#43: Web3, and interactive storytelling

💩 Cool shit

Ravi & Emma - A wonderful piece of interactive storytelling. Turn your camera on and participate in a story told in Southern Dialect Auslan (Australian sign language).

The Opera Game: A Chess Story - A story told entirely through an interactive chess match, backed by Opera music. Another great example of interactive storytelling.

Wander Prompts - Prompts to take with you on a walk.

How Not to Suck at Money - Disclaimer: This is sponsored by an investment management firm. Nonetheless, a really creative (and interactive) way to teach you about managing money.

Can Data Die? - A great data analysis by The Pudding, through the lens of a seemingly everlasting image online.

The.com - I don’t usually share paid online services but The.com has an interesting proposition. It’s a website builder, built on the web3 thesis of ownership. I expect to see more of these web 2.0 online services rebuilt with blockchain and NFT. Will they last? Unclear.

Alternative To - This is handy. Find an alternative to just about any online tool you use.

Mediaopoly - This is such a great idea. Find out the media diet of anyone on Twitter. You can see their top news sources and how left or right leaning their news diet is.

💎 Word gems

DAOs: Absorbing the Internet (The Generalist)

A long, and thorough article on DAOs that serves as a great explainer, despite the heavily pro-DAO bias. The analogy of a co-op that can scale makes sense to me, but what’s never questioned is if making a co-op scale is inherently a good thing.

Because DAOs are built on public blockchains, they benefit from global financial infrastructure from day one. It’s simple to spin up a shared wallet that is controlled by a collective. And though crypto onboarding still leaves a lot to be desired, once you have a wallet and some tokens, you have the ability to transfer those tokens to any other account in the world, no matter where they’re based. Essentially, a DAO allows you to spin up a cross-border fund with collaborative functionality baked-in.

Look what you made me do: a lot of people have asked me to make NFT games and I won’t because i’m not a fucking dumbass. now let me tell you why only a dumbass would get into NFT games (GB 'Doc' Burford)

In contrast to the article above, this piece is heavily critical of NFTs. The tone and writing is annoying, but looking past that there’s some great points on how NFTs obfuscate ownership and a claim that the inflating value of NFT is artificially driven by a small group of people.

Long time ago, people came up with an idea for something that already exists: a ledger. Like, I buy from you? It’s recorded. You buy from me? It’s recorded. What happens if the computer burns down? Well, like bittorrent, it’s a peer to peer technology, which means that it’ requires help from every participant’s computer (full disclosure: this is the Explain Like I’m Five version; I am simplifying this). Nothing can happen just because one person says so, because the idea behind cryptocurrency is that it’s about trust, or rather, the lack thereof. It doesn’t have the wikipedia problem of “anyone can edit this.” They call this idea “the blockchain” and they wanted to put a currency on it that’s basically banking-free (because libertarians invented this as a way to get out of being taxed). But still, trust has to come from somewhere.

It’s basically a really inefficient way to solve problems the rest of us already solved with currently existing technologies, but because it’s new, a bunch of people in Silicon Valley rushed to tell everyone how great it was — trying to come up with problems blockchain could fix, rather than solving a problem that exists with the blockchain. A big part of the reason they felt it was great was because it would create a currency that wasn’t backed by the government. Generally, these things don’t work out too well (remember Pullman, Illinois? No? Well, it was a city where a guy paid people not in real money, but in fake money he’d created, so they had to buy stuff in his shops and they couldn’t leave their jobs and had to keep working for him. Bad situation. It got shut down.).

Notes on Web3 (Robin Sloan)

A third piece on Web3, still critical, but brings a different angle. Following the thread above, this piece notes that much of “web3” is built on Etherium, and sounds a lot like a monopolization of blockchain and NFTs, rather than a democratizer.

Many Web3 boosters see themselves as disruptors, but “tokenize all the things” is nothing if not an obedient continuation of “market-ize all the things”, the campaign started in the 1970s, hugely successful, ongoing. I think the World Wide Web was the real rupture — “Where … is the money?”—which Web 2.0 smoothed over and Web3 now attempts to seal totally.

Right-clickers vs. the monkey JPG owners (Garbage Day / Ryan Broderick)

Garbage Day is a great newsletter about online culture, and this piece looks at the culture war around web3. This felt like a nice cap to the three articles above.

The best overall articulation I’ve seen so far of why Web3 is so hated by many online subcultures right now was from @nicodotgay, the Twitter user behind the right-click mosaic. They explained in a follow-up tweet that they weren’t anti-NFT for ecological reasons. “The real issue is that they represent an attempt to re-impose artificial scarcity on culture,” @nicodotgay tweeted. “‘Digital scarcity’ is an anti human evolution ideology that imposes board game-like rules which serve no purpose than to preserve the game itself - to hide the internal contradictions of capitalism that become painfully obvious in an area of culture that has overcome scarcity.”

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