The Internet is changing the economics of creative work – or, to put it more broadly, the economics of culture – and it’s doing it in a way that may well restrict rather than expand our choices. Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it’s created by amateurs rather than professionals, it’s free. And free trumps quality all the time.
Different from the typical website whose URLs act as persistent indexes to a page and its contents, Tokenize This destroys each work right after its creation. While the unique digital object remains viewable by the original visitor for as long as they leave their browser tab open, any subsequent attempt to copy, share, or view that URL in another tab, browser, or system, leads to a “404 Not Found” error. In other words, Tokenize This generates countless digital artifacts that can only be viewed or accessed once.
There’s a movement called the circular economy which is about designing services that don’t include throwing things away. There is no “away.”
A non-extractive economy is going to look very different to today’s economy. These points feel opposed somehow but they are part of the same movement:
With CupClub, it’s all about infrastructure.
With the battery-free Game Boy, it’s untethered from infrastructure: once manufactured, no nationwide electricity grid is required to play.
We’ll need better tools to track and measure. There will be new patterns for new types of services. New technologies to build new products. New language. So it’s fascinating seeing the pieces gradually come together.
Normally after the design was built, you would find places for the art to be located and then you would go out and select the artist that you wanted. That is historically, the traditional way to go.
But this time, someone else was calling the shots. A planning official, basically, who comes along and says, “We want you guys to work with an artist.” And the architects are like, “Sure of course.” But then the official goes—“No, you don’t quite understand. We want you to use an artist as a co-equal member of the design team.” That is, the artists are going to have just as much control as the architects. It was really unheard of.