All right. So first off, it is so great to be here with you both. And on the heels of our partnership announcement between Lamina1 and Consensys Linea, so that was a very exciting moment for us last week. We announced our partnership together. I am Rebecca Barkin. I'm co-founder and CEO of Lamina1 alongside my friend and co-founder and highly esteemed author, Neal Stephenson. You may know him from Snow Crash, Seveneves, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age. There's a whole host of others. And each of those novels have provided a great sort of glimpse into the future. I'm also joined by Joe Lubin, obviously a legend in the space, and I'm sure everyone here knows him, but co-founder of Ethereum, founder of Consensys, chairman of Sharplink Gaming, and prolific investor and advocate of decentralization in general.
Hear me? There we go. Yeah. Is this going in and out?
It is going in and out a little bit, but maybe if we don't move our heads.
I'll try to stay very still.
Exactly.
First, I think it's probably helpful to provide a little context about why we're on stage together. We did just launch a partnership. Lamina1, for those of you who don't know, in 2022 we founded Lamina1 to provide an interactive media platform, one that was owned by the storytellers and the fans that actually make the internet a really interesting place to be. This year, we're also making that platform work for us with the launch of a new IP called Artifact, which will be on Linea. And so as IP transcends one format or another, sorry, I'm trying to get this to normalize, and it's obviously accelerated by AI as well, the concept of ownership and control and validation and trust has become an incredibly important topic. So I'd like to start there. Neal, in your writing, can you, am I, did I just blow you out?
In your writing, you've long anticipated the cultural and social implications of new technologies as they take hold. You wrote about the rise of personalized AI in The Diamond Age and the dangers of unchecked corporate greed in Snow Crash. What trends are you watching right now in AI with regard to content creation specifically? Like, you know, what concerns you? What are you excited about?
Well, since we're in a kind of DeFi-friendly environment here, like one thing I'll point out is that AI, the AI industry in its current form is the very definition of centralized because there's only a few companies that have the resources to train these big models. And so we're really, the more we use AI, the more we're kind of making ourselves dependent on systems that are in most cases sort of opaque and out of our control. There's exceptions. Some are more open than others. But it is kind of an inherently centralized type of technology. And you know, as far as its application to content production, I've written about this on my Substack. I'm definitely on the side of, you know, the average creator here. And you know, a thing that's been notable has been a kind of almost glee in the way that some advocates of AI talk about essentially doing away with creators or, you know, greatly reducing their compensation and their influence, you know, as if artists getting paid too much was really the thing that we need to be worrying about in our society. So, you know, I'm more interested in looking for ways to hopefully leverage the capabilities of AI to make things better rather than worse for creators.
Yeah.
Is there anything on that note, Joe?
Yeah, sure. So I agree that, you know, big tech has been dystopian. Essentially, the whole reason for our ecosystem to exist is in opposition and evolutionary to the current structure of civilization. Essentially, we've been living for millennia under top-down command and control where authorities imbue intermediaries with authority, trust, and those intermediaries maintain ledgers of who owns what and what privileges different people or groups have. And that's a great system if you're building a civilization, but it's a pretty bad system if you're living in that civilization. If you're 99% of the people, in the context of user-generated content, I would call that authority or overlord-generated civilization. And so what we're doing in our ecosystem is basically Satoshi comes along, invents this more powerful construct of trust, decentralized trust, and he shows us how to operationalize it on a next-generation database called a blockchain. And now we have this new global foundation of trust, and Vitalik comes along and others come along, and we build decentralized finance, and now we can move into different industries and sectors of the economy, and we can disintermediate and decentralize. And it doesn't mean those companies are going to be destroyed. They may be disrupted. They may embrace the technology. They may evolve. But I would call that more decentralized user community-generated civilization. And so that's kind of where we're going, I think, with Lamina1, where the next step is on networks like Linea. We've done a lot of work over the years to create enabling layers of technology and scalability and usability. And I think that users are going to be more enabled than disintermediated. I think it's going to be a golden age for user-generated content and community-appreciated content. So I'm pretty bullish.
Yeah. I mean, I serve on the financing and production board of the Venice Film Festival, and every year we go and we talk to writers and directors about what they're most sort of concerned about, and financing has always been an issue for creative projects, managing equity, managing IP rights, and a really sort of archaic licensing system. That was one of the things that, one of the ways we were able to get their attention. So, just to stay with that for a minute, I was surprised actually, Joe, to learn, because obviously everybody knows how much you've contributed to the Ethereum ecosystem and decentralization on the whole, but you're pretty passionate about music and arts and the creator economy in general.
Media, what decentralization can do for media. So why do you think that's so important, like right now in the age of AI, and what can Linea specifically, in its recent launch, bring to entertainment and media, to entertainment and IP?
Yeah.
So, you know, intellectual property is very important. You need to be able to be self-sustaining if you're an artist, if you're a creator. The older system tended to reward organizations with more lawyers than creators. And, you know, like, you know, overlord-generated civilization, that's where we were living, and we're moving into an era where the technology will enable new implementations of the current legal constructs of intellectual property. I think we're going to be able to make it more granular, more composable, more immediate in terms of knowing that you've got a copyright or being paid out or licensing the content. But I also think that, and that all comes from a world that is designed by and predicated on scarcity. And I do think that we're moving beyond scarcity mindset, which sort of causes us to live in fear all the time, and we've been doing that for millennia or millions of years, essentially moving into an era where robotics, automation, AI, abundance in so many of our systems is going to enable us to move into a mindset that's more focused on creativity and generation of healthier and preservation of healthier ways to do things. So I actually think that IP might end up, like locking down your IP might be less necessary. We've seen it in the NFT ecosystem where you don't have to buy this NFT in order to use it, use the JPEG as your profile picture. But it's kind of amongst the community that you operate in, it's something that you pretty much need to do or your reputation is tarnished. You could be shunned potentially. And so I think the art world could work that way where a lot of content is open, could be IP registered but free to use, and projects by students can use it for free. Projects that get commercialized, maybe that's a different license, or maybe they just get shunned by a community if they're not rewarding the creators that contributed to their project.
It's a great point. We're going to get to Artifact a little later, which is our collaborative worldbuilding IP, which does carve out space for fans and the creators themselves to have a direct relationship and, based on reputation, actually aspire to some level of equity in the development, the deployment, and the success of an IP, which I think is really exciting. But Neal, I wanted to chat with you too because you are such a renowned futurist. You know, many people cite Snow Crash. I know you love this, but many people say Snow Crash is the sort of, it was the origin of the metaverse. He certainly coined the term. And in fact, I remember when I was living in Silicon Valley, there was a saying there that more money has been raised on Sand Hill Road on the concept of Snow Crash than nearly anything else. But it always struck me a bit as a cautionary tale more than like a blueprint. And so I'm curious, like when you see how everything has developed, like what do you think we got wrong? What concerns you the most, or what excites you about what they took from those stories and what it means for the future?
Well, it's useful to keep in mind that it was written a really long time ago. It was written in the late 80s, early 90s. The internet as we know it existed at that point, but it was not something that most people knew about or had access to. You know, universal email didn't exist. You might have an account on CompuServe or AOL, but they were separate systems. And the World Wide Web didn't exist. So it was very early in that sense. And kind of what happened the year after the book was published was two sort of big bang events in the same year, one being the creation of the World Wide Web and the other being Doom. And those were both hugely transformative events in our transition to computer graphics as something that normal people had access to, because once you've got the web, you've got a medium where people want to exchange images. They want to have computers that are capable of showing pictures, and Doom is another sort of technology that expanded really rapidly and made people want to have, you know, better computers. And so, but obviously I didn't see any of that coming at the time I wrote the book. You know, the direction it went, there's this kind of early era of the kind of hippie grad student phase of the internet when people were apt to have very idealistic ideas about what it would mean for everyone to have access to all the world's information. And then there was this era of centralization and consolidation, kind of the Web 2 phenomenon. And I mean, I think some of that is in the book. You know, in the book, it's clearly shown that there are parts of the metaverse that are controlled and dominated by big centralized companies and other parts that are more kind of free-form and available to everyone. But I think, you know, really to answer your question, the big thing that was transformative in mostly a bad way was social media and kind of algorithms that could both kind of read your mind as you were using these platforms and then use that information to feed you, you know, a version of reality that was calibrated to make you engage more. So that is a development that I think has had a lot of obviously bad consequences for our civilization and that I, you know, completely didn't see coming in 1990.
Yeah. So I don't think people walked into a VC and tried to raise money on the dystopian elements that Neal described. Although maybe they did, because here we are.
I don't think they... somebody built it.
