10.8.2021 - Another week, another Newsletter. I’ve been a bit inconsistent due to some personal things but have also been working on a couple of items that might be ready for release soon.
I don’t have much to say up here except that I may be slightly more inconsistent as I get ready to release something big, so all I can say is keep an eye out and make sure you’re subscribed to receive this weekly newsletter.
I hope you have a good one.
-C.N
What I wanted to posit in this tweet is simply that there are competing paradigms on where the future of the internet will take us. There seems to be this position that something like Web 2.0 (social media and media giants as we know them) will cede or lose power to the now coalescing institutions forming Web 3.0. I want to push back on this slightly and say that we’re going to see an intensification of some of the dominant platforms in Web 2.0 like “TikTok.” By all means and purposes, TikTok isn’t explicitly Web 3.0, but it’s not entirely Web2.0. By Web 3.0, I mean technological changes or paradigm shifts like the hyper importance of NFTs and decentralized platforms like the OS stack that is Urbit. Essentially we’re at the cusp of a religious paradigm shift with the slow “fall” of Web 2.0 and the rise of Web 3.0, but this should not imply the disappearance of the legacy of Web 2.0. TikTok can prove as much. We are undergoing the most significant online shift since the .com bubble right now.
French theorist Jean Baudrillard conceptualized a simulacrum to be a copy of a copy with no original. The Balenciaga x Fortnite collaboration is Is simply a modal shift from material modality to a virtual one. While brands themselves may be Simulacrum for other reasons, this is just the process of transubstantiation. As technological Innovations continue, we will see a return of Idealism. What these new virtual mediums facilitate is the convergence of materiality and objectivity as such. In the west, materiality and objectivity tend to be conflated because of the predominance of common sense empiricism; that which is real is self-evident to the senses or that which is intelligible to sense experience. With this new video game ontology, we see the material cross the threshold explicitly (made pungently clear with the rise of NFT collectibles) and the virtual becoming real with AR technology. We only see the tip of an entire possibility with digital media and objects as such. I hinted at this by coining NFOs “non-fungible objects,” which would be augmented reality or the implementation of digital items referencing popular culture references like In the movie “Ready Player One.” I don’t believe this to be too far off, and we haven’t begun to understand the possibilities blockchain technology offers as Web 3.0 explicitly becomes the age of the Blockchain.
I don’t want to say much here regarding the estimated time of arrival of “Technolalia,” but I want to say that if you’ve been keeping up with the newsletter, it will pay off soon (-ish).
Accursed Share is an NFT production studio that I’ve been keeping my eyes on since early in its inception. For those who have been keeping up with me, you would know that I wrote a short piece going I to the philosophy of NFTs regarding expenditure (link).
I’m pretty excited to see Julien’s upcoming work, and I’ve briefly commented on the point of interest regarding production regimes.