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<aside> ✴️ synopsis² aka "is this worth my time?" (bc attn is increasingly the scarcest resource):
[1] intro → [2] framework → [3.0] combinatorial cryptomedia → [3.1] primordial buzzword soup → [3.2] humanity’s mood ring → [3.3] computational market democracy
[1]: humanity is a collective, planetary-scale force. we need planetary-scale media. this media needs to be decentralized → planetary-scale cryptomedia
[2]: scalability, decentralization, and agency/interactivity (s/d/a) are key attributes of digital media. modern media is attempting to simulmax all three attributes. the platonic ideal of an open metaverse is the simulmax of s/d/a.
[3.0]: s/d/a simulmax for media requires ai/ml and crypto. s/d/a simulmax = open metaverse = digital representation of Jung's concept of "collective unconscious." refik anadol is currently the best example of an artist using ai/ml techniques to scale collective representation within media.
[3.1]: toys become big things. ppl are currently combining ai x nft x crypto into toys like iNFTs and AI-generated cryptomedia. these toys are considered within "gaming" and "art" but will evolve to be more serious later.
[3.2]: imagine the real-time representation of humanity's real-time mood, accomplished through some combination of homomorphic encryption + federated learning + NLP + RTS. we already have existing precedents for this, and HMR is just an obvious evolution of these precedents along s/d/a framework.
[3.3]: iNFTs (or another mechanisms for self-sovereign personal digital agents) might eventually be used for digital democracy. interfacing digital agents with market (fiat & crypto) is already possible. digital agent interop w/in the State's govt interfaces will require time for widespread discussion about the legitimacy of digital democracy.
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<aside> ✴️ Synopsis:
[1] Introduction
The story of the 20th and 21st is a story about humanity's realization and continued reconciliation of its status as an interconnected, planetary-scale force. Benjamin Bratton posits that "Planetary-Scale Computation should be understood as the means of and for the liberation and articulation of public reason, collective intelligence and technical abstraction as collective self-composition." This goal provides an imperative for a collective media (i.e., "any extension ourselves", in the words of Marshall McLuhan) that uses planetary-scale computation to help us better know (sense, feel, understand, etc) ourselves — this media must be decentralized in order to scale to 7.9 billion people.
[2] Framework
Media and media platforms can be placed within a framework of scalability, decentralization, and agency that is analogous to that of the Scalability Trilemma for blockchains. The evolution of media in the digital age of the 21st century has historically tended towards further scalability and further user agency/interactivity but only recently has media evolution along further decentralization taken place. The platonic ideal of the "Open Metaverse" exists as the simultaneous maximization of scalability, decentralization, and agency and therefore requires crypto (i.e., cryptoeconomic mechanisms, cryptographic protocols) to serve as the economic membrane for both decentralization but also scale that cannot be achieved in centralized models which become user extractive over time. AI and crypto can solve the social scalability problems of our global, media ecosystem — Web3's promise is that of social scalability, that is to increase "the number of people who can beneficially participate in the institution" of our public digital space.
[3.0] Combinatorial Cryptomedia
The simultaneous maximization of scalability, decentralization, and agency for media and media platforms requires further development and adoption of crypto and AI/ML-based innovations in social scalability. AI/ML techniques are already being applied to represent collective psychic processes by artists like Refik Anadol, who is actualizing the concepts of the "collective unconscious" (Carl Jung) and the "collective memory" (Maurice Halbwachs) within his artworks.
[3.1] Primordial Buzzword Soup: Crypto, NFTs, AI, and the Metaverse
It turns out that the actualization of the Open Metaverse and the representation of our collective psychic processes within digital media turns out to be the same act. The toys that will become the next big things are being created through combinationial experimentation of primitives within our zeitgeist’s primordial buzzword soup (crypto! NFTs! AI! metaverse!). We will be focusing on the toys emerging at the intersection of cryptomedia (of which I consider NFTs a subcategory) and AI/ML, namely iNFTs and AI-generated cryptomedia. This particular track of media evolution corresponds to a rightward movement in the upper half of my framework, in which already decentralized cryptomedia are seeking to increase scalability and agency (NFTs → iNFTs and dNFTs → multisig i/dNFTs → fully decentralized cryptomedia). The synthesis of crypto and AI challenge characterizations of these technologies that map them along opposite ends of the centralization-decentralization spectrum. Some continually advancing tech primitives (both crypto and non-crypto) that hold promise in helping achieve S/D/A simulmax include zkSTARKs/zkSNARKs, timelock encryption and VDFs, GPT+, Merkle-CRDTs, further adoption of real-time streaming (RTS) architectures, dynamic bonding curves, and crypto-native serverless.
[3.2] Humanity's Mood Ring
Towards a Blueprint: [real-time streaming (RTS) architecture] + [VQGAN+CLIP OR NLP Sentiment Visualizer] + [federated learning] + [homomorphic encryption] + [DAO] + [Web3 social media/messaging] + [ZKPs] + [anti-Sybil mechanisms: some combination of token-curated registries, Proof-of-Humanity, decentralized trust graphs, "DAO for verifying humans")
Imagine wearing a mood ring that reflects the current collective mood of humanity — this is Humanity's Mood Ring (HMR). HMR has multiple existing precedents and is close to being, if not already, possible from a technical standpoint (though social adoption will lag as concepts like federated learning, differential privacy, and crypto permeate the Overton Window).
[3.3] Computational Market Democracy
Towards a Blueprint: ****[self-sovereign digital agents: iNFTs] + [interoperability with interfaces for markets & governance] + [Distributed/Decentralized/Mesh C/N/S] + [continued advances in AI/ML]
A preliminary exploration of the intersection of direct, digital [market] democracy and personal digital agents, as well as speculative visions for how CMD could manifest, ultimately benchmarked to how this prospective future is already being manifested.
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"The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interests upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance." – Carl G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“ … in the last analysis what is the fate of great nations but a summation of the psychic changes in individuals?” — Carl G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
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The story of the 20th and 21st century is a story about humanity's realization and continued reconciliation of its status as an interconnected, planetary-scale force. The formalization of this relatively recent shared reality is a continuing process, for example, the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission of Stratigraphy is currently seeking to identify a definitive geological marker based on radionuclides from atomic detonations from 1945 to 1963 in order to formalize the beginning of the geologic epoch of the Anthropocene, defined "as the period of time during which human activities have had an environmental impact on the Earth." Although the specific, defining "moment" of this collective realization will be a continued topic for retrospective narrativization, the mass articulation of the concept of mutually assured destruction via full-scale nuclear war throughout the Cold War era is clearly a prime candidate. Since the end of the Cold War, our global "Contemporary Period" has tautologically been defined by those happenings that highlight the unmistakably interconnected nature of humanity — global contagion and virality takes on financial, ecological, memetic/informatic, and, as has been made evident to us most recently in the form of COVID-19, biomaterialistic forms. As I put the finishing touches on this piece on November 26th, a new coronavirus variant reminds us, yet again, of the inescapably interconnected nature of our modern existence.
<aside> ✴️ from *What is Planetary-Scale Computation For?* by Benjamin Bratton:
[8:00] Benjamin: The very concept of climate change itself, not the chemical and ecological phenomena, but the concept of climate change (the model of the statistical regularity that we refer to as "climate change") is itself an epistemological accomplishment of planetary-scale computation. Without that sensing, modeling, calculation, simulation apparatus, from satellites to temperature [sensing] to the supercomputing simulations, the very idea of climate change itself would not have been provided. [It] would not have been possible.
(22:15)
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The goal of "liberation and articulation of public reason, collective intelligence and technical abstraction" provides an imperative for media (i.e. "any extension of ourselves", in the words of Marshall McLuhan) that helps the collective better know (sense and understand) itself. Towards a blueprint for planetary-scale cryptomedia is a first swipe at developing a framework for thinking about how the ongoing development of decentralized media through crypto (i.e., cryptoeconomic mechanisms and cryptographic protocols) might enable humanity to better know itself as this class of technologies (i.e., cryptomedia) continues to be developed and adopted. A breakdown of this work is as follows:
<aside> ✴️ ****from The Red Book by Carl G. Jung
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<aside> ✴️ Scalability, Decentralization, and Agency
[This three dimensions of media in this framework are analagous to the three properties of blockchains implied by the Scalability Trilemma.](https://www.figma.com/embed?embed_host=notion&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.figma.com%2Ffile%2FfunHMjtAf1Pnaq7pbq5iDg%2Fplanetary-scale-cryptomedia%3Fnode-id%3D0%253A1)
This three dimensions of media in this framework are analagous to the three properties of blockchains implied by the Scalability Trilemma.
This framework places media and media platforms along three dimensions:
Broadly speaking, Web 2.0 media companies sought to maximize some combination of the scalability of their media assets and the level of agency offered to the user/consumer/player. While jpeg/mp3/mp4 files are nearly infinitely scalable in that the same mp4 file can be replicated and distributed at zero marginal cost, the affordances for interaction possible in these mediums are scant. On the other hand, while video games like Minecraft and Fortnite are highly interactive and afford higher degrees of freedom, the scalability of multiplayer video games across large numbers of players is limited by technical constraints in synchronizing interactions and dependencies between distributed clients (players). It was only until relatively recently that the idea of another dimension of consideration for media, namely decentralization, become widespread with the cultural rise of NFTs and "Web3".
The platonic ideal of the "Open Metaverse" exists as a circle in the top right corner of my proposed framework, thereby representing media that simultaneously maximizes scalability, decentralization, and agency. That the establishment of a Metaverse requires crypto to serve as a robust economic membrane can be explained through this framework by interpreting Web3 as a reaction to the limitations of scalability achieved through centralization — the centralized nature of Web 2.0 platforms limit both the extensity and intensity of participation in spaces that disproportionately extract from users. Web3's promise is social scalability, that is to increase "the number of people who can beneficially participate in the institution" of our public digital space.
<aside> ✴️ from Money, blockchains, and social scalability by Nick Szabo:
Social scalability is the ability of an institution –- a relationship or shared endeavor, in which multiple people repeatedly participate, and featuring customs, rules, or other features which constrain or motivate participants’ behaviors -- to overcome shortcomings in human minds and in the motivating or constraining aspects of said institution that limit who or how many can successfully participate. Social scalability is about the ways and extents to which participants can think about and respond to institutions and fellow participants as the variety and numbers of participants in those institutions or relationships grow. It's about human limitations, not about technological limitations or physical resource constraints.
Even though social scalability is about the cognitive limitations and behavior tendencies of minds, not about the physical resource limitations of machines, it makes eminent sense, and indeed is often crucial, to think and talk about the social scalability of a technology that facilitates an institution. The social scalability of an institutional technology depends on how that technology constrains or motivates participation in that institution, including protection of participants and the institution itself from harmful participation or attack. One way to estimate the social scalability of an institutional technology is by the number of people who can beneficially participate in the institution. Another way to estimate social scalability is by the extra benefits and harms an institution bestows or imposes on participants, before, for cognitive or behavioral reasons, the expected costs and other harms of participating in an institution grow faster than its benefits.
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The crux of the current iteration of this Web3/crypto/Metaverse buzzword zeitgeist can be boiled down to one simple question: What does a socially scalable planetary-scale media that trustlessly affords individuals agency and expressivity look like? Or, put simply, how do you get 7.9 billion people in the same room together?
If we were to define that "room" as a very large physical building then Tim Urban has shown us that cramming 7+ billion people together is possible, but "beneficial participation" would probably be impossible under such conditions. We could dematerialize our definition of "room" to a single voicecall between all 7.9 billion of us but, as anyone who has ever played COD on Xbox Live knows, beneficial participation would still be impossible. A single chatroom, even if we suspended the laws of physics and assumed perfect synchronization with no latency across 7.9 billion connected devices, wouldn't be socially scalable for similar reasons. These are instances in which affordances for individuals' agency in shared spaces results in chaos.
If we dial back the individual affordances for agency/DOF/interactivity to allowing each person the bare minimum of communicating a "0" or "1" by flipping a single, pre-assigned pixel on a single 88,882 x 88,882 (= ~7.9 billion) grid then, even assuming that we've solved the proof of Humanity problem and that there's sufficient trust in the backend host(s), we still haven't scaled beneficial participation.
We can dial up individual affordances for expression/agency in digital space to its present maximum, in the form of a hypothetically perfectly decentralized and trustless Minecraft server instance with zero latency across 7.9 billion distributed devices, but the experience would probably devolve into a virtual rave at the Schelling point of (x=0, y=0, z=0). Needless to say, neither the addition of a global chatroom nor voicechat (either proximity-based vs global voicechat) would enable scalable beneficial participation.
<aside> ✴️ Dancing rainbow flowers and butterflies by jcponcemath
<aside> ✴️ Face Generator -2 by munusshih
<aside> ✴️ Point-Lights Animation by Thomas Diewald
<aside> ✴️ Portal - Box by watabo_shi
<aside> ✴️ Torus Tango by Richard Bourne
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