Creative economy thinker and entrepreneur Yancey Strickler shares his vision for metalabels, a new model for cultural production “like indie record labels for all forms of creative output.” Following a release proof-of-concept (a ‘record’ in his nomenclature), the Kickstarter co-founder maps creativity after platform capitalism. It entails a move away from lone creator-entrepreneurs to teams, protocol-driven compensation and ownership, and audiences that prioritize context over ‘content.’

Mario Santamaría’s solo show “Gárgola” opens at Centre d’Art la Panera, Lleida (ES), wedging two metaverses into one exhibition space. An architectural structure marks the exact plot of land the Spanish artist purchased in Next Earth, a virtual 1:1 reproduction of the planet, while suspended screens render a 13,5 billion light-years drop (the fall, 2022) into the Voxels Ethereum virtual world. A winding liquid cooling system further reminds viewers of computing’s (very real) materiality.

“The Fable of Net in Earth,” the 2022 ARKO Art & Tech Festival kicks off in Seoul. Inspired by decentralization (mycology, Web3), it brings together Morehshin Allahyari, SunJeong Hwang, and Young Joo Lee, and others. Featured works include Eobchaecoin (2022), Nahee Kim’s unabashedly ponzi cryptocurrency (it will be very profitable in 2082), and De Anima (2018-21, image), Clara Jo’s film probing humanity’s relationship with nature, that draws on footage from Kenya, Myanmar, and France.

“The Byzantine Generals Problem,” a group show seeking consensus on crypto, opens at distant.gallery. Curated by Domenico Quaranta, the online exhibition features Sterling Crispin, Sarah Friend, Ben Grosser, Anna Ridler, and 10 others. Interrogative in tone, included works span Rhea Myers’ blockchain visualizations (2014-5), Kyle McDonald’s Ethereum carbon footprint calculations (2021), through a Web3 Dot Com Séance (2022, image) by Simon Denny and collaborators.

“Pardon Our Dust,” a solo show by avatar artist LaTurbo Avedon, opens at the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK), Vienna. The show’s titular work (image, 2022) riffs on a slogan used to describe 1990s websites as ‘under construction,’ revising that narrative of progress for nascent Web3. Serving as tour guide and critic, Avedon parses emerging decentralization and ever-present commercialization, in a narrative rendering virtuality torn between “construction and deconstruction.”

“Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul,” a whitepaper by researchers E. Glen Weyl and Puja Ohlhaver, and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is published. In it, the trio describe a web3 where tokens denoting “commitments, credentials, and affiliations” are “soulbound” to individuals, and these non-transferable identity markers are used to govern more efficiently (e.g. DAO vote-weighting based on expertise) and to generate more equitable datasets (opt-in with privacy controls). Moving beyond ‘trustless’ DeFI frameworks, they propose decentralized sociality (DeSoc) “which encodes trust networks that underpin the real economy today.” Drawing on the community and infosec foibles in crypto over the last decade, they extend the model to prevent concentrations of power, and propose checks and balances to protect its decentralization.

What comes after platform capitalism? An assemblage called ‘hyperstructures,’ according to Jacob Horne. In an essay published on his website, the co-founder of the NFT marketplace aggregator Zora outlines the frameworks he sees emerging around crypto protocols. Inspired by the utopian architecture of Paolo Soleri, Horne argues the permissionless nature of hyperstructures generates low-friction exchange, yielding more equitable outcomes for participants (versus web 2.0 platforms where the user is the product). Is this the frothy rhetoric we’ll hear as money flows into web3? Yes, but Zora’s manifesto claim that “platforms hold our audiences and content hostage” is not wrong.