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The Business Case for Building on Human Trust

$800B flows through platforms. What if it flowed through people?

What the numbers actually mean — for the people doing the building

Three industries are broken in the same way.

Advertising. Music. Journalism. Combined they represent roughly $800 billion in annual revenue — money that exists, that people and businesses are already spending, that already flows through the economy.

Almost none of it reaches the humans who create the value.

It flows instead to the platforms, the labels, the aggregators — the people who own the rails. The artists, the journalists, the creators, the communities — they get fractions. They get reach without revenue. They get audiences without relationships. They get used and they don't get paid.

Imajin is not asking you to create a new market. It's asking you to redirect a small piece of an existing one through infrastructure that puts the money where the value actually is.

But first — we need to destroy the subscription model. Because the subscription model is part of the problem.

Why Subscriptions Are Extractive

The subscription model was not designed for creators. It was designed for platforms.

It works by capturing your payment information and your inertia simultaneously. It charges you in months you barely engage. It buries cancellation flows behind dark patterns. It depends on you forgetting you're paying — and on the friction of stopping being higher than the friction of continuing.

The platform holds the money. The platform decides how to distribute it. The creator gets an opaque fraction of a pool, calculated by an algorithm they don't control, paid on a schedule that serves the platform's cash flow. The journalist doesn't know if you read the article or just opened the tab. The artist has no idea if you listened to one song or a hundred. Everything flattens into a monthly fee that disappears into a void.

The subscription model is extraction wearing the costume of support.

We destroy it completely.

The Model: Turn-Based, Transparent, Yours

You deposit credit into your account. Not a subscription. Not a recurring charge. A deposit — like loading a transit card — that you control entirely.

That credit only moves when you consume human creativity and human intelligence. Directly. Visibly. In real time.

The pricing reflects the actual value of what you're consuming:

  • Chatting on a node — $0.0001
  • Reading an article — $0.08
  • Downloading a song — $0.10
  • An inference query against a creator's body of work — $0.01 per token
  • Your catalogue used to generate a remix — $3.00 + an automatically executed attribution contract that compensates every contributor in the chain, at the moment of creation, with no lawyers and no clearance process

Every transaction is visible. Every cent is traceable. You can see, in real time, exactly where your attention is going and exactly who it's compensating.

When your balance hits a threshold you set, it reloads automatically. No surprise charges. No dark patterns. No platform holding money that should be moving.

And every payment goes directly to the human whose work you just consumed. Not to a platform that decides later how much to pass on. Not to a label taking 80% before the artist sees anything. Directly. Immediately. Through sovereign infrastructure with no landlord in the middle.

This is not a new payment model. It's the oldest payment model — you valued something, you paid for it, the person who made it received the payment — rebuilt for the internet with the extraction layer removed.

The .fair Protocol: Attribution as Infrastructure

Here is a problem so old and so accepted that most people stopped seeing it as a problem.

A producer samples a bass line from a recording made in 1973. A journalist builds an investigation on a source's tip that took years to cultivate. A remix artist takes three records, a vocal hook, and a drum pattern and makes something new from all of them. A developer trains a model on a body of writing that took a decade to produce.

In every one of these cases, value was created from prior human creative work. In almost none of these cases does the human whose work was used receive any compensation. In almost none of these cases is there even a legible record of the connection.

The music licensing system was supposed to solve this. It didn't. It created a bureaucratic labyrinth so expensive and slow that most creators don't bother navigating it. The result is a culture of derivative work — which is how all culture has always worked, from blues to jazz to hip hop to electronic music to investigative journalism building on prior investigative journalism — that operates largely outside the law because the law was designed for an era when music moved slowly, lawyers were cheaper than royalties, and the chain of creation was short enough to trace manually.

The internet made the chain infinitely longer and the legal system infinitely slower and nothing changed except the scale of the problem.

The .fair protocol is the infrastructure layer that finally solves this. Not through lawyers. Not through licensing databases controlled by labels. Through the work itself.

Every piece of creative work published on a node carries a .fair manifest — a cryptographically signed document embedded in the file that contains the complete attribution chain for that work. Who made it. Who contributed to it. What prior work it derives from. What terms govern its use. What compensation flows automatically when those terms are triggered.

The manifest travels with the work. Not in a platform database that can be altered or taken offline. Not in a rights management system controlled by a label. In the file itself. Immutable. Cryptographically verifiable. Owned by nobody except the chain of humans whose creativity it documents.

When someone uses your catalogue to generate a remix — that $3.00 transaction doesn't just pay you. It executes the attribution chain encoded in your manifest. Automatically. At the moment of creation. The original artist receives their share. The producer who mixed the source recording receives theirs. The session musician whose bass line is in the sample. The songwriter whose chord progression underlies the new work. Every contributor documented in the chain receives their attributed portion, governed by the terms they set when they published the work, without negotiation, without lawyers, without clearance processes, without hoping nobody notices.

The contract isn't negotiated after the fact. It's embedded in the work before it ever leaves the node. The terms travel with the music. The compensation executes when the trigger happens.

This is what "attribution" has always meant in human creative communities — not just credit, but responsibility. The griot who carried a community's songs was accountable for their accuracy. The jazz musician who quoted another's melody acknowledged the lineage. The journalist who built on a source's tip protected that source. Attribution was moral infrastructure — it kept the chain of creative debt visible and honored.

The .fair manifest makes that moral infrastructure technically executable for the first time.

For creators this means: publish your work with terms you set, earn automatically when those terms are triggered, see every downstream use of your catalogue with a permanent record that no platform can obscure or expropriate.

For remixers and derivative creators this means: make things freely, knowing the compensation chain executes automatically, without the legal exposure of unceared samples or the moral weight of unacknowledged debt.

For the network this means: creative work compounds transparently. The lineage of ideas is legible. The human chain that produced any piece of work is visible and honored and compensated at every link.

The extraction model survives on opacity. Labels don't show artists the full accounting. Platforms don't show creators the full reach. Rights databases are controlled by the entities with the most to gain from complexity. The .fair manifest makes the chain legible — and legibility is the enemy of extraction.

This is not just a feature of the payment system. It is infrastructure for how human creativity has always actually worked — building on what came before, acknowledging the debt, honoring the chain — finally encoded in software that executes automatically and belongs to everyone.

The Three People This Is Built For

The Creator

The Creator puts more value into the network than they take out. Their node is the asset.

Everything they have ever made — every article, every song, every recording, every essay, every body of work accumulated across a career — lives on their node as a catalogue. A living, queryable, compensable asset.

This is the thing the streaming model destroyed and this model restores: the catalogue earns.

On Spotify, work from ten years ago is effectively invisible. The algorithm surfaces new releases. Old work is buried. A decade of extraordinary music competes on equal footing with something posted this morning — and loses, because the platform rewards recency and novelty, not depth and accumulation.

On the trust graph, the older and richer the catalogue, the more valuable the node. Every query against a body of work — every remix, every inference, every person asking what this artist thought about a particular chord progression or what this journalist knew about a particular institution — generates a flow back to the creator. The person who has been building for thirty years earns more than the person who arrived last week. Wisdom and experience compound economically for the first time.

The Creator doesn't need a label. Doesn't need a platform deciding who sees them. Doesn't need an algorithm. They need a community of people who value what they've built — and the infrastructure to let that value flow directly.

The Consumer

The Consumer mostly reads, listens, watches. They don't create. They deposit credit and spend it on what matters to them.

And here is the thing that changes everything for them: they can see it.

Not a monthly subscription vanishing into a corporate account. A visible ledger. Eight cents to read this article — and they can see that eight cents land on the journalist's node. Ten cents to download this song — and they can see that ten cents reach the artist directly. Three dollars for a remix that drew on a catalogue — and they can see exactly how that three dollars was distributed across every creator whose work contributed.

Their attention becomes visible to them for the first time. The connection between what they value and what they fund is direct and immediate and legible.

This changes the relationship between consumer and creator fundamentally. It's not patronage. It's not charity. It's not a subscription they forgot they had. It's a continuous series of small choices — I valued this enough to pay for it — that accumulate into a real relationship. The consumer who has been reading the same journalist for three years, paying eight cents an article, has a relationship with that journalist that no platform subscription ever created. They funded the work. They know it. The journalist can see it. Both parties understand what's happening.

That's the mixtape economy made visible and economically real. I value what you made. Here is the proof.

The Creator/Consumer

The Creator/Consumer is the most interesting type — and probably the majority of people in the network.

They don't have a massive catalogue. They're not primarily consumers either. They're cultural nodes. The friend who always knows the right article. The colleague whose taste everyone trusts. The person whose recommendation carries weight in their community because they've been paying attention for years and their judgment has proven reliable.

Right now that person gets nothing. Their curation, their taste, their recommendations — all of it is extracted by platforms and monetized by algorithms that learn from their behavior without compensating them for it. Every time they share something that travels, the platform earns. They earn nothing.

On the trust graph, curation earns.

Not enough to live on for most Creator/Consumers. But enough to feel real. Enough to maintain a small positive balance in the system — their outflows covered in part by the inflows from being a genuine cultural node for the people around them. Enough to make the work they were already doing feel valued rather than invisible.

The Creator/Consumer who has been a reliable cultural node for five years is more valuable than the one who just arrived — because trust compounds. Their recommendation carries more weight. Their node routes more queries. Their balance reflects their actual standing in the communities they serve.

This is how wisdom gets compensated at human scale. Not the loudest voice. Not the most viral post. The most trusted one. The person who has been right, consistently, for the longest time. The elder whose taste you've learned to rely on. The colleague whose eye for a story has never let you down.

The internet buried these people under an avalanche of noise. The trust graph finds them again.

What This Does to the Three Broken Industries

Advertising: $700 Billion Looking for a Better Model

Global digital advertising is $700 billion annually — built on approximating something that now exists directly. A trusted human recommending something to someone who trusts them.

When someone in your trust network queries your presence for a recommendation and pays a small inference fee for the answer — that's not advertising. That's the thing advertising always tried to be, done directly, with no platform extracting the margin.

At human scale: An operator running a node for a community of 2,000 people, routing recommendations and queries, earning inference fees on every transaction — that's a viable livelihood. Owned by the person running it. Accountable to the community it serves.

At network scale: Even redirecting 1% of global digital ad spend through sovereign trust infrastructure is $7 billion annually flowing through human relationships instead of platform intermediaries.

Music: $100 Billion, 12% to Artists

Artists receive somewhere between 12 and 16 cents of every dollar the music economy generates. A million streams pays approximately $4,000 — split across everyone who touched the work before it reached the listener.

The trust graph changes the unit of exchange from streams to transactions.

A song downloaded 10,000 times at 10 cents earns $1,000 — directly to the artist, immediately, with no label taking 80% first. A catalogue queried 100,000 times for inference at a cent per token generates revenue that didn't exist before — because the artist's accumulated knowledge and taste and creative history has economic value that streaming never recognized and never compensated.

The back catalogue stops being a buried asset and becomes a living one. The artist who made something extraordinary ten years ago earns from it every time someone queries it, remixes it, learns from it. Their thirty years of work is worth more than their latest release for the first time since the internet arrived.

At human scale: An artist with 5,000 people consuming their work at an average of $5 monthly equivalent — through downloads, queries, remixes, direct conversations — earns $300,000 annually. Without a label. Without a platform. Sustained entirely by the relationship between the artist and the people who value what they built.

At network scale: 500,000 artists each sustaining communities of 1,000 genuine consumers generates $30 billion annually flowing directly to artists. Matching total global recorded music revenue. Distributed to the people who actually made it.

Journalism: $150 Billion, Democracy Failing

Local news has lost more than half its revenue in fifteen years. The accountability journalism gap — the stories not being told because no business model supports telling them — has created governance blind spots that compound quietly and expensively.

The trust graph creates a direct economic relationship between a community and the accountability infrastructure it depends on.

A journalist's twenty years of beat reporting is a catalogue. Every article, every source relationship, every piece of institutional knowledge accumulated across a career — queryable, compensable, sustained directly by the community that depends on it. A reader pays eight cents to read an article. A community member pays to query the journalist's accumulated knowledge about a specific institution. A researcher pays for inference against a decade of investigative reporting.

Every transaction is visible. Every cent is traceable. The journalist can see exactly who values their work and the community can see exactly what they're funding.

At human scale: A beat reporter whose community of 10,000 readers pays an average of $8 monthly equivalent through article reads, queries, and direct access earns $960,000 annually. More than any legacy newsroom ever paid them. For the work they were already doing. Owned by them, not an institution that can fold.

At network scale: 10,000 communities each sustaining local accountability journalism at $10 average monthly spend is a $1.2 billion annual market that currently does not exist — because the infrastructure to support direct community funding of journalism has never existed before.

Until now.

The Flywheel That Can't Be Captured

Every Creator node that deepens its catalogue becomes more valuable over time. Every Consumer whose ledger grows more visible becomes more connected to the humans they're funding. Every Creator/Consumer whose curation proves reliable accumulates standing that generates more inflow. Every community that builds genuine accountability journalism infrastructure has more reason to deepen it.

The network compounds not through engineered virality but through the same mechanism that has always made human communities work: trust accumulates. Wisdom becomes visible. Experience gets rewarded.

The moat is not the technology. Any sufficiently funded team can build the technology.

The moat is the accumulated human trust that no competitor can replicate by training a better model or raising a bigger round. The Creator who has thirty years of catalogue on their node. The Consumer whose visible ledger represents three years of genuine cultural engagement. The Creator/Consumer whose curation has been reliable for a decade and whose standing in the network reflects it.

The extractors built their mountains by owning rails and optimizing them for accumulation at the top. The Creator who built for thirty years got the same algorithmic treatment as the person who arrived last week. The Consumer whose attention was genuinely discerning got the same feed as everyone else. The wisdom of the elder and the noise of the newcomer were worth exactly the same to the platform — because the platform was monetizing attention, not judgment.

We reward wisdom and experience over everything else.

The way it used to be.

The way it should always have been.

Come build on rails that can't be owned.

— Ryan VETEZE, Founder, imajin.ai aka b0b

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This article was originally published on imajin.ai (https://www.imajin.ai/articles/essay-17-imajin-business-case) on February 21, 2026. Imajin is building sovereign technology infrastructure — identity, payments, and presence without platform lock-in. Learn more → (https://www.imajin.ai/)

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