Letter One to Carter Franz About Superior Act
Billions, Moral Syndromes, Chits, Superior Act System, Complexity, Trillions
Dear Carter,
For the last few weeks, I’ve been watching Billions. The central attractor here is comedy: Paul Giamatti’s “Chuck Rhoades Jr” is one of the funniest villain heroes I’ve ever encountered. He is a wonderful personalization of the whole “political” or “guardian” ethical syndrome. This concept of an ethical syndrome comes from Jane Jacobs’s in her 1992 book “Systems of Survival” , who distinguishes between Guardian and Commercial Syndromes. Even though the first rule of Guardian moral syndrome is “Shun trading” - Chuck Rhoades, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York: Wall Street’s Cop - he’s all about trading. His rise to success is all about the accumulation and deployment of chits.
You owe me a chit: nothing big, but a few hours worth of serious work. I gave you that for that — unique - crypto currency event back last year. Whatever the outcome of that product, it was a valuable experience. I learned more about Blockchain and got a chance to perform. This work should offer equivalent, or even better results for you. This is in relationship to Superior Act. The project doesn’t need a full white paper: that would be overboard. But it does require a miniature version of a white paper, some copy that can explain a complex and intricate technical system.
Your work is turning intricate technical systems into understandable prose. Superior Act is a different kind of technical system: the technique is aesthetic, ethical, and financial.
Let me try to explain the system to you as fast as possible: Superior Act is an (i) institutional performance that takes the form of a (ii) synthetically cooperatively owned platform for (iii) group creative acts. (i) Institutional performance means that the whole thing is a performance art piece, this is important because the “roles” that people will play are very different than the typical roles that people play - it also situates the entire project as an art piece, a very large-scale collaboration with a whole network of people (ii) Platform are the internet’s versions of marketplaces. Uber is the most simple example: it’s (at core) platform to connect those who want a ride and those who want to drive them. Just as marketplaces charge rents, the platform charges a “fee.” Uber’s is 20%: this is typical. There is an ongoing movement for what is called “platform cooperativism” An example is the “Driver’s Cooperative’ which describes itself as a 100% worker’s owned cooperative in New York. This is an example of unitary cooperativism: that means that only one class of agent (driver) is the cooperative owner. Synthetic cooperativism is, as the name suggests, when multiple groups act as owners. In the Case of Superior acts, the groups are: buyers, suppliers, organizers, operators, partners, cofounders, and funders. When buyers of a product own the supplier of the product, it’s called mutualization: it exists mostly with insurance. With Superior Act, there’s always a mutual aspect; meaning, that with every dollar spent on the platform, the customer owns part of it. The same goes for dollars selling things on the platforms (suppliers) effort spent organizing sales (organizer) running the platform (operators) offering shared resources (partners) running the whole project (cofounder) and providing money (funder)
Now we can arrive at the last part of the system: the group purchase of creative acts. Here, the “grammar” is structured around 50,000. For instance, the first Superior Act is a sale of 200 boars for 200 usd each. This 50,000 usd number gives a gravity to the acts: it means that they each will make a significant difference for the supplier. They do not, however, dictate any specific commitment on the buyers. A superior act could, for instance, sell 10,000 versions of a toy for 5 dollars each, or one 50,000 consulting project.
That’s about 387 words to explain the general system. Now I can turn to work through the first act on the system: “Elastic Authorship” - these are 200 boards painted by TMT, the painting collective that Job and I run. These paintings had, taken together, more than 20 different co-authors: that’s why their authorship is “elastics.”
250 dollars plus 50 shipping (bulk shipping rates apply too, so you can buy more and get a relatively low shipping increase) - this is not exactly cheap, but there is very high value, in at least three areas: (a)decorative (b) talk capital (c) collective participation. Each of these Elastic Authorship panels uses a technique that Drew Beattie calls “ambient figuration” - it is, in a way, seeking to be the cubism of the 21st century. Whether or not this works, the objects have a clear decorative value, they will animate whatever space they are in (b) talk capital is a phrase from Chinese, it describes having something special to talk about: these paintings are that, they were made in a unique way in Thailand (c) collective participation: each dollar spent on the platform gives .00625 SuperiorNFTs. When the platform achieves it’s target of 8 million Superior Acts, then each of the 8 SuperiorNFT will be worth 5000 usd, meaning that each dollar spent on the platform in Phase 1 (the value of the NFTS declines in future phases) will return 32 dollars.
There’s another 300 words to explain more about the structure. It is complex: the paintings are complex, the motivation is complex, the structure is complex. These complexities are, eventually, advantages, but they are, at the moment, challenges. Once we can begin to create movement on the platform, finding the “funders” will be easier. There’s already a perfect contact waiting for the news. How to create the movement? That’s why I wrote you this email!
Yours,
BB