Uniqueness: Difference between revisions

But, deep down: in [[René Descartes|Cartesian]] terms, paper is physical, real-world stuff: in Descartes’ lexicon “[[res extensa]]”; [[intellectual property]] is ''thinking stuff'': “[[res cogitans]]”. It doesn’t have any physical dimension. It is [[Symbolic|''symbolic'']].  

The differences between the physical and the intellectual started to melt at the edges upon the camera’s arrival. They bubbled away forever when, in the 1980s, we got floppy disks and began routinely to truck in digitial information. Once you could extract information entirely from its [[substrate]] and copy it with perfect fidelity ''in the æther'', the game changed altogether.

Older folk, like the JC, may remember the epiphany that came with ripping a CD for the first time. Suddenly there was no loss of fidelity at all.  No need for a TEAC C-90. Sure, you still needed a blank CD, but you could lift the data off it without compromise.  

This provoked nervous fidgeting from recording label executives, but as long as blank CDs cost a bomb and posting them to your mates even more, “digital piracy” was a manageable problem.

 

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 off guff on the internet''?  

 

''How do I be'' ''me''?

The [[blockchain]].   

Tokens on a [[blockchain]] are to the file transfer protocol as Millennials are to Boomers: digitally native, preternaturally wise, immune to the foolish notions of yesteryear. They exist in, and are of, the digital realm. In this way, a [[blockchain]] and the regular internet are ''[[incommensurable]]'': [[Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life|non-overlapping magisteria]]. It is as if the internet were some flawed Boomer notion that, like so many other flawed Boomer notions, the kids have re-rendered in the language of tomorrow.   

The paradigm case  of “a token on a blockchain” is, of course, [[cryptocurrency]]. Say what you like about [[bitcoin]] — and the [[JC]] has plenty to say [[Bitcoin|elsewhere]] — but it ''is'' “[[blockchain]] native”: it exists in, of and only ''within'' the blockchain. Bitcoins are therefore ''intrinsically, certifiably, unique''. You absolutely can’t rip them off. That is about their one true advantage. The only one, maybe, but it is an advantage.<ref>Unless you are planning to use them buy naughty things on the dark web, that is: see Andy Greenberg’s excellent {{Br|Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency}}.</ref> 

And if you create your artwork ''on'' the [[blockchain]], you get that same native uniqueness: any facsimiles of the artwork that exist ''off blockchain'' — copies floating around on the internet, hanging in fashionable galleries and so on — are, certifiably, [[ontologically]] ''inferior'' to the one on the ledger. That one is the real deal.  

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''. No oils, no egg tempera, no canvas, no ''objets trouvés'': you must create your art on-chain.  

===The metaverse, the dying analog world, and pixelated pop-tarts===

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 pixelated rainbow cat pop-tarts 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 ''value'' as artwork “natively” lives outside a [[distributed ledger]], or whose [[value]] ''does not subsist in its [[substrate]] at all'', 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 designing 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>We use “holy” advisedly. But see our essay as to why [[doubt]] is no bad thing.</ref>   

Unlike any  other ostensibly stable store of value,<ref>I know, I know: “stable”.</ref> cryptocurrencies have no [[issuer]], come with no implied promise, are backed by the faith and credit of no sovereign and are good discharge for personal debts under the laws of no existing present legal system except ''El Salvador'', and we hope we are not offending anyone by wondering whether that really counts. Cryptocurrencies are the purest, most distilled abstract code; their value is held aloft entirely by the prevailing consensus that “aloft” is where they should be — yet on that flimsy pretext, some threaten to escape the gravitational pull of the Earth altogether.