The untranscendability of delusion, or how the metaverse is a gateway drug to the physical world.

Moonbirds Hockey Player

Throughout two years of COVID lockdownsi there was a lot of talk of “accelerating the economy towards digital-first, remote-first” etc. etc. But early evidence from a post-lockdownii western world indicates that there’s still TREMENDOUS market demand for us to be back together IRL again.iii

Indeed, in just the last few months, we’ve seen conferences oversubscribed, hotel prices skyrocketing, and airplanes packed again like sardine cans, not to mention the rise of high-profile “utility” digital art online membership clubs capable of awakening hundreds of millions of previously dormant dollars in order to monetise the elite personal networks of SV billionairesiv on the premise of world-class in-person parties/conferences with enough wrapped-up swag to make Christo blush.v News at 11, it turns out that the physical world still matters and people are willing to pay through the nose to enjoy it!vi

But for what? Well, mostly for the priviledge of building and entering exclusive networks.vii This was even the early promise of the now-beleaguered NBA Top Shot ecosystem: finally a chance to meet the players! Shake hands with your heroes! Just “add to cart” to realise your dreams today!!11! That even worked for some collectors who played the TS “collector score” game exactly how Roham envisioned.

And speaking of meeting heroes, anyone else going to NFT.NYC in June this year? There was a 0.1% chance I was going to attend – I’m just not in love with Manhattan and being there once-a-decade felt about right, so the 7 months since the 2021 edition of the conference was a bit too close for comfort – but with the Proof-fueledviii excitement in the space right now, I’m now closer to 30% to go. Even though we’re still in a broader crypto/NFT bear market and the chips are down, who can say “no” to a good party?

Or to a great shared delusion?ix

___ ___ ___

  1. …and counting *cough*Shanghai*cough*
  2. N.B. NOT post-COVID – the virus hasn’t gone anywhere.
  3. At least on our own terms! Workplaces aren’t all being bum-rushed, but voluntary opportunities to unite are swelling like high school pants at a cheerleading competition.
  4. *cough*KRO*cough*a16z*cough*
  5. And you thought the comp for the NFT market was the measly $60 bn annual turnover of the fine art market, anon? Oh dear, how much we have to learn together! Nevermind that there’s also the $400 bn annual turnover of the collectibles market to consider, or the value of the $4 bn annual golf membership market, or $87 bn fitness membership market, or $1.5 tn annual turnover of the clothing/fashion industry, and on and on and on…
  6. Ironically, this was my thesis on the future value of physical sculpture back in December 2020 when I was still trying to poke holes in the nascent NFT/digital art phenomenon. Turns out there’s plenty of room for both in the world!
  7. To quote the great Matt Levine: everything is seating charts!
  8. “But Pete utility is scam donchaknow! Moonbirds aren’t worth as much as TRUE ART like Fidenzas and Punks!1eleven!!!11” I hear you Timmy, I really do, but Jesus’ second coming is still more imminent than “1/1 szn.” I’m sorry, I don’t make the rules. Alls I can do is roll profits from fun-mega-party-town into more elitist (and vitally so!) pursuits further down the road. It’s a thankless job but somebody’s gotta do it.
  9. Speaking of shared delusions, it turns out that the concluding joke from Woody Allen’s 1977 film Annie Hall yields bountiful insight into the topic:

    Sheila Heti: Let me read the joke. It’s at the very end of the movie, and Alvy is talking about meeting Annie for coffee, and he says, “After that it got pretty late and we both had to go, but it was great seeing Annie again. I realized what a terrific person she was and how much fun it was just knowing her, and I thought of that old joke—you know, this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, ‘Doc, my brother’s crazy! He thinks he’s a chicken!’ And the doctor says, ‘Well, why don’t you turn him in?’ And the guy says, ‘I would, but—I need the eggs.’ Well, I guess that’s pretty much now how I feel about relationships. You know, they’re totally irrational and crazy and absurd, and I guess we keep going through it because most of us … need the eggs.” The funny thing about the joke for me is that there are no eggs. Just because the brother thinks he’s a chicken doesn’t mean there are eggs. And David was like—

    Nathan Goldman: If this is a joke about the necessary delusions that sustain a relationship, does it also speak to the delusions that sustain life in general? As in, if modernity and postmodernity are epochs in which everything has become disenchanted and historicized and revealed to be socially manufactured—even the very notion of romantic love—we have two options. We can bracket that and live our lives not thinking about it, or we can say, Yes, it’s all constructed, but that doesn’t make it any less real.

    Rabbi Zohar Atkins: If we read this as being about modernity and our relationship to inherited myths—if that’s another possibility for the joke, that we’ve been handed all these traditions, and we kind of need them for the eggs, even though we can no longer believe in them sincerely, like people did two thousand years ago—to what extent are we deluded in thinking that we have a choice, if in fact we are operating from a powerful unconscious drive? If you hear from someone who’s complaining about a relationship they’re in, but they’re not breaking it off, and you’re like, “Get out of there,” and they’re like, “Well, I need the eggs,” I mean, you’d probably be concerned, right? But you might also say, “You know what? If that’s their choice—clearly it’s doing something for them. I shouldn’t just be listening to what they’re saying consciously. I should be observing their unconscious, and their unconscious is saying, ‘Yeah, I love it.’” Similarly, the rational project is all about debunking religion, or debunking myth, and meanwhile, so much of what we do continues to be mythical or irrational. I think the lesson might be that we can’t reason our way out of delusion. Delusion is so much bigger than what we can say about it.

    Sheila Heti: What you’re saying is making me think that part of what’s interesting and funny about the joke is that he’s giving a conscious voice to his unconscious understanding of, “Well, I need the eggs.” It’s weird to hear someone be able to speak aloud their unconscious.

    Nathan Goldman: That feels right to me, and it also makes me wonder about the meaning of the form of the joke. Walter Benjamin talks about Kafka in relation to two components of the Talmud—Aggadah, or narrative, and Halacha, or the law. Benjamin says that traditionally, Halacha is subservient to Aggadah, but that Kafka’s genius is that he sacrifices the truth of tradition for the sake of its transmissibility—so, his writings are parables that abandon or negate the very truth the form is designed to illustrate. It’s almost like Kafka empties the Jewish parable of its content but maintains the form. We could think about this joke as performing something similar—doing what Zohar’s talking about, negating the mystification while also replicating it. Maybe this is where the absurd texture of modernity—and the joke—comes from. Not from saying, “This is irrational, and therefore we have transcended it,” but by being able to puncture or negate the irrational and still not transcend it.

    Rabbi Zohar Atkins: I think what Nathan just said about the emptying out of the content but the preservation of the form is such a great description of what Woody Allen does in general, and of his use of intellectualism as a kind of superficial fashion. The characters will be reading McLuhan or Tolstoy or whatever, and you get this feeling of being so intelligent by participating in it—or at least I did as a teenager—and meanwhile the characters are completely idiotic. But that’s as old as philosophy itself. The philosopher always has to hold herself in suspicion of being a sophist. And maybe that’s the ambivalence—Do we get wiser from art? Or is art just another prop by which we justify ourselves in our psychopathy? I don’t mean that to sound cynical, because I need the eggs, obviously. That’s why I’m here.

    Do read the whole thing (archived).

One thought on “The untranscendability of delusion, or how the metaverse is a gateway drug to the physical world.

  1. […] physical is worth fighting for goddamit! Indeed, we seem to be fighting for it more and more lately. […]

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