It’s a once in a lifetime day on the calendar, but just another today on the Internet. And while many hold out hope the angels will fly them 22222 the moon, lately, it looks like their ride might be headed in the other direction. Ah well. Plenty to be thankful for while we’re still here on earth, even if it’s just the comforting melancholy of romanticizing the past, or the cathartic release of ugly crying about the future.
Chad & El Prof
Markets
BITCOIN ETHEREUM CARDANO SOLANA DOGECOIN SHIBA INU TEZOS(Price changes reflect past 7 days as of 2.22.22 @ 4:20 PM EST.)
- #WWIII is trending on Twitter today. What more is there to say? Sometimes, time moves backwards, too.
- On the other (paper) hand, here’s the guy who big shorted the diamond hodlers. Clearly, he had the right idea.
NFT = no fucking thanks?
I had the pleasure of hanging out with a few of our wayward Higher Order Readers this weekend. And, while I appreciated the empirical evidence that we’re not just shouting into an empty void, I was taken aback to learn some of you are sticking with our little letter without understanding what the hell we’re talking about half the time.
I can’t say I was surprised to hear our Burgessian IYKYK prose style is inaccessible to some. But I was, pleasantly so, to find that even crypto skeptics see value in what we’re doing. Perhaps it’s because we occupy a particularly of-our-time Internet niche I like to call ‘Blockchainfreude’ — or ‘web2.5’ if you don’t get harm-joy from needlessly complex compound German words. Web2.5 consists of companies, publications, and properties like our own, dedicating precious time and energy to talking about and working with web3, even if we find it to be, in the immortal words of The RZA, fucken rudiccullus.
In addition to our oft-shared friends over at Web3 Is Going Great and Garbage Day, authors like Max Read and Ted Gioia are consistently hard at work removing polish from ERC-721-secured turds and shining light on the silver linings in a space many find to be blissfully ignorant at best and scam-shilling / planet-killing at worst. Although web3 is clearly unpalatable to a majority of the population, I’d argue it’s a good thing some of us are willing to engage with this inevitable paradigm shift regardless. We need open, adaptable minds working to solve the problems we face — not just another meme account to articulate the human race’s hopeless trajectory in a somewhat witty way.
Of course, one look at our featured image and you can see ‘just’ is the operative word there. Enter Blockchainfreude, which aims to accomplish both. We seek to engage with the best elements of the blockchain and scoff at the other 96% — an angle justified not just by you all, our cherished H0Rs, but by the NFT market at large.
Some of the buzziest NFT artists use their platform to make statements on the sorry state of crypto culture. We previously spotlighted Nick Bax’s project criticizing OpenSea’s data vulnerability. Then there’s the Super Fungible Token, designed to remind us that the photos associated with an NFT can be changed at any time. And, in a few days, we’ll see the launch of the latest from performance artist Schl0ms. Schl0ms is a web2.5 creator most famous for blowing up a toilet and selling the fragments as NFTs, which is about as deft and obvious a metaphor as I’ve ever seen.
Earlier this month, Schl0ms blew up another unsubtle symbol — this time a literal Lambo — as an FU to the con men and cash grabbers who see the market as little more than an IRL GTA: Online cheat code. That the artist stands to make millions off the 888 minted shards of the car is, I assume, irony as a poetic device. Point is, it’s only a matter of time before Blockchainfreude goes mainstream. But we’re very thankful for all of you who knew us before we were cool.
SPONSORED BY
Which is as good a place as any to remind y’all of our own shameless NFT cash grab, built from the memes of others, as commentary on, like, how all art is subjective and derivative, but you should totally still pay us for our proud plagiarizing, or something.
Pfffairy dust
Six months into writing for Culture H0R, my mental reserve of crypto information is the equivalent of an average house on Hoarders. And, since some of you apparently still don’t get what an NFT even is, let me stay on theme and dive a little deeper into the aforementioned Super Fungible Token as an opportunity to share the burden of all this thoroughly fugazi information.
NFTs aren’t actually overpriced JPGs. You’re not paying for an image. You’re paying to own a unique combination of characters on a blockchain, which is basically a permanent virtual transaction log. It’s ‘permanent’ because, unlike traditional databases hosted on server farms, chains are decentralized. For example. If the Facebook server shut down, you wouldn’t be able to access the site until they got it back up again. But for the Ethereum blockchain to shut down, 51% of all access points would have to, which is next to impossible. (Unless the whole world goes all Revolution on us, which probably won’t happen for another year or two at least.)
So, if you buy an NFT, your (anonymous user) name is etched in history next to the string of characters representing a non-fungible token. To a lot of people who spend too much time on the Internet, this digital, cosplayed permanence is a valuable thing. Especially if the string of characters point to an asset with some sort of social or economic worth, like an ape profile picture priced higher than an island nation.
However, because blockchain real estate is expensive and it would take immense capital and computing power to upload an actual image file onto a chain, there is almost always no ‘real’ link between the image and the actual NFT. There are automated smart contracts designed to regulate the transactions, but they can be written to allow the image to change at any given time. Which is exactly the absurdity that the Super Fungible Token lampshades. Designed by the multimedia project digital void and Twitter meme curator @WTTDOTM, the SFT is an NFT minted so anyone can drop a link to any image, which will, for the time being, become the NFT.
Now, no one actually owns the SFT. The best art is never for sale, although its exquisite approximation of vintage Nintendo style and thematically appropriate meme (submitted, at the time of publication, by yours truly) would surely fetch a pretty altcoin penny on the patently tasteless OpenSea. But the idea it represents is priceless. There is no inherent value to NFTs, because not even the sometimes-excellent, oft-atrocious art associated with them is really permanent. The only part that lasts forever is the record of you buying into the hype, even if your Pudgy Penguin animorphed into an unsolicited DP in the meantime.
Take the bad with the bad
And now for the hard-hitting Blockchainfreude you’ve come to love:
- El Salvador is on track to become the true Decentraland, proposing sweeping reforms to citizenship red tape so any old Bitcoin hodler can become a subject of Nayib Bukele, the Twitter-trolling, bowtie-less Tucker Carlson of web3. Which sounds pretty awful to me, but is, unironically, most degens’ wet dream.
- The El Salvador of the U.S.A., Wyoming, proposed its own stablecoin. Even the founder of a digital asset bank in the state admitted she didn’t see the point, but hey. Those cryptobros almost bought the Constitution, so they’ll for sure turn out to vote in their local elections. Right?
- Solana-based NFT marketplace Magic Eden became the first of its ilk to introduce doxxing as a formal policy, as a safeguard against rug pulls. Personally, I like where their head is at. But their target audience might not.
- A pinned post from the Tubby Cats Discord server went viral for imploring its users to ‘NOT announce to the server when [they] are going to masturbate’. Apparently, this has been a ‘reoccurring issue’. The poster expressed shock at users with ‘such under developed social skills that they think a server full of mostly male strangers would need to know that’. But, to me, this seems like exactly the sort of thing I’d expect from a server full of mostly male strangers.
SLOPPY SECONDS
