(2021-11-04) Surprise! The Future Of Media Involves A Cryptobased Popularity Contest

Surprise! The Future of Media Involves a Crypto-Based Popularity Contest. I asked my followers to help me win a popularity contest. It’s called the Write Race, and despite the name, it doesn’t involve much writing. Though contestants have the option to write a couple sentences about what they will do if they win, it’s mostly a winkingly dystopian game of clout, with the end goal of being voted into a mysterious online community called Mirror.xyz.

Once voting wraps up for the day, Mirror tweets out a list of ten winners who made it to the “finish line.”

Their reward? A digital token granting access to a unique subdomain on a publishing platform where writers can earn cryptocurrency for their prose.

On one level, Mirror is a simple blogging platform like Substack or Medium. But it also offers an ever-expanding suite of crowdfunding tools made possible by blockchain technology that pushes the act of raising money on the Internet into psychedelic new shapes

So far, quite a few projects on Mirror have very little to do with writing at all

But a handful of writers have already used the site to generate jaw-dropping sums of money in one fell swoop—often on surprisingly heady subjects, and sometimes before they even put pen to paper.

Unless you’re a crypto fanatic, it’s easy to see Mirror as a kind of niche, crypto-driven amalgam of platforms like Substack and Patreon and Kickstarter—with more steps

founded by former Andreessen Horowitz crypto partner Denis Narazov in 2020—had secured an undisclosed investment from Union Square Ventures, among other early backers, at a $100 million valuation.

Officially speaking, the purpose of the Write Race is to allow existing community members to have a say in who gets to be a part of it: Past winners get 1000 votes to throw around during every Write Race; everyone else starts with only 10. While not exactly egalitarian..

The fight for a living wage is important to Dena Yago: She now works as the co-founder of Applied Arts, a creative agency focused on exploring more equitable labor conditions for artists. So when a friend told her about Mirror, she decided to try using it to fund a long-form essay, on a topic near and dear to her heart. She’d recently posted a Twitter thread about how R.J Cutler’s 2021 Billie Eilish documentary, The World’s a Little Blurry, felt like “the perfect object lesson in affect theory,” and wanted to expand on it in a 6,000 to 8,000-word piece.

The amount she raised for the essay—the equivalent of $27,000 at the time and now more than $46,000—was more than a performative proof of concept for the idea that cultural criticism has more value than our media overlords tend to let on. It also enabled her to realize every aspect of the project on her own terms, hiring an editor, a visual artist, and a researcher and donating a portion of the funds to a creative writing and mentoring organization called WriteGirl.

“I'm not totally naive—most of the people participating in cryptocurrency probably don't share the same values as me,” said Alioto, who has done work organizing freelance writers.

In weeks that followed, my successes and failures in moving up the leaderboard proved about as arbitrary as they are in real life—and as contingent on who you know.

Mirror revealed it was opening up its entire battery of tools, including blogging, for everyone to use—not just winners of the Write Race. In a move that recalled non-crypto predecessors like Substack and Patreon, it also announced that it would also be taking a 2.5 percent fee on all economic transactions. (2021-10-05-PublishingOnMirrorIsNowOpenToAll)

The news didn’t mean that the Write Race was going away: Winners would enjoy the ability to create a unique subdomain, along with a degree of decision-making power in the community that Mirror has yet to explain.

Jarrod Dicker, a venture capitalist in the crypto space who previously worked as the vice president of innovation and commercial strategy at The Washington Post, is probably the closest thing the community has to a resident media critic. In addition to being an early investor in Mirror, he’s the co-founder of a collective called Dark Star that has been using the site to pen a number of heady essays about the intersection of the media business, the creator economy, and Web 3—often while leveraging Mirror’s own tools as an object lesson, alongside colorful references to pop culture and rock & roll.

As someone with a background in the news business, Dicker said he doesn’t see Web 3 subsuming the traditional media industry any time soon. But he does think the space opens up avenues of revenue, like NFT sales and crypto-based crowdfunding, that even legacy publications could tap into. He also believes that sites like Mirror have the potential to lay the foundation for a new, more community-driven kind of media ecosystem, driven by enthusiastic and supportive niches of fans.

Where the advertising-driven business model of digital media typically requires publications to prioritize coverage that will garner as many pageviews as possible, writers on Mirror can earn money simply because a small and engaged group of patrons is passionate enough about a project to put their money behind it. (patronage)

Of course, not every writer is a good fit for a model that obliges them to consult with, or even defer to, their patrons. When it comes to creativity, the most desirable kind of benefactor is sometimes just a benefactor.

There are other potential barriers to entry. Even without having to go through the Write Race, familiarizing oneself with the technological aspects of crypto can be a time investment that many freelance writers simply don’t have.

As Alioto put it, “The demographics in emerging tech probably privilege the same people that the tech world privileges—probably more white, more male, have some seed funding to already play around with.”

while you technically don’t have to compete in order to use Mirror anymore, the Write Race is more popular than ever: As of this writing, the queue is roughly 21,500 users long. Maybe that’s a testament to the cleverness of the idea as a kind of twisted publicity stunt—like a new restaurant in town, there’s no better advertising than a line outside your door. Or maybe it’s something deeper than that: Maybe it’s a sign that people are looking for an excuse to drop out of the Internet as we know it, even if they don’t know what things will look like on the other side.