art the the most used word is art artist and um and so just like in dada in which we don't have any it's completely open the chat is open the working groups are open anyone can join um we don't have any trolling or bullying on data the same way we don't have any chilling on our chat we don't have conflict we don't have people we go really deep into things um but yet and we disagree a lot of times but there is no conflict we just go deep and work it out and listen to each other so we wanted to understand what is it then that is that is making this possible and it comes back to the focus on the people um the thing that i find consistent across data as the as a platform for art and the working groups as a platform for ideas and the chat as a platform for interacting is the connections between people so we show up as people experiencing each other and responding to each other and valuing each other and i think that is the the bed of what the the beautiful things that that we've come that have come out from the invisible economy that's sort of the the fertile ground that's the seed bed that allows everything else to grow um yeah and so so it's interesting like for people to understand what we're asking people to just contribute to this help us uh come up with you know governance and this new system and this details and and so much work and so much time spent and yet people come to us and and it's like thank you thank you for allowing me to to be part of this right and and really really sorry it's it's really groundbreaking work too right we're doing things and thinking about things that haven't been tried before so it's not like it we're just taking some recipe and following it we're actually coming up with all of this together no one knows the answer we're working it out together and that's a very special magic also yeah so let's go i don't know how much time we have but i try to go quick through the like the actual difference between the korean markets and uh what we're doing so if you go back for a second the the main thing about the visual economy is that uh intrinsic motivations when you replace them by extrinsic rewards expected strengths and rewards like money they disappear or they diminish or sometimes just completely are completely gone so the environmental economy is basically the radical separation of in our case art but anything that we do for based on interesting motivations from the market all of the things that are visible in a market become invisible all of the things that are invincible in the market become visible so let let's just go quickly to see for people to to see so in a market let's say there are a market the traditional market you have artists and you have collectors uh artists already start with a with a disadvantage because the artists actually don't have the same bargaining power because the artist needs to sell to buy food to base rent while collectors don't have to and so it's already starting in a disadvantage point and then happens is that the way markets work is a bunch of artists are competing with each other against each other to sell stuff collectors are competing against each other to buy the things that have more value and then the market is incapable of putting a value on anything that is not quantifiable so art in our case becomes quantifiable because becomes an ah because a commodity and it becomes um something that has value because it has scarcity so if the artist is dead it's better because then it can't produce any more art and so on so the way it works is that that price needs to be pushed up and so you have a bunch of intermediaries galleries creators the press everybody is participating in this system so that value for report because it's really price goes up and at some point there's a secondary market in which artists are not included and then collectors uh continue to make money out of extracting value from the artist so then blockchain comes along and we say oh this is the opportunity to give power back to artists let's change things and so what happens with the crypto and marketing is very evident today is that it's just the same thing the mechanics are the same the dynamics are the same the only difference is that they're saying well now they're not intermediaries but it's not really true but let's say there are intermediaries that's the only difference and then your you know we didn't say well now with the smart contracts we can actually assign royalties to artists so let's give only 90 to the collectors this time right so it's basically the same and so the one thing that blockchain has though that is amazing is that the possibility to launch a token because the the thing about tokens and this is why it's called the internet of value is because we can now replace price as the coordinator of the coordination method and have a token in its place that can actually uh account for value that couldn't be possible before that's what's called the internet but then what happens in the crypto space is that or in it in the crypto space in general is that they use they launch a token to attract people to their platform or to fundraise or they call it governance software but it really is another asset that also has a price that also is speculated on and it becomes used useless as a governance tool or as a community building tool and so the environment that we have here is basically an environment of competition scarcity and speculation the incentives are all extrinsic and all quantitative quantitative so we put numbers next to people with uh reputations and you know rankings in leaderboards and so on the outcome is actually the same as in their market which is few winners extreme inequality value extraction from artists is exactly the same and what it's out of the boundary the things that the market cannot account for their encounters and capable have accounted for intrinsic rewards the qualitative the uh um and the anything that is impactful so people always ask us well so how can we just bring more collaboration like how but it was if you can't because this environment is actually proven tons of research and evidence that it makes us less collaborative more competitive more selfish less ethical more prone to cheating and and so on so um so what do we do what is uh the difference with uh what we're doing at sparta if you want to take it from here yeah so i guess you know the the way to start ex imagining the invisible economy is we know that those outcomes that we've identified from the traditional art market and the current crypto art market were not the outcomes that we wanted to have we wanted the collaboration we wanted to value the intrinsic side of things so we knew that we couldn't have the same system um and in fact in order to get the opposite outcomes we needed to do nearly the opposite of whatever so yeah that's probably my constraints right we don't have constraints anymore so we made we made the token invisible right it accounts for the value on the platform it accounts for the value of it that everyone contributes but it's not visible and we make those contributions the intangibles what's visible you want to show the next slide yes well basically our ground truth is the action in itself whatever you make a drawing on that that's the reward you're coding that's the reward you're contributing as a reward intrinsic reward for yourself and it's also the contribution to the community because it's a contribution to the commons and if the entire environment we don't need sanctions we don't need to vote we don't need to uh rules we don't need to have constitutions the entire environment we don't even need to do anything to build community is taking care of it by itself and the token represents the value that everyone is contributing and it's everybody's getting that reward uh as to honor the contribution yeah it it does mean that once the environment is set and we're really lucky that data already has that environment all of these things then become possible if you can imagine doing them doing something that hasn't been done before yeah so thank you if anyone wants to know more power data on twitter just give us a shot thank you so much thank you all so much for joining us data sounds awesome uh everybody check it out