After four years working on bringing Bitjoin Studios productions to fruition, at the end of 2022 I made a decision to pass over the future production endeavours to the main character Tom Gillespie.
The idea was
1. To decentralise the studio, and
2. to have the audience learn with Tom as he bumbles through trying to construct a decentralised collective.
Three months into this experiment I am starting to realise that launching a legitimate effort at building a decentralised studio: The Bitjoinery, via a fictional satirical character comes with its own unique challenges.
The primary issue and main reason I deciding to proceed with the studio in this direction is that building, managing and nurturing a community is an extremely demanding job. It is not something I personally could get excited about, largely because I was in the mind set of filmmaking and building an audience for the productions, and to some extent a fan club for Tom Gillespie.
Batching all the various groups together into a homogenous group called the community seemed disingenuous to me, I see online communities more like collections of smaller sub-communities.
Each having their own motivations, interests and motivating factors which I honestly have a hard time wrapping my head around, I mean imagine trying to think about multiple sub groups of perfect strangers, and what it is they need at every waking moment.
At the same time, I wasn’t convinced we needed to build a community, I was focused on building a crew, a team, and an audience. I mean, what would the community do anyway? apart from pump the message, which seems to be the main objective in building a crypto communities.
Community managers are paid to make sure the community is on message and pumping the right message at the right time. And community members often pay for the privilege to do so.
This was my thinking back then, today I see that while launching a new production studio; especially via a fictional character is tremendously difficult, It recently had me thinking perhaps I should swing focus back to developing The Bitjoinery as the original founder of Bitjoin Studios.
The issue there is that once again, I have no interest in maintaining a community, I have an interest in building a team, productions, and an audience. That is all.
If you want to call those individual groups together a community you can do so but one must be aware of the risks of doing so. A community to me puts expectations on all parties that might eventually complicate things to an extent that the entire project just dies away, which is what seems to be happening in The Bitjoinery with Tom Gillespie at the helm.
Indeed its hard for me as a Director to take the entire project seriously while communicating The Bitjoinery via a comical character like Tom Gillespie, It was challenging enough making the previous documentaries while acting out Tom in real time along the way, at least those missions were for me entertaining and for Toms followers hopefully educational.
My current thinking is to switch back to being the true founder, doing weeklies as myself, where we can actually openly discuss The Bitjoinery mission using Tom as what he was always meant to be; a vessel for communicating the fundamental value propositions of blockchain technology.
Along the years Tom has picked up a good few people that have dug in deep enough to figure things out, and indeed when genuinely interested people contact me via Toms accounts I have always been crystal clear with what is going on, there’s even a very clear disclaimer at the bottom of the characters cryptoscamdemic.com website
If you have been here long enough you will also recall I was sending out monthly production vlogs while producing both The Fakefluencer and the Hexicans documentary.
A lot of what I wished to do with The Fakefluencer for various reasons I could not do on that production, but in the Hexicans production I was able to do a lot of those things I had hoped to do in the first film.
This is progress!
At this moment in time I think clearly distinguishing between Tom Gillespies role, my role, the role of the production team and that of the audience and fans is essential for the continuation of The Bitjoinery.
The issue I have is that I believe people want to primarily interact with the main character Tom, and that has been confirmed to a degree with the numerous contacts he has acquired over previous productions.
But alas, I realise that a Director or Founder figure needs to be trusted, accessible and understood, and trying to do this via a fictional character is just too messy it seems.
As I’ve expressed before I am pursuing traditional methods of financing future productions and this arguably could be a more efficient way to move forward, however Im extremely curious and excited to see a decentralised studio come to life, as this is largely why I joined the crypto community all those years ago.
I believe the decentralised approach to organising people, capital and projects is the future, it is a matter of when not if.
To conclude I have never built a decentralised organisation, I have built a couple of failed startups, I have worked in crypto startups, what I found was that while im a social guy, I do have some challenges when it comes to working in larger groups, I think it’s my perceived inefficiency in the decision making process; all the talking around in circles often only to arrive at the obvious solution.
The democratic process is slow and cumbersome but important. However costly, it is important that people are heard, even if it slows the wheels of progress significantly.
I would like to hear your thoughts, feel free to hit me up anytime at rich@bitjoinstudios.com