A Creator’s Mecca

Cancel culture.

It’s rife.

I see it everywhere.

One example I remember from a while back, which resonate’s a lot more now, was that of Pete Evans.

He’s an Australian Chef.

In a podcast I listened to he explained his journey, and how every year he would visit the US, touring the same set of TV shows.

Then one year, he got a call, “we just can’t have you back on, sorry.”

And that was it…

Shut out.

No explanation.

After years working for them, he was edged out, and if memory serves me it was nothing more than a daytime TV slot rustling up a couple of yummy dishes.

What happened?

He confessed he never found out…

And doubted that would change.

The truth is, the point here is to shine a light on the incentive structure, rather than the specifics.

Was it the producer that didn’t like him?

Was it the broadcaster that didn’t like him?

Was it the advertisers that didn’t like him?

As a Chef he had started exploring the impact of a whole food diet, the negative side-effects of refined sugars, and the nefarious antics of the processed food giants.

He was asking questions.

And the status quo didn’t like it.

So enough was enough.

They cancelled him.

He confessed this started happening more and more, as his views became less and less mainstream, slowly being pushed to the fringe’s of the Celebrity Chef TV world.

Interesting.

What threat does having someone with alternative views have when cooking up a storm on daytime TV?

Truthfully, I can’t answer that.

We will never know.

But to hammer home the incentive, it’s clear to me, those paying the bills in the world of traditional TV call the shots.

Advertising revenue is the lifeblood.

Piss off your customers and you don’t have much of a business…

Changing gears, let’s look at another example.

No longer is it necessary to break into the traditional TV world, depending on production companies, and large broadcasters for survival.

You can be your own broadcaster…

Instagram.

Twitter.

YouTube.

Whatever your social media platform of choice, anyone with a smart phone, can be posting content of their own in just a few minutes.

Powerful.

Very powerful.

But what is the incentive structure here?

Quickly, we find ourselves in a similar place, with survival dependent on selling adverts.

Misbehave, in the eyes of the platform, and they’ll cancel you in a flash.

Indeed, in the last couple of years I’ve had friends YouTube channels blocked, Twitter accounts frozen, and Instagram’s shadow banned.

Twitter, pre-Musk, even cancelled the President of the US Donald Trump…

Anyone is fair game should they step out of line.

So where is this all going?

Well we’re in a scary place right now.

The thought police are everywhere.

“You might have freedom of speech, but you don’t have freedom of reach” was a comment that resonated lately.

Hmmm…

The scenario’s I’ve detailed, if only brief, lay out brilliantly why Nostr is so important.

There is a big difference between someone like Rumble saying “we won’t cancel you”, versus a decentralised protocol that is censorship resistant, which literally cannot be switched off. . And hence Nostr has grabbed my attention.

So what’s the vision?

Well I see a world that will become a content creators dreamland.

We are going to tear up the miss-aligned incentive structure of old…

How?

Well the ability to receive payment in a value-4-value format, with Bitcoin micro-transactions direct from your audience, obsolete’s the need for advertising.

Admittedly we’re very early.

Very very early.

So as it stands, I don’t know of a creator that is able to live full time on a value-4-value standard.

But this will change.

It will change fast.

Firstly from a user perspective, as the eco-system improves, more and more people will be drawn to Nostr-native products.

Having one public-private key login to multiple different apps has a very powerful network effect.

So eyeballs will arrive.

Of that I am sure.

So secondly, from a content creators perspective, I envision a vastly improved landscape to build their audience and businesses from.

Nostr solves a huge problem for them: platform risk.

As mentioned, they cannot be switched off, cancel culture is nullified.

To me this brings to mind truly solid foundations.

Bedrock to build upon.

So as I wrap this up, I want to share a product idea with you, that I for one would pay for.

Mecca for content creators…

A Nostr client, that helps me catch content ideas that I have, and takes them through a workflow right to the ears and eyes of my audience.

It would include:

• Ideation
• Production
• Hosting
• Publishing
• Scheduling
• Promotion

The ultimate combination of Notion, Riverside, Descript, Adobe, Anchor, Hypefury, YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, Medium and Twitter.

The key: it cannot be switched off.

I would pay for this.

Would you?

Best, Jake

Ps - cancel culture arrived in my life in quite a spectacular way last September, as my ex-business partners Pete, Juliet, and Andy, of The Bitcoin Adviser, deemed it necessary to cancel me after a single podcast appearance I’d made. No chance to know I’d made a mistake. No chance to rectify the mistake. No chance to apologise for the mistake. Indeed, the internal metrics and stories I shared were never explained to me as strictly private, yet there I was 48 hours later locked out of email and shouted at on a phone. What a journey life is hey! Interestingly, I now feel a sense of gratitude, as I realise had I stayed I would have been shackled to their fear, not able to simply be myself, forever chaperoned by whatever their narrative of the day might be. From the bottom of my heart, good luck to them, but it’s time for me to build a creator’s Mecca.