I’m temperamentally digital native, where there is literally nothing special about the “original” unless you impose specialness. But clever distribution mechanisms that ride various pragmatic tradeoffs? Yes.
Conversation
Maybe there can be artistic merit to clever distribution protocols though. A serial time-rights auction where viewers get access in an artistic rather than random (lottery) or utilitarian (highest bidder) order? An essay that’s released in order of Myers-Briggs types?
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That would be fun. An essay of mine that’s released ESFJ to INTP order should behave differently than one released in the reverse order. Or astrological signs. Scorpios first.
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Distributional artistry is rare. Banksy for eg. But in a world of aggregation theory, reach-o-nomics, and distribution being more important, maybe go from dumb to smart to artistic distribution?
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Distribution as performance art is the only way I can think off to make digital art substantively unique, rather than ascriptively unique with bolted on artificial scarcity and vanity markets driving it. You could genuinely reshape how a potentially historic work makes history.
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One reason I’ve kept most of my work free or really cheap is that “people who can pay” is almost never an interesting audience. And the higher the price the less interesting the conversation.
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A $5 substack is already a significantly less interesting audience conversation loop than free. A $18 print book is enough to break the loop entirely for all but the biggest works. A $1 million painting in a billionaire’s private collection is basically dead.
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(subscribers of *my* various newsletters of course, are uniquely interesting, high IQ, exceptionally attractive, superior humans)
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(and I do get that since I’m not dependent on my writing for a living, I can afford to be more picky about how/where/when I play, unlike artists entirely dependent on art, with minimum-wage jobs being the backstop)
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In a related vein, I wonder what’s the proportion of NFT-issuers who are:
a) working artists who really need the $
b) people with alt income sources like me
c) trusties
d) primarily crypto people moonlighting as creators
e) other — corporate funded stunt marketers etc
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A very good litmus test of how your aesthetic sensibilities shape your commercial posture is to ask, as a thought experiment, what sort of restaurant you’d open? Let’s make this an in-line poll, why not.
- Exec chef to billionaire4.8%
- High-end fine dining29%
- Chain franchise12.1%
- Street food cart54%
124 votesFinal results
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I’m definitely on the street-food end. Ideally serving up a “locally world-famous” unique signature item under $5. But not super unique. Something like my spin on a well-known thing. Like a dosa cart with a unique filling.
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“Locally world famous” is not a joke. It describes many street foods. Locals take out-of-town visitors there, who become new fans. And people who leave retain strong memories and try to get it shipped to them worldwide at great cost. It’s a good metaphor for subcultural capital.
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If anyone ever visits my hometown of Jamshedpur btw, I highly recommend this place. A true NFT among chanachurs. I still manage to snag some on occasion when friends travel there (well, my sister’s friends, since she’s retained stronger ties than me). fakirachanachur.com/index.html
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The locally world-famous food metaphor btw points to unique distribution as an angle. There’s often a story to the story of food getting out if local neighborhoods. For eg. friends hand-carrying it on flights, then dividing and mailing the stash as part of care packages.
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Once I found a uniquely good potato chip in a DC cafe. Billy Goat chips from St. Louis. Later on a cross country road trip, I specifically detoured through St. Louis for the chips. I’ve since twice special ordered them at shipping cost ~ chip cost.
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Now that’s an NFT among chips. Once when I randomly found a few bags at a Home Goods in the Seattle area, I was elated like I’d discovered a Picasso at a garage sale.
They really are very good. If you’re a potato chip connoisseur, seek them out.
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Wonder if this could work digitally. A blog post that’s only findable in a network neighborhood (set of whitelisted requesting static IPs?) but also randomly posted on sites elsewhere. Can you in fact impose such a terroir on a network topology?
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Maybe the real innovation needed here is a digital network embedded in a continuous metric space with digital geofencing and exponential drop-off in trust as you retreat from a node. That would be a canvas for NFTs par excellence.
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How hard would it be to make a computer network with embedding geography as an explicit topological feature? Like gps on every host and a cryptographically signed location tag on every packet? Otherwise exactly like tcp/ip and interoperable with it as a subnet.
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...but allowing for location-based filtering/routing capabilities for qualified packets. The gps need not go with the host but could go with owner.
And geo-mapped hosts need not exist on a mirror world earth. You could map it to virtual worlds.
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Ie a local circle drawn on “shitpost tweets planet” should contain people who are geographically close too, but otherwise locations could mean anything, within mapping limits. 🤔
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This might actually be the best way to do digital real estate. Not like Linden Labs approach. Topological logic based on “proof of proximity” derived from physical earth. Artworks anchor uniqueness via location rather than directly. There may be a million jpegs but with (x, y)
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If such a network started and somehow mapped earth coordinates to solar system locations with some freedom, with progressive lock-in, early adopters from LA could choose to set up base on Ceres the asteroid and drag LA there.
How could the math work? 🤔
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This is an interesting topology problem with limited tearing allowed (the way world map projections like Mercator work... basically an orange peel problem). More freedom than strict projection though. You don’t need shape or distance preserving almost everywhere.
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There may be an actual patentable technical idea here. If so, I hereby public-domain it 🤣
Let’s see if I can lay out highlights.
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1. Every unique content item must be content-addressable and associated with a physical geolocation signed with a private key by the author or rights holder. This tag expires and must be reset periodically or the content piece becomes invalid on the “terroir network”
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2. The rights holder may use the location to define access rights for other locations.
3. Every location is mapped 1:1 to a topologically equivalent location on a virtual world, which could be a mirror earth or something else topologically compatible.
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4. Every new item added to the world must conform to the topology created by previous items, and will constrain the topological freedom of future items, creating a progressively locked-in virtual geography that’s approximately isomorphic to earth.
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5. The progressive lock-in must preserve distance order relationships almost everywhere except along pre-defined global “tear” boundaries, but need not preserve actual distances or angles or areas.
6. The world itself must be uniquely identifiable by its tears/singularities.
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This is trivial for any single planet or asteroid. You could also do a set of planets (glue them n-pole-to-s-pole like a string of beads, in order of mean distance from sun, and each join would be a singular latitude on the earth map where the distance metric is discontinuous)
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This is fun. I’d build it if I had the technical chops for it. Seems like it should just be a minor extension to tcp/ip stack.
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This is no longer an NFT thread. It’s a virtual worlds thread with room for NFT-like inclusions as a natural consequence of proof-of-proximity geographies.
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Continuous, orientable geographies are more interesting and powerful than graphs. Few understand this.
See: Blum and Kozen, “On the power of the compass (or, why mazes are easier to search than graphs)” (1978)
One of my favorite papers.
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Moar NFT jokes
Quote Tweet
New zen metaphor!
An NFT is like a finger pointing to the moon.
Except, and this is the potentially kinda clever bit, it is a specific finger, the finger of the author. In this case, the moon god.
Kim Jong-Un was minting NFTs before they were cool btw. kimjongunpointingatthings.tumblr.com
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