EcstaSHE Spotlight: Arikia Millikan

^{At Thrilld Labs, we believe that the future of Web3 is shaped by connectivity and action-driven collaboration. That’s why we launched EcstaSHE, a business community for female Web3 professionals, leaders, and execs. We are thrilld to feature women in our network who are building the future of Web3.}

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^{In this edition, we’re proud to shine the spotlight on Arikia Millikan. Arikia is the founder & CEO of CTRL+X, a media technology company bridging traditional media with Web3 technologies, and which ultimately seeks to decentralize the digital publishing industry.} 

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^{Arikia is a journalist and entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of technology and media. After starting her career in NYC as an editor at WIRED, she spent years watching platforms extract value from the people who create it. Now based in Berlin, she founded CTRL+X to build the ownership layer that digital publishing infrastructure never had.} 

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^{We had the pleasure of interviewing Arikia to learn more about her work and  thoughts on the Web3 business space. Read her responses below.} 

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What are you currently building or working on within the Web3 space?
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I started my career as a journalist the old-fashioned way–by being in the room when things happened and writing about them. I covered emerging tech for WIRED during the era when Silicon Valley still believed its own origin story: that the internet was going to democratize everything, that the gatekeepers were finished, that the future belonged to the people with the best ideas.

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Then I watched the platforms eat the press. Slowly, then all at once.

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By the time AI companies started hoovering up everything journalists had ever written–without asking, without paying, without so much as a byline–I had stopped writing about the problem and started building the solution. 

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CTRL+X is a protocol-based system that enables authors to register journalistic content as an on-chain asset and license it programmatically, to human readers and AI systems alike. It allows readers to read what they want and pay via micropayment transactions.

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Why did you decide to start CTRL+X?         

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Throughout my entire career I’ve watched problems form on the infrastructure side of the publishing industry, and not many people have seemed to care about fixing them if it didn’t result in instant profits. No one was looking out for the long term, and now we’re dealing with the worst kind of technical debt–the kind that is tanking the very institutions that built their whole brands around being the protectors of knowledge. The kind that is making practicing journalism financially prohibitive to the world’s best journalists, and only profitable to people doing something that isn’t journalism at all: selling MLMs, doing entertainment media and abhorrent paparazzi behavior, spreading misinformation and propaganda.

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We are not going to have the kind of journalism left that we need to support democracies around the world if we don’t find new ways to fund quality journalism. So I’ve invented one, and I’m building it.

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What do you hope our industry will do or change in the near term?

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I hope our industry will create systems and consumer products that embody the ethos that the visionaries of the internet imagined would push humanity toward enlightenment–or at least a more positive evolution. Let’s call it the opposite of enshittification. I worry, though, that the people in our industry are selling out too readily to the ones who are currently profiting from the status quo and destroying the possibility of a better world.

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What’s the most valuable growth or career tip you’ve learned that you wished you’d realized earlier?

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I used to worry that if I put my ideas out into the world before they were fully baked, less-qualified people would try to steal them and execute them poorly, or that malicious people would try to stop me from building entirely. Somewhere along the way–maybe from one person, maybe from many people coming from different directions–I was told that no one will be able to build my vision in quite the same way as me, and that by keeping my ideas locked down I was just denying my future collaborators the opportunity to find me and join forces.

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Now every time I meet someone building in this space in parallel, I think to myself that I wish I’d met them sooner. But in the end, maybe everything is right on time.

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Another tip: be visible. I used to be afraid of public speaking, and would only get on stage if I was invited. By the time I was 25 I’d been to so many tech events with all-male presentors, that I told myself I would never say no to a speaking invitation. I wasn’t sure I was qualified to be on stage, but I knew audiences would rather hear literally anything I had to say than a word from some of the mediocre men whose talks I’ve suffered through.

Now, after giving a TEDx talk, I know I belong on stages all over the world. I apply to speak where I think my voice will be valued by the audience and am generally accepted and now even compensated. I feel sorry for the organizations that fail to recognize my qualifications. I wish I would have understood that the world would benefit from hearing my voice sooner.

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Anything else you’d like to add?

I think it goes without saying: we need more women in Web3, and we need more community spaces where women are respected and protected.

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Thank you, Arikia!

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^{Web3 is bringing about a new world. What kind of world? An open, decentralized space where trustless tech thrives, individuals innovate, and communities continue to collaborate, we’d argue, with some added alliteration.}

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^{Women like Arikia are leading the way. And we want you, fellow women, to join us in building that future. EcstaSHE offers a space to connect, collaborate, and share in business opportunity.}

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^{Join EcstaSHE}

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^{EcstaSHE seeks to connect action-oriented, professional female decision-makers in and around Web3 to enable networking and business collaborations. To this end, EcstaSHE offers regular sessions with panel discussions or fire chats, a siloed networking environment, newsletters, and other growth possibilities.}

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^{EcstaSHE members get prioritized access to conference tickets where Thrilld Labs provides giveaways. We also actively build speaking gigs, interviews, and business opportunities (at times) provided by our partners, whilst we also publish articles about business topics. We welcome women from diverse backgrounds, experiences, and expertise levels.}

^{To learn more about EcstaSHE and how to get involved, read more here or apply here.}