Only The Weird Is Real
Let's Only Copy The Good Stuff
Most people live their lives as some kind of copy of other people. In general this is encouraged by society, after all it’s one of the main purposes of school. You go to school to learn, but also to become a good citizen. Besides the crushing boredom of school there is the pain of the process as you are being molded into a pre-made shape. Your edges are sanded and your squishy parts compressed until you fit.
I think everyone at some level struggles with this. We all struggle to keep the parts of ourselves alive that society doesn’t seem to want. Friendships are wonderful because they give us a space to keep ourselves going, and let us love the weird and strange and beautiful in other people. But eventually adulthood comes for us all.
Adulthood is when things become serious, and when most of our time is spent working. Adulthood is when we look to find a mate and raise a family, when many of us lose track of the weird parts of ourselves. Old friends drift away, replaced by work friends who only know us from work, who have maybe only seen glimpses of our weird selves.
Life isn’t only work, life isn’t only responsibility and work, but those are the structures through which most of our energy is passed. But there are people who take a different path - the artists path.
The artist is the person who can express the weirdness inside them well enough to create their own reality. The artist can forge something new which can stand on its own, which doesn’t need society’s blessing to exist.
There is a marketplace for these creations, the land of entertainment, the land of play and that’s how most artists make a living. The vast majority of people who spend the focus of their lives working and tending to functions of the world love to visit the creations of the artists when they have time off.
Of course the dream factory is not run by artists. It’s run by managers, by merchants who are doing us all a service by financing and organizing the resources needed to create movies, shows, concerts books, etc.. Their vision is the scientific vision. The vision which looks for repeating patterns, which looks to raise up the weird to the level of a theory, which is how we end up with genres. “If you liked this, then you will like that”.
Genres are fine, but necessarily they are prisons. Their appeal is completely understandable, they are products and they hold the promise of a market for artists, but necessarily they sand down the weird edges.
I say all this just to point out why it is only the weird which is real. All of those things which contain some glimmer of new are the weird things. All of the art which seems familiar and comfortable is a copy of what came before. The real is original, it hits this world like lava hitting the air. Over time it becomes incorporated into society, copied enough times to become part our culture.
But it’s not enough to just be weird. You can be weird but in a bad way. You can be weird in an unappealing way. You might just be crazy. You can be too weird, you can be so weird that it’s impossible to build a bridge from where you are to the rest of society. You can be weird and suck.
Most NFT Projects Completely Suck
NFTs are weird, crypto is weird, and a lot of it sucks. I spent the last couple of weeks diving into a bunch of NFT projects and ended up completely exhausted and kind of depressed.
The art associated with most projects is not only bad, but somehow derivative and bad. So many dead smoking cat heads.
The ponzi vibe is so intense. The discords are absolute madness.
Projects endlessly hype themselves while people shamelessly dance like monkeys for the chance to be on a white list, only to sell the WL token for a quick profit, or have every intention of flipping the NFT on day one.
Most projects are outright copies of other projects. Even bad projects get copied. And yet some of them are weird but good.
The DeGods project definitely has the “David Bowie” vibe, though I admit I might not be cool enough to join. The Bōryoku Dragonz are “backed by a top team of NFT collectors, designers, community builders, and artists”, which somehow feels too exclusive for me not to mention too expensive.
Both of these projects have a whiff of the Bored Apes to them - something compelling which at the same time makes me feel bad that I feel compelled. I think it means they have been able to induce social anxiety in me through the internet. Maybe I’m just jealous?
Make Me A Copy
Tojiba CPU Corp project is pulling a cloak of weirdness over corporate jargon. You know it’s genuinely weird when you feel the urge to copy it. I feel that with Tojiba.
I am compelled by JFK’s brain to ask how can it be “Mimesis” when the newest things are also the coolest things? Is it because when we notice something cool and new we want to incorporate it into ourselves?
The feeling when when you find something you didn’t know you were looking for, but you immediately need to have.
Jump In The Fire
When you are young it is easier for something new and cool to take over your life, to become completely obsessed with it, to start to identify with it. As you age your daily routine gradually makes you immune to total transformation by a bolt from the blue, which is what makes web3 so fascinating. As I spent the last two weeks deep inside NFT discords, I was amazed at the breadth of people I met, from all over the world, from all walks of life. It felt a bit like I would imagine the frontier town of western America might have felt during the gold rush. All while working from home.
I was rubbing shoulders with people I otherwise might never have spoken with. I was joining spam rushes to raid people’s twitters and discords. The whole experience was thrilling and nauseating at the same time. The rush of jumping in with two feet is starting to wear off a little bit, and I can feel a slight melancholy taking its place. At the same time, it does feel like web3 and nfts are deeply new, new in the sense of a new paradigm new. For underneath all of the shilling and rugging and raiding and flipping and endless discord notifications there is something new stirring within the opened rift, something weird and something real.
(credits to https://twitter.com/shokkasmtc for the Dark Raviolis, https://www.jamesclapham.com for the office hell picture, and this is the url for the tojiba project https://tojiba.biz )