Dapper Collectives — DAOS For The People.
I often get asked what I do, it’s not easy to answer because well, I do a lot things. The main thread through all of them is building better futures for creative people. That’s what I’ve spent more than six years doing at Brud and what my team and I continue to do now as Dapper Collectives.
At Brud we were defining the future of “spatial computing.” That term has lost out to the more popular “Metaverse” now, but the visions are directionally the same. Brud believed in a future where narrative and celebrity could be utilized to bring us all together. We live in a present where more and more issues are global, scary, and complicated, and they demand narratives and personalities that can engage around these things with relatable messages and at scale. That’s why we created Miquela, Blawko, Bermuda, Cain and the rest of the Brud Universe. The allegories that our characters engage in have been deeply entertaining and inspiring for a generation in ways that X-Men comics and Pokemon video games were for me as a young person. It has been one of the great joys of my life to take a crazy idea and turn it into an organization that has touched tens of millions of young people.
That said, we were building in an era that was deeply challenging for creative people and organizations. We set out to address as many of those challenges as we could by:
- Developing characters that enabled creators to share their talents through vehicles that protected them from the terrors of being a public figure.
- And optimizing their talents by partnering them with other creatives that could complement their skillset and share their collective output via a virtual talent.
That meant better outcomes for songwriters, actors, engineers, visual artists, directors, producers, screenwriters, etc. etc. It made for many magical moments, but at the same time, we couldn’t help but notice that we couldn’t escape the same challenges that all creative people and organizations faced in the Web2 era.
Those challenges weren’t limited to but included these 4 major issues:
- The business models of the dominant media platforms of our time (Instagram, Youtube, Spotify, TikTok, Etc.) extract most of the value that creative people produce. Leaving creative people fighting for scraps, and unable to sustain their practices.
- Media has traditionally been valuable because it was scarce. The internet made it instantly reproducible and removed its scarcity. While this allowed almost anyone to engage with most media — a thing most creators loved — It also destroyed traditional media business models and left creative people starving.
- As a result media creators have been forced to sell anything but their media, meaning the most successful creators are not necessarily the best media creators but the creators that most successfully sell their audiences’ attention to other brands and/or tangential products they’ve created.
- The current structure of media organizations prevents employees and contributors from maximizing their dynamic and wide ranging talents, instead forcing them to specialize and crank out the quantity in the hopes that their output would capture attention and dollars.
Insert “Crypto Fixes This” joke here.
My interest in crypto started more than 8 years ago. The idea of digital money prodded at ideas that had been formed in the socio-anarchist circles of my youth: cooperatives, time banking, all things Graeber. Crypto seemed like a technology worth riffing on with other nerds, but an impossibility. Something that would live as an inside joke but never really break through.
And then it did. And then Ethereum launched and it broke my brain.
With the emergence of general purpose blockchains the appeal shifted from nerds riffing on digital money to actual programmable money. At the time I was thinking a lot about how programmable media radically changed my world (Mp3s, Napster, Etc.) and how programmable money would radically change finance, and potentially many other fields. What soon became clear was that general purpose blockchains were incredible coordination technologies! An opportunity to coordinate people around ideas or causes that were important, and to incentivize people to create more value for others instead of needlessly extracting for themselves. The utopian whitepapers and fantasies began to consume me and speak to problems for which there were no traditional solutions. Then slowly but surely the ideas in these utopian whitepapers began to be realized by ambitious teams like the teams behind CryptoKitties, Maker, and Uniswap. It was becoming clearer every day that blockchain and now “Web3” could potentially solve those intractable issues I’d been dancing around for years in trying to make the world better for creative and innovative people. It could also solve the pain points we had at Brud, and if we could solve our pain points then so could anyone else who was making media for a living.
Now we just needed to prove it was doable, and that meant Brud Inc. needed to become Brud DAO. To do that we needed to build a stack of media dao “legos” that would enable Brud or any person or organization to do what myself and the team envisioned.
And that’s what we’re doing.
Dapper Collectives is making DAOs mainstream by focusing on media creators and organizations, or as we like to call them “storytellers.” That’s because we see all of us as storytellers. Today we not only live our lives, we write our autobiographies in real time. Our stories are distributed across social media, with video, images, audio and text. We see Miquela as a super storyteller, someone just like you but with a team and resources to enrich those stories. By creating tooling that enables everyone to monetize their creative output and to incentivize others to join them in creating better work, we think we can build equitable futures for innovators and the people who contribute to these organizations. We also think we can showcase how anyone who creates can solve those 4 big problems mentioned above:
- The business models of the dominant media platforms extract most of the value that creative people produce. The take rate of Web2 platforms become your opportunity. Collective ownership means shared upside. People making great things together, win together.
- Media has traditionally been valuable because it was scarce. NFTs enable media to be both individually ownable and universally accessible. The impossible has been realized, information can be free and creators can be compensated.
- As a result media creators have been forced to sell anything but their media. With DAOs enabled by Dapper Collectives you will be making media and selling media. With contributors being compensated alongside the DAO treasury so that you can continue to improve what it is that you do.
- The current structure of media organizations prevents employees and contributors from maximizing their dynamic and wide ranging talents. DAOs enable a modular work culture, that means contributors can plug in to different DAOs as they’d like and contribute their skills for compensation. Put all your talents to use.
The best way to build tools that actually work is to make them work for ourselves. So we’re starting with Brud DAO. We’ll be dogfooding our tools and getting it very right and very wrong in public. We want other creators to learn alongside us so they can get it right the first time.
Below you’ll see the first slide I ever made to explain what a Brud DAO could look like to investors and employees. It’s changed dramatically since then but it can inform what to expect.
While the full docs and tokenomics are coming soon, what’s important to understand now is that we’re building legos that will work for every creative person or organization.
Anyone or any group that does any of these things:
- Dreams up creative ideas
- Produces them as media
- Markets that media
- Sells that media
If you or a group of people do any of those things you will now have the tools to democratically source and align on the best ideas, incentivize the best producers to realize those ideas, incentivize your community to market those realized productions, and to sell those realized productions with funds flowing back to the people that worked on them and your organization’s treasury for use at a later date.
We are creating primitives that should inspire any creative person to take our work and fork it as they see fit, we can imagine major news outlets, virtual celebrities, and high school basketball stars using the model in very similar ways. The options are endless and we’ll be collectively learning A LOT together.
So standby as we get ready to ship the Dapper Collectives software that will power Brud DAO as well as YOUR DAO on Flow.
Follow us @_collectives_ and stay tuned for updates.
Have a very weird 2022 and thanks for reading.
Trevor
