The Electrician is an NFT novel written by a crowd

Future. A graphic novel called The Electrician is set to be funded, written, and produced by thousands of NFT holders. The “generative art campaign” could be either pure chaos or an experiment in communal storytelling that provides a route to creating organic franchise properties.

Community authorship
What if you and thousands of your friends wrote a graphic novel together?

• That’s the idea behind The Electrician, which follows the title character as he “navigates a climate-changed and corruption-ravaged LA that has been turned on its head by greedy real estate developers and massive income inequality.”
• The novel will be funded and written by holders of The Electrician NFTs, of which 10,000 have been issued.
• Holder-writers will literally decide the direction of the entire novel, “from what the characters wear, to the decisions they make.”

A portion of the NFT sales will be donated to California-based community wellness program Uplift Family Services.

Chaos theory
The Electrician is spearheaded by writer-actor Jon Barinholtz (NBC’s Superstore, Netflix’s Chicago Party Aunt), who called the project a “generative art campaign” and “reverse Comic Con,” meaning “instead of creating a product with a small group of people pitching it out to buyers, putting it on TV, and acquiring a fanbase, we’re taking a fanbase, making the material, and then going to buyers.”

The issue is, how does a community of thousands of random members expect to come to a consensus on story points, thematic direction, and character arcs? It’s a writers room on steroids — but without a showrunner and without, maybe, actual writers. But if the novel comes to fruition, it could herald a fascinating new art form in the Web3 world.