The Future is Dense and Modular
🔍 #tech #web3 #psych #knowledgework
Last Tended: 18.11.21
This essay is 3 of 7 essays for The Tech Progressive Writing Challenge. Join the build_ Discord to join the conversation.
Core-accretion theory is the current model of how planets form. Small dust particles amass together in the random collisions of space into an elemental core. After a certain mass size, speed and temperature, gravity gradually draws in more material to formulate the gaseous planetary body. Information is similarly accreting, becoming more dense and packed for increasingly efficient consumption and transaction.
Memes, for instance, are structured relational representations of information where elements can be recombined. They’re structured because the meme template is the foundational layer of understanding. It’s also relational because the humour is in understanding how the remixed elements make sense within the context of the template. Because it’s easy to comprehend, it’s easy to pass around and thus become viral. Instead of sharing jokes between friends, memes become inside jokes to pass around digital generations. A picture may be 1000 words, but memes are 1000^2 because they become representative of culture (as much as they’re jokes).
NFTs, however, are a whole other level. Now people are building on top of these meme templates. Not only are they being remixed with new information but they are being used as vehicles of value. These transactions can be:
social signifiers (being part of a community or becoming well-known)
financial (earning significant figures as they become objects of trade in marketplaces)
ownership (owning a unique piece of art)
These have expanded to not only include images but also media like music and videos. As they gain popularity there’s even more value accrued to the original medium (Ravikant).
In some cases NFTs are also representative of DAOs or potentially digital cities — even more expansive structures of meaning creation. Information is now identity. Such as in the case of using (n, m) structure in Twitter handles to mark your loyalty to a DAO. Not as though this is news of course, usernames have always been an overt tag of digital identity. However, the governance structures that such an organisation requires places it on the level of a company, or a (digital) city. It becomes a creature of bits and bytes that morphs, shrinking and growing, according to the needs of the members. To pledge visual signs of a DAO is thus encapsulates your support for an idea and a particular set of values.
Why does this matter?
Put simply: survival of the fittest. The beauty of Web3, as Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant point out, is that its elements are “composable”. The ability to plug-and-play apps means that information is stackable, portable, free from constraints of Web2 silos. Like Lego blocks you can create whatever you want as suits your needs. Modularity wins not just in Web3 but in countless other examples. Startups can win against encumbent enterprises because they’re more flexible in scaling up or down. Flexible architecture moulds around its occupants not the other way around. Whatever’s composable means that it’s adaptable. And whatever can adapt to its environment means that it survives. Like water eroding canyons or the evolutionary lengthening of giraffe necks, it’s technological Darwinism.