When hanging out with a new internet friend, Jesse Walden, we jammed on intersections between avatars, digital goods, and crypto… and he used a phrase that is still stuck in my head.
“Once that happens, there’s no going back.”
This is a very powerful framework to think of ideas/products on the edges of behavioral or institutional breaks. Where there’s tremendous potential energy in building something that can cross this threshold.
Paradigm shifts are hard to time because it starts by looking at the individual. Where then your assumption is, at minimum, there is a group that exists beyond this individual. You may be able to piece together this group, but this is not what sustains a movement. Or at least, not what will produce scale. What this group needs now is a sense of momentum and delineation. And also… hunger for an enemy.
This is the act of producing awareness, by building a new space. By outlining this group you have built for, and creating a sense of shared presence, you are crafting direction. Because the counter force of the crowd they were once dissatisfied with but confined to has been weakened. It has been weakened because there is now an understanding that a break is possible.
The initial break is the first sign of potential of a new crowd needed to sustain a paradigm shift. And now you are trying to become that very thing you broke away from. The new center of gravity. The dominant culture, with beliefs that have progressed beyond that of previous lives.
Something I think about a lot in regards to consumer social, is since the growth and dominance of Facebook. Everything has been made as a derivative of their influence. This is one of the benefits of scale, the very achievement of scale creates an unconscious influence and reference to that very thing. It’s own reinforcing agent.
This is why Mark’s cry for “domination” was necessary. It was an act of sheer force. A necessary demand in order to sustain momentum towards a monopoly. And Facebook does have a monopoly. It’s the monopoly of what identity looks like in digital spaces.
They’ve exercised this with every integration, and most consumer founders have respected this with everything they’ve built since. Even the act of building a smaller, more private social network doesn’t break from Facebook. It will simply show the constraints that don’t exist at Facebook. I can go through examples of this for days.
What should excite every founder is the ability to question systems at scale, and the idea that if provocative enough… you can ignite a point of no return.
So where are these ideas and how do we even get there.
Pick an artifact. Reduce it down to the core theme. Approach the appropriate abstraction, that would explode that very thing.
The core theme I’ve been attracted to exploring is identity, specifically how we represent ourselves online. I map identity online through phases. You may have seen me write about this before. Briefly:
P1 - Establishing Identity (Facebook wins)
P2 - Performative Identity (Twitter, Insta, Snap, TikTok, Vine, Twitch)
P3 - Extended Identity
So why doesn’t 2nd Life take? How can you abstract something which has not yet been established. What would progress when we are able to identify the ability to consume each other online. The competition of performance of that very thing. And so, every individual becomes their own media company. An influencer economy builds… we can dive deep into this hole another day.
So how can this whole thing explode. Funny enough, like many unravellings of great civilizations it unknowingly started from within. Brud’s Lil Miquela, a new media form within the Facebook empire… is an agent of subversion to the model that is the core of consumption on the same platform.
And so the core question at Eternal, is what happens when everyone has the power to abstract their own identity. There are plenty of subsequent questions that come from this that we ask ourselves daily. But what is true, is that if this happens… there is simply no going back to where we were before online.
I think this same dynamic is true for how we view money and crypto. For alternatives to meat. Actually becoming a space-faring species.
Recently someone asked me what happens after avatars. I think we essentially become floating voices in some sort of digital ether…
Some one-offs.
Thom Yorke + Paul Thomas Anderson’s Anima is sooooooooooo beautiful. Also it’s so incredibly interesting that this launched on Netflix and not Youtube considering it’s a music video/short film.
Writing is an act of reasoning, as a relief from conflict. Whether that is manufactured or genuine. However, what I find for myself, is that it is difficult to write unless I have been consuming a lot of hard content. Books, articles, art… but it is also an act of peace not having to write.
I turned 24 this past week… and I feel old.
I didn’t proofread any of this… so I hope it’s not gibberish
That’s it for today. 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.