#174: Telephone Free Landslide Victory
Which topic are we talking about today? The metaverse, COVID-19, cryptocurrency…how about all of them. I wish I was joking. I really hate it. Next time I’ll write about liminal spaces or something. But as I noted in the last issue, the omicron variant is suddenly an inescapable topic, not just a newly-pervasive source of concern but also a rich vein of social media material, a meme that had been mass-uploaded to everyone’s brains, in parallel with its rapid spread through the physical world—two different kinds of virality converging upon the same meaning. This time around, catching COVID means announcing it on Instagram in a multi-day rollout, firing off anxious Twitter jokes, and fully embracing the pandemic’s status as content even as it ruins your holiday plans in meatspace. Like omicron now, a short list of topics are always top-of-mind, varying slightly according to who you follow, but regardless of what those topics are, it does feel like we’re all increasingly obligated to periodically weigh in on the same few things, whether we want to or not. Twitter has trained us well.
On the surface, it doesn’t feel like the omicron variant could possibly have anything to do with cryptocurrency, but of course it does—not for any good reason but simply because any given set of extremely popular topics are now required to mate and reproduce. Matt Levine recently wrote about a new crypto token called Omicron, which essentially amounts to a financial bet on widespread awareness of “omicron” as a concept, almost like a way to collect royalties on the word’s usage—a meme coin that happens to correspond to a major global event rather than a breed of dog. “The more people say ‘omicron,’ the more people will look to buy Omicron Coin, and the more valuable it will be,” Levine writes. “(Its value) is up because it is a tradable claim with the word ‘omicron’ in its name, and the word ‘omicron’ is up.” If Web 2.0 (and social media specifically) is the core infrastructure for making and distributing memes at large scale—for transforming ideas and events into content and letting it all flow together in the feeds—then crypto and Web3 extend that logic further, offering mechanisms for monetizing and formalizing the collage of words and images that accumulates in all our heads, both voluntarily and involuntarily, reifying the memes by manifesting their real value, and thereby building monuments to what we’re actually thinking and talking about, not what we pretend we are. Far from a repudiation of Web 2.0, this is its ultimate validation. Levine shares the same self-loathing that I feel spreading the word about Omicron Coin. “You probably hate me for typing that,” he writes, “but I promise that you don’t hate me as much as I hate myself.” Just like COVID, we help transmit it and then feel bad for doing so!
I enjoy thinking of the internet as the canvas onto which we all collectively project the chaotic contents of our brains. The more we look at that canvas, of course, the more it in turn determines what’s in our brains. That powerful loop perhaps explains all the feedback shrieking from the world’s speakers, the volatility that now seems to characterize everything. We have become completely immersed in what Nassim Taleb calls “Extremistan” (as opposed to Mediocristan), the manmade world that amplifies everything it can, ensuring that outliers proliferate and few phenomena are normally distributed. Ironically, COVID has pushed us further into Extremistan, tethering us to fully manmade digital environments and releasing us from the remaining physical constraints that imposed a modicum of discipline on us. Cryptocurrency is the ideal technology for these conditions, as it is perfectly designed to propagate itself by intensifying the memetic forces already rampant online as well as offline (which are both the same place, it turns out). The metaverse, as many have suggested, may just be a metaphor for the domain where all of this happens, something less concrete than Facebook’s promotional video—an alternate universe where the only constraints that exist are artificial and instead of weather we have discourse topics.
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Reads:
Why we’ll never stop mourning the American mall. “Every effort to repurpose a mall becomes a fascinating performance of architectural insufficiency, of a bespoke thing being wrenched into a different, and more practical, and less entertaining, function.”
Corner stores are the new darlings of the global tech industry. “Instead of transitioning to big-box retailers, communities will continue relying on the same shops they have for generations, but they’ll have evolved into futuristic outposts that double as tiny warehouses, banks, and grocery-delivery hubs.”
In addition to the obvious reasons, e-commerce is fueling organized retail theft by providing an ideal resale channel for stolen goods. Related: my recent post about Amazon and the convenience store death spiral.