The Invisible Economy FAQs
Frequently Asked Questions and Resources
I am new to DADA and the Invisible Economy. Where do I start?
You’re in the right place. Hopefully, we’ll have the answers to your questions in this FAQ. To dive deeper, check our website where you can draw with others and see visual conversations. For questions on how to draw on DADA, please see the DADA FAQs.
You can also read the paper that kickstarted the Invisible Economy, and watch our Working Group Videos where we discuss its implementation. You can read our thoughts on art, crypto art, and other topics in the DADA Blog.
Itching for more? Join our Discord Channel.
Please watch this explanatory video of the DADA ethos. And this one.
What is DADA?
DADA is a collaborative art platform where people speak together through drawings that they create directly in our platform with our drawing tools. Nothing is uploaded.
DADA has over 160K registered users and the community has created over 125K artworks on the platform, the largest collection of rare digital art in the world. DADA is free to use and open to everyone 18 years and older.
What is a Dadakin?
A Dadakin is a member of and contributor to the DADA community. Dadakin can be artists, fans, collectors, coders, collaborators, etc.
Why Dadakin? Why not just call people users?
Can I draw on my phone/iPad?
We are not yet compatible with mobile phones so the best way to experience DADA is on a computer with Chrome. You can use your mouse, trackpad, or a tablet, like a Wacom. If you want to use an iPad, using Sidecar on Apple can help. You can use the iPad as an extra screen for your Mac and then you can use the Apple Pencil to draw.
I can’t reply to a conversation. How do I participate in a visual conversation?
In order to reply to a visual conversation, you need to earn the right to do so by accruing 200 points, which you can easily get by making several drawings, following artists by clicking on the star next to their names, and liking drawings by clicking on the heart icon.
Do I have to invite others to participate in the visual conversations?
No. You need to get the 200 points first. You can also invite people via email before you post your drawing, but if they are new to DADA they will have to get the 200 points first.
Here are some DADA FAQs.
What’s the best way to invite people to DADA?
Share dada.art with them. Once on DADA, you can invite people to any drawing you have started (not to replies).
How can I make new people feel welcome on DADA?
- Start a new drawing and invite someone new to DADA.
- Find the first drawing from someone who just joined and reply to it.
- Reply to the daily drawing challenge which we use to welcome artists.
- Follow them and comment on the drawings from people who joined recently (ditto above).
What is the Invisible Economy?
DADA’s Invisible Economy is an economic model for the arts based on intrinsic motivations and social norms. It allows a global community of artists driven by intrinsic motivations to create collaborative digital art, and to receive a social dividend regardless of the free-market while creating collective long-term wealth.
Here’s our White Paper. And a summary in Spanish: versión en español.
What is the purpose of the Invisible Economy?
The vast majority of artists, whether they are independent, fine, commercial, or amateur, cannot make a sustainable living from their chosen profession. Millions of talented people could make a living from their art but are discouraged by the economic realities of being an artist. Only 1% of all artists capture the value created by a global art market that is opaque, elitist, inaccessible to most people, non-inclusive of women and minorities, and driven by speculation. Sadly, the current state of the crypto art market is also driven by speculation and star systems. The mission of DADA’s Invisible Economy is to end the paradigm of the starving artist worldwide and to do so through intrinsic motivators, away from speculation and ruthless competition by creating a self-governed token economy in which artists get a guaranteed basic income for their contribution to the community.
Why is it called the Invisible Economy?
Because we are radically separating the art from the market. This means that the art is never going to be directly associated with any transactions. All the transactions will happen outside of the DADA drawing platform. With the Invisible Economy, DADA has created an economic model where artmaking is radically separated from the market, allowing people to make art freely without the pressure to produce and to be rewarded with a guaranteed basic income for their participation in the community. This model includes a system of intrinsic incentives that reward the participation and collaboration of artists, art lovers, and art collectors.
How is that money going to be invisible?
By designing a system that hides the value flows and maintains DADA as it is today. It will be invisible in our system, but with transparent transactions and balances on Ethereum. It’s a paradox, but we can only make it invisible by being completely transparent. Our system is built on trust. You can’t have a cohesive community without trust.
Our biggest task in all of this has been: how do we introduce money into the system without disturbing the already existing value flows that make DADA work? That is our challenge. We have avoided the ‘do this’ then ‘earn that’ mechanisms that replace intrinsic motivation with external reward. In the Invisible Economy, there will be no direct correlation between any particular action and rewards because this is what the community has told us it wants. Many DADA artists have said they love DADA so much, but sometimes they feel guilty because they are spending hours there when they should be looking for work. One of our mandates is to create a system that protects what makes them happy in DADA. Another is to create a system in which artists can do what they love without any pressure to produce.
As Joe Chiappetta puts it:
Intrinsic Artistic Motivations + Economic Arts Fellowship = Invisible Economy
Artists’ Guild + Art Stewards’ Guild + Shared Benefits = Invisible Economy = Art World Disruption
What prevents speculation in DADA?
The Invisible Economy provides a layer between the making of art and the market. The market (and all of the myriad ways funds can come into the Invisible Economy) will be external to the determination of how both the value contributions within DADA are measured and also what gifts (rewards) are distributed within DADA. That’s the secret sauce. To get the environment right: so collaboration as opposed to competition, sharing, connecting, feeling valued, and validated. And to protect that environment so that it can continue to work its ‘magic’. It all about the system’s incentives. Crypto art is incentivized for a speculative economy. DADA’s Invisible Economy is incentivized for intrinsic rewards.
Where do we get the money?
We intend to mint a token that people can purchase to claim or acquire art on DADA or to invest in the token. The proceeds will be used to fund the UBI. We also have many different ways to monetize the 125,000 artworks created on DADA, from selling NFTs to creating merchandise, exhibitions, books and all kinds of content.
What chain is the DADA token going to be issued on?
Initially Ethereum. But who knows, Dada might migrate / expand to other chains in the future.
What kind of token will it be?
We are planning to issue an ERC 20 as a DADA token which sits alongside the artworks, which act as a form of collateral and which can in themselves be used as a medium of exchange. The DADA token can be used to pay for artworks and will be distributed to artists as UBI.
Will there be a stable coin?
That’s the plan for the UBI and revenue distribution. We are exploring different models.
Is token development in the software development phase, or still in the conceptual, pre-coding phase?
Pre-coding but going into simulations (as of November 2020).
How do you plan to distribute the tokens?
We have a basic gamified system in which we can transfer the points accrued by the artists into tokens so we can reward past contributions. We would also like to reward people in the community that have contributed tremendous value to DADA without drawing. Read the section in our paper about the token.
What can I do with these tokens?
You can use it to exchange or purchase art, you can keep it as an investment. The value of a cryptocurrency increases depending on the number of holders, its utility, and turnover. The more value we create, the more people will join the network, the more value the token will accrue due to network effects, so we can really think about art accruing value beyond its commodification. As people purchase the token we will be able to fund the UBI.
Can I list them on an exchange?
We would like the DADA token to be interoperable. Our token and NFTS should be able to be used in other platforms and we should be able to accept other tokens. But this means that the crypto art community must build standards we can all agree on, such as respecting royalty schemes between platforms, and the art can live and be used in a permissionless but trusted way across platforms.
What do you mean by art as a medium of exchange?
You can use a DADA drawing to purchase other DADA drawings, or even to purchase art on other platforms, eventually. Here’s the chapter on this topic.
How will the profits be distributed among the artists collaborating in a conversation?
Through our gamified system which is already in place in the drawing platform.
Can I get a DADA Token?
You will have to earn it by contributing intrinsic value to the community (by drawing, participating, or otherwise supporting DADA). You will also be able to purchase it.
How will your UBI program work?
There are many ways to argue for basic income. Basic income is not just about the redistribution of wealth. For example, UBI based on the fact that value is being extracted from planet Earth which is our commons. In our case, we are proposing a guaranteed basic income (not universal) based not on redistribution of wealth, but instead on accounting for intangible values and contributions to the system that money can’t handle. It is a different way of creating, transferring, and accounting for value.
In our very particular case, this basic income is not distributed by merit, but by a combination of effort, passion, and value created. All very hard things to account for but we are pretty far ahead already developing our contribution metrics. We are building a system for a community that already exists, so the outcomes are already all there. The value created flows to everyone who is creating it, to guarantee a baseline for each Dadakin, so artists don’t have to work on commission or sales to the market.
Here’s the chapter on UBI on our paper.
Could we think about boxes like the basic income for living? Food, a place to be, and as artists, the chance to dedicate ourselves to art?
We refer to these as needs.
As every country has different costs of living, how will you implement a globally inclusive model?
We know that a $500 basic income will have a different impact in Caracas than in New York. And then the question becomes what’s fair? Should the artist from New York earn $1000 and the artists from Caracas $200 so it is adjusted to their respective realities? Although living in NY is very hard, artists in New York have a lot more opportunities and benefits than an artist in Caracas. They also have more options in terms of mobility. Other factors beyond the cost of living should be factored in. We can choose the impact as a criterion to keep in mind, like for whom we can actually make a bigger difference.
What is the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic incentives and intrinsic and extrinsic motivations?
The difference between incentives and motivations is a tricky one, but incentives are embedded in the system and drive us into action, while motivations are what we feel. For example, a sales offer is an incentive, but it can be motivated by FOMO.
While incentives can be intrinsic or extrinsic, motivations are positive or negative depending on the emotions they trigger.
The Invisible Economy Incentive Framework
Is DADA decentralized?
Our ultimate goal is to decentralize as much as possible. In order to get there, we will experiment in a more centralized way as we move towards decentralization, ideally through a DAO.
Can an artist tokenize their DADA drawings on other platforms?
We recommend artists not to tokenize their DADA art on other platforms since this art is ready to be turned into an NFT and we want to make sure that the royalties always come back to the community.
What is the royalty structure in the secondary market?
90% goes to the fund that distributes income to artists. 10% goes to the collector. However, we are considering completely abolishing secondary markets.
How are you going to jumpstart the economy?
It seems like the best strategy for us is to use a bonding curve, start with a minimum collateral, and distribute tokens and rewards to the community that they can use to buy art on DADA. We can do this using the common app of DAO stack. So we can start small with a community that already trusts each other, and test extensively, and go from there. And we need to do simulations on cad cad. On the other hand, once we activate our marketplace, the money collected will go to a fund that the artists can govern from the DAO. Eventually, we’ll need to decide how much is distributed as basic income and how much goes to the collateral of the bonding curve.
Will you start with a controlled number of token holders?
We are not interested in launching the token to raise money but to build a sustainable economy based on our community values. It makes sense to start with people we trust so we can test our assumptions, possibly artists with a certain amount of points or drawings, as well as collectors, advisors, or collaborators who have given us a lot of value outside of DADA.
How does the reputation/points system currently work on DADA?
People earn points when they draw, more points if they reply to a conversation. They also earn points for following artists, liking, commenting, and interacting. We don’t have a leaderboard. Points earn people colored dots (like badges), which are increasingly difficult to attain the more people draw. We don’t really need reputation systems because people earn trust by drawing together.
What is art stewardship? How is it different from collecting art?
In art stewardship, collectors are the custodians of the art they collect. They have responsibilities towards the art as well as rights. In our model, a steward will make sure that the art is available for display, and will not have the right to burn the token. A steward may ensure that the art finds a good home. The steward of art collects art because they love it, not for speculative reasons, or they admire the artist and want to support them. We are challenging the notion that collectors can extract value from artists like Exxon extracts oil from the earth or Facebook extracts value from its users because this leads to distorted incentives to buy art.
Owning art in the context of DADA doesn’t mean private property, it means stewardship of the commons. But in practice, you pretty much get all the benefits of private property except the right to exclude anyone from viewing or remixing the work, and the right to destroy it. Please see our preliminary proposal on art stewardship.
Is it easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of DADA? Or the kin of DADA?
Only if the rich man is a speculator. ;-)
What are DADA’s basic governance principles?
Self-Engagement: People contribute to what they want, when they want, and as much as they want.
Equitable: Power flows to whoever has the initiative and willingness to do stuff and contribute value.
Decision-Making Power: is acquired in proportion to people’s value contribution and how much they are impacted by the decision.
Continuous: An open, ongoing deliberation process that ensures that a diversity of options are on the table.
Participatory Decision Making: Not everyone should make decisions but anyone can.
What’s a remix?
It can be a way for people to play with different drawings on DADA in order to create conversations with already existing drawings. Eventually, it can also mean adding layers to an NFT, with other drawings, animation, music, etc. It is permissionless, and, since ruled by smart contracts, authorship is correctly attributed and payments distributed among the creators automatically.
But copyrights…
From Primavera De Filippi: “Creative production is currently regulated according to traditional conceptions of author and work — the two pillars of copyright law. With the advent of digital technologies and the deployment of collaborative production platforms, we are witnessing today the emergence of new artistic practices which encourage sharing and collaboration — the two pillars of commons-based peer production (CBPP). Copyright law should evolve to better account for the progressive transformation of a creative process which naturally enriches the cultural commons.”
Will DADA implement other practices like collage?
Yes, there is a lot we can do using our current drawings as a base, we are going in the direction of remixing, doubling down on collaboration of all kinds: music, animation, etc.
What is the meaning of “commons”?
https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-history-and-evolution-of-the-commons/2017/09/28
The Commons are also the subject of Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel winning research. It goes beyond physical “assets” also for digital, cultural, knowledge, etc.
Is it possible to think that we can produce art and stake it? Like put everything in a big store to be freely used and get dividends?
Yes, the “tangible/visible” value “reserve” of DADA will always include the NFT art collection created on and minted through DADA, one of the foundational, visible “value stocks”. But in DADA’s case, there are also many foundational invisible value stocks.
Are the Working Group Videos links available?
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyxZTwSczCmfgBap95HydlA/playlists
#teamscarcity or #teamabundance?
We believe the value proposition of crypto art is not scarcity, but volume and scalability.
What can I do as a member to help the DADA community?
You can draw on DADA, make friends with artists, or join any of our working groups. Spread the word.
What do you think about “commissioned art”?
We could contemplate it but without the constraints of a commission. We are creating a system where people are driven by intrinsic rewards. To make a commission for a client is a transactional exchange for an extrinsic reward.
From our paper: “Teresa Amabile, a professor of psychology at Harvard who studies creativity and innovation, asked a panel of successful artists and curators to rate, based on creativity and skill, a selection of commissioned and non-commissioned works. The non-commissioned work was rated significantly higher in creativity than the commissioned work, yet there was not much difference in technical quality. Experts found commissioned art less creative, and artists reported that commissioned work was constraining: they found themselves working towards a goal they didn’t endorse, in a manner they didn’t control. Amabile’s findings underscore the importance of having the freedom to make art without external constraints.”
Have you faced the topic “who is an artist” or “what does it mean to be artist”?
Yes. We briefly touch on it on the paper, we talk about what we define as art, in contrast to what is artistic but not art. Everyone is welcome to make art on DADA. We always say that not everyone is an artist but anyone can make art. For DADA, who is or isn’t an artist is irrelevant, just as the question of what’s good or bad art is irrelevant.
From our paper: “Art can manifest itself in all kinds of ways, but it always requires us to abandon ourselves fully to artistic exploration in order to discover concealed, unrecognized aspects of ourselves. Art involves the sublimation of the artist’s fears, feelings, and repressed desires. This is how it heals and transforms. As Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents: “Artists worked on the raw material of their own unconscious conflicts through the art materials which allowed the audience to identify with these unconscious conflicts embodied in the artwork and rendered in culturally acceptable symbolic form.”
Is there an estimated time for the first simulation to start? Will it be a limited time simulation? How will we choose how to gain the first money?
We will be doing the first simulations in early 2021 as one of the activities DADA is developing during the KERNEL program.
People may get random amounts, for instance, instead of 500 each month for 2 months, an unexpected amount each month instead will feel like a gift.
How will it be decided which art will be sold or made available and at what price?
An element of randomness here will also create the feeling of gift. People won’t be able to choose directly which artwork will be minted. I do remember reading though that after a while preferences (expressed by? likes? other means?) can be taken into account, so if I like art by Mox then I might have a bigger chance of minting something by him.
One of the ideas for pricing is that people will put money in (their gift to DADA) and out of that money, some artwork will be minted. But it won’t be bought by a specific price.
Will the art be sold as individual drawings or visual conversations?
Assuming in one way or another we have a fair system to rate the contribution of DADA members in the community, how do we use this rating?
This is done through the “ikigai”. Latest ideas were of having it as a dynamic NFT, becoming fuller and more colorful reflecting each person evolving contribution. It’s such a beautiful concept. Sebnem or Sparrow can write more about it.
Is the DADA token going to be listed on Uniswap DEX and made convertible into fiat money?
I remember Sebnem saying yes. But please confirm this and possibly also give it some context.