As cryptocurrencies, meme stocks, and N.F.T.s upend markets, Internet culture is transforming traditional notions of value. The New Yorker staff writer Sheelah Kolhatkar appraises the new online economy with the digital artist Beeple, the technologist and essayist Anil Dash, and Neha Narula, the director of the Digital Currency Initiative at the M.I.T. Media Lab.
I especially like the term “non-fungible token” or NFT.
A blockchain is a kind of electronically notarized ledger 📒 where the copy with the most “work done on it” is deemed the “blessed” one, and those that do the work of building the checksums are rewarded with skim crypto cash 💰 (which effectively causes inflation).
What must one of these NFTs be like? Something signed with a public-private key 🔐 and the unique identity of the token also stored in some kind of blockchain scheme so they may be looked up by whomever and more new unique tokens added when needed?
Not sure what it has to do with memes, these two. Memes have different values when deployed by different people, but that derived from the perceived power, ie, how many people are likely to respond to the meme, eg, repeating something Donald Trump said has high potential because it’s likely that millions of others have also heard it (so it resonates).
Memes are in principle fungible, very much so, like genes 🧬 they are characterized by scrupulous copying. How they get the copying done ✅ is however they can.
The fungible nature of memes is in fact central to the memetic therapy process I’m developing. You cannot extirpate a meme from a person (or a social group)—that’s like saying “don’t think about elephants”—memes must be recognizable.
They can and do mutate, sometimes quickly. Another example of the preference of replicability over practicality, as in invention, perhaps (to be explored later). Blockchains and NFT are about the opposite. The checksums used in blockchains will cause them to break down completely at the slightest fiddling around with their contents, which is precisely their purpose.
Memes live to make lots of copies, mutate a few of them (usually blindly), make more copies, lather 🧼 rinse 🚿 repeat 🔁 until survival of the fittest by natural selection.
Blockchain cyber currency 💴 and NFTs (like watermarked, serialized data files?) want to provide verifiability across networks purely by data alone.
The act of using them is a meme, however, as are all the terms and concepts associated with them. The goal is to coöpt the memes associated with hard currency 💷, precious commodities 💍 , and genuine works of art 🖼 so that the entire memetic edifice of the concept of money and trade and value built up over millennia of shared human history to produce the concept of “fungible trust” appear to function in a new, virtual environment where making and transmitting perfect copies is commonplace, or indeed, is the essential nature of the environment itself.
So perhaps the use of e-currencies and such may be thought of as an additional layer of memes, ie, the use of an e-dollar imitates the use of a dollar 💵 which in turn imitates actual trade which in turn imitates the mutual help of tribal or familial relationships which in turn imitates actual love ❤️ and caring.
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