At the end of this summer, my co-founder Cameron and I began testing the beta version of Cent, an ambitious project we’ve been conceptualizing and building since February of this year. Cent is a complex technology with a simple interface and an even simpler mission: to enable anyone to earn income from anywhere. Simply put, it’s the evolution of the social network into an income source.

Most of us spend hours each day working for free. We pour our creative energy into networks that give us no direct economic value in return. Statuses, Tweets, Instagrams, and Snaps all take time to create and provide unique value to many people. Yet nearly all the value they generate is directed to the singular profit of the corporations who maintain these services.

Before blockchains, there never really was a viable alternative. Given the technology available, internet companies had to create centralized codebases, and since they created and maintained this software, they could easily reap the financial rewards of its use. But in the last decade, an alternative substructure of the internet has begun evolving — one that allows for new types of user-compensating networks to exist.

In the same way the web democratized access to information, blockchains are democratizing access to value and trust. We are moving towards a world where networks are the predominant sources of connective, rather than substantive value. Cent is built on the notion that the connective value of a network is what should earn it profits, but the substantive value — the content coming from individuals within the networks — should be redirected autonomously to the users within the network who benefit most from that value.

Cent was born from a few key ideas — the first being that social networks aren’t really social networks — they’re content networks. You have an existence on Facebook because you’ve created content and put it on Facebook. Whether that content takes the form of photos, statuses, comments, or videos, any mainstream social network would be a blank page without the content creators that give it life. We are “social” on these networks only to the degree that we are consuming, liking, commenting on, and sharing the content of others.

Given that social networks are actually just content networks, it’s odd that Facebook is valued at over $400B while nearly all users of the platform make $0 for producing its content. If writers still make money while their publisher rises in value, shouldn’t content creators make money while the networks they share on rise in value? Is the technological value that Facebook provides truly worth all of the creative value of the nearly 30% of humanity who post their content on it? We don’t think so. We think the future of the economy (and the world) rests with the creator, and the history of the internet is a slow march towards this inevitability.

For many, this march can be scary. Autonomous systems, code, and robotics will continue to replace human jobs (and thereby sources of income) that do not rely directly on labor that is uniquely human. But what labor is uniquely human?

The only labor that is uniquely human is labor that computers can’t (currently) do. The more an occupation requires an algorithmic workflow, the faster that job will become an actual algorithm (pour coffee, add sugar, swipe card, repeat). Given that trend, the foundation of tomorrow’s economy must rest on things that are difficult to turn into algorithms. This foundation must be composed of mechanisms that directly monetize the aspects of humans that are non-algorithmic — perspective and creativity.

Perspective, in this context, is your unique angle of view on the world, your subjectivity, your personal feelings. Creativity is what you make when you use your perspective.

When critics of rapid technological progress warn that this rampant global unemployment will lead to chaos and economic depression they are often conflating two separate ideas — “employment” and “income”. As long as society requires money, mass unemployment is only a catastrophe if there aren’t other sources of income available.

It’s nearly always assumed that “unemployment” itself is an inherently bad thing — but is it? Is mass employment really the crowning achievement of an enlightened society? If humans invent robots to do jobs they don’t want to do, is it really a tragedy that those jobs are no longer required of humans?

In many ways, the opposite is true. Rising unemployment can be seen as a sign that we are entering a new age of automated productivity — that our species is being liberated from the types of labor that were inherently sub-human to begin with.

As we’re unshackled from the chains of cruel, pre-digital industrial processes and set free to explore the unpotentiated creative landscapes of our psyches, new octaves of human flourishing are suddenly made possible. Just as the moral progress of the 19th Century abolished most racial slavery, the technological progress of the 21st Century will abolish most economic slavery.