Editor’s Note
In 2015 John Hagel shared a blog post titled “Disruption by Trusted Advisors”. In it, Hagel explores how “with the advent of Big Data, sophisticated analytics, social software, the Internet of Things and cloud computing, just to name a few of the enabling technologies, the “trusted advisor” business model now has the potential to expand from the niche of the very wealthy to become a mass-market event.” Hagel’s post is very generative and I think is directionally correct, but the part of his premise that I do disagree with is that the scale to the mass market will come at the hands of new businesses models supported by intelligent systems. Instead, I see the “trusted advisor” business models becoming a mass-market event through another recently coined term, “creator”.
Li Jin, a 31-year old venture capitalist, may be the one person most synonymous with the creator economy. While at Andreesen Horowitz she prolifically championed the influencer industry with blog posts like The Passion Economy and the Future of Work and 1,000 True Fans? Try 100 - the latter of which is an ode to Kevin Kelley’s concept of 1000 True Fans which more or less states that: If a creator can get 1000 people to pay them $10/month, that is $120,000 in yearly income.
The 1000 True Fans premise is central to the concept of creators. A “creator” is someone who produces entertaining or educational content that meets the interests of a target audience. Because the internet makes the discovery of customers much easier, the creator doesn’t need to appeal to everyone. They just need to make content that is appealing enough for 1000 people to be willing to pay $10 a month.
This content can take a lot of different forms but typically includes:
Blogs and articles
Industry news articles
Images and infographics
Videos and screen captures
Audio and podcasts
Email
Social media
I also believe that “creators” are Hagel’s true “trusted advisors”. Here’s why.
It is now conventional wisdom that, by removing friction, the internet enables abundance economics. "The “economics of abundance” is based on a critique of our present economic system, which finds value only in scarce commodities – i.e., things which can be sold at a high price because demand exceeds supply. Because this economy depends on demand always outstripping supplies, it also depends on “scarcity-generating institutions” – institutions that either manipulate supply or demand in order to keep us in a constant state of need. The internet turns that on its head.
In many instances in which “information” or “opinion” is the good that is in demand, the only thing scarce on the internet is a way to filter them out. In other words, like a friend’s grandfather used to say, “opinions are like assholes. We all have them and they all stink”.
On the internet then, the central challenge then is to find an opinion that does not stink. Today, in order to find these rare rose-scented buttholes, we turn to the aggregators with their vast troves of data and their sophisticated algorithms, but far too often these recommenders mistake noise for signal, ushering you down a mediocre path. In other moments we turn to platforms such as Yelp for restaurant recommendations or AirBnb for lodging recommendations, but here in an attempt to solicit a useful number of user-generated reviews, these platforms have made the review process so frictionless that it is hard for the user looking for a recommendation to discern a signal from their noise. “Was this review a bad one because the food sucked or because the underpaid waiter was having a bad day?”.
What’s really needed when trying to make decisions using the information found on the web is someone whose taste you trust. Someone who is able to push your boundaries just enough that recommendations don’t echo off of each other, but also so that they aren’t clearly a miss. You need a tastemaker. You need a trusted advisor.
Despite the promise of AI systems being able to do this, the number of features a model must get right are too many to be able to expect anything close to useful in the coming decade. Instead of looking to our future robot overlords to fulfill this ambition, we should inward, to the creator economy and NFTs.
While the details are not clear here, what I see is a peer-to-peer marketplace for tastemakers, for trusted advisors. These trusted advisors could help you pick out the best place to make a reservation in a couple of weeks, what clothes to buy online, what new records to check out, under-the-radar AirBnb listings, shows to watch on Netflix, ways to style your wardrobe, recipes to cook, on and on.
In one vision of this future, as an aspiring customer looking for “trusted advice” about what to consume would purchase access to personal curation through the procurement of an NFT. This access could manifest in a few different ways, but for the sake of the argument, let’s say that owning an NFT gets you an hour of advice a week.
Depending on the notoriety of this advice the NFT could cost you anywhere from $1,000 to $1,000,000,000 dollars. The owner of this NFT would then be able to lease out their allotted time on a marketplace to other aspirants. For example, the owner of the $1,000 NFT (this could be the same person as the trusted advisor or an early investor) could lease out their hour for that week for $20.00. As the value of an hour of advice rose, the owner of that NFT would be able to charge higher prices. In other words, they could enjoy a return on their investment.
The important thing I am explaining here is the dynamics by which a new generation of “creators” or “trusted advisors” would be able to bootstrap their business. They would be able to sell blocks of their time to investors in the form of NFTs in order to help fund customer acquisition costs, while still retaining others. They would then be able to earn revenue by leasing out the blocks of time that they retained, while other investors would be able to earn revenue by leasing out the blocks of time they procured.
It will likely look different, but these are the types of dynamics in play with “creators” and NFTs. While some of them will look like performers, many others will take the form of “trusted advisors”. It is through this process, not machines and big data, that I believe “the “trusted advisor” business model” will be able to “expand from the niche of the very wealthy to become a mass-market event.”
In coming newsletters, I hope to come back to this to explore it fuller. Limitations on my time this morning are preventing me from going deeper, but I thought it was an important concept to introduce because I want to build on it later through ideas such as “What does a Substack offering taste look like?”.
Otherwise, the rest of this episode recommends one of my favorite Jazz albums of the year - a collection of hidden jazz gems from Japan curated by some of the world’s best collectors (trusted advisors), explores the premise behind the book Freedom and shares some of my favorite skateboard deck designs. Hope you enjoy it!
What I’m Listening To
One of the hidden secrets of post-WWII Japan is its exquisite, long-running jazz scene. From the late 1960s to the early 1980s - in the shadow of Miles going electric, of the Weatherman, of the Headhunters - Japan was a hub of jazz invention.
Record collectors Tony Higgins and Mike Peden have spent the past few years unearthing this hidden collection of modern Japanese jazz masterpieces for Western audiences. J Jazz: Deep Modern Jazz from Japan Vol. 3, is their third attempt at this and in my opinion, their most successful.
From post modal grooves to jazz dance cuts, spiritual selections, and Brazilian-inspired gems, this brilliant 13-track triple vinyl “showcases the versatility and forward-thinking approach from these composers and musicians.”
Sporting an incredible tracklist from start to finish, the release features mega-rare standouts from the YasuhiroKohno Trio (“Song of Island”), Masaru Imada Trio (“Planets”), and Hideyasu Terakawa Quartet (“Black Nile”) alongside some of my favorites like Kohsuke Mine’s looping “Morning Tide”.
If you are a fan of jazz this is a must-listen. Find it here.
What I’m Reading
Gordon is certainly right here, networked software DOES have this unfortunate quality of forcing us to choose between: being complicit in anarchy and being complicit in every authoritarian regime at once.
But this tradeoff is not unique to networked software, it is present anywhere freedom is. That is the central premise of Sebastian Junger’s latest book Freedom.
Freedom begins in the middle of a mysterious pilgrimage Junger is taking, describing in immaculate prose the general part of the world the story is taking place in (along the railroad tracks in the Eastern United States), but little more. He tells us this pilgrimage is a sort of discovery process in order to truly understand what freedom is. In order to do so, they have decided to trek for miles along railroads, eschewing almost all of modern comforts sans coffee and cigarettes.
Junger’s description of his journey is often interrupted by long historical detours filled with beautiful prose on the history of Native Americans and how they fought back on the incursion on their land, the building of railroads, life as an early European settler in the United States, and much more. As well as discussions on anthropology, primatology, boxing, poker and more, it is through these explorations that Junger tugs at the thread of the meaning of human freedom.
Junger’s main thrust is that true freedom is uncomfortable and inconvenient. In the world of networked software that could mean full of malicious code, exploits, child pornography and so much more. In order to neuter those threats, we (as a society) give up our freedom to a centralized source of power that promises safety and convenience in exchange.
But that submission can quickly cascade into slavery. In order to strike an efficient frontier, we need insurgents. Insurgents are, and always have been, human societies’ antidotes to empires. Junger explores this through stories of how the nomadic Scythians held off the mighty Persians; the Montenegrins outfought the Ottoman Empire, the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, and always lurking in the subtext, the United States recent withdrawal from Afghanistan (Junger is known war reporter and 2 of the travelers on his journey are Afghanistan war veterans) to the Taliban.
Empires are, by nature, slow and powerful. While insurgencies are small but fast. It is this simple asymmetry that explains how insurgencies are able to prevail and ultimately keeps Empire’s honest until they are not, and then another insurgency starts up.
An “honest” Empire is not a just empire. From the Han Dynasty of Ancient China to the Roman Empire to the United States, there seems to be a sweet spot of economic injustice that is moderately unfair to most of its citizens but produces extremely powerful societies. Junger explores these dynamics as well as some of the stories less favorable to insurgencies such as the destruction of Indigenous civilizations by the conquistadors and the spirited, doomed resistance of the Apaches, but the central premise remains clear: Although we may not agree with the extreme tactics of insurgencies (or protest movements or hackers or startups), we are indebted to them because it is the very threat they pose to empires that ensure we don’t swing permanently into authoritarianism.
Junger drives this point home in a short, incredibly well-written book. You can find it here.
Worth Your Time
What I learned from a year on Substack (Platformer) - Casey Newton’s reflections on being independent for one year make for one of the most interesting pieces on the media written in the last few years.
How to Eat an Elephant, One Atomic Concept at a Time (Kwokchain) - Kevin Kwok analyzes how Figma and Canva are taking on Adobe—and winning.
Fresh Today, Faded Tomorrow? Brand Resilience in a Changing World (Tasha Kim) - An exploration into the qualities of lasting consumer brands — and how an accelerating trend cycle is changing the playbook for success.
The internet didn’t kill counterculture, you just won’t find it on Instagram (Document) - “To be truly countercultural in a time of tech hegemony, one has to, above all, betray the platform which may come in the form of betraying or divesting from your public online self.”
The Death Of Counterculture: Where Are All The New Style Tribes? (Ape to Gentleman) - Josh Sims looks at where all the style tribes have gone.
The Interface Phase (Not Boring) -We shape our interfaces; thereafter, they shape us. Packy McCormick explores how the new interfaces and spaces from web3 might bring web3 mainstream.
The dopest skate decks
Since the days of Toy Machine and Baker Skateboards of my youth, skate decks have always been some of my favorite works of art. I think it is something about their impending demise - the forms they have yet to take - that really attracts me. In recent years, Supreme has taken this concept of the skate deck as a form of contemporary art quite literally, featuring decks from Damien Hirst and Lee Quinones. Those decks, alongside some of my other favorites from places like Fucking Awesome, Killing Floor, Jim Greco, and Frog Skateboards are featured this week.
Knocked this one out of the park. I can't catch em all so maybe this is business as usual, but still...