Jordan Topoleski, founder of Arkive, argues that DAOs can beat algorithms at curation by aggregating thousands of T-shaped experts, people with deep expertise in one area and broad curiosity elsewhere. Arkive recently acquired Aria Dean's "Eulogy for a Black Mass," which treats memes as art, embedding meme culture into their platform.
You're sort of flirting with access and curation. It's an interesting— you're like, we want to make it curated, we want to make it super high quality and steer it one way, but also we want it to be the people's movement. This is supposed to be a community of people that comes together and brings ideas, right?
Yeah.
And I think this is actually one of the things that crowds are really good at doing is idea generation. I mean, it will always trump individual minds, in my opinion, in my eyes. When you need to generate ideas, I think crowds are excellent. I think when you need to find a specific resource, crowds can sort of ramify. I don't know how to say it, but like, yeah, just spread out and they find exactly what's helpful.
It's exactly actually what we're seeing, seeing at Archive, where a lot of the members of the community early on have been, I'd say, are very T-shaped people. And what I mean by that is they're super intense with their focus in one area. So for example, you could say, ah, like a sports card collector that's the 3rd biggest sports card collector in the entire world. You know, they probably have a massive collection of sports cards. You see them as a member of community. Then you also see someone who's a contemporary art gallerist, super indexed on contemporary art and saying, you know, they are one of the foremost experts in that area, super involved, have a very big collection.
Right.
If you bring together thousands of these people that are all these T-shaped experts in their individual categories, you could say, oh yeah, I'm the sports card guy right now, the sports card gal right now. But oh, now I get to learn about contemporary art. Oh, now I'm learning about watches. Oh, now I'm learning about video works. Oh, now I'm learning about all these different areas that start to come together. When you do that, you can say, wow, if you bring together people that individually have a lot of expertise, you can start to have this collective intelligence, this collective mindset that I think is the sum of the parts are less than the whole when it all comes together and adds those up.
Well, that is really, really interesting, and I'm starting to wonder which systems exactly sort of you have the best outcome when you let the people choose. And I kind of feel like culture is like, you know, if you're gonna define culture, it's probably like what people like. I mean, it's broad. How would you define culture in the first place yourself? I know it's a big question, but, you know, let's give it a try.
Yeah, I mean, I think culture is the expression of people. I mean, quite, you know, quite broadly, I think, put. But I think when you think about culture, it's exactly fit for what you're saying in terms of defining, because the issue is it's very hard to define because there's so many micro pieces that are kind of building up to it.
Precisely.
So if you think of culture as a collection of, you know, mindsets, of attitudes, of people broadly across, across the world, you can think about why having different diverse perspectives into what culture means is really important. I'm sure if you ask that same question, what is culture to 25 different people, They all give you a wildly different answer. And even more than that, they'd probably have to think on it for 90 seconds to actually come up with their answer. And again, it's like the exact point is that there are very different meanings to what it is. So there isn't a reason in trying to define that in a top-down way. Instead, what if we think of a system bottom-up? And something that I think very uniquely right now, we're in this attention economy that's very poised to kind of put that in front of our faces more and more. Social media does a great job of that. very new experiences of culture. Actually, one of our acquisition rounds was focused on that. We acquired this piece called Eulogy for a Black Mass by this artist, Aria Dean, and it was actually focused on memes and thinking of memes as a form of expression, both a form of art, but something that's become super front and center for society and—
Yeah.
Undoubtedly, you know, a big part of the cultural story. This one was particularly talking about Black queerness, but I think there's so many narratives that kind of get baked into how these are being created, the origin story, things like that.
