# Streaming Value: Building Through Flow in an Age of Collapse > Essay CoCreated with GPT + prompted analysis of podcast transcript by cstreet. In this Episode, [Graven](https://x.com/GravenPrest) from [FlowState](https://x.com/flowstatecoop) and [SuperFluidDAO](https://x.com/Superfluid_HQ) delegate joined us to explore how streaming money mechanisms could transform open source funding, creator support, and community resilience. To explore the full scope of [[Episode 3 - When Money Flows, Builders Thrive]] here: [Listen to Episode 3 here.](https://www.buzzsprout.com/2460445/episodes/17059458); DYOR Resources located here: [[EP3--DYOR]]; [[Episode 3a - Dialectical Insights]] ## A Paradox In our current technological ecosystem, we've created a fundamental paradox. The very tools designed to connect and liberate us have morphed into mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and disconnection. What began as revolutionary technology promising sovereignty and independence has been captured by the never-ending cycle of venture capital, token speculation, and exit liquidity. **As builders within this ecosystem, we find ourselves trapped in unsustainable patterns that drain our creative energy and fragment our communities.** "We're at the point where we all envisioned this tech being used in collapse, when systemic things fall apart, this technology can rise up. Here we are," Crystal observes. The irony is inescapable —Web3 was **designed as infrastructure for resilience during systemic breakdown, yet our funding models and community structures often replicate the same brittleness we aimed to transcend.** This contradiction becomes visible when we examine three frameworks that emerged from our conversation with Graven from FlowState: - the Continuous vs. Discrete Value paradigm, - the Relational Infrastructure model, - and the Fractal Community design. Each offers a pathway toward systems that might actually serve us during the transitions ahead—if we're willing to say the quiet parts out loud about where we're currently failing. ## Continuous vs. Discrete Value: Beyond the Casino Economy The fundamental distinction between continuous and discrete value exchange forms the backbone of Graven's work with FlowState. "When you do something once, it's transactional... but continuous and streaming is relational because that artifact stays live and the connection between the value exchange is continuously moving," Crystal notes, building on Graven's explanation of streaming value. > This distinction transcends mere financial infrastructure—it represents fundamentally different relationships to time, attention, and human connection. Our current economy functions primarily through discrete transactions that optimize for short-term extraction rather than long-term flourishing. As Taylor observes, this creates "a very short term gain... but when you coin every single thing, it just dilutes and then you lose that relational connection." Graven highlights how this discrete transactional model has infiltrated even our public goods funding: "We went from a Giveth grant round to a Gitcoin grant round, back to back... flooding the zone, putting out as much content as possible... and it creates a negative externality of people's attention." This battle for attention fragments our creative energy precisely when we need sustained focus to solve complex problems. The streaming model offers an alternative—continuous value flows that allow builders to remain in what Graven calls "flow state," the psychological condition where deep work becomes possible. **"We're trying to keep builders in a flow state so that they can actually make the breakthroughs that they are dreaming of," he explains. "But if they don't have the funding or don't have the time to focus on those deep research questions, they're not going to make it."** > **Research Context: Flow State and Creative Production** The concept of "flow state" was pioneered by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, who described it as a mental state of complete immersion and energized focus. Research shows that meaningful creative breakthroughs typically require sustained periods in this state, which is disrupted by financial precarity and attention fragmentation. A 2018 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that economic insecurity significantly impairs cognitive function and decision-making quality—suggesting that funding stability directly impacts innovation capacity. Similarly, historical funding models like DARPA's long-horizon research programs demonstrate that continuous, stable funding produces more transformative innovations than short-term competitive grants. ## Relational Infrastructure: Encoding Trust in Systems Design The streaming model represents more than just technical infrastructure—it embodies what we might call "relational infrastructure," systems designed to nurture ongoing connections rather than maximize extraction. Graven articulates this when comparing SaaS business models to traditional software: **"When someone is paying you that there's implicit or explicit kind of contract being made... that you are going to reinvest that to build a better product continuously."** This insight extends to public goods, where one-time donations primarily reward past work while continuous streams invest in future creation. "A one-time donation is kind of paying you for what you've done in the past. Great job... When you're committing to something that is going forward... they're betting on you to make good on that in the future too," Graven explains. Taylor expands this concept beyond finance: "It certainly seems like it lowers the barrier to entry... you can open a stream and, like, this can happen in a very low risk. It doesn't need to be hundreds or thousands of dollars." This **low-friction relationship building allows communities to develop trust gradually rather than requiring large initial commitments.** Crystal connects this relational infrastructure to broader information flows: "We're creating these **connections of human value and value exchange and then we're putting a token stream or a streaming device into that, but we're also streaming information and knowledge and co-creation."** This integration of financial, knowledge, and social capital streams represents a profound shift from siloed, extractive systems toward integrated, regenerative ones. > **Research Context: Trust as Infrastructure** Sociologist Charles Tilly's work on "trust networks" demonstrates how sustainable communities develop through repeated, low-risk exchanges that gradually build confidence between members. Similarly, Elinor Ostrom's research on commons governance shows that successful common-pool resource management depends on graduated commitment mechanisms rather than all-or-nothing participation models. The streaming model operationalizes these social principles into technical infrastructure, potentially addressing what scholars like Shoshana Zuboff have called the "trust deficit" in digital platforms—where transactional models have eroded the social fabric needed for collective action. ## Fractal Community Design: Beyond Infinite Scale Perhaps the most profound insight emerges around scale and community structure. Rather than pursuing infinite growth, the conversation reveals a pattern that might be **called "fractal community design"—nested scales of organization that maintain human connection while enabling broader coordination.** Crystal describes this approach within JournoDAO: "We decided to do pods... So like you and I are doing a pod right now... and then you plug into a mothership... So you're ephemeral in these larger communities, but you have a presence when you go in with your pod or with multiple pods. But then you can pull back out and get into that intimate container where real work happens." > Graven affirms this principle: "Fractal designs are great. That's how you scale. Like you can't just throw a hundred million peers into some system and expect it to be not extremely messy... hopefully you can scale that through... some sort of fractal design and... some sort of cadence of reconnecting and separating." This insight directly confronts the scaling obsession that dominates tech discourse. Taylor connects it to our evolutionary limitations: "Humans have only ever operated in, even the Dunbar number style 100 people or so... and so now we've just hyper, over the course of a few generations, sped into this very uncomfortable reality where we're all trying to figure out what are the systems to allow... the things I ultimately know at a ground truth in my own brain... to map into me being part of a global collective." Rather than fighting these limitations or ignoring them, **fractal community design works with them—creating human-scale containers that nest within larger coordination structures.** This enables what Crystal calls "composting"—the ability to metabolize conflict and challenge within contained environments: "For a community and an individual to have resiliency, they have to be able to compost that negative aspect... when something happens in a community it can either fracture it if you've got friction and you don't deal with it, the flames can burn the community down or the community can compost it and become stronger because of it." > **Research Context: Fractal Organization and Resilience** Complex systems research demonstrates that fractal organization patterns—where similar structures repeat at different scales—characterize resilient natural systems from forests to coral reefs. Anthropologist David Graeber's work on "bureaucracy" shows how large-scale human organizations typically fail when they impose uniform structures across different scales rather than allowing appropriate local adaptations. ## Building Infrastructure for Future Generations These frameworks—continuous value, relational infrastructure, and fractal community design—converge around what **Graven calls "the infinite game," the long-term vision that transcends quarterly gains and token pumps.** This vision directly challenges what Crystal identifies as the venture capital trap: "Everything is that short-term game like what? What is going to get us to the token, what's going to get us to that flip of the money so that VCs can pull, get their exit liquidity and exit the whole thing." This short-term extraction mentality creates what **Taylor calls a "vacuum" where communities struggle to maintain coherence and purpose.** Against this vacuum, he suggests we need to focus on "building the connective tissue that creates some cohesion, enough cohesion and coherence between what would feel like completely disparate communities." Continuous funding streams, relational infrastructure, and fractal community structures together create this connective tissue—binding communities across space and time without sacrificing their autonomy or unique characteristics. This approach directly addresses what Crystal identifies as our core challenge: bringing people with us through systemic transition. **"When systems do collapse, you're going to go to your community gathering places... and if you don't have a bridge for them to understand what the fuck you're doing, you're not going to be able to bring them with you."** The systems we're building now will determine whether communities can navigate the transitions ahead with dignity and connection—or whether they fragment under pressure. As Taylor notes, **we're in an "era of Trojan horses" where we have the opportunity to "slide a better narrative into the ecosystem when those centralized entities swoop in."** The designs we embed now will shape what's possible later, when the pressure intensifies. > **Research Context: Infrastructure as Politics** Historian of technology Langdon Winner's concept of "artifacts as politics" demonstrates how infrastructural design embeds power relationships and governance models that persist long after the designers' intentions are forgotten. Public infrastructure historian Marta Gutman similarly shows how community infrastructure becomes particularly crucial during periods of systemic transition, providing both material support and symbolic coherence as other systems fail. Contemporary examples from Puerto Rico's community mutual aid networks following Hurricane Maria demonstrate how local resilience depends on infrastructure designed specifically for community autonomy and distributed coordination rather than centralized control. ## The Resistance is Relationality As we navigate the transitions ahead, our most powerful resistance tool may be the simplest: **choosing relationship over extraction, continuous connection over discrete transaction, community composting over fragmentation.** The technical designs matter profoundly—streaming value, relational infrastructure, fractal community—but they matter because they enable patterns of human connection that our current systems actively undermine. "We're walking a razor's edge in emergent tech," Crystal observes. The systems we build could either enhance or diminish our collective resilience as larger structures falter. **The core insight from this conversation is that technological resilience cannot be separated from relational resilience—our ability to maintain community through difficulty, to metabolize conflict rather than fragment beneath it, to bridge between scattered nodes of resistance.** The storm is not coming—it's here. The systemic collapse we designed for has begun. Whether our technologies actually serve us in this transition depends not only on their technical specifications but on whether they nurture the relational foundation that ultimately sustains us: our ability to see each other, trust each other, and build together through uncertainty. The future belongs to those who can maintain flow amidst chaos, relationship amidst fragmentation, community amidst collapse. Our resistance begins with embedding these principles into every system we build, every community we nurture, every stream we open. The continuous resistance to extraction is what will ultimately create the world beyond it. --- ## Begin exploring the full scope of [[Episode 3 - When Money Flows, Builders Thrive]] here: - #### [Listen to Episode 3 here.](https://www.buzzsprout.com/2460445/episodes/17059458) - #### [[When Money Flows, Builders Thrive]] - #### DYOR Resources located here: [[EP3--DYOR]] - #### [[Episode 3a - Dialectical Insights]]