Media today is extremely centralized. Most content with a broad audience base is created in a very closed and exclusive system — there are a few major studios we can all name, and they continue merging with one another into ever-bigger monoliths. Old media distribution methods are inefficient and expensive. If it’s not a blockbuster, it’s not a success. Sometimes this system results in great art. But mostly it leads to safe art.

The curatorial power is in the hands of a few elites in Hollywood and New York, and the barrier to entry for creatives to capture their attention and get a chance to contribute is very high. For a movie or a book to be a hit, it has to make tons of money and reach a cultural saturation point. (Making a feature film in the U.S. costs $30 million at minimum and needs to gross $120 million to break even. Seventy percent of book advances never earn out.) The decision-makers in these corporations are risk-averse, and much of the media they make is derivative, repetitive, and not diverse.

The gig economy and an apparent surplus of talented creatives has encouraged exploitative practices, notably including spec work, where an artist works for free in the hopes of getting paid later. Freelancers wait months for payments and endure inconsistent flows of work and profit. It shouldn’t be so hard to make a living as a painter or a writer or a musician while film and publishing and music executives net millions upon millions of dollars in personal profit every year, but it is.

The Cellarius Core by Sean Andrew Murray. The Cellarius story revolves around a superintelligent AI that gains sentience in the year 2084.

A Decentralized Renaissance

We’re trying to rethink these outdated, limiting models for making art and telling stories at Cellarius. If you’re new to our project, here’s a short version: Cellarius is a science fiction story that explores humans’ relationship to technology. Cellarius is a platform that enables peer-to-peer, decentralized, transmedia content creation. Cellarius is a community where enthusiastic creatives and collaborators craft and evolve the story together. We believe that science fiction is for everyone, and we regard that idea as a challenge as well as a guiding principle.

In our White Paper, we discuss our aim to spark a “Decentralized Renaissance.” As we continue to onboard artists and collaborators, build the platform, and expand our community, the full scope of that ambition has crystallized. I hope the result is just as crazy as it sounds.

“Renaissance” is a heavy word, and we don’t use it lightly. It means “rebirth” or “reawakening.” The historical Renaissance, which took place from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries in Europe, was not only a massive surge in art and literature, but in learning, science, and information access. From the depiction of perspective in painting, to the development of the scientific method, to moveable type, major transformations took place in every field. It was a paradigm shift, a cultural transition in every possible sense: the medieval era ended and the Modern world began.

How can we use blockchain and Web 3.0 technologies to precipitate such a flourishing in the digital era? We want to create new channels of opportunity and new paths to abundance for creatives. By decentralizing the processes of creating, sharing, and funding art and stories, we hope to build a digital ecosystem in which new forms of creativity can emerge, and even flourish.

“Stargazer,” by Priscilla Kim, one of over 500 works of visual art Cellarius has commissioned so far. Learn more about Stargazers and other factions from the story in the Cellarius Universe Guide.

Rewriting the Narrative

The Renaissance showed how liberating capital can precipitate an increased interest in funding and producing art. The innovation of double-entry accounting, first in the Middle East and later in Italy, allowed for more exact, transparent financial management and therefore wealth accumulation, which families like the Medici used to support artists, scientists, and more. The arts flourished in this period in large part because patrons were investing in promising artists and commissioning ambitious, groundbreaking works. Greater accuracy and transparency in bookkeeping meant that businesses could run more efficiently, which manifested as wealth creation.

Add to this shift the ability to disseminate the written word widely, cheaply, and in vernacular language using the Gutenberg printing press, and the magnitude of the transformation in this era isn’t hard to believe. The printing press also led to the earliest regulations on treasonous language, which eventually emerged into the state-controlled system of copyright that still rules over the sharing of content today. It makes sense that a societal-scale unleashing of information would start to look pretty chaotic, pretty quickly.

It also looks a lot like the first generation of the internet, or Web 2.0. Copyright does a lot to protect and recognize the people creating value by producing “good” information, and it’s not hard to understand why artists suffer when their work becomes a stolen mp3 or e-book file online. When information is easily replicated, shared, and adapted, it’s hard to know which information is correct, and where it originated: which information to trust.

Despite all the ways the internet has changed information access and communication, we have yet to witness a uniquely digital-age flourishing in the arts. Web 2.0 unleashed a species’ worth of information and revolutionized our entire culture. Fandoms also came alive on the internet, forming communities online and exchanging suddenly abundant information about the art they love. Creatives can showcase works in progress and converse with fans directly on social media, all but breaking down the old distance between an artist and her audience. Web 2.0 is about sharing, replication, access, an abundance of information.

A problem with Web 2.0 for creatives is that it’s incredibly easy to steal and replicate digital media files, so getting one’s work out there often comes at the cost of making a living wage. A problem with Web 2.0 for readers and users is that we have no control over our data nor any value we create, so the profits from our attention go right to the pockets of a handful of billionaires in Silicon Valley, rather than where we might want it to go. Profits and recognition go to the aggregators of data and content, rather than the actual creators and contributors. The experience of browsing on Amazon or the Apple store isn’t such a different experience from pre-digital browsing at Blockbuster or a record store, but the marketplaces are extremely different, to the great detriment of artists.

When we introduce new mechanisms to establish trust, introduce provenance tracking, and user reputation to the already-productive communities and networks of Web 2.0, the result could be an open, permissive, yet safe and profitable digital environment to benefit creators and consumers of art alike. The reader or viewer doesn’t have to move from walled garden to walled garden, but has access to a rich, diverse, open landscape, where information travels freely and innovation is possible. It is new in the sense that it is digital, but this mode of open-source storytelling also resembles the ancient collective traditions of mythmaking and folklore, the roots and sources of our most beloved and enduring stories.

Just as in the historical Renaissance, a quantum leap in creativity follows a revolution in the movement and exchange of money and information.

“Chemics,” by São Paolo-based artist Aluisio Cervelle Santos. Cellarius has commissioned works from artists on six continents and aims to build a globally inclusive community of collaborators.

Rethinking Coordination and Collaboration

We believe that in the case of blockchain-supported collaborative storytelling, the medium is the message. Many blockchain and Web 3.0 advocates are optimistic about those technologies’ potential to reduce the need for third-party intermediaries, which consume value and introduce friction to transactions and exchanges. Feedback loops can become not only cheaper, but shorter. Information and asset provenance is trackable and transparent. The lore and IP are collectively owned and controlled by the community.

The current societal model of intellectual property law does not foster an open, creative environment of adaptation and remixing. The outdated institution of copyright can become much nimbler on a blockchain-supported network. We want to explore on Cellarius how high-quality narratives can emerge and evolve on a peer-to-peer platform, allowing a story to grow without a centralized ownership structure. Web 3.0 can enable reduced coordination cost, more reliable provenance of digitally native content and assets, and more permissive rights structures around derivative works to encourage more collaboration and robust idea circulation — while recognizing the contributions of individual creators.

The phenomenal recent success of “Black Panther” also shows that diverse, inventive content is not inherently risky to produce. With better ways to measure demand and solicit feedback, perhaps we can validate our assumptions about telling more inclusive stories. A Web 3.0 platform with a robust incentive flow not only can take better advantage of available capital and distribute it more fairly, but can offer a lower barrier to entry for participation to a broader base of people across the world. We can develop more flexible ways to measure attention and value and funnel those back into the system. New projects can form more locally and organically in a complex network rather than in the bottleneck of studios and big publishers. Blockchain technology offers a reliable, trustworthy means of complex coordination to make all of this possible and sustainable.

A scene by Karla Ortiz from “Kira,” a CellConZero story-in-progress, by Steven Barnes, Mishi McCaig, and Karla Ortiz. Collaborative, transmedia storytelling is the heart of the Cellarius platform and community.

There are lots of other ways in which blockchain could improve the business of making media outside of the Cellarius platform, whether for major franchises or small indie projects. Remember double-entry accounting? More accurate bookkeeping means more efficient business. What if we could do the same for complex production pipelines? The ability to trace and manage assets across a wide array of vendors could lead to significant cost savings even for a major media house or franchise. Wouldn’t it be great if that money were freed up for better payment structures for creatives or investing in innovative new projects? We hope to test these assumptions and many others on Cellarius, and share the results. A rising tide lifts all boats.

The point is that major studios, franchises, and publishing houses can still do what they do — we aren’t trying to use Cellarius to dismantle or undermine the groups that made the books and movies and comics and games we all love, that inspired us to do this work in the first place. Cellarius doesn’t need to take money or power from these places in order to see our ambitions through. But a story also doesn’t necessarily need to be viral, to saturate and infect an entire pool of viewers, in order to be a “success,” insofar as success is defined by quality and impact over click rates, likes, and ad revenue. There is plenty of creativity and plenty of value to go around. In this new paradigm, the great stories that will change minds and hearts can reach us in new and more diverse ways. Stories, after all, are what this is all about.

In our current media environment, as collective trust in news and facts is crumbling and the lines between advertisers and publishers are blurring, to the point where our very perceptions of reality feel unstable, the signal seems clear: we need to reclaim the distinction between information and meaning. Stories are one of our most powerful tools for making meaning from information. We can use blockchain and Web 3.0 to figure out how to make stories, better, together, in the next digital age — the Decentralized Renaissance.

Cellarius is currently accepting applications for their Private Alpha at cellarius.network.