Greetings and welcome to A Small Field of Vision #1.
There are few different topics as polarising as crypto-talk these days.
Although Internet has always been a confirmation bias cesspool brewing simultaneously in multiple echo chambers, crypto talk lately has been more divisive than a Russian State broadcaster!. On one side the universally hated crypto-chad-bros WAGMI each other at the back everyday while loudly proclaiming the end of states, banks or any societal institution that genuinely needs to change and on the other side mid wit “right click savers” tend to minimise all technological changes and future capabilities to self-servingly proclaim everything is a scam.
The truth -as always- lies somewhere in between.
Whenever a new technology bubble emerges, the end result is always name-calling. A bifurcation of belief usually occurs as people are dazzled by the latest shiny object. For the zealots, incentivized to see the bubble grow ever larger, they will call the uninitiated “normies, haters, skeptics, losers, closed-minded” etc. For those who are too late to the trend to achieve the truly ridiculous returns of early adopters, the next most financially lucrative option is to do as Michael Jordan did, and join the dunk industry. “Bernie Madoff! Tulip bulb 2.0! Pyramid scheme! Charlatans!” [NFT Projects are just MLMs for Tech Elites]
First, to declare my position:
I have been a Bitcoin and Ethereum holder since 2013 and 2017 respectively and have been inspecting every shiny new protocol since the start of the pandemic.
This sporadic newsletter will include notes from my readings while trying to map this new frontier and hopefully these fragmented notes will turn into a coherent narrative by the end. The idea is to shine a light on intellectually stimulating cases without preaching to the choir. And the aim is to not have lambo talk, the hot new NFT PFP, million% APY Ponzis.
Tremendous amount of brain power is spent on R&D lately and developments have been converging at light speed.
Work on web3, interoperability, composability, restoration of the open internet, the idea of DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations) as a new form of human collaboration, NFTs as a built-in authentication layer to artistic endeavour etc. are rousing ideals and with nonstop tech research by devs (Ethereum as a data availability engine, zero knowledge proofs, sharding etc.) I believe many of these will come to fruition quicker than naysayers can realise.
Yet back in the beginning of the 2000’s a similar techno-optimistic narrative called the web2.0 was subverted by corpos in the blink of an eye; giving us, post-truth, anti-vaxxers, super low attention spans and the total loss of consensus on reality. All emerging from web2.0’s brave ideals for democracy, open internet and social media. We’ve witnessed first hand how these ideals can be subjugated and corrupted by corpos/states/big money or unintended consequences occur. (QAnon anyone?)
https://twitter.com/drorpoleg/status/1470008007727755272?s=20
Writer and Web3 sceptic Robin Sloan notes:
Many Web3 boosters see themselves as disruptors, but “tokenize all the things” is nothing if not an obedient continuation of “market-ize all the things”, the campaign started in the 1970s, hugely successful, ongoing. I think the World Wide Web was the real rupture — “Where … is the money?”—which Web 2.0 smoothed over and Web3 now attempts to seal totally.
We are seeing examples of how cryptocurrencies might indeed be the missing native economic layer of the internet in art & gaming (play 2 earn) communities, finally decoupling monetary compensation from ads which frankly was never the best solution to a digital world, and in turn has completely failed us.
Critics aren’t fazed however, because this financialization can turn society into “a reflexive ADHD over-financialized dystopia with even more wealth concentration and a bunch of dopamine chasing plebs” - human click farmers with nothing better to do in a ruined world with jobs overtaken by AI and robots, living on some kind of subsistence mode in a virtual world - just as many sci-fi works have predicted.
This polarisation is fueling a partisanship among users and talking heads on both ends sure know how to create fanatics out of normies.
So as to start some kind of healthy discussion, I'll start with a quick recap of both the criticism and the changes on the past year.
The community is diversifying: It is true that the crypto space has been a subset of the broader tech space in general, and is dominated by the white male lambo boys. It’s also no secret that cryptocurrencies have come out of American libertarian ideals. Yet thankfully both the technology and the communities are maturing aren’t limited to libertarians anymore.
https://twitter.com/surge_women/status/1461416694119755778?s=20
Criticism about the environment is being addressed too, albeit slowly. Most new alternatives are already boasting green technologies; and communities like the surprisingly cool Hic et Nunc on Tezos, DAOs working on diverse societal issues are leading the way. ETH will also be switching it's mining protocol mid-2022 to lessen it's energy use by 99% while supposedly BTC miners are going green as well.
A wide variety of DAOs have been established, some popular ones like the constitutionDAO -which tried to buy an existing copy of the US constitution sourced ±50million and got outbid- and citydao which bought a plot in Wyoming as an experiment in decentralised ownership of real world assets have made it to the mainstream.
Many that didn’t are trying to change academics, peer-reviewed journals, film financing, music ownership, farming & ecology, philanthropy, fashion etc. Cryptoheads on the internet have already written a new constitution for web3, referencing EFF founder John Perry Barlow’s seminal hacker manifesto “A declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”, declared DAOs are a key technology for labour movement, and are already fundraising for whatever needs fundraising.
These self-forming, self-governing networks are already demonstrating a new superpower: to harness and align the power of a crowd with a speed and agility that makes even the most modern corporation look stodgy. [Forbes]
There are community building experiments in the “meatspace” like Atlas Urbium, or the aforementioned citydao which might pave the way for future governance.
We are beginning to see what the future entails for these communities. While they have demonstrated that the logistical problems of rapid fundraising at this scale have been solved, cracks are beginning to show in governing at scale. We will need to think the next steps through, and ecology seems to be a good inspiration:
https://eco.mirror.xyz/zhtmSvJzPvBcWut0IKHQFgP6P3bEuvte3UKZDWZenNU
NFTs, which have probably alienated more people than Woody Allen at a parents’ meeting at this stage, have become increasingly prevalent in arts & digital collectibles. The idea that digital information can be owned and can be valuable is widely accepted - bar gamers because evidently gamers have very strong opinions on everything and they hate change - and is now gaining traction as a possible future framework for fashion, events & ticketing, digital identities & music.
Ethereum opened a new space and provides an opportunity for artists to work with a previously unknown medium. This is exciting to the point of mania-inducing, which is what makes it feel simultaneously hopeful and dangerous. It’s also what creates a financial bubble, which for the obvious reasons is dramatically exacerbated in the case of NFTs. [Using the technology as a tool]
Issues of collective ownership and the importance of being able to reap the fruits of one’s creative labor are taking the front seat, and finally even crypto peeps are now coming to terms with the fact that, the summer where everyone made copycat animal profile pictures were cash grabs and has taken its toll on NFTs.
It is important to note here that we think that NFTs as a technology hold incredible promise to help more evenly distribute financial outcomes to community users, not just community organizers. We are in the early days of exploring what digital ownership actually means and it is far too bearish to universally decry the technology. [NFT Projects are just MLMs for Tech Elite]
Metaverses started to pop up a dime a dozen. Critics would be correct in pointing out that they aren’t much different from Second Life / The Sims / Minecraft and corporate ones like Facebook’s Meta’s are “soul-deadeningly antiseptic, and molded entirely from the plasticine of the corporate imagination”. Yet notable intellectual publications like Archdaily and Jacobin are some of the institutions that seriously begin to ponder about the future of metaverses.
If the Metaverse can’t be separated from real life, then the Metaverse is real life, to the point where the term “Metaverse” itself eventually fades away and the constructed reality is rendered invisible. Consider how capitalism became something like the West’s version of Windows, an operating system quietly running in the background in the neoliberal era. The End of Reality could become the new End of History. [Jacobin]
There have been many other QoL improvements, technologies have matured, Filipino gamers are still making money playing games, although not as much, as the government wants in on the action now, and on greener days it looks damn sure that crypto technologies are here to stay put banks out of business. And, when you come to think about it, normies have never been good at judging the importance of a future technology anyway, did they?
https://twitter.com/profgalloway/status/1195913802690289664
That’s all for now! I wanted to keep it as concise and hopefully enjoyable both for cryptoheads & nocoiners. Next destination: the enigma of Music NFTs, will they ever be viable?
If you like what you read, share it please, because sincerely without a “RT and win crypto” campaign it’s impossible to reach an audience these days. And the off-chance this is a runaway success, I also edit a music newsletter.
Thanks to Boranpasha for ideas & edits.
See you on the next edition, Palomino.