#li jin

[art-mirrors-art]

Li Jin - 尘缘旧梦 {Faded love, or Old dreams of past attachments} (2019)

[oldsardens]

Li Jin - Woman with dog

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Li Jin - Untitled

[heyhopperart]

[oldsardens]

Li Jin - Untitled

[cpoetter]

The next big thing in 2023 is decentralized social networking. We're finally beginning to see users waking up en masse to the risks of centralized social networking companies, not least catalyzed by the recent threatened ban of TikTok and Twitter's capricious suspensions and prohibiting linking out to other platforms. Users, creators, and businesses have realized that it's dangerous to invest in building an audience on these platforms when there's a looming risk that the rug gets pulled out from under them. We're at a moment where there is a collective sense of "We’ve lived with the existing paradigm of closed social platforms for 15 years. What comes next?" I think we'll see a decentralized social network start to gain steam in the next year that allows users to own their social graph and content and port it across various applications. We'll also see more creators experimenting with web3 tools that allow them to reach their audience in a platform-less way, i.e. through tokens acting as a new kind of social graph. -Li Jin, Co-Founder & General Partner at Variant

The next big thing in 2023 will be...

I like Li Jin. however, she's not acting according to her own words. she has profiles on Lens and Farcaster, two decentralized social protocols. she's never posted on Lens, and there are only a handful or so posts from her on Farcaster dating back two months to one year. but she's posting on Twitter regularly.🤔

[aulel-process]

One of my classmates on the passion economy! We weren’t close, but briefly knew each other from extracurriculars. 

“So the passion economy idea is broadly about this idea that in the future more and more people are going to be able to make a living doing what they love and specifically I'm very passionate about the creative economy and people who possess a creative skill and how are they going to be able to monetize those skills in the future. And the reason why I'm particularly interested in creatives is because for much of human history, people with creative talents have only been able to monetize that talent through intermediaries. They've had to go through central distributors like talent agents or movie studios or art gallery owners or agents of some sort in order to access the broader market and the beauty of the Internet is now that people with any sort of special passion or talent or skill or ability that anyone in the world wants to tap into and access in some way can now connect to that audience directly without having to go through middlemen and so the passion economy is really about how do those people connect to that audience and how do they monetize that so I'm really passionate about future platforms that are giving people this ability to find work and to monetize their own talents and their passions.”

Completely completely unrelated aside: making money off of one’s art is not what I believe legitimizes an artist. An artist is not “pro” because of money. But to be able to “solve” the issue of making a living allows more artists to spend more time doing what they love.

[whatimconsuming]

In 1935, the US enacted various New Deal cultural programs to provide relief for jobless artists and democratize public access to art. A century later, it’s time to renew that spirit. Enter: Universal Creative Income.

Universal Creative Income is basic income for online creators.  There are 2 broad ways that UCI can come to fruition, outlined in the blog post: 1) Platform-funded UCI 2) Crypto UCI, with governance decisions made by the community The New Deal was essentially a small-scale experiment in UCI, with employment for 10K+ artists who created over 100K works. Importantly, it shifted the perception of art from a luxury good, funded via private patronage, to a critical part of a democracy. The present day mirrors the 1930s in many ways, with widespread job loss, a broad sense of burnout, and a need to bridge divides. COVID-19 has exacerbated income inequality. The creator economy, which already had lacked a middle class, needs more on-ramps than ever. Today, there is widespread access for creative work: social media platforms enable users to consume a vast universe of creators’ work at no expense. But the ad model and digital nature of content have undermined the economic viability of content creation online.

Universal Creative Income, the modern-day form of New Deal-esque art funding, is most likely to come from platforms. Companies can apportion some revenue to fund UCI for emerging creators on the platform, and provide a monthly stipend to those creators.

For platforms, the idea is simple: use company revenue to fund a Universal Creative Income program for emerging creators on the platform. For instance, companies like Facebook or YouTube could carve out a fund to support creators on the platform and send them a monthly check to cover basic living expenses, regardless of skill, training, or background. UCI differs from most prevailing platform creator funds in terms of consistency of payments, transparency of eligibility criteria, and focus on smaller emerging creators. To the last point: we believe focusing on creators who are in the greatest financial need would create the largest impact on participation in the creator economy. While there have been numerous creator funds that pay successful creators (e.g. TikTok), our hypothesis is that funding the long-tail of creators can create more business impact than funding top creators who can already monetize in myriad ways. Creators would need to meet certain eligibility criteria to receive funding, and would be phased out of the program after a set duration. That way, everyone gets a shot, but the platform isn’t on the hook to pay the same long tail of creators forever. A UCI program targeted at emerging creators can engender more creator loyalty and build a proprietary acquisition channel for the next generation of talent. (it’s like being YC vs. chasing hot growth deals). UCI would be esp. beneficial in boosting participation among diverse creators. Just as unpaid internships exclude students from lower-income backgrounds, the current creator paradigm of amassing a free audience before eventually monetizing locks out less well-off creators. Successful implementation of UCI would bring improvements in creator stress and mental health, and create a more equitable path for a more diverse array of creators to be able to pursue content creation as a career. While UCI may appear to be predicated on altruism on the part of companies, there are tangible business benefits that could make such a program a worthwhile investment. UCI can better align creator & platform incentives, yielding more + better content that drives user engagement. As an alternative to platform-funded UCI, crypto could also be used to implement more transparent and democratic forms of artist funding. A community treasury could use a portion of its holdings to fund a UCI program. Rather than a centralized company making unilateral decisions about UCI, users and creators of the DAO would participate in governance decisions. With pandemic-induced job insecurity and heightening income

inequality, it is more pressing than ever to enact programs that create broader on-ramps for creator success. Universal Creative Income can be a step in this direction.

The Case for Universal Creative Income — Mirror

By Li Jin and Lila Shroff