LUME. Creatives in Web3 Age

The cultural history of the internet is often told through silicon chips and fibre-optic cables. A more human story, however, began in the basements and wood-panelled dens where tabletop roleplaying games (RPG) first took shape in the 1970s. This article traces the evolution of the web through the experiences of tabletop roleplaying communities, with a particular focus on Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) players during periods of platform change. The key takeaway from RPG communities for cultural producers lies in understanding how creative work is increasingly shaped by digital infrastructures. The Analogue Roots of Participatory Culture When D&D was published in 1974, it was structurally unusual: a rule system designed not as a finished product but as a framework to be expanded, modified and shared by its players. Innovation scholar Eric von Hippel used the term "lead users" to describe groups encountering emerging social and technological needs, often years prior to wider marketplace recognition. RPG communities fit Hippel’s description well. These communities immediately began producing their own adventures, distributed through photocopied newsletters, hand-stapled zines and convention networks. In the language of contemporary media theory, this represented participatory culture in its earliest analogue form (Jenkins, 2006). As tabletop RPG communities moved online during the Web1 era, they carried with them a culture built around open standards, collaborative worldbuilding, and shared creative ownership. Early internet forums, fan sites, and digital archives became spaces where players openly modified rulesets, expanded fictional universes, and circulated community-created content. The idea that a creative framework could be shared for others to build upon, without giving up control of the core intellectual property, was already embedded in RPG culture long before Creative Commons licensing was formalised in 2001. These communities were, in effect, conducting an extended live experiment in what Yochai Benkler terms commons-based peer production: the collaborative creation of shared cultural resources outside both the market and the state (Benkler, 2006). Players were no longer passive consumers. They were active stewards of a shared creative space. From Forums to Platforms The transition into Web2 dramatically expanded the reach of tabletop gaming culture. Virtual tabletops (eg. Roll20 and Foundry VTT) made remote play accessible, while streaming platforms transformed collaborative storytelling into spectator entertainment. Critical Role, a live-streamed Dungeons & Dragons actual-play series featuring professional voice actors, demonstrated that tabletop roleplaying could attract a global audience. In 2019, Critical Role's crowdfunding campaign for its animated series The Legend of Vox Machina raised more than eleven million US dollars. This signalled the commercial maturity of the RPG creator economy. This commercial growth came with a structural cost that took years to become visible. As creators moved their work onto centralised platforms, their roles became that of  tenants than owners. Characters, campaign worlds, fan wikis and streaming archives lived on servers controlled by corporations whose priorities were shaped by shareholders, not communities. Algorithm changes could bury years of content and platform closures could erase entire archives of lore. Writer Cory Doctorow has described this dynamic, originally developed in the context of social media, as 'enshittification', a process by which digital platforms initially attract and serve users before gradually prioritising extraction and monetisation over community wellbeing (Doctorow, 2023)." The Open Game Licence Moment The risks of platform dependency became clearly visible in 2023. That year, the corporate owners of the D&D game, Wizards of the Coast, proposed revisions to the Open Game License. The licence had governed third-party D&D content for more than two decades. The proposed changes would have significantly increased corporate control over community-created work. The backlash was swift. Publishers, developers and players began migrating toward alternative open systems almost immediately. Although the revisions were ultimately withdrawn, this incident exposed a structural vulnerability that had for a long time been concealed behind convenience. Creative work built on corporate permission remains subject to corporate decisions. For many creators, this was the moment that made the theoretical risks of platform dependency feel real. Web3 and the Question of Ownership This tension helps explain why some of the most influential Web3 experiments have emerged from RPG and creator communities. One example is the Loot project, released in 2021, which echoes the original design philosophy of D&D in a significant way. Like the 1974 D&D rulebooks, Loot began as a minimal framework rather than a finished system. It consisted of 8,000 text-based “bags of adventuring gear” (NFTs), released without artwork, formal mechanics, or a central development team (Loot Project, 2021). The project functioned as an open-ended prompt for community-driven worldbuilding and experimentation (Adventure Gold DAO, 2021). The ecosystem that formed around Loot also experimented with NFT-based forms of character representation. The ownership of a “bag” could act as a portable on-chain identifier through a crypto-wallet signature across community-built applications. While not a formal decentralised identity system, it anticipated later discussions around interoperable digital identity and composable user-owned assets. This experimentation emerged alongside growing interest in standards such as W3C Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and self-sovereign identity (SSI), which seek to formalise user-controlled digital identity. In parallel, decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) have explored governance models that distribute decision-making through token-based voting and smart contracts which could be compared to the distributed narrative authority found in tabletop role-playing games. However, empirical studies have shown that governance activity within DAOs is often disproportionately driven by a small subset of highly active members (World Economic Forum, 2022). This concentration of influence challenges the ideal of full decentralisation, even while these systems echo the shared authority of RPG cultures. Ultimately, these developments highlight a central tension in creative digital systems. Whilst ownership and governance are described as decentralised, they remain tethered to uneven participation and the realities of infrastructural control. Cultural Production as Infrastructure Management For cultural producers, this history suggests that the decisive question is not which technology they use, but how it structures power: Who retains the ownership of the work and does the technology support continuity within creative communities? The aim is not to reject platforms, but to understand their role more precisely from visibility, and collaboration to how they define what can be preserved, shared, or monetised over time. Web3 offers one avenue to make this logic explicit. It embeds ownership, identity, and governance into infrastructure itself. But its lesson is broader than any single technology. Cultural production in a digital era is always also about infrastructure management. The question I propose cultural producers ask themselves is not whether new systems are “better”. Rather ask whether these systems strengthen the capacity of creative communities to sustain themselves and ownership of their work across technological change. Sources Adventure Gold DAO (2021). Adventure Gold and the Loot Ecosystem. AGLD Whitepaper. Available at: https://adventuregold.org Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Yale University Press. https://www.benkler.org/Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks.pdf Doctorow, C. (2023). "Social Quitting." Locus Magazine, January 2023. Available at: https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-social-quitting/ Goel, A.; Rahulamathavan, Y. (2025). "A Comparative Survey of Centralised and Decentralised Identity Management Systems: Analysing Scalability, Security, and Feasibility." Future Internet. https://doi.org/10.3390/fi17010001 Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU Press. https://nyupress.org/9780814742952/convergence-culture/ Loot Project (2021). "Loot (for Adventurers) FAQ." lootproject.com. Available at: https://www.lootproject.com/faq von Hippel, E. (2005). Democratizing Innovation. MIT Press. Available at: https://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/books/DI/DemocInn.pdf Wizards of the Coast (2023). "An Update on the Open Game License (OGL)." D&D Beyond, 13 January 2023. Available at: https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1423-an-update-on-the-open-game-license-ogl World Economic Forum (2022). Decentralized Autonomous Organizations: Beyond the Hype. White Paper, 23 June 2022. Available at: https://www.weforum.org/publications/decentralized-autonomous-organizations-beyond-the-hype

Lynch self-funded and launched davidlynch.com in December 2001: years before YouTube, Spotify, or the creator economy had names. Many major technological revolutions in cinema and music have been driven by artists. Bergman shot Saraband digitally in 2003. Sinatra pushed for the LP format in the 1950s. Prince released music-on-demand in 1999. They were artists who recognised something new and committed to it before the business model was obvious. David Lynch is a great example of this in the internet age. When the web was still mostly dial-up static and blinking cursors, he launched a website that anticipated almost everything we now take for granted about the creator economy: subscription content, daily micro-formats, direct-to-audience release, multiple revenue streams, all aligned to a personal brand. He did it because he was genuinely curious about a new channel and asked himself the most productive creative question: what does this channel empower me to make that I couldn't make anywhere else? A maker first, always To understand Lynch's approach to the internet, you need to understand how he approached everything. He was always the creator first. Everything else, the platform, the format, the revenue, followed the work. He began his career as a painter, and his first film happened almost by accident. Lynch's early ambition was to become a painter, and after studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, he created his first film, a 60-second animation entitled Six Men Getting Sick (1967),  for an experimental painting and sculpture contest. The moving image was just another surface to paint on. His feature debut, Eraserhead (1977), is one of the defining examples of creative commitment in cinema history. It was shot almost entirely at night; funding was never constant; production stopped many times when the money dried up. Lynch supported himself by delivering The Wall Street Journal and lived on set for a time. The sets were largely built from scavenged materials. He took five years to finish it. "The life in that world… there was nothing like it. Things go so fast when you're making a movie now that you're not able to give the world enough — what it deserves." — David Lynch on making Eraserhead, from Lynch on Lynch (1997) The film cost almost nothing to make, but it did not reach audiences through normal cinema. It spread through the midnight movie circuit: one-off late-night screenings in a handful of theatres, where you had to already know it existed to find it. Ben Barenholtz of Libra Films persuaded a local theatre owner to run it as a midnight feature, where it continued for a year, then ran for ninety-nine weeks at New York's Waverly Cinema, had a year-long midnight run in San Francisco, and a three-year tenure in Los Angeles. That cult of the initiated eventually earned the film seven million dollars. Long before the internet gave Lynch a new channel, he had already spent a career reaching devoted audiences directly through late-night rooms, word of mouth, entirely outside the mainstream. This same instinct would drive his approach to digital technology but it wasn’t easy. As late as 1996, Lynch was still cutting films on a flatbed Kem system and told an interviewer flatly: "I personally hate Avid. I haven't a clue how it works." He was one of the great directors in the world, and he had no interest in learning the tools the rest of the industry had already adopted. What changed was the website. When he began shooting short pieces for davidlynch.com with a cheap Sony PD150, a consumer camera he initially dismissed as a toy, he started teaching himself, scene by scene, not quite knowing what he was making. Gradually, he started liking the camera more. "These 35mm film cameras are starting to look like dinosaurs to me. It's all so slow. It kills a lot of possibilities. With digital video everything is lighter. You can think on your feet and catch things."By the time he came to edit Inland Empire, something had shifted entirely. He did it all himself, on Final Cut Pro, in his home office, over six months. "I absolutely love editing," he said afterwards. "When you go in there on your own you discover elements that you wouldn't if you were one step removed, like an ordinary editor." The man who hated digital and had no idea how it worked had become someone who spent half a year alone with software he had taught himself, finding a film he didn't know he was making. "These 35mm film cameras are starting to look like dinosaurs to me. It's all so slow. It kills a lot of possibilities. With digital video everything is lighter. You can think on your feet and catch things." By the time he came to edit Inland Empire, something had shifted entirely. He did it all himself, on Final Cut Pro, in his home office, over six months. "I absolutely love editing," he said afterwards. "When you go in there on your own you discover elements that you wouldn't if you were one step removed, like an ordinary editor." The man who hated digital and had no idea how it worked had become someone who spent half a year alone with software he had taught himself, finding a film he didn't know he was making. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6Dyl1V_Hvg Lynch did not sit down one day and decide to master digital filmmaking. He picked up a cheap camera for his website, treated it like a toy, and let the process lead him somewhere he hadn't anticipated. The sideways move, step down in prestige, smaller in scale, technically unfamiliar, turned out to be the biggest step forward of the late part of his career. He probably didn't see it coming.  The website nobody thought was a good idea With the rising popularity of the internet, Lynch decided to use it as a distribution channel, releasing several new series he had created exclusively on his website, davidlynch.com, which went online on December 10, 2001. Some context. In 2001, YouTube didn't exist. Netflix was a DVD postal service. Spotify was a decade away. The conventional wisdom, even among forward-thinking media people, was that the internet was a place to promote your work, not to release it.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY69kb64M_8&list=PLUWV-eLxVgFEqLQp9UeXGusHR9X2BFB3Q Lynch opened the self-funded site in December, available only through a monthly $9.97 subscription, but with its official launch, began offering $7.79 individual subscriptions to three episodic series he was creating, beginning with Dumbland. Next up was the surrealist sitcom Rabbits, and later, a Twin Peaks-like drama called Axxon N. A separate site store offered a digitally remastered high-definition transfer to DVD of Eraserhead, a collection of his short films, posters, T-shirts, arty nude photos and other merchandise. The site also included an Experiments area and a chat room where Lynch and friends sometimes participated. In 2002, Lynch had already built a tiered subscription model, a per-episode purchase option, a merchandise store, a DVD arm, an experimental content section, and a community space. He had essentially invented what we now call a creator platform, years before the term existed. The content was characteristically uncompromising. DumbLand is an adult animated web series created and voiced by Lynch. The style is intentionally crude both in terms of presentation and content, with limited animation. Each three-to-five-minute episode took Lynch ten days to make. Dumbland was commissioned by gaming and entertainment website Shockwave.com in 2000. After the dot-com bubble burst, the episodes were eventually released through Lynch's website in 2002. Rather than shelve the work when his platform collapsed, Lynch built his own. He didn't wait for someone else to give him the infrastructure; he created it. Example of a chat conversation on lynch.com, from Reddit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DGp5ijBGlI The OG content creator If Dumbland was Lynch experimenting with the format of animated shorts online, Rabbits pushed the experiment further, into something stranger, more formally ambitious, and genuinely unlike anything that had been made for the web before. Rabbits is a 2002 web series of eight horror episodes created by David Lynch, though Lynch himself referred to it as a sitcom. It depicts three humanoid rabbits, played by Scott Coffey, Laura Elena Harring and Naomi Watts, in a room. Their disjointed conversations are interrupted by a laugh track. The series is presented with the tagline "In a nameless city deluged by a continuous rain… three rabbits live with a fearful mystery." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66XPYk9bdhc&list=PLTPQcjlcvvXHcfdpIaKCDM7NjU_Y2zqax All three leads, Watts, Harring, and Coffey, had appeared the previous year in Lynch's critically acclaimed Mulholland Drive. Lynch shot Rabbits in 2002 on digital video. The shoots happened at night, on a set built in his backyard. The film uses major Hollywood talent, a carefully designed set, and Angelo Badalamenti's score, but it was made in a garden at night and released episodically to paying subscribers online. The content itself plays deliberately with the sitcom form. In addition to disjointed conversations, whenever one of the rabbits enters the room, the unseen audience whoops and applauds at great length, much like in a sitcom. The rabbits themselves, remain serious throughout. In some episodes, mysterious events take place, including the appearance of a burning hole in the wall and the intrusion of a deep voice coming from a disfigured face projected on the back wall, suspended in a sinister red light. The episodes of Rabbits were gradually uploaded on davidlynch.com, with access available through subscription. The series was available to both members of the site and via pay per view. This dual model is now standard across every streaming platform on earth. Lynch used some of the Rabbits footage as well as previously unseen footage featuring Rabbits characters in his 2006 feature film Inland Empire, associating the Rabbits with three mysterious Polish characters who live in a house in the woods. The web series became source material for his most ambitious feature, and Lynch and his producers decided to explore self-distribution with the release of Inland Empire, a feature film bypassing the traditional studio system entirely.  The Weather Reports: daily content before daily content was a thing The element of Lynch's internet work that attracted the most enduring affection is the one that sounds, on paper, most absurd: a daily weather forecast delivered by himself from his painting studio in Los Angeles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wZE9FMK3aA&t=50s Lynch began these daily weather forecasts in 2005, in the form of a daily phone call to LA radio station INDIE 103.1. He later moved them to his own website, producing them until 2010. Shortly thereafter, he uploaded the daily video reports to his avant-garde website, created before the days of social media. YouTube had just launched, and it would be a good ten years until podcasts gained popularity. When asked whether it was an art project, Lynch deflected completely. He told the New York Times: "People are kind of interested in the weather. It's not artistic. It's just me sitting there in my painting studio." The weather reports were Lynch doing something simple, consistent, and genuinely himself, every single day, and building an audience through regularity and authenticity. This is the founding logic of every successful content creator who came after him. Consistency and genuine voice beat production value every time.The reports always ended the same way: "Have a great day, everyone." When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Lynch brought them back on YouTube. Within a year, his 365 weather reports accumulated ten million views on YouTube, and his David Lynch Theater channel reached over 270,000 subscribers. One particularly heartbreaking weather report came after his friend and frequent collaborator, composer Angelo Badalamenti, passed. Lynch reported no weather conditions that day, instead simply saying "Today, no music." That is the kind of moment no algorithm can manufacture and no strategy can plan for. The Interview Project: reinventing documentary for the web In 2009, Lynch turned his attention to a different kind of online experiment. In the David Lynch Interview Project, Americans were randomly selected and asked to share their personal stories. The team found people driving along roads, going into bars, going into different locations. During the 70 days the project was active, the team travelled 20,000 miles and conducted 121 interviews. This video is available only in YouTube.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNpYymysUQo The web series was created by his son Austin Lynch and Jason S., with music by Dean Hurley, and launched on June 1, 2009 at interviewproject.davidlynch.com. Each episode was three to five minutes long, the perfect length for web consumption at a time when most filmmakers were still thinking in terms of broadcast slots. This kind of project would have needed a broadcaster, a distributor, and a significant budget to reach an audience through traditional channels. By releasing it online, episode by episode, Lynch could build an audience progressively, let word of mouth do the distribution work, and maintain full creative control.  What he actually believed about creativity and new tools Lynch's creative philosophy is laid out most clearly in his 2006 book Catching the Big Fish, and it speaks directly to anyone standing in front of a new technology wondering what to do with it. "Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure."— David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish (2006) The internet, for Lynch, was not a shallow-water opportunity. It was a place to go deeper and to make things that couldn't exist within the constraints of broadcast television or theatrical release. The same logic he applied to digital video applied to the web: it was faster, lighter, and freed him from gatekeepers. He also believed that the work should come first and the medium should serve the idea. Inland Empire started as a short online collaboration between Lynch and Laura Dern, but it came out so well that Lynch couldn't bear to release it online, and built a feature-length film out of the idea. The internet didn't replace his other work, but actually fed into those projects too. He was treating the internet the way he treated filmmaking: as something you commit to with your own resources because you believe in it, and then you figure out how to get it out to those who will love it too Lynch also understood something about monetisation that is still underappreciated: multiple small revenue streams, each aligned with your identity, are more resilient than dependence on a single platform or deal. Lynch had his own line of special organic coffee blends, David Lynch Signature Cup, available for purchase on his website and at Whole Foods, advertised via flyers included with several Lynch-related DVD releases. This is what we now call a brand extension. Lynch was doing it intuitively, because coffee was genuinely who he was. Completely on-brand for a man who spoke constantly and lovingly about drinking a "damn fine cup of coffee" in his own work. The takeaway for anyone creative He was a creative person who, when a new channel appeared, asked the right question: what can I do here that I couldn't do anywhere else? The answer, in 2001, was: shorter things, stranger things, daily things, subscriber-supported things, things that don't need a network to approve them. So he made those things. This pattern repeats with every new platform and every new technology. The creative people who thrive are rarely the ones who wait to see how the technology settles before committing. They're the ones who get in early, make things that are native to the new environment, and build a direct relationship with their audience before the space fills up. David Lynch’s internet work is as representative an expression of his style and sensibility as Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks. Showing up every day, being genuinely yourself, and doing it in public was Lynch's strategy in the early 2000s. That’s a strategy that remains relevant now.  "Stay true to yourself. Let your voice ring out, and don't let anybody fiddle with it. Never turn down a good idea, but never take a bad idea." — David Lynch The five Lynch principles for embracing new technology as a channel for creative expression Ask what the new medium makes possible, not what it replaces. Self-fund where you can. Control is worth more than comfort. Show up consistently. Regularity and honesty build audiences. Build multiple revenue streams aligned to who you genuinely are. Let the work feed the work. Online experiments become raw material. Raw material becomes film. Film becomes the platform for the next experiment. Sources & further reading: Wikipedia — David Lynch Variety (2002) — Lynch launches online site Wikipedia — Rabbits (web series) Wikipedia — DumbLand Open Culture — David Lynch made a disturbing web sitcom called Rabbits Reactor Magazine (2025) — David Lynch's wonderful weather Nerdist (2025) — You can listen to all of Lynch's weather reports on YouTube AccuWeather — Remembering Lynch for his weather reports Royal Meteorological Society — Forecasting couch: Lynch does the weather MIT Docubase — David Lynch Interview Project Jared Lyon: David Lynch Phone Booth archives David Lynch Past News Welcome to Twin Peaks — One year of the weather report Nicolas Saada / Substack — David Lynch, internet and us all Split Tooth Media — Harebrained hereafter: Lynch's Rabbits Film Obsessive — Dumbfounded: viewing Lynch's Dumbland Lynch, David (2006) — Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. Tarcher/Penguin. David Lynch Theater (YouTube) — @DAVIDLYNCHTHEATER — full weather report archive Interview Project (YouTube) — @interviewproject — all 121 episodes in HD (2024 re-release)