I am excited to announce the launch of the beta version of Immutable Type, which commences the public journey to build blockchain technology for journalists and the communities they serve.
Immutabletype.com
The beta product is Immutabletype.com, which is an NFT platform designed for collectors with Ethereum wallets. The vision for Immutable Type will push us to evolve these tools to realize a decentralized journalism alternative to the corporate media infrastructure present worldwide as of November, 2022.
Community Curation
Local voice and the long-tail accessibility values require a combination of technology solutions with ever decreasing costs of adoption, provable publications by contributors, and community agency governing its truth in direct partnership with journalists.
Media ownership today is concentrated among a few conglomerates, or is underfunded at the local level. Macro stories naturally consume the vast majority of resources, and editorial decisions are centralized at best, and potentially nefarious at worst. Journalism and its moral obligation are edged out by the financial incentives of the current structure of corporate media, advertisers, shareholders, and governments coordinating political interests. This systems leaves significant room for innovation and improvement.
The necessary technology to include the audience as owners is now present in the fullness of crypto, smart contracts, web3 wallets, and decentralized ledgers. The “product” may now become the “client”, and the “client” may become an “owner”. Journalists will be able to serve their own interests by serving alongside the owners of their works, thus circumventing the need for central authorities who moderate our speech, form our narratives, impose its language, and sanction our very voice and history. We are ready to evolve beyond its constraints.
Collectible Journalism
Caretaking our history in a provable manner requires receipts from people who were there and will curate legitimate value. The immutable ledger provides us all with these assurances and extends the practice of collecting beyond newsprint front pages and magazine covers to the digital work of the journalists themselves.
Journalists may now submit their work to be read and collected by their fans and communities free from the influence and expense of intermediaries. Journalists may tell the stories they need to tell on behalf of the communities they serve and find collectors of their works when it is especially impactful.
This method of community curation, collecting journalism, moves beyond the business models of subscriber fees and ad sponsors and provides the chronicler the freedom to serve more narrow stories without the economic necessity to appeal broadly to thousands of media consumers in service of ad impressions. Collectors and benefactors will purchase what is provably rare, accurate, and persistently accessible over time. Immutable type is stronger than movable type.
Roadmap 2022-2023
As we launch Immutabletype.com, we have many preconceived ideas of how we may achieve a destination well into the future, and we must be aware that the milestones will be tested and abandoned when no longer relevant to the mission.
We have done our best to conceive a roadmap as a guide and publish it here with the most extreme caveat advisable.
Early Roadmap Status
As of this post, we are on track for the Q4, 2022 deliverables and preparing estimates for Q1/2 work to be done. Our use of AI to generate graphics as NFTs will be covered in a separate post, but this work is being delivered to coincide with Miami Basal Art Week, 2022 and will serve to demonstrate many useful and exciting functions for collectors.
Very important to the next phase of product development is completing development to publish articles as NFTs. This is a small leap from where we are today, as core technology is in place, but this product is a very exciting release expected for Q1. I’m very confident this will land well.
Sharing and Collecting
Thank you for spending time learning about Immutable Type. As we are well within a bootstrapping phase, the best opportunity to contribute is to offer to share this work and provide world-of-mouth support wherever you feel comfortable.
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