(Auto)magical realism, cartoonification, marketverses, and crypto creators
June 18, 2021 Edition
Welcome to Edition #59, wherein I, and especially the Trillium Canine (a northern breed with a regal pelt), regret not having air conditioning.
“I do think it would speed things up if you followed my social media.”
(Auto)Magical Realism
File under: Amusing & Creative Internet Projects. The Magic Realism Bot—which is exactly what it sounds like—still puts a smile on my face. A few recent favorites:
The project is the brainchild of Chris & Ali Rodley, and is “inspired from the magic realist stories of Jorge Luis Borges,” paired with automation via a “computer-generated bot that [is] posting poetry on Twitter.”
FaceCrime?
MIT Technology Review recently published a rather disconcerting article (written by Abby Ohlheiser) on a mysterious “beauty filter” that TikTok seems to have applied, without consent, for certain users. Nothing to see here!
You might think that a subtle auto-upgrade might be desirable for many of us; turns out that people don’t love having their likenesses altered by an enigmatic algorithm without their knowledge. Ohlheiser cites one example, from Tori Dawn, where their jawline is visibly slimmer with the filter “on”; as Dawn moves a hand around their jaw, the filter clearly toggles on and off. Per Ohlheiser, she was able to reproduce the effect on her own phone. The experiment group, if that’s what it was, seems to have been limited to certain Android users.
After a query was sent to TikTok, the effect magically disappeared within two days; a cryptic statement was released saying “that there was an issue that had been resolved.” Beauty filters are indeed common in many social media apps, and tend to receive somewhat different responses across cultures (for instance, being an accepted default for many Chinese WeChat users, as Ohlheiser points out).
It’s one thing to offer visual filtering as an opt-in feature, and quite another to “tune” users’ faces without their consent. As we move further into a world where reality is augmented both visually and aurally, and where AI-driven media like deepfakes proliferate, these examples of filter-modified humans represent a related but different cyborg class of synthetic digital media.
Meanwhile, in less disturbing TikTok news, Okayplayer’s Elijah Watson wrote a fun article on how DJs and producers are filming short tutorials showing themselves sampling classic songs and modifying the samples into beats. This “original/OG to sampled” trend, in Watson’s telling, is bringing awareness of the craft of crate-digging to a new generation of young music fans and producers. Most importantly, Watson introduced me to DJ Habibeats, who, in addition to being a talented creator, has an artist name that I very much covet. Free 💰 idea: how about an NFT marketplace for creator handles??? Sign me up—you can have Trillium for a few (hundred) million and I can have the villa I’ve been scouting.
The Cartoonification of the Self
In case a minor jaw tweaking isn’t enough for you, you can also choose to go full prince/ss. As augmented (visual) reality continues to achieve mainstream engagement, Snapchat released a new Cartoon 3D Style Lens. Now you, too, can look like a cartoon character from Frozen. [Ed.: I will resist the temptation to explore what it means that turning oneself into a cartoon is a desirable thing. That said, many people I know in Silicon Valley have effectively done just that without resorting to augmented reality filters, so clearly there is a market here.]
Per TechCrunch’s Amanda Silberling, 215M users have already engaged with this lens on Snap, with over 1.7bn views. This is not an all-together new trend, as Silberling notes, but one that effectively continues the behavior that went viral with FaceApp (2019) and other progenitors. And Snap isn’t alone; TikTok is also active in this space—for better or worse, as noted above—as are several smaller companies, including a popular new app called Voilà AI Artist (what a name!) The app enables users to upload selfies and receive cartoonized versions of themselves in return. No points for guessing which foreign intelligence services thank you for your voluntary use of this harmless product.
The Marketverse
Digiday’s Seb Joseph recently wrote an interesting article on Roblox’s evolving advertising business, detailing one of the ways in which the now-public company intends to monetize its 42.1M daily active users. Incredibly, users are spending an average 2.5hrs/day on the many Roblox mini-games or “experiences”; this engagement lends credence to the Trillium refrain that Roblox is best understood as an emerging type of social media platform rather than a traditional videogame.
Another interesting comparison, per Joseph, is to Netflix (3.2hrs/day on avg), albeit for a different demographic and a participatory entertainment experience rather than a more traditional “lean-back” experience. Precisely because of Roblox’s platform architecture, where developers and/or brands can easily create their own experiences, the company is well-adapted to a world in which custom advertiser activations are desirable and “native advertising” is evolving from bottom-fold advertorials to polished experiences that mimic the aesthetic of the platform on which they’re hosted.
Joseph notes that companies like Nike, Warner Bros, and Gucci (no comment) are experimenting with novel types of promotional placements. Warner even recreated the Washington Heights neighborhood (in Roblox) to promote its “In The Heights” musical. In a sense, this and other, similar concepts build upon the age-old idea of a “fan forum,” now digitized and containing collectible digital goods, interactive characters, and avatar-based engagement with fellow fans. Gucci enabled digital try-ons in its “Gucci Garden,” and is experimenting with a digital direct response campaign.
While marketers might lack the reach and turnkey nature of existing digital ads tactics—like programmatic display, for instance—and will only be able to reach a relatively specific type of person through Roblox (for now), they seem likely to embrace a new creative canvas, particularly if they’re working for brands that skew towards a younger audience. As Joseph writes, Roblox is still at a stage where its ad dollars must be pulled from other established budgets. That’s never an easy phase for any platform, but it’s plausible that Roblox will navigate it quickly and well given the level of differentiation it offers relative to peers at present. Stay tuned for The Trillium Tower, an integrated digital nostalgia experience, coming to you soon.
Crypto Creator Corner
I’ve been meaning to share this Mirror post from last month: “The Next Social Graph: Splits, Supports and Attributions.” The piece, which was co-written by several authors, is worth reading in its entirety. The authors were inspired by a recent Mirror feature release, “Splits”: a "crypto-native approach [that] replaces a social contract with code-enforced rules that can’t be fudged.” Mirror, for reference, is a Web3 Medium/Substack equivalent: a publishing platform built on Ethereum’s rails.
The simple version of the rather lengthy explanation that Mirror posted is that its platform now offers authors the ability to share NFT revenue derived from their writing with collaborators and conceptual influencers. The revenue-sharing is handled automatically through smart contracts, such that funds are instantly disbursed to the other parties according to the payout structure that the author(s) select.
I love the concept, particularly as collab rev-sharing is one of the topics that creators complain to me about most often. Others, like Stir, are trying to tackle this same user need through more of a “Web 2.0” product solution where their creator back-office can handle automated collaborator payments. Mirror’s solution feels like a more elegant approach, to me, albeit one that is still subject to human quirks. After all, who’s to say whether someone’s influence is worthy of 7% or 11% of your proceeds? And, of course, you still have to negotiate with your all-too-human collaborators. [Ed.: unless, you know, #GPT3.]
While there are details to be worked out, and plenty of edge-cases where things could go wrong (again, enforcement being challenging in this space), I’m excited by this idea, and the promise of direct consumer-to-creator(s) payments that don’t require an intermediary, settle immediately, and can be re-routed to funders, collaborators, or conceptual supporters as coded into smart contracts. One might envision a future-state where this is the more common method of compensating creators—”combinatorial compensation,” perhaps?—and where a complex, layered system of media-as-NFTs enable creators to receive financial benefits from their past (and present) output.
Moving from writing to music: a new blockchain-based music platform called Opulous just raised $6.5M in fresh capital. We’ve written about Opulous before: it’s a platform where musicians can sell NFTs directly to fans. Those NFTs can include copyright NFTs and non-copyright NFTs that confer benefits like VIP fan experiences. Copyright NFTs effectively enable artists to pull forward cashflow via royalty futures. The platform supposedly also offers artists the ability to use royalties as collateral to secure loans. For more on Opulous, I recommend this overview.
Lastly, I continue to be a big fan of Async Art, a marketplace that specializes in “programmable art.” This programmable art consists of many “layers,” which, in aggregate, constitute one “master.” The layers can be modified by external data sources—imagine the weather, or time of day, or the price of Ethereum changing the background color of a painting—or human input. Layers can have multiple states, meaning that any given artwork has a new characteristic: dynamic variance.
Async is now supporting music, not just visual NFTs. In practice, this means that each music NFT on-platform has the ability to “change its composition…it may sound different each time you come back to listen.” The songs’ layers are essentially instrumental stems, each of which has multiple variants for fans to choose from. The result is a wide variety of final outputs, each with its own cultural (and financial value). It’s worth playing around with the music-specific marketplace (to which I am unable to link due to some idiotic Substack policy quirk); you’ll quickly see the many directions this could evolve, as artist-originated and fan-originated versions, based on the same core ingredients, proliferate.
For your ears only
As mentioned at the top of this issue, summer has arrived, and summer always makes me think of one band: The Avalanches. Somehow, we recently hit the 20-year anniversary of the group’s incredible album, Since I Left You. To commemorate the milestone, the group recently released a new edition of the album with plenty of previously-unreleased remixes from various artists including Sinkane and Black Dice. The full album is out now on Spotify and is worth your time, whether you’ve never heard it before or, like me, you’ve listened to it (somewhat) obsessively for years.
Since I Left You is from another era of music when sampling was in a gray-area. The album consists of original compositions and vocals, laid atop some 3,500 vinyl samples from every genre imaginable. It still sounds like nothing else and it’s still fantastic. Two tracks below, including a brand-new version of “Tonight May Have To Last Me All My Life,” featuring another all-timer: rapper MF Doom (RIP).
To be continued.
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