What is the Ownership Economy?

Ranting on the prospects of a Creator Economy Middle Class

Just as crypto re-branded as Web 3.0 to sound more legit, the passion economy is now being called the “ownership economy”.

This is a paradigm where the Creator Economy emerges in a more decentralized way where they can actually own their stuff. I never was able to migrate my 23k Medium followers, so why is that? What about migrating my 209k followers on my A.I. Newsletter on LinkedIn? Nope. These platforms own me and even my labor down the years.

How the personal brand evolves into the Metaverse and through this weird tunnel called Web 3.0 means that things need to change.

If my 208,000 LinkedIn followers are just numbers, and I don’t own all that networking grit and hours of labor, we need something just a bit more fair.

If my “passion economy” earns me not enough to live on with inflation, we also have a problem. The Creator Economy is for the most part dragging us through the mud.

Lin Ji is a Creator Economy evangelist I really like to follow, she has a podcast of Nathan from Every.to. The Podcast is called Means of Creation. It’s there that I was trying to find out how they see the “ownership economy” evolving.

You can go to 2:20 of this video:

Lin Ji also writes for a16z’s Future. Lin Ji’s strength is not content though, it’s venture capital, especially around the Creator Economy. She was featured in the NYT in the Fall of 2021. She is one of the co-founders of Variant.

Jesse Walden raised this fund alongside investor Li Jin, who tells TechCrunch that she has joined Variant as its third general partner, merging her firm Atelier Ventures with Variant after deploying the entirety of her own creator economy-centric debut fund. Passion to ownership, well kinda.

Even the VC of the Ownership economy aspect of the Creator Economy is now leaning hard into the Web 3.0 narrative. This is also thanks to NFT hype generated in 2021 and huge liquidity generated by the Fed’s massive QE that began in March of 2020. The various “pyramid schemes” of the Creator Economy passion workers, are being very molded by following the money.

This is why Meta is so crazy now about copying and cloning the early success of Roblox into the architecture of Horizon Worlds. Roblox keeps an absurd amount of the profits from their child-labor gaming scheme. You know, as they “teach the kids to code”. Just look at what ByteDance has done to the global teens as TikTok has evolved. Some of them are Creators that can found their own indie media empires and Creator talent companies.

The problem is this “ownership economy” is still very immature in 2022. Certainly if you are talented on YouTube, you can make a living. On most other “platforms”, not so much.

Variant “believe next-generation networks will grow bigger, faster because they are owned and operated by users.” Some of us on Substack are indeed hoping this is the case. Many of the writers I grew up writing alongside on LinkedIn and Medium have established significant Newsletters on Substack. Since they appear on Substack’s leaderboards they sort of grow automatically.

Variant partners with founders at the earliest possible stages. It’s $110 million fund is decent.

a16z who backs the likes of Coinbase and OpenSea, understand well how to align the “Creator Economy” and “Ownership Economy” with Web 3.0 hype and FOMO that triggers a somewhat reluctant and individualist GenZ who are always looking for rat-race hacks and side-gigs. So whether its Every.to or something else, you can almost sense their stamp on things. The branding has zing and the narrative has swag. They have entire teams molding these things. This is really about the advent of the synthetic personal brand. It’s almost like South Korea K-pop culture meets Web 3.0 ideology.

In the future of media and the future of the internet, it’s also just very amusing to follow.

It doesn’t stop there though. a16z is also cloning Y-combinator, and it’s called START.

You can read more about it here:

https://a16z.com/2022/04/18/introducing-a6z-start/

How a16z corners the Web 3.0, Ownership Economy, and genomics and biotechnology is going to be fun. It’s also going to fan new flames in the decentralization debate of centralized ownership. Money and talent wins in American Capitalism, the game is rigged. Venture Capital is also rigged against the ethical superiority of women, for the profit motive of the dominant male VC leaders and bro-culture. It’s heavily entrenched, so it’s glass ceilings and pyramid schemes, if we are going to be honest.

That’s not to say that much of the Ownership Economy isn’t good. It’s at least a step forward.

Jin and Walden overlapped during their time at Andreessen Horowitz, and, despite considerably different founding theses for their solo GP firms, found plenty of shared interest as they deployed their respective funds during the pandemic. The ownership economy is highly collaborative and more about social networks. This is why social media like Twitter and LinkedIn feel vaguely relevant to the Creator Economy.

“We realized that there was quite a bit of overlap and convergence in the themes that we were investing against — we, the passion economy, and Jesse, the ownership economy,” Jin told TechCrunch in an interview. “We co-led several deals together, we co-invested in several deals together, and it just became quite clear that the two theses were two sides of the same coin.”

Jin Li is diversifying her bets, and picking her battles and focus. We don’t really know what she becomes yet. In the future of Capitalism it may be that the Creator Economy as it looks today best exemplifies a world of winners and losers, the middle class hardly and barely exists. This has not been lost on Jin Li and it’s a notable problem for users. Uh sorry, I mean “Creators”.

At 2:40 of the “Ownership Economy” podcast video Jin Li admits a “lot of the terminology is under development”. This implies not just a quickly shifting Web 3.0, but a game of thrones even about the narrative that we are spun and what is marketed to the masses.

As member of the Creator Economy impoverished (the lowest caste in Web 3.0 decentralized citizens), I guess my question is what is the ownership model look like if I’m just a pawn in an VC game?

I don’t think anyone will ever tell me. I might just have to suffer in silence, and alone. Either way I do wish people like Jin Li well and will try to keep some ears to their podcasts moving forwards out of humble reader interest. (You’re biased Mike!).

TechCrunch says about Jin Li:

Jin has cultivated an outsized presence in the tech investor community in the past couple of years, building up her reputation for spotting trends in the creator economy space. She spent nearly four years at Andreessen Horowitz helping the venture giant source deals, before leaving last summer to start Atelier Ventures. Jin officially launched the $13 million fund this past February, though she had been writing checks throughout much of 2020. Throughout 2021, Jin has grown more outspoken in her views that technologies born out of the blockchain, like NFTs, may be the key to the next generation of creator monetization tools.

More outspoken about the ownership economy, you don’t say? Because those passions are bringing us next to nothing.

If you want to support me so I can keep writing, please don’t hesitate to give me tips, a paid subscription or some donation. With a conversion rate of less than two percent, this Newsletter exists mostly by the grace of my goodwill (passion for A.I. and the Creator Economy) & my own experience of material poverty as I try to pivot into the Creator Economy, haha.

If you want to get my Creator updates, you can read the current issue here to hear what I am up to. You will notice on my home page of AiSupremacy, I have more interactive features on the right-hand margin.

Thanks for reading and have a good weekend!