NFTs, Laughing, Manufactured Time, and Paywalls (Spam Mail #26)

💩 Cool Shit

You Laugh, You Lose - Turn your camera on and try not to laugh.

Click here to save the world - Sounds simple enough, right? This takes you on a ride just by clicking.

Zed Run - There’s a lot of hype around NFTs, but this is probably the first example I’ve seen of NFTs moving beyond just a way to collect digital things. Buy and breed virtual horses and compete in digital horse-racing. No animals harmed in participating.

Sebastian Ly Serena - I’m not quite sure what this is. It’s like a Rube Goldberg machine made of web form fields.

edding Wall of Fame - A virtual wall to make virtual street art.

Sequencer64 - A virtual drum sequencer.

Wisdoms for Love 3.0 - This feels like next generation web. Described as “an NFT-themed game that allows users to collect digitised wisdom tokens in a virtual shared space”.

The Birds and the Trees - Impossible Foods have a very clever site that explores how to talk about the tricky subject of climate change with your parents.

What’s After The Credits? - If you’re like me and hopefully wait for an after-credits scene this will be very useful.

💎 Word gems

The Tyranny Of Time (Noema / Joe Zedeh)

A fascinating exploration into how modern society has been so fiercely shaped by our push for ‘regulated time’. Railways, shipping and industry created manufactured time, and GMT was the unification of that movement.

The Earth is not a perfect sphere with perfect movement; it’s a lumpy round mass that is squashed at both poles and wobbles. It does not rotate in exactly 24 hours each day or orbit the sun in exactly 365 days each year. It just kinda does. Perfection is a manmade concept; nature is irregular.

The empty brain (Aeon / Robert Epstein)

If you like to think about how humans think, this will pique your interest. This article dismantles the concept that our brain processes information like a computer, and instead posits that the metaphor we use to understand our brains changes with the technology paradigm around us.

As we navigate through the world, we are changed by a variety of experiences. Of special note are experiences of three types: (1) we observe what is happening around us (other people behaving, sounds of music, instructions directed at us, words on pages, images on screens); (2) we are exposed to the pairing of unimportant stimuli (such as sirens) with important stimuli (such as the appearance of police cars); (3) we are punished or rewarded for behaving in certain ways.

Everything Is Becoming Paywalled Content—Even You (Wired / Jason Parham)

The ‘splinternet’ describes how the internet is being divided up - politically, geographically, socially - yet as more of the web becomes monetized there’s a growing division between the free internet, and the paid one. As the article dives into everything becoming paywalled, there’s a shift happening. While platforms, like Facebook, arguably give you access to everyone they monopolize the relationship. With individuals owning the relationship (using services like Patreon or Onlyfans), the free but ad-filled web slowly fades away.

The internet turned everything into a commodity—now built on what economist Jeremy Rifkin calls “access relationships,” where “virtually all of our time is commodified” and “communications, communion, and commerce [are] indistinguishable.” Think of it like an open subscription loop, or peer-to-peer lifestyle funding. The next frontier is a world where everyone is an influencer, and we are all just paying for, and being paid for, a litany of perfectly curated feeds.

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