In this week’s issue:

• Touch Grass: Creative DAOs Doing the Most (ok but define “most)

• It’s Giving: MetaBirkin Energy

• Still Downloading: We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Programming to Bring you…

• Bible: Bops, Reads & Other Sundries

• Bonus Palate Cleanser: Duran Lantink’s Frankenstein Lab

What to Expect from Babe (the unexpected, obvs)

Every Tuesday, at whatever time the data says is the best time, you’ll find Babe in your inbox. Each issue will look something like the one you’re reading now, only different. To keep things classy and somewhat organized, it will almost always include the following four elements. It will for sure serve.

My mostly uninformed take on creative DAOs is this: fascinating experiments in collective organization that are simultaneously ahead of their time and 100% chaotic.

For the uninitiated (ie me), a DAO is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization—basically a group of people working together with a shared bank account and a set of rules enforced by blockchain smart contracts instead of legal paperwork. Like many things in life, the idea is brilliant on paper and messy as fuck in practice.

But mess is where the magic unfolds, right?

OK so I've started poking around the small-small world of creative DAOs—collectives of artists, musicians, writers, and dreamers trying to reimagine how creative work gets funded, distributed, and valued. And I've found some neat shit I'd like to share.

1. ThePark.wtf is revolutionizing music collaboration with their weekly creation ritual. They've built a community where musicians from all over the world come together to create, mix, master, and publish a song from start to finish every single Friday. In doing so, they're bypassing traditional music industry gatekeepers entirely—no record labels, no agents, just direct collaboration and distribution on-chain.

   Basically, instead of artists waiting to be "discovered," they're building community-based recognition systems where the relationship between creator and audience becomes symbiotic rather than transactional.

2. Metalabel isn't technically a DAO in the strictest sense, but it's building infrastructure for creative collectives to release "drops" of their work together. Think of it as a record label model, but for any type of creative output—music, writing, visual art, whatever—with built-in tools for splitting revenue and governance. Their whole vibe is "curation as creation," and they're working with everyone from established artists to DIY collectives.

3. PleasrDAO started as a group that pooled funds to buy expensive NFTs (including the one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang album previously owned by pharma bro Martin Shkreli for $4 million). But they've evolved into something more interesting—a collector DAO that's exploring how to fractionalize ownership of cultural artifacts and make them accessible to more people. They're asking the question: what if owning cultural treasures wasn't just for the ultra-wealthy?

Cheers to that.

A common thread winding its way through all of these experiments is how they're tackling the eternal struggle all creatives face: how to make a living from your work without selling your soul to the corporate machine. They're trying to build systems where artists maintain ownership and control while still connecting with audiences and getting paid.

Of course they’re nowhere near perfect, but they’re trying. And I do like things and people who try.

4. Take FWB (Friends With Benefits), the social DAO that's part exclusive discord, part events company, part creative incubator. They've built a community of thousands of creative people who hold their token, host irl events in cities around the world, and fund creative projects from their members. Is it technically working? Depends on how you define success. Research tells me their token price (par for the course) has been all over the place, and they've had to pivot their model multiple times. There’s also this article 😬 from 2023. But, they've also created a vibrant community and funded dozens of creative projects that might not have existed otherwise.

What's clear is that building sustainable creative communities requires more than just tokens and voting mechanisms. It requires thoughtful community design, clear shared values, and talented people who can hold the vision together when things get messy (which they always do). And that shit’s hard.

The most successful creative DAOs are the ones thinking beyond pure decentralization dogma and instead asking: how can web3 tools help us build more equitable, sustainable creative communities? They're using tokens not just as financial instruments but as coordination mechanisms—ways to align incentives around shared creative goals.

So um, are creative DAOs working? I have no clue. But I also kinda think that’s an unfair question to ask at this point in the game. It’s like asking an American Revolutionary War soldier if things are working even though the war technically hasn’t even ended yet. Ugh, I don’t know if war is really the best parallel here, but the point is it’s a long fucking process and I think creative DAOs are learning how to work. 

They're messy, experimental, and sometimes frustrating. That’s art in a nutshell, that’s revolution—that’s life! But they're also creating new possibilities for creative people to collaborate, share resources, and build economic systems that reflect their values. Which I think is a good thing (esp when taken with grains of salt) most any day.

1. Time well spent with my mom at Seattle Art Museum. 📷

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