NFTemples of Curiosity
There are contextual limits to the word 'wallet' that will eventually hold us back from imagining the potential of NFTs. Let's look beyond the flat fiat world and think bigger.
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It’s Time To Move Beyond Wallets
The Evolution of Digital Identities
Masks and Rituals
Web3 - We Now Own Our Digital Masks
OOO
The Collector Bug
Cabinets of Curiosity
Conclusion
To all the cosmic travellers out there,
Another week in the rabbit hole has come and gone, and the energy from New York has just about made it over the pond to me here in the UK, and it smells glorious. Seeing the billboards and the smiles, and all the pfp creatures out and about in meatspace has been incredible, and cemented what we all believe to be true; we are exactly where we are supposed to be.
In the spirit of punk6529, there’s work to be done. Let’s onboard more people.
It’s Time to Move Beyond Wallets
Our behaviour around technology is limited by the language we use to describe it. It’s important that the context in which technology is held to by language does not inhibit its growth. Words we ascribe to new technologies should effectively describe its function, whilst remaining open enough to allow us to imagine unrealised potentials.
The definition of semantics is the study of meaning in language. The word “semiotics” comes from the Greek word semeiotikos, which means an interpreter of signs. Signing is vital to human existence because it underlies all forms of communication.
Signs are given meaning by the way they make use of certain structures. The structure employed is sometimes immediately detectable, in which case we can say that it is part of the surface structure of the piece of communication; if it is not immediately detectable, we can say that it is part of the deep structure of the piece of communication.
- Sean Hall; This Means This, This Means That: A User's Guide to Semiotics (2007)
Based on this, the word wallet is immediately detectable to the structure of finance, and monetary custody. I don’t think this does anything to help NFTs capture the imagination of the wider public. There is a scepticism to cryptocurrency; ‘magical internet money,’ which many can’t help but subscribe to on first pass. However, removing the world of NFTs from this flat world of currency and money may help more people embrace them for what they are; complex expressions of our identity. Temples of our curiosity.
…semiotics is not about simply accepting the meanings that we think are being given to us. Instead, it is about questioning, reframing, and sometimes making shifts in, the perspectives from which certain signs are viewed.
I believe the word ‘wallet’ will soon hold our collective imaginations back from the wonder of what is actually happening beyond the 400,000 Metamask seals. The word wallet brings to mind flat, paper assets that are pinned in two dimensions and tucked away out of sight. It’s a cold vessel of protective paranoia projecting from the larger extractive economic framework of the fiat world-machine, and so to simply pick that up and translate it onto the rich and textured environment behind all our Metamasks is inadequate in my opinion.
As extensions of our identity in digital space, NFTs, and the realms in which they will soon be utilised and deployed, are way beyond what the word wallet will ever convey.
So with an intent to move away from defining these entities in relation to a flat space of money, can we instead immerse them into a space; a three-dimensional space of discovery in which to experience everything you’ve collected and hold?
It’s not a wallet. It’s a temple of our identities, and a model of the communities we are a part of.
Evolution of Digital Identities
The contents of our OpenSea wallets are already open for all to see. There is an option to hide NFTs, but that is mainly used for spam; to hide the things you don’t want to be visible in your collection because you never chose to collect it. This is a dramatic shift in how our most treasured possessions have been displayed on a mass scale. We don’t hide our NFTs because they are inseparable from the whole. They exist as part of the whole.
The nature of the blockchain is that you can’t hide what you own; it’s a public ledger. We all watch as whales trade million dollar punks for fun. That is a privilege that has never been experienced as collectors of culture.
So why do we collect? People collect things that they value. It may mean something to them and no one else, or it may be of value to society as a whole; be that ornaments, sculptures, artwork. They then display them in the privacy of their home, proudly above the mantelpiece. The general public wouldn’t ever have access to the front door to see the work, but a few would know you owned something special.
With NFTs it’s different. They carry that status of unique digital ownership universally, 24/7. That circle of space on your twitter profile is the entire digital world’s first impression of you, and first impressions always count. Hence, million dollar apes.
We laugh at people who argue they can right-click + save for free, because they just don’t see that yet. The unique digital ownership is what people are investing their identity and value in. They proudly wander across the various digital realms with a strange creature of 10,000 on their faces; part of a tribe they have chosen and offered themselves to as biological vehicles. For the power they now carry as agents of our identity and, as OhhShiny says, our profile; it does no justice to them being left in cold places called wallets. They belong in the temple from which they have been summoned as guides to us, their loyal followers. An open space we can experience. Symbols of something greater than ourselves, and objects of a connected culture that is drawing people in from all over the world.
Referencing this infamous cartoon, we’ve now reached a point where people are offering vast portions of their wealth to be the dog. But this embodying of an external entity isn’t new at all.
Masks and Rituals
For thousands of years human beings have worn masks in order to embody some-thing else; whether that’s spirits within rituals or Freddie Krueger on October 31st. Masks open up a portal for individuals and communities to connect to an invisible world beyond their material selves.
Existential psychologist Dr. Clay Routledge speaks of this ‘invisible world’ and how it is our aspiring for a symbolic immortality beyond death that allows us to engage in these complex narratives.
You have to transform yourself into something symbolic, and so one of the arguments that [Ernest] Becker made is that humans live in two worlds; we live in the material physical world where every morning we wake up and we have our aches and pains, we have to go to the restroom, become well and aware of our animality, our creatureliness. But we also live in this imaginative symbolic world where we’re able to create works of art, build religions. That world is the world of meaning that we seek to create and ultimately that’s the world that’s immortal. I know I’m going to die but I can be part of a project, part of a hero project that outlives me.
The ritual behaviour that is evolving on Twitter and Discord - the two melting pools of the meme culture within the web3 ecosystem - feels absolutely part of a symbolic effort to transcend individual existence, and be a part of an immortal whole. Web3 is this generations hero project, and it’s why so many people are dropping everything they are doing to be a part of its growth; to help realise it. It’s a global call to action. More than half a million people have spent over $9 billion dollars on NFTs via OpenSea alone in the past three months. There has never been such an explosive and dynamic project attempted at a scale like this before.
The way that a blockchain grows over time, collecting moments and enshrining them in a cryptographically secure record is akin to an immortal etching of a universal ledger. Where we are right now may well be the cave-painting era, but it will serve as an embryonic period from which something much more transformative will emerge from.
"Since the dawn of mankind we've been wearing masks, and they (represent) cultures that live within nature, worship nature, fear nature," said photographer, Chris Ranier. "They are using those costumes to connect with something that is beyond Earth."
As we wear our pfps, type our memes and tweet our gm’s, we are transcending mortality and etching ourselves into a story that is beyond materiality. There is a sense of duty that I have uncovered in helping understand and support the growth of web3 that I have never felt before. It’s a creative and compassionate evolution out of the dark era we have been held within. It just so happens to be a lot of fun at the same time. The masks, and our collections of digital artefacts, tell the story of our adventure along this hero’s journey. There are highs and there are also many lows, but the journey is truly special, and it’s only just beginning.
Web3 - We Now Own Our Digital Masks
Passing from web1 and 2, with the invent of decentralised ledger technology, we have now reached the stage where the assets we exchange between ourselves online are truly digitally native. Their existence can finally be untethered from any centralised conglomeration looking for a cut of the pie.
We have absolute ownership over our digital expressions, and as creators and collectors of value, the only thing stopping us is the faith in ourselves. This has blossomed into the magical landscape we are all discovering together now.
There’s never been a safer time to take risk, or such a large community welcoming risk-taking. The web3 ethos encourages open dialog, exchange, and education. As people learn, they share, and the scene’s knowledge compounds. Not Boring - Sc3nius
It’s a way that we can leave a legacy, even if right now it is just one of holding jpegs. What’s happening around the jpegs, as communities grow and connect, is what will drive this hero project forward. The BAYC apes are going to be around for a lot longer than us mortal creatures will be, and so we will perhaps live on in their spirit, logged in the blockchain and coded into eternity for all to look back on as a trailblazer; an original. The first to mint.
I believe these characters will go on to live a life much, much, much longer than our own. In essence they are immutable, and so the rights that these characters have is an interesting concept that is ripe for play. By collecting them we sign ourselves as their voice and vessel, for now.
But one thing is for certain, a flat wallet is not going to cut it. They have a right of their own to live and play in space freely.
OOO
It’s interesting to start thinking about these digital artefacts as more than just boxes of art, or pixels, or renders. When they came into existence, they began a life of their own. Imagine this narrative from their side of the equation?
Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology (“OOO” for short) puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally–plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone, for example. In contemporary thought, things are usually taken either as the aggregation of ever smaller bits (scientific naturalism) or as constructions of human behavior and society (social relativism). OOO steers a path between the two, drawing attention to things at all scales (from atoms to alpacas, bits to blinis), and pondering their nature and relations with one another as much with ourselves.
The BAYC apes and the Cool Cats; they are objects that are existing just as the chair does that you are sat on. They are entities in their own mode of existence. I believe they deserve a new space of their own beyond the concept of a wallet. This space should celebrate their story, the art of collecting, this digitally symbiotic harmony between man and ape. It’s a problem that architects should be solving; interior designers, art curators, game designers; it’s a spiritual problem of UX.
We are no longer just consuming. We’re taking part in a global effort of curation and cultural discovery. It’s shaping our collective identities and values. How we each collect says a lot about who we are individually, and what we are a vessel for contextually. Collecting is something we’re all connected by.
The Collector Bug
Collecting, for us, is a particularly powerful way of communication. It tells of our values, social placement, and intelligence. The things we collect reflect our location, and hold memories of specific experiences, and broad cultural events.
It’s a very human behaviour to collect things. What it is we collect can say a great deal about who we are and the story we carry, even after we’re gone. Objects are infused with a backstory, a context, a place and time from which they emerged. Museums attempt to retell these stories in curated experiences, to help reanimate times gone by.
On a more intimate scale, I think we all collect things in our own daily contexts. Some perhaps do so sub-consciously; some in a more outright and outlandish manner. We curate the image we want people to see of us, as a matter of taste.
When we have an array of collected items, we find these a place from which they can be seen. With care and craft, they become a display of unique artefacts that carry a meaning reflecting the collector and their time, conveying a story to the audience.
In the modern sense you have fine art collectors. The utility though is limited, and all it really does is hang there and gather dust. To the collector, in their personal collection, these can be reminders of a feeling or evoke a time they hold dear, and so the personal attachment to certain pieces is deeply subjective for this reason.
When put into dialogue with the subjectivity of their collectors, these objects cease to have intrinsic value and become cultural and critical signs despite their amassment and even the impossibility to be seen within their multitude.
- Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector (The Barbican)
With NFTs the landscape has changed. It’s gone from 2D chess to 4D chess. These belong in a space that is beyond our own, a space that is gradually becoming rendered with greater fidelity. At present, the utility of our pfp mask stretches to Twitter and Discord, as well as granting access to certain areas of NFT culture via proof of ownership.
As the aperture into the metaverse increases, these pieces that we are collecting are going to emerge as the living entities that they are; the genies in the bottle. This is when I begin to get excited about the future utility of these characters we are collecting; or more so, adopting. Especially as many roadmaps have teased 3D character designs in the near future.
We’re already beginning to see ways that these game-world creations can begin to leak into the ordinary world we occupy, and not just with VR goggles strapped to our heads. The first thought is naturally VR + XR.
Beeple has shown us a different way that this other world can open itself to ours though, with his latest piece he’s created for Christie’s: HUMAN ONE. It’s described as follows: The new sculpture is a generative work of art, a dynamically changing hybrid physical and digital piece, which the artist intends to seamlessly add and evolve creatively over the course of his lifetime. Once again I think Beeple is ahead of the curve in trying to find innovative ways to seamlessly merge the physical and the digital realms, with storytelling at the heart of it.
There is going to be a surge in innovation around how we render these digital collections in the physical world, to celebrate more of the art in collecting, rather than the old model of consuming.
In the periods of the Italian Renaissance and Victorian England we can start to see the wonder in creating immersive collections.
Cabinets of Curiosity
Back in the 16th Century, a craze for collecting swept across Europe. As travellers returned from the foreign lands they brought back strange and mysterious artefacts from beyond the known world. They sold these pieces to the aristocracy who filled their grandiose homes with them.
As their weird collections began to amass, the competition amongst the class became how to display the most wondrous story of the objects in their collections. As the stories were pushed further and further into the realm of fiction, collectors began inventing backstories to generate the greatest intrigue. That’s why spaces known as the ‘room of wonder’ and the ‘cabinet of curiosity’ were invented.
They ranged in size, from as small as a dedicated piece of furniture with multiple drawers or could stretch to the size of an entire room. Every object offered an opportunity to tell a story about an epic adventure or, more often, to fabricate one. Like everyone else, the wealthy liked to define their personalities through the possession of glamorous objects as tangible tokens of their intelligence, erudition, wealth, and taste.
The Victorians and the aristocracy of Renaissance Italy embraced the challenge of telling the greatest story and setting the most adventurous scene for their collections. We must also look beyond our own collections being held in wallets and see them for what they are; temples of our identities and the communities we are a part of. They deserve a unique space to breathe, and be immersed amongst.
Conclusion
As OhhShiney stated, the first company to call it a profile and not a wallet, will win. If you’re seeing it as just a wallet then you’re missing the point. You’re missing the significance of these new opportunities to tell stories.
I think you can even take this a step further though, because I see them as a network of temples. We each have our sacred pyramid and connected by a network of burrowings, like the mycelium in the soil of a forest floor, we are all communicating and sharing the nutrients to support each others growth. A ‘wallet’ is walled off, and it’s not transmitting the significance of this new interconnected world that is being forged in the digital tundra radically enough.
The monetary terminology is tied to the old system that got us here and will soon be a limiting factor to our imaginations. These digital creatures, otherworldly spirits, are not going to be held flat in a wallet. They’re going to be worshipped in a temple, celebrated in a museum, or relaxing on a cruise ship.
Like Aladdin’s last wish for the Genie, we all want our friends to be free, and so soon we will have to release our apes, our cats, our Deadfellaz and our Doodles into the open plane for them to live and breathe as they should.
If you’ve ever played Mass Effect 2, I think this future form of collectorship could look a lot like the crew aboard the Normandy. In that game you collect your team as you discover them in far away lands; you earn their trust through unique missions and dialogue and then they repay you with sacrifice (or betrayal) in the main story, dependent on how your in-game relationship with them developed. I think the characters we collect could soon exist in a place like that, aboard a ship we can wander amongst, where we can sit down with them to talk and relax. Maybe AI will play a part in that dialogue.
However that ends up looking and feeling, it isn’t going to be inside a wallet. It’s going to be inside a cryoptodickbutt shaped spaceship that’s made of candy floss coated mushrooms, destined for the Dogemoon and beyond. What I’m saying is the limit should be our imaginations, and using wallets prevents us from doing just that.
N.B. I could do a whole other post on the fact that the word ‘wallet’ is a distinctly male object and so potentially is a very limiting factor for the diverse adoption of NFTs and crypto as a whole. From what I’ve heard coming out of NYC, and based on my own observations so far, it’s a very male heavy scene, and so new terminology may well be needed sooner rather than later to help address that imbalance.
Thanks for reading once again. If you enjoyed this NFT dissection and want one of these a week in your inbox then make sure you subscribe below!