The Armor of God

"issue": 079

Dec 12, 2021

Generally, I’m known to play most of my work close to the chest. But with the passing of Virgil I took time to reflect, as certain deaths push us to do, about why we publish work in the first place.

What it opens up in ourselves, in others. How generative it is to place work in the public, how it creates the reference chain for the changes we desire. Why writing wasn’t always enough, and the frustration it created.

I wanted to push myself in using a medium I’ve never touched before (GAN image creation), while focusing the input methodology within something I feel very confident in (references & spirituality).

I can’t find the quote right now, but Virgil talked in an interview about the ability for creators to bring forward “both the essay and the object”. That’s the vibe, and this is the first solo collection of work to kick it off.

11 Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. 12 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. 13 Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. 14 Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, 15 and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. 16 In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. 17 Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.
18 And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people.
— Ephesians 6:11-18 (NIV)

Belt of Truth

Breastplate of Righteousness

Gospel of Peace

Shield of Faith

Helmet of Salvation

Sword of the Spirit

I find it interesting how in a previously hyper secular expression of technology, web3 has reignited a very open sense of (generalized) spirituality.

The nature of congregation (DAOs), identity talismans (NFTs), openness of interactions (Blockchains).

For this collection I wanted to approach it both literally and with clear reference to childhood Sunday School. While embracing the emergent visual language that I’ve been digging in a lot of other works (textures of the time).

Please, take these objects with you.

Art is made in hindsight.
— Virgil Abloh

I don’t do edits really, so excuse typos and things that don’t make sense.

Thanks so much for giving me your attention. I hope it was worth it, if not… unsubscribing will not hurt my feelings, and will give you back time you literally cannot have back.

Much love.

Live in the light

It's Not A Ponzi

"issue": 078

Reggie James

Dec 9, 2021

This is a short dispatch /// Alternate title: Ephemeral Markets In Search Of Utility

I have yet to see a defense of why NFT’s aren’t a ponzi scheme that is shareable. Everything rests on top of vague notions of culture and community and a general shared mental image of what they might become despite what they are today… with very light gloss-overs of the technical challenges that exist in that future reality.

I’ve written plenty on my fears of what happens to us, when all of our interactions are mediated with a legible financial transaction potential underneath it. The erosion of hospitality. And in the same breath I have oozed over the utopian potential of creative infinites for the culture now that the value of work can be realized more smoothly, and future royalties can be programmed in.

What I want to give, right now, is a simple snapshot of the economic mounds we’ve been playing on as it relates to most NFT collections.

In Defense Of Ephemeral Markets

One way I can tell the general (relevancy) health of an NFT collection is the amount of bot bids I receive on pieces & their cadence. As they start to slow down, I run through a process of either conviction or ditching → recognizing the scene is shifting its attention elsewhere. (I’m not saying I’m proud of this, or that this is the right framework, I’m simply sharing what is true that runs through my mind)

What we are witnessing is not Ponzi, it’s an ephemeral market on a new commodity of identity.

THE MEDIUM IS THE MARKET IS THE MESSAGE

I think what’s most interesting about the nature of blockchains is the environment of legibility. And in seeing each other’s every move, with the financial under and overtones of each one, we naturally associate that with market dynamics.

But the classical market vocabulary no longer work for this environment. And so, new emergent language is both necessary and daunting. It has created the fencings of this culture.

In Search Of Utility

The reason we are in an ephemeral market, driven by scarce attention across constantly emerging projects, is because beyond the swapping of identity talismans these objects do not hold that much value yet.

This will change and is already changing.

I also do not discount that, it is simply entertaining. Entertainment is one of our oldest and most enduring utilities across the human experience. These markets are fun, despite some painful moments of rugging, over leveraged individuals, and other poor actors.

Culture has an inherent ephemeral quality as a structure of communal expression. Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti + Culture is our Business by Marshall McLuhan might be a good dense reference here. But as longer lasting, and ritualistic function gets encoded into these objects, we will see the value and transaction styles explode in both directions. Beyond the market trading, inflation/deflation patterns we see today.

Live by the medium, die by the medium. It’s not a ponzi. It’s that when everything is a measurable market, you see how fast people can move on. And that is a very different environment to get used to.

I don’t do edits really, so excuse typos and things that don’t make sense.

Thanks so much for giving me your attention. I hope it was worth it, if not… unsubscribing will not hurt my feelings, and will give you back time you literally cannot have back.

Much love.

Live in the light

Amateur Environments

"issue": 077

Reggie James

Nov 7, 2021

alternate title: becoming each-other’s everything

In technology, we consistently speak on the democratizing force of the internet and the subsequent effects on society.

But lately I’ve been thinking not just on this shift of democratization and more tools in more hands. Instead, thinking of this force as “amateur-ization”.

The realization that software is able to abstract a typically professional environment, to a more open for participation amateur one.

For a short list of examples:

Twitter = amateur intellectualism
Instagram = amateur photography
Youtube = amateur videography
Robinhood = amateur finance
OnlyFans = amateur pornagraphy
Depop = amateur retail
Crypto = amateur governance & capital

Amateurizing has compelling effects on the environment. It reconstructs our referent objects from those that have situated themselves “above” through some means → towards each other.

Like streetwear, it creates new rules of construction. New possibilities of interaction - both socially and with the materials being sourced.

What’s brand new is the distribution and ease in which our peers can contextually shift their identity towards the rest of us.

I believe this is the meta-tension between generations. Those that grew up in predominantly professional environments vs amateur ones.

It manifests itself as “misinformation caused by Twitter/Facebook” or “crypto is a ponzi-scheme” or “streetwear isn’t fashion”.

But ALL of these breakdown eventually.

Quick reasons why amateur environments are interesting to me:

Tiktok is fun because it’s like a double amateur environment. A lot of Tiktokers want to be YouTubers. This double amateur environment gives clues as to what is desirable in a higher sense / where attention still stands / etc.
Robinhood is interesting because it’s an amateur environment where the participants do not desire to become professional. They simply want to have access to a similar outcome. By that I mean, no one spending their time in this way wants to graduate up to working at Goldman Sachs. Those are the suckers stuck in the professional environment. It’s better to organize on WSB and play their own game.
Continuing on the above, Robinhood is interesting because the arena of the amateur and the professional are the same. The structure of market can no longer exclude the amateur.
Once the amateur environment becomes the primary environment, the professional one becomes the anti-environment. Warhol putting the Brillo Box in the center of the gallery.
The amateur environment is the direct-to-consumer-to-consumer. “my producers, are they not my consumer”

Ex-Machina: bridging the gap from sci-fi to sci-fact | by Isaac Oluoch | Becoming Human: Artificial Intelligence Magazine

Software is the ultimate de-materialization tool. Turning entire machines and organizations into pixels. Spreading that light across any hand holding a pocketcomputer.

What other professional environments are ripe to be dematerialized, amateurized, restructured for new participants to adjust the nature of the medium itself?

I think what web3 understands spiritually, is the previous amateur environment has become incredibly professional. This loop continues in perpetuity of our existence and provides us with the opportunity to build… anything.

I don’t do edits really, so excuse typos and things that don’t make sense.

Thanks so much for giving me your attention. I hope it was worth it, if not… unsubscribing will not hurt my feelings, and will give you back time you literally cannot have back.

Much love.

Live in the light

Founder to Founder: Take A Vacation

"issue": 076

Reggie James

Oct 18, 2021

Super short dispatch.

I recently took my first proper vacation in two years. Typically I’ll do a three/four day weekend to rest up when I need it. But this time I hit a real wall.

Luca had gone on vacation, and was encouraging me to take one. The day after, Kate called me to encourage me to take a vacation. Then during the board meeting, everyone encouraged me to take one… not just say “yeah, I’m planning to take one soon.”

Founders live and die with their identity wrapped around their companies. There’s a lot that goes into that, and people will say it isn’t healthy. I don’t really care for those people. That’s what creation is like. We aren’t betting the farm not to have this be core to the very fabric of who we are.

It never feels like a good time to take vacation. But part of your role as a founder is setting up structures that can maintain without you for a period of time. Trust the structures you’ve built.

Burn out is real. You don’t want to cross that line. It’s not doing you any favors.

Your team can see it. Your investors will see it. The product will feel it. And then everything you wanted to hit just right, will fall flat.

Two bars from people close to me that are coming to mind while writing this.

There is no prize for not taking a vacation - Jonny
You have to go see visions to have visions - Kate

This dispatch is really for one reason only. If you’re a founder and you’ve been debating taking that vacation, it sounds like you need it. Take it. Everyone will be better off because of it.

You have my permission. Write me when you do.

Special thank you to Bryce for hooking up Utah for me <3

I don’t do edits really, so excuse typos and things that don’t make sense.

Thanks so much for giving me your attention. I hope it was worth it, if not… unsubscribing will not hurt my feelings, and will give you back time you literally cannot have back.

Much love.

Live in the light

Finding Our Place Online

"issue": 075

Reggie James

Oct 5, 2021

Our social products were supposed to be a new sense of home. A digital 3rd place you could expand your sense of self. The best neighborhoods you could form, experience, and extend relationships within.

So what happened?

MoMA | MoMA Offsite: From Matisse to Matisse

Our web1 emergent ideals of online spaces didn’t last too long. With the ushering in of Facebook and the subsequent giants we live within today, came a new set of realities. Instead of fluid expansion and expression, we flattened identity for ease of perpetual consumption. Instead of space, we restructured time to continually surface top down recommendation.

We thrive on enragement bait. Constantly positing our individuality against those of others. Wrapped in anxiety driven status games.

Agency, is constantly being stripped away from those that construct the very experience that is the network.

We’ve heightened an abstracted sense of relationship to each other. Removed the notion of physical closeness. Lost abilities of ownership, and definition.

Even our group and “community” platforms are over-run with floods of notifications with low context and 0 structure other than holding the chat itself in messy tabs to navigate. This doesn’t even mention the increased social dialogue of the need to join as many communities as possible… never finding what we are actually hungry for.

It’s bleak. And we can all admit that. And we can also all admit, that we have to be here.

We want to be here, because we want to be close. We want to be present.

I’ve been thinking about finding my sense of place online for a while. It’s been an outwardly facing mission for some time. It’s something I consistently struggle with — as exemplified by my recently unfollowing of 300+ people on Twitter.

Instead, I continually come back to those values: closeness and presence.

I believe everything rotates around these themes. It’s why we get upset at our partners. Why we go to parties. What makes a good meeting or bad meeting. The reason families have been structured in a fairly consistent way for centuries.

The question then becomes: What are the technologies we can leverage to embody these values?

Not an abstracted mental leap we tell ourselves, but a daily lived reality for how we socialize online.

There’s been a lot of abstract hype around concepts of “the metaverse”. Informed by the rise of web3 and popular gaming, fueled further by the sci-fi reverence the wider technology community holds for literature like Snowcrash and Ready Player One.

I don’t care to give my take on this subject specifically (Matthew Ball has said too much as is, and VCs used to look at me crazy when I talked about the metaverse years ago), as much as care to give us another reference point to extend from.

“Lifecycle of a Software Object” by Ted Chiang.

Where we see the ties of community within a spatial app, slowly falter as compatibility to port to a new spatial world that’s gaining popularity struggles.

This to me is far more accurate to the emotional resonance we will and should feel in these environments, how these environments will operate, and how these environments may struggle… than anything else I’ve read.

What I focus on, daily, is what it means to hold place in these worlds. Looking around at what we have today, in gaming and social, I’m still deeply unsatisfied.

What we can build today, right now, to bring us to a new understanding of what social might be?

What social is, and will always be, is about presence and closeness. Everyday we enter spaces to have this exact sensation. We use artifacts to form our environment towards our desires. And we adjust our presentation of self to both mesh with and reflect from those around us .

It allows us to feel touched, from hundreds of miles away. To hear someone, we have yet to meet, but can understand deeply from a consistent closeness of a dedicated relationship.

Where we are going, where we need to go before it all breaks down, is a new spatial alignment.

It’s world building. It’s agency. It’s knowing who your neighbors are, and that meaning something.

We want to build vibrant online neighborhoods, bursting with emergent cultures.

To achieve that, it’ll take something really new…

I don’t do edits really, so excuse typos and things that don’t make sense.

Thanks so much for giving me your attention. I hope it was worth it, if not… unsubscribing will not hurt my feelings, and will give you back time you literally cannot have back.

Much love.

Live in the light

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