Digital Excavation, Preservations, and Museums
Also: Nusantara, New Bonding Curve Research, and Moby
This week I visited the Roman Baths in Bath. When we excavate and preserve we add our own story to the past: with or without records, we divine what life was like. The longer we go back in history the more of it seems to be compacted into sediments and lost to time.
What makes some of these historical spaces interesting is that it’s not just about the history but also the act of *how* it’s recontextualized in the present. The museum is an embedded story about the past.
But, a museum is a script, a way to frame the past and it in itself is also open to recontextualization. If you’re unaware about the past, you might be mistaken for imagining that the scene above was close to what it used to look like in the Roman era. But, the weathered statues surrounding the great bath were installed late in the 19th century along with the opening of the museum (during that time). A 100+ years later, the museum itself has become a part of the museum: a unique heterotopia outside usual time and space.
Being surrounded by history, I’ve also been wondering about my own work and one thread that seems to run through a lot of it is a fascination and interest in documenting process. I write on the web mostly from a desire to document. I tracked my writing in debut novel and released all three drafts of it. Witness The Draft is an art project of documenting the creative process of writing a draft novel in a month. See You There is an artwork that draws its own provenance over 5 years (a few months in).
It’s almost as if I’m being driven an almost voyeuristic allure of wanting to see what goes on behind the veil of the surface… of everything. In the works of others, it’s interesting to see how something goes from inception to completion. In myself, it’s the same: if I document a process, I recontextualize and rediscover myself.
While the modern web is only about 20-30 years old, it’s both full of recontextualization and yet devoid of purposeful recontextualization. It’s full of it because we constantly repurpose media into new contexts. A YouTube video with its own comments is different to that same video on TikTok, Twitter, or Reddit.
But, the web has few intentional museums: a meta-institution dedicated to recontextualization. We have the Internet Archive, Know Your Memes, and blockchains (that are still waiting for its true time to shine as the record-keeping guardian it is). For the latter, in a 100 or 200 years time, they are more likely to remain around versus singular servers and will likely become central to studies of early Internet life.
While blockchains keep records well, it’s ultimately still learning how to do that. For example, KnownOrigin shutting down, leaves almost 200k+ NFTs vulnerable for losing the images attached to it because it used an older formatting standard. So, if that disappears, you’re only left with records: like a gallery where all you see is the placards and frames. The NFTs themselves won’t disappear, but their context, could.
I thus have a desire for digital museums but, not in a kitsch way, like a metaverse museum. Something that *feels* like a physical museum, but isn’t. Video is a great format, like this documentary on Hungrybox in Smash Melee.
Long-form articles of a time, place, and scene in the web *can* work, but it doesn’t feel like the right tool because the context of the long-form article feels like it’s the same medium as what it’s trying to contextualize.
Maybe it’s Genius, but for the web. A way to browse the web (and the archive of the web) as a museum. Imagine going to a tweet from 2012 and immediately seeing interesting context deemed interesting by a random internet user (“this tweet was a part of the 2012 Met Gala”). Imagine opening an old blockchain transaction from 2016 and it being given new context to its importance to some event (“this transaction was a part of the White Hat group rescuing funds from The DAO hack”). And to ensure that this contextualization itself isn’t lost, it needs to be anchored in immutable ledgers and could be ranked through the same algorithms used in Community Notes.
The web is so rich, yet I fear we will lose much of it eventually. Lost to the shifting sands of platform birth and death, link rot, and regulatory mold. If we want to preserve it, it means that maybe we have to excavate our own work and that of our peers in this time, or build towards building truly new museums of the digital age.
PS: Someone decided to recontextualize the Roman Baths museum by putting a jar of mayonnaise in a corner of it. Art.
Bonus Content!
Nothing much to report here this week. Just been offline, mostly, sightseeing and spending time with family. I *do* want to watch the final season Umbrella Academy though. Going to be queuing that up if I have down time.
Nusantara
With the Olympics over, one of the cities bidding for the 2036 Olympics is Nusantara, which is itself still being built because it’s aiming to be the new capital of Indonesia. Moving and building a capital this size is interesting!
Bonding Curve Research
It’s funny that memecoins is the “2024” crypto narrative and it predominantly being driven by memecoin trading using bonding curves: something I co-invented + predicted from around 2016. Speaking of context and excavation, here’s the article I wrote back in 2018 on how I got to these ideas. Much of it is driven by Pump.fun on Solana having earned almost $100m in revenue.
Given this issue is about context, the most interesting part however is the teams doing serious research on this domain. Friends over at the Bonding Curve Research Group released a great new study a few weeks ago on engineering resilience in these markets.
Compared with static supply tokens that struggle to adapt to market conditions, dynamic supply tokens offer much-needed flexibility and stability in crypto’s unpredictable market environments, demonstrating the benefits that primary issuance bonding curves offer in the design of more resilient economies.
Moby - Porcelain
Classic hits often go in and out of rotation. Moby’s Play is one such album that randomly find its way into my life. Enjoy! :)
As always, hope you get to enjoy a sunset this week! Suspect newsletter will remain a bit on the shorter side as I continue some downtime until September.
Simon