General Seminar N°8
SOCIAL TOKEN FUTURE WORK
September 15 2021 11a PST / 6p GMT
With Julian Bleecker and Nicolas Nova & special guest host Matt Jones (this Matt Jones)
SOLD OUT!
LIMITED TO 16 SEATS. $20/SEAT.
All of the hand-wringing and cripplingly banal future casting and self-serving speculating about the Future of Work feels like it recursively self-serves the entities commissioning the equally self-served agencies asking these questions. You know — Arup and Steelcase and Herman Miller and IDEO and PSFK and McKinsey and they’re all friends and I have friends there, but still… the questions about the future of work come from office furniture multinationals like these along with all the commercial real estate investment trusts and global meganationals that have enormous investments in the massive network of buildings and associated infrastructure (pipes, tubes, RJ45 cables, kitchens, pallets of La Croix, facilities crews, parking lots) in and around which they expect office workers to occupy.
It’s reasonable for these folks to postulate what the heck the near future of work looks like — and do so in such a way as to make sure they will be unencumbered by dramatic changes in what work actually means in the near future.
And..what we wind up with are futuristic work pods with built-in AR/VR/XR rigs or desk furniture that looks like it belongs on a very fast, very expensive yacht crewed by waifish office managers.
Or, the Microsoft Bob equivalent of the future of work — ugh. (And to all my dear friends at FB, it’s not personal. Truly. I get it — the challenges of trying to do good work in the belly of the beast, &c.)
What I have missed and what I would like to discuss are emerging, barely sensical social-technical instruments that seem to suggest new arrangements between a ‘producer/worker’, their work, and the audience/customers for that work. And even further, some of these instruments create a configuration between producer/worker and the audience such that the audience actually participates directly in the work of making the work.
In future work, will we all have our own Social Token? Will we invest in promising high school basketball players? What is the marketplace for gardeners, municipal sanitation workers, teachers, and air traffic controllers? Did you know General Seminar has a $SEMINAR token and I have no idea what it is for or why I minted it? Want to talk about all of this? SIGN UP FOR GENERAL SEMINAR!
Yeah. Still doesn’t quite make sense because it’s right at the barely legible edge of making sense. It’s liminal. Like a weird dream that made sense in the dreaming, and when you wake up you wonder what was real, what was possible, and why you had a weird dream where you were mixing tracks with your favorite musician, then they gave you a hug, and said, “It’s done. It’s beautiful. Let’s drop this now, together.”
I don’t want to prognosticate. I don’t want to ship out a 200 slide “FUTURE OF WORK” trends report that tries to make me sound like an expert.
Because I’m not an expert. I just want to hear us, collectively, make sense of what is going on, what its multiple destinations might be, and talk together about what might be coming next.
If you have any interest in any of this, or if you’re trying to make sense of it for your work, client, “brand” or just to not feel like you’re losing touch with this fast moving world, then please join us for General Seminar N°8 — SOCIAL TOKENS FUTURE WORK.
Wednesday September 15st, 2021 at 11am PST / 6pm GMT. Hosted remotely via Zoom. Limited to 16 participants. $20/seat.
In this General Seminar we will address these topics through the use of Design Fiction. Participants will collaborate in small groups to imagine meaning of SOCIAL TOKENS FUTURE WORK or associated future exemplars, products, services, companies, forms of experience that represent SOCIAL TOKENS FUTURE WORK in the near future in which we “work papers” are SOCIAL TOKENS that contain all of what you’ve done and created. And there are low-scale scandals abut faked SOCIAL TOKENS with falsified Harvard coursework and only a few hold-outs work for USD rather than ETH or BTC.
General Seminar does not expect extensive preparation, but we do provide some suggested materials (below) to browse before we meet. Consider this stimulus material. Remember, General Seminar is not a lecture, it is a discussion — like a salon or dinner party. Everyone will have an opportunity to contribute their thoughts, their questions, opinions, and points-of-view.
Some Stimulus Material (Send Any Suggestions!)
[₿ On Monetizing Community with Patreon Cofounder Sam Yam)
[The Creator Economy: NFTs and Beyond]
[Afterparty enables creators to launch their own nNFTs and social tokens]
[Special investigation: Socios ‘fan tokens’ - what they really are and how they work – The Athletic] (PAYWALL)
[Social Tokens Year in Review]
[The Passion Economy and the Future of Work]
[“Fantasy Hollywood” — Crypto and Community-Owned Characters - Future]
[CRYPTOMEDIA, NFTs, AND THE NEXT INTERNET - The Hundreds]
[Rally.io] <= Crypto for Creative Communities
[coinvise] <= Create Community Tokens
[I Joined a Penguin NFT Club Because Apparently That’s What We Do Now] <= Community NFTs
This can’t be future work, right? I’ve certainly been wrong about such things in the past. In fact, not just “such things” but probably more things than I remember.