Uniqueness: Difference between revisions

[[File:NyanCat.png|450px|frameless|center]]

}}The [[Blockchain]]’s unique selling point is ''uniqueness'': an entry on the ledger is fixed, immutable, unalterable and unique for all time. It cannot be changed, without editing every node on the [[distributed ledger]], and it cannot be duplicated.  This sense of uniqueness, which is encoded into the design of a [[distributed ledger]], quite alien to the engineering of the internet, which depends on duplication as a means of transmission.   

The internet not only allows, but ''encourages'' lossless copying: that’s the essence of its [[End-to-end principle|end-to-end]] architecture. This brought to a head a conundrum for [[intellectual property]] laws that had been brewing since, arguably the time of the [[Jacquard loom]]. The idea of “intellectual property” was forged in an analog age, where the distinction between an ''original'' and a ''copy'' was clear and [[Ontology|ontologically]] fundamental. Also, the cost of generating copies was non-trivial and did not easily [[scale]]: since intellectual property was necessarily embedded in a physical [[substrate]] — to read a novel you needed a physical book — you could treat [[intellectual property]] as if it ''were'' physical property. To all intents, it ''was''.   

The Man — and many struggling artistes, content creators and also Metallica — were confronted with deep questions about authenticity and uniqueness, which they weren’t ready for and, to be candid, still haven’t really got to grips with, thirty years later. ''How do I distinguish between my real stuff, and the ripped of guff on the internet''? How do I be ''me''?

And now, in our heady times,<ref>I mean, [[Bulltard|stark raving ''bonkers'' times]].</ref> we are asked to behold a solution. An alternative network architecture that ''guarantees'' authenticity. Problem solved. The real essence delivered back to the creator. And what is this marvellous thing?  

But that is a big ''if''.  The price you pay for entering the [[distributed ledger]] and getting your uniqueness back is that you must leave the peer-to-peer world, everything on it, and everything on the even more-flawed analog world underlying it, behind ''forever''.  

   

Now maybe walled-in media platforms structured as [[decentralised autonomous organisation]]s are different, but mostly, a [[blockchain]] is a crappy place to create art. It’s a ledger system: a fancy ownership register, made of cryptographically-hashed code. That is, artistically, ''limiting''. Great, if pixellated rainbow cat-poptarts are your thing, but for anyone making art the old-fashioned way — paint and paper, sand and glue, finding bicycle wheels, inverting urinals and signing them — or even more so writing music or literature, whose artwork “natively” lives outside a [[distributed ledger]], or whose [[value]] does not subsist in its [[substrate]], but rather in the abstract information the [[substrate]] carries (such as a book, film or score) — having your artwork encoded on a [[blockchain]], in a unique [[substrate]] doesn’t really help you. It’s one thing for David Hockney to do all his painting on an iPad: but the history of art would have been quite different, and quite a lot less fun, were Caravaggio or Duchamp obliged to restrict themselves to Nyan Cats in a cashbook.   

So here’s the irony of the blockchain: if you aren’t quite ready for permanent immersion in the Metaverse: if you are not yet ready let the analogue world go, then not only does the blockchain not help: it makes things worse. To mint a token of a canonical “real world” artwork, is to create a non-fungible ''representation'' of it — a non-copy — the one that is certifiably, [[ontologically]] inferior ''to every other ripped-off copy:'' unlike a digital copy, it is uniquely, definitively ''not'' the original work.   

The rampant copyability of anything everything in Web 2.0 no doubt prompted the stampede to non-fungibility. ''Authenticity'' is in deep demand: no-one trusts experts anymore. ''Everything'' is ripped off. ''Everything'' is fake. Indubitability — [[certainty]] — is some kind of holy grail.<ref>But see our essay as to why [[doubt]] is no bad thing.</ref>   

We say, “no,” all the above [[Notwithstanding anything to the contrary|notwithstanding]].  

Now: do these ghastly poems have a single iota of ''[[value]]''? Outside their very real extortion potential, they do not. Does their critical ''uniqueness'' change this? It does not.

There is great danger of crushing humiliation should they ever get out. So why does he keep them? The JC has wondered about this, and never managed a good answer — beyond the ''thrill'' they generate. The thrill from the singular terror that they ever be found by anyone and leaked to a disinterested world — God forbid, minted on a blockchain: encoded on every node of our future universe, perpetually inerasable part of our canon.   

{{sa}}

*[[Distributed ledger]]

*[[Blockchain]]

*[[Non-fungible token]]s

{{Ref}}