Dirt | Substack

8. Intellectual property will become less defensible in the short term but it is still cultural gold. From “my kid could do that” to “right click and save,” new media from the early 20th century onward has been poorly received. As W. David Marx writes of NFTs in Dirt, “whether or not this particular NFT bubble bursts, we should take them seriously ... See more

maybe here, we do have an aesthetic counter to the wallflower non-style of Big Tech: a raging messy semiotic meltdown of radicalizing (if absurdist) meme culture where the only ideological no-go zone is the liberal center. Key here is that most of this activity is happening under the guise of avatars, pseudonyms, and collectively run social media a

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the obvious aim of the then newly christened Meta to stake an ownership claim not only over users’ “true identities” but over all the things that populate their sensoria, replacing physical reality with virtual realities for which we would need a cascading array of subscriptions to navigate the ever-proliferating levels of differential access.

The metaverse will no doubt bring many benefits, joys, and human advancements, while also raising additional questions about our self-conception and what it actually means to 'advance' as humans. The metaverse is compelling because it asks us to more viscerally engage with what we believe about our bodies — about the paradigms we reify as we scaffo... See more

Today, virtual worlds are microcosms of the physical world. Eventually, the two will bleed into one another. This is already starting to happen: