"Much of culture now has the hollow, vacant feeling of having been made by algorithm. Consider the drab, broken anti-spectacle of Addison Rae performing trending TikTok dances onstage with Jimmy Kimmel or NFTs sold for millions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s—it’s art and pop stripped of all verve, fertility, and eroticism. What’s left is the new aesthetic of lifelessness and void, a consumer culture of throwaway experiences that wash right over you like an Ambien. It’s made to be experienced without friction: seamless post-death entertainment from an empire ruled over by a sleepy, old man."
— Dean Kissick
In the last year, the rise of NFTs and digital ownership has shaken up traditional power structures and top down control in favor of more decentralized, cooperative systems. In turn, we’ve witnessed the shift of power from the editor to the creator, allowing creatives and fans to own their digital work and capture their upside.
First it was developers, then artists, then musicians. In the next ten years, this same paradigm shift in ownership will come to entertainment – fundamentally upturning the way that Hollywood operates.
Today, creatives have two choices: they can either bootstrap their audiences on big tech platforms like Youtube or Tiktok, where they’re at the mercy of algorithms and paid pennies on the dollar for their work. Or, they can sell their ideas to a network, forfeiting creative control and signing on to steep deals, where a handful of executives make decisions about what gets funded and what gets to be legitimate TV.
Audiences have more influence over distribution and grassroots cultural trends than ever before, yet are left out of most decision-making – creating a sense of distance from content.
So we asked ourselves: what would happen if we placed the control into the hands of fans, in turn creating a cooperative and decentralized network for entertainment creation, distribution, and consumption?
At Mad Realities, we believe these two things will shape the future of content:
Interactivity and shared experiences. You would think we’re in the golden era of content with abundant optionality with sophisticated algorithms telling us what we want to see. But the experience of consuming content today is passive and often done alone in dark rooms. We see the future of content going a step further – community formed around shared attention, conversation, participation, and IRL social experiences.
Co-creation and ownership. The creation of new forms of media will be collaborative, contributors will have ownership beyond meaningless credits, and the content will be formed around the sentiment of the community interacting with it as it’s being created, in real-time. The antiquated, corner office, one-to-many production model will be retired in favor of community and co-ownership. Content will never be the same again.
Since launching our interactive reality TV dating show Proof of Love, the first unscripted TV series ever to be funded via NFTs, we’ve had over 1,500 members participate in the co-creation of the show and over 172 ETH worth of interactive passes minted and purchased (making the show entirely self funded without a network partner.) In the last 6 months we’ve proven out what it looks like to build one show funded by NFTs – we want to make it possible for ANY creative to fund, create, and distribute their own work and foster their own community support and contributions.
Mad Realities is a decentralized media platform reimagining entertainment for the modern world — focusing on shared experience, co-creation and ownership at the community layer.
Picture something like crypto Netflix, where behind every ****show on the platform, there is an active community co-creating and bootstrapping distribution. We believe that interactive content is nothing without dedicated and engaged audiences, and web3 properly incentivizes all parties involved (talent, viewers, creatives, etc.) to create and surface the most entertaining content possible.
Content is the answer to onboarding the next 100 million users into crypto and the path to the first true crypto consumer use case must happen in phases to teach the fundamentals of web3 to consumers in an intuitive approach. Thats why we are starting with our own content as the first step towards building out a decentralized media network and up-ending Hollywood.