The Creator’s Power of Warping Reality and the Audience’s Power of Accepting the Strange
Also: Self-Funding Harberger Taxes, NFTs-as-Performance, and I Launched the Rocket in Factorio
I’m fascinated by accounts of culture before they’re popular. This week, an old video went viral of MGMT playing a gig in 2003 that included their eventual hit song, Kids.
It’s amazing. Watch the entirety of it.
The Creator’s Power of Warping Reality
As a creator, you have to invite people into your world. In the beginning, there’s no audience and there might never be. To create, to summon the adjacent possible, it’s imperative that regardless of whether an audience arrives or not, you enjoy it. Many creators create because they mimic what they see in the hopes that conversation moves to them, that the audience nearby, peels their eyes away to a slightly similar thing. This create-to-validate process, however, is like wandering the world not by looking up at the world around you, but only by staring down at a map in your hands.
When MGMT is on that tiny stage, they exude joy and fun. They love being there. They run out and have a stick fight in the middle of the song. As one commenter puts it out: “they were truly committed to not taking themselves too seriously”.
When this happens, it tells the audience that if they join, their curiosity might be rewarded. In 2003 this was important. In 2024, it’s almost necessary, because among the smorgasbord of infinite media, people want to know that if they dive in, that there is a conversation happening at the other end: sharing with a friend, reading theories on a subreddit, and watching reaction videos on YouTube. You have to perform for yourself, first. The audience can tell when the work is an invitation versus an attempt at validation. It’s the difference between: “Join me in this world I created versus Respect me for what I created.”
The Audience’s Power of Accepting the Strange
Because much of culture is social, it takes time and effort to listen alone. To not accept the warm group hug of popular culture, but to be where it’s uncomfortable, different, and new. Luckily, for those few who are, there’s usually a handful of other stragglers who’ve wandered in away from the borders of their maps. In that (illegally) smoke-filled dive bar on a cold Tuesday night, you’ll be lucky to find the deepest connection that culture can gives us: not the popular joy of connecting with the rest of humanity, but the completeness of being understood, if only for a short time. That culture is like joining a group of friends and immediately sharing similar inside jokes.
If you’ve been there, you know that there’s a chance that the new culture around you, be it a fresh band on stage, strange art in a warehouse in Brooklyn, or a mind-blowing short story by a writer from Ghana, could one day become a glue for the everyday. The deep connection would’ve then paved way for cultural oxygen, to something that everyone enjoys. And so, those wanderers will then become alone again, wandering where the map had not been drawn yet, in the hopes of again bumping into those who have also left the trails.
Not everyone is made to enjoy both: the ease and joy of the well-trodden and the strangeness of the new. If you can, if you’re willing to take risks, there’s great power in accepting the new and strange.
Here’s to the creators willing to warp reality and invite us in. And here’s to the audience that’s comfortable with the strange and stepping in.
📚 Reading - The Circle by Dave Eggers
Enjoying this. Gets better as it goes on. One thing that does annoy me about the book: there’s no numbered chapters. I read/listen to books (usually have the audiobook + text). The audiobook for this book has chapters, but it’s from simple breaks in the actual book itself. So, it’s hard to keep track of which chapter I’m on when I want to switch to listening and vice versa. It’s annoying, because there’s clearly breaks in the book, it’s just not numbered. :/
📺 Watching - Skeleton Crew
Oh man. What a great first two episodes. Childlike wonder at this new Star Wars installment. Goofy, funny, adventurous, magical. Hope it keeps the momentum going! They should’ve done a Star Wars like this a long time ago.
🕹️ Gaming - Factorio
51 hours later, finally finished the base game and launched a rocket! The late game is quite funny: it’s a constant game of → “oh shit, why’s my throughput going down? ah, the new sulfuric acid pipeline clearly bottlenecked my gasoline production. oh shit, the green circuits have gobbled up my copper and I need to increase throughput on my copper train system. oh shit, why’s the lubricant not coming in? wait, I deadlocked two trains accidentally. alright, manually drive the trains away from each other and reset the signals on the train network so they aren’t driving towards each other.”
Fun, but panicking, because it always feels precarious in a way. That somewhere, a cascading failure might trip up the entire system. Case in point: my oil wells ran (practically) dry, which means I’m producing gasoline through coal liquefaction, which requires heavy oil. But, if I run out of heavy oil accidentally through consuming it, the entire thing crashes down, which would mean, I’d have to venture into the wastelands through alien biter nests to reset the system by finding new oil wells again. Or, being worried that my nuclear power setup would crash, throwing away 80 mw of energy off the grid, leaving the entire factory choked down and vulnerable to attacks… which, is why I’ve kept about a few mws of steam engines and a coal supply belt around (but powered down). Just in case I need to reboot the system without manually clanking away at ore deposits, lol. It does remind you of the real world, just how precarious its supply chains sometimes are. I spoke previously about how Factorio teaches you software engineering, but even though there’s no market in the game, it also does teach you about economics.
I’m pretending that the expansion doesn’t exist. For my own sanity. 😅
🏃♂️Running
Getting back into my running. Since my sub 2hr half goal, I’ve been slower to ramp up again. Have a 15km race coming up and just hoping to go out and have fun. Focusing on enjoying the sport for now, more so than feeling I have to push myself too hard. Also: in happy news. Finally got the ASICS Superblast 2. It’s been quite hard to get as the shoe is so popular, but finally checked in at the right time, and found a pair. Delightful shoe! :)
💾 Links
Collective Filter and NFT Performance Art
I enjoyed Takens Theorem’s project and article on NFT-As-Performance. Collective Filter is an NFT recommender system forming a part of this thesis (a data performance).
Westerman also highlights a dimension of representation and reality: “reality and representation not as opposites but as co-determining concepts.” Cryptoart has related traits at its core, the boundary between digital and physical reality, where a representational encoding in mathematics allows participants to transport properties of the physical world (like ownership) and project them into a new digital reality.
Self-Funding Harberger Taxes
It remains a very interesting problem. I wrote about it again recently in the context of film studios using already-finished films as tax write offs and not allowing the public the option to buy it out to see it.
We know the public value of IP/media. Inventions and culture eventually become public domain. For some cases, if the IP is left unused for decades until it becomes public domain, it might have been at a loss to the public. Thus, using Harberger Tax, one can re-imagine that IP must be constantly be valued by its owner and taxes paid on it as a result IF the IP is privately exploited. In other words, you pay for the privilege to take a product OFF the market. It could even be the case that the period of private exploitation exists as it is for 5-10 years, after which, if it’s at a certain scale, the owners need to pay to keep it out of the hands of the public. Some older readings on Harberger IP + open sourcing from Matthew Prewitt and Luke Duncan.
What’s new and interesting with Gwern’s proposals is that you try and solve the holdout problem by taxing the estate of IP and essentially creating a fund against the general economy such that the IP owner can choose to accept a buyout if they are under-exploiting their own IP. But, like with most of these proposals, you start churning out an endless continuation of Harberger tax turtles all the way down.
An alternative to self-assessment I’ve been thinking about a lot over the years is to instead approach the problem from the other way: to incentivize bids and pricing against assets. In some way, you try to reward underutilized liquidity in finding illiquid assets. Could be in the form of many options:
What if a bidder receives income/interest on their bid funded by taxes on sales in the system?
What if market makers receive proceeds from finding bids?
Maybe you design a competition for valuations for accurate pricing and allow those doing the valuations to earn from the sales?
What if it’s a betting market on valuations and fees from the sales are a bonus to bettors?
You’re essentially trying to decrease holdouts by taking fees from future sales and to do that you invite pricing, bidding where it didn’t exist before. I feel like there’s a simple idea here waiting to be discovered.
Post Mortem World
The NFT scene is heating up again. Lots of interesting projects that people have worked on, coming out.
I enjoyed Teto + TokenFox’s Post Mortem World. It plays into NFTs-as-Peformance + it also invites us to participate in a strange world they concocted. Creating onchain art together alongside being asked deeply existential questions. My kind of art. :)
It’s still minting until the 13th if you want to participate.
🎶 Music
Lightning Bug - I Feel…
Great soaring track for when the winter clouds part and the weakened winter sun plays at your skin. :)
Enjoy a lovely sunset, friends. See you next week.
Simon