As humans we trust. We trust our friends. We trust our families. Through trust we gain so many things. From safety to advice which can change our fortunes.
When you trust someone with your heart you gain love. When you laugh freely you gain new relationships. When you trust you forego inhibition which only hold us back from new avenues and new experiences. Let’s call this freedom.
Freedom in where we go, the things we choose, the way we interact as per the desire and promises of democracy and liberation. All leading towards the supposed utopia of globalisation where all is equal, and all is fair.
Sounds amazing right?
Utopia pie turns to sh*t sandwich.
Tim Berners Lee, The inventor gave us the keys to global freedom. The opportunity to exchange information and more freely, widely and globally. In fact the internet should have been the foundation of a rapid rise to liberation and global democracy. The spirit of the internet was decentralised. We were empowered at that point to expose and share information and to trade as we wanted. At the heart of the internet there is no central authority. (No, GoDaddy is not the owner of the internet). There is no financial system at the heart of the internet.
However: over the last 25 years, since the internet was open to all, we lost our freedom. It was not taken. We stupidly gave it to Facebook and Google and Amazon.
The First Apple. Oooh a shiny, red apple.
As the old saying goes: “Nothing in life is free” or “If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.” Rather like poor old Snow-White. We all knew what was going to happen when we watched her take the apple from the “kind old lady”. She was hoaxed to eat a juicy, red, beautiful apple . A free apple. In return for living happily ever after. God she was stupid.
If the dwarves where at home they would have seen it and stopped her. Even the f**king birds could see it was a bad idea. But she shooed them away and invited the witch into her own home.
You see the truth is we are all like Snow-White. We ate the apple. Many apples. And through that the promise of the internet has faded and the power lies with the huge middle men feeding on our data, using human life stories as fuel to gain more market capitalisation.
In return we are now realising that we got friends we didn’t really want in the first place and stupid , stupid cat memes and adverts that get in the way of why we googled in the first place. We were duped. We had the chance for real freedom and we blew it. Or did we?
A Happy Ending?
Maybe snow-whites witch actually did her a favour as after all? You see without her near death experience she wouldn’t have woken up to her dreams. The Prince would have never come to find her and woken her with a kiss?
Maybe in the real world our witch and Evil Queen come in the very unlikely form of Alexander Nix. (The founder and now exCEO of Cambridge Analytica) and the big boys like Facebook and Google.
Saviour via a man who was capitalising from stealing millions and millions of life’s in the form of Facebook profiles and in regard to Facebook, Mark Z and his team cunningly using humans like blood diamonds in Sierra Leone.
For without the scandal of Cambridge Analytica fixing votes and without Trump claiming fake news we would in fact still live in blissful ignorance of humans a currency.
Enter the Prince. Enter Blockchain.
Blockchain is a technology based on the very foundations that humanity has evolved upon. The very promises that the internet offered from openness, freedom, accountability and altruism.
The middle men misused our trust for their self-gain. The they hide and own our data and transactions and manipulate us. To reference another legend of creative story telling: We never get to see the wizard behind the curtain. We never get to see our data. Nothing is transparent. Nothing is traceable. Like the brainy kid you sit beside when you doing your test in primary school. Except he has his bloody arm tightly curled around his paper so you can see the answers.. ( maybe that was just me!)
The blockchain is the very opposite. It offers light where there is dark. An open, distributed ledger of transactions which can never be changed. Which can never deceit and can never be taken down.
Instead of a central entity that records and ‘verifies’ transactions in whatever form they come in, The blockchain duplicates the ledger to millions of nodes (that are servers and peoples personal machines) around the world and they all have to verify that the transaction can be made. If everyone in happy, consensus is reached. The transaction is approved and the block is added to the chain.
No Fingers in the Till.
In the old world the central authority could, if they so wanted to, manipulate the transaction some way because that were the ones who owned the data. In the blockchain. Domain everyone has a copy like an enormous google document that everyone can read and write to but only when they have agreed it’s a valid one.
Once written to the blockchain transactions can never be deleted.. All protected not by a burly bodyguard but in fact cryptography of the highest order. Another piece of genius rather like the cryptex in the Da vinci code. Where if you tamper with it, it does not work. It’s transparent and completely traceable and Immutable.
Before I move on; There is only one small glitch. Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor. Although there are many theories about who “he/she’ is or ‘they’ are, 9 years later and remains anonymous.
That said in religion, billions around the world follow only stories. Has anyone you know ever met the man himself? Nope, didn’t think so.
A World of Mis-Used Trust
Blockchain is the foundational element of the next generation of computing. A new chapter based upon the very thing that humanity needs more than ever. Trust. Through the scandals that have ensued over the last years we the public have started to question everything. Fake News to Insurance PPI scams. Voting scams to bottles of perfume filled with poison. A chasm has started to open where trust has fallen victim. Brands and Consumers sit in the middle now aware of deceit now aware of our worth in the digital tunnels where data flows.
Blockchain is the foundation and the infrastructure but it needs more. For a start it needs “things” to track and record. These come in the forms of Coins or Tokens. For example, lets take the most famous one; Bitcoin/ Simply put: Bitcoin is a financial asset/application that is traded, transacted and recorded on the blockchain.
Tokens from the Fairground. Monopoly Money for all.
But there are many, many other coins and tokens. Terms often considered by many people as interchangeable, but refer to two completely different concepts. They are two different units created using cryptography and are jointly named cryptocurrency.
Coins store value over time, like a digital equivalent of money.
Tokens are digital assets, issued by the project/application that is trying to offer a service based upon the blockchain or alternative blockchains. A token can be used as a method of payment inside project’s ecosystem i.e perform the functions of digital asset or simply represent a share option in a company as a shareholder or maybe give access to the project’s functional and many more .
The Miners and the Workers.
For Blockchain to work it needs resources/ participants to provide the verification for consensus and them record to the blockchain. These are called Nodes which in turn are called “miners”. They all run the same algorithms which verify the transaction with other nodes but then solve an ingenious and very hard (processor and energy intensive) riddle/problem. If they solve it first, they get to add the block to the chain and in return they receive payment the form of bitcoin.
The Super Computer
Finally Ethereum. (Although I could go on and on as at last count there thousands of blockchain projects therefore resulting in thousands of Tokens and Coins and also alternative public and private blockchains) : Ethereum Is a public blockchain bundled with an application framework with the objective of providing an operating system which can run applications (called dApps) and Smart Contracts. Ethereum comes with it’s own crypto currency call Ether of which is used to purchase processing power.
A glimmer of hope in a broken world: But WTF does is mean for creativity?
Well Blockchain it’s not going to help with ideas, design new products, create a catchy strap line or conducted a memorable soundtrack / jingle. Creativity is human. It will always be our biggest strength. Creativity through imagination that evokes emotion is hard if not impossible to replace with any technology, now or in 50 years.
Blockchain offers solace to the problems the creative and media industry has fallen victim too. Greed and gain were too much to refuse and the middle man came in to capitalise. Sitting in-between the creative (artist) and the consumer. With that power comes secrecy and deceit and the result is the artist, the creative, is left near empty handed.
For the creative: Music, Art, Design, Ideas are the fruits of labour and often fruits of love. Not only is the middleman taking the main slice of the pie, Plagiarism like never before is upon us. Nothing is scarred unless it comes with a Getty watermark. And that hardly works! Either way the creative misses out.
Worse still, the middle man inevitably drive up prices. Overtime the consumer pays more and yet they claim “overheads and high competition” therefore they pay the artist less as the green eye monster grows within.
Blockchain to the rescue.
Serenity returns. For ease, lets group all the creative output, whether design, music, art etc.. as one for now and imagine a world where the tools to create an asset, whether music or digital design element was directly integrated to the blockchain.
Ownership and Distribution.
The result is the author of that asset is, at the source or origin, linked to the asset as the owner. Now imagine that they are in control of defining the usage rights, fees etc of their asset (as smart contract). A single click and it’s published and yet linked to the blockchain. The result: It’s traceable forever more.
Here onwards: whenever the asset is used it’s recorded on the blockchain. If there was a cost associated to the asset the user is notified and the author ( or authors ( take a band for example) receives payment. Not annually, monthly or weekly ( it takes 170 plays on average for Artists on spotify to paid $0.1) but in fact immediately.
I have the power (as He-Man once said)
Even better still: the power is with the artist. If it’s their birthday and they are feeling happy and generous they can give their asset away from free for just a a day. Maybe they are charitable? They can change the terms of the smart contract in one single place so that if the user is a registered charity; they can have the asset for free. No middle man. No bad oversized pinstripe suits.
See the blockchain empowers the artist like never before and platforms and solutions to do this are constantly emerging as I type..
“Trust me, I work in Media”
For the brands: the opportunity to actually see where your ad was placed will be a truly transparent experience. No more bulk purchase of media and no more lies about where the media house placed the ad. Because whether we like to think it’s honest now. It really isn’t. So the brand gets effectiveness through a new transparent world.
A New Playground.
The opportunity blockchain brings is more than just creative asset management, distribution and payment. The blockchain will enable new agency models and give the creative teams a new playground to create completely new products and services.
As awareness has grown and nothing can be hidden ( #metoo), the consumer demands to see the purpose and heart of the brand and the blockchain enables a way to put a brands heart on their sleeve.
It’s not about tweaking a company vision statement. It’s not just a campaign anymore to shout that a brand is honest and pure. It’t about products and services which are just that. Democratic. Open. Fair.
This is where the big opportunity is for the creative world. To shift dimensions. Think with altruism and to define new businesses, products and services on the blockchain.
A New Agency.
This is where is gets really exciting. The agency model is broken for many reasons. But to highlight a very obvious one: Agencies (and companies in general) have been built to bring the best people together in one place. They set up a company, get a few clients get an office and go hire the people that they need and all sit in the building together. Like a concrete brain.
Which is great in the old world where the problems agencies solved were in reason templated and we knew the dimensions. We knew the skills we needed day in day out. Secondly the competition for great people however hard it used to be, is extreme in todays world.
However to truly be a value add to clients the agency of the future must be able to tackle many types of problems and offer differing solutions.
If you are a holding company with vast amount of people, different skills and amazing resource management with zero politics in-between the various companies you buy. Then perfect. But we all know that is not happening anytime soon.
Over the past few months I have been working to solve what I call “Grid Intelligence”. Or what has been called in past “Wisdom of the Crowd”. Where we accept that:
1) the best minds and talent are spread across the world.
2) the best seem to have realised that going solo is a great thing and they can harness the gig-economy
3) the briefs we have today and the solutions the client want are much more varied and need different minds and backgrounds. Constantly.
From Concrete Brain to a Fluid Ecosystem of Creation.
The Blockchain offers the ultimate solution where Open Innovation can be harnessed from the crowd around the world. Where AI, based upon understanding the brief ( and a little human help!) can find the people you need. The blockchain puts a smart contract into the heart of the process to engage then right minds and reward the contribution from these historically unattainable minds. Through this we solve problems in different ways. Through this we could create a global creative reputation through contribution and consensus and through this brands and agencies could even start to share IP to be able to attract even more incredible minds.
Redemption
Finally. It’s not just about all the new startup and blockchain brains. I believe that the big boys have the chance to take seat in the confession box. To admit their failings and short comings and rearchitect that way in which they operate.
Go on Adobe. Do the right thing and get Photoshop to cut out the middleman. Go on Facebook, give us back control help us been rewarded for our data and in return we will give you our loyalty.
Take a look at Spotify. They have just bought MediaChain, a blockchain solution for assets with transparent transactions and provenance and immediate reward. This shows that they are considering a more open an transparent route forward. They are repentant. They could survive.
Very rarely do we get a second chance to make the world a better place so please don’t F*** it up again.
We need to remember the rules of new channels. As digital started to become a channel, the rule was never to ‘port’ a print campaign onto a webpage. Or worse still: we took entire business models and simply ported the bricks and mortar model of banking ( designed in the Victorian era) and put it on the internet!
Blockchain and creativity means creativity at every level of business.
So go on, take another apple. Think about it. Give it a clean. Take a bite. This one promises a little more. However just take one more look at the old lady who gave it to you. Can we trust Satoshi Nakamoto when we don’t know who he is? Or maybe that does not matter. The Dwarves looked after snow-white after all.
They were her network.
Her guardian.
We have BlockChain.
Ben
Founder : Bull in a China Shop
He-Man had the power.