- I’ve been told that the reason someone will do something without being paid with, you know — dollars and stuff, or some other sanctioned fiat currency — is because they themselves receive some kind of ‘psychic payout.’ When we’re paid to do something the traditional way, we feel recognition that we are valued enough that someone is going to exchange some “folding money” (as my dad used to call it) for a commitment of our time, intellect, creativity, muscle power, etc. The higher one is paid in folding money, the more we are signaled that we are valued. The more we are valued, the more we are meant to be content to do the job.
- A few weeks ago I had a call with a customer for my earnest little product company, OMATA. I figured there was an issue with their device, and genuinely hoped we could sort things out in a Zoom call. There are a few things I’m unable to do because circumstances are, well — constrained, let’s say. I get a cold feeling when I’m unable to do anything to sort out an issue but, well — I hold out hope. I remember this particular customer well — one of the first people to commit to the Kickstarter five years ago. We stay in touch every so often.
- Zoom did its ding-dong’d and we’re on the call and then it started, and didn’t stop for awhile.
- For the next 50 minutes of the 45 minute call, Shaun went through a detailed, deep UX and UI redesign he had done for the OMATA iOS App. Top to bottom. Figma boards. Maybe it was a Miro board, I can’t tell the difference half the time. In any case, they’d come up with a complete UI flow. Font redesign. Subtle adjustments to layout and changes in screen interaction dynamics. The whole smash. All deeply rationalized and explicated based on best practices and principles for designing an App. Which is what he does professionally.
- For the first 4 minutes a defensiveness percolated somewhere in my brain.
- You see, I had to build the App myself after a design & development agency pushed a napkin across the table with their proposed fee — $336,000 (including a discount). That may have been a fair bid. Seems a bit steep when your budget tells you you don’t have that kinda mazuma.
- (Plus, I suspect a bunch of that bid was for them to learn how to build this particularly tricky kind of App. It wasn’t just an App to show screens of data pulled from some data source, or any other fairly hygienic App type like photo sharing, messaging, or any of the 5 classic App archetypes. This App had to communicate to a piece of bespoke hardware over Bluetooth. As basic as that sounds, it’s actually a briar patch of gotchas, unknowns, and definitely an unknown number of unknown unknowns that equals cost creep.)
- My defensiveness during those first 4 minutes was all purely mine. I wanted to say to Shaun, “..do you have any idea how many all-dayers/all-nighters I spent in the winter of 2017 to actually get this to do anything at all, never mind luxuriating on color and font choice? Do you have any idea that this was the first time I wrote an App that anyone besides myself would have to use? Do you? Eh? Hmm?”
- I stepped back in my head and, well — basically stopped listening to the specifics of what Shaun was presenting and just floated in the warm bath of a feeling that, holy crap — someone is presenting something to me that’s super helpful and creative and thorough and they’re excited and they did this..cause they want to.
- From the perspective of experience, Shaun’s presentation and design boards represented many tens of thousands of dollars of UI design and application architecture. It was as if I commissioned one of those small, earnest agencies that sprung up around the “UI/UX Design” idiom and, well — this here was our first design review.
- For the next 46 minutes, I stayed still and quiet. I was luxuriating in the moment. Someone wanted to spend their time without being asked, and do this work without being paid, at least not in fiat currency. Psychic coin? Wanting to bring meaningful contributions to something he believed in? What’s going on here?
- Wait.
- Before you try to answer, here’s another one.
- Back in 2018 that App I wrote that was going to cost $336,000 (including a discount) but instead I had to learn how to build an App and write it myself?
- Well, because I wrote it, it had a bug. What a surprise. It worked 93% of the time, but 7% of the time this intermittent bug would appear that was annoying. But by then, working 93% of the time was fine because there was so much else I needed to focus on — like production issues resulting in trips to Finland with 3 days notice; getting the website going; bad hires; taking out the trash; sales, right — sales.
- I had a stock reply — a little macro — I could trigger in the Zendesk support system reply field to provide a work-around which was frustrating and simple at the same time: essentially it was a convoluted way of saying — ‘Try again.’ I was playing the odds that the next time you’d be in the “93% bucket” and it would work. That along with an explanation that the only person in the backyard garage studio that constituted Global HQ who could address the issue was busy with some other task and was also me, although some of the time I put the blame on ‘Edgar’ — who conveniently doesn’t exist and thus was happy to do a myriad of things, including taking blame for delays in shipping, bungled mass emails, bad coffee, etc.
- Then Pepijn came along. Unlike ‘Edgar’, Pepijn actually exists. He lives in Belgium. He came along completely out of the blue with an offer to help look at the issue.
- “Let me take a look.”
- Sure. I gave Pepijn access to the Github and a few days later he came back in a Slack message and said, “I think I know what to do.” And then he started doing it. He was doing $200/hour master technologist iOS developer work for the equivalent in psychic coin.
- Working from Belgium in his free time (he has a normal, human job and on top of that a busy family life), I would wake up in the morning here in Venice Beach with a stream of Git commits popping up representing hours and hours of work he had done. On top of that, he enjoyed taking time explaining to me what he was doing and why — I was actually learning from him. It was more than code, and more than ‘work for hire’. This continued for many, many months — expanding beyond this particular bug to refactoring other components, creating some utilities that I use to this day for diagnostics, and taking ownership of the knowledge-transfer from the R&D team of the core firmware for the product. That last one was no small feat. And Pepijn did all this while continuing his regular job and tending to the needs of family.
- There was MH who came along from Australia (I think..) completely out of the blue and offered to write the Android edition of the App. In six weeks, with very light comms and effectively no need for being coddled, handled, or spindled — he was done.
- “Done. It’s ready!”
- It was done. It was ready. And, like Satoshi — he vanished into the ether. Seriously. He came. He conquered the non-trivial task of porting the iOS App to Android, and then with a digital salute — vanished like a fart in the wind.
- There’s the brothers Joni and Daniel who come along and make little “brand films” because it’s fun, I guess. (It actually is.)
- There’s the mysterious “R” who PayPal’d OMATA $300 to “help out” — I ended up adding it to the money to Joni and Dani who had some hard costs for renting some gear for their OMATA brand film.
- And not least but rather first, there’s Cary who banged on the door back in 2017 to run sales — and does so to this day, years later, even after I couldn’t pay him anything whatsoever.
- Psychic coin.
- What’s my point here?
- We might be on the edge of something with the percolating notion of the “Social Token”
- “What’s that?”, you may wonder as I wondered. And still wonder.
- I’m not entirely sure beyond the technical aspects. I made a few, so I suppose I have some idea of what it is from a mechanical perspective.
- But the etherial sensibility around being able to create a digital representation of one’s affinity for or contribution to the value of a social formation and its meanings, values, ambitions, goals.
- This may sound alien to you if you consider that fiat currency as being the only suitable exchange mechanic to represent value. Or values.
- And-or, this may sound futuristic to you if you can imagine a world — perhaps without even understanding it entirely — in which social formations create their own representations and rules around value, and where there are markets that allow for exchange across various tokens to/from others, and fiat, too.
- That described above exists today, although it feels like it’s from a moment in the near future.
-
Let’s say Pepijn — who refused any kind of value exchange at the time because he understood the circumstances — received 1000 $OMATA social tokens for his efforts. Is that meaningful? What does 1000 $OMATA become, and what can it become? Does it imbue him some psychic upside? Can he exchange it for something else, perhaps governance rights to that shape decision making? Or does it move him to the front of the queue for the (uniquely rare) product OMATA makes?
-
Does having $OMATA in the world signal something ineffable that has more meaning and character than OMATA would were it just a plain-old-fashioned C-Corp?
- I don’t know, to be honest.
- But it feels worth an experiment — a kind of probe into the near future from the present where I feel a strong motivation to build alternatives to the sometimes corrosive, often-always extractive intermediation mechanics and algorithms available for creating and sustaining communities with purpose.
- Social Token $OMATA