֍ Folklore_0x ::: Drip

PROFILE PICS: "an individual’s online identity can be entirely severed from their real self. Their personhood can be determined and confirmed by other metrics: a crypto wallet, for instance, rather than a social media profile. Visual identification can thus deviate from the face, towards more abstracted forms of self-expression." https://arkive.net/magazine/evolution-of-the-profile-picture

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Flatness. Back in 2018, 032c published an excellent article describing how time and space on the internet seemed to simply collapse into itself. Do we think this is still true? Do we think it will be true in the coming decades? I personally don’t think so. It seems to me that emerging communities bring a new sense of localised history — and as a result? Depth. https://032c.com/magazine/the-big-flat-now-power-flatness-and-nowness-in-the-third-millennium

"If a self-certifying protocol is one that allows authorship of content to be proven directly through user keys and content addressing, a self-certifying web protocol is one that also has content linking and discovery." https://jaygraber.medium.com/web3-is-self-certifying-9dad77fd8d81

What makes a web3 creator? What are some initial patterns for how web3 creators are developing communities? https://rafathebuilder.notion.site/The-web3-Creator-Playbook-1bb3897983284bbb954a207f78258076

Goblin Mode. Let’s revisit this trend from last year, and maybe think through the consequences and how it’s persisted. “Even the way that Gen Zs present themselves has become an act of anti-idealism. Whereas the millennial women of Instagram — the millennial women associated with the “that-girl” trope — would strike the perfect pose and use filters to enhance their natural beauty, Gen-Zs use their phone cameras to distort the natural ideal of the human face, obscuring their features with emojis, cartoon glitter, surreal lighting and other distorting CGI masks.” Do you think it was a moral panic? Or a serious trend that is changing the social fabric of how we connect and collaborate? https://thecritic.co.uk/the-death-of-ideals/

Tokenised Communities. In this overview, Forefront does a yearly deep dive on the state of onchain networks and patterns emerging from their innovative designs. Reading through this is a fun exercise, what is persisting through the bear market? What has been abandoned? Read more: https://review.forefront.market/

How the law is changing: integration of smart contracts into the legal documents of organizations, and the creation of cybernetic organisations. "The Cybernetic Organization (CybOrg or ‘BORG’), is a traditional legal entity that uses autonomous technologies (such as smart contracts and AI) to augment the entity’s governance and activities." "BORGs augment state-chartered entities (legal persons) with autonomous software such as smart contracts and AI. Crucially, legal entities that are BORGs do not merely use autonomous technologies as an incidental part of their business–instead, much like a human might have a robotic prosthesis surgically attached to his shoulder, BORGs are legally governed by autonomous technologies through tech-specific rules implanted in their charter documents." https://delphilabs.medium.com/assimilating-the-borg-a-new-cryptolegal-framework-for-dao-adjacent-entities-569e54a43f83

“People refuse to believe that they, too, are responsible for the growth of today’s social media as well as the death of apps like the intimate and beautiful Path they eagerly pine for.” https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/18/23672769/social-media-inevitable-death-monetization-growth-hacks

To all our new members: Welcome to Folklore ———————————— Our community curates and discusses long-form content related to the digital humanities: community, lorecraft, human relationships, and digital realms. Our website: https://folklore.institute Click here for our list of links. Funds from membership are allocated to local charity and commissioning new writing and super light operations (currently branding and building Ark, our memory AI) ———————————— Want to become a full member? 👉 Click here: https://zora.co/collect/oeth:0x2451761fed91d394ad6ba01215f8b46abe70fc96 If you have any questions, just send @rafathebuilder a DM.

IRL is continuously becoming more "online" in strange and exciting ways. Chenoe Hart speaks about the future of autonomous vehicles in 2016 — what happens when a car doesn't need to be a car? Instead, a car becomes a vessel of experience. Like an online app, these vessels can have custom software and adaptive environments... "Our future passenger experience might bear little resemblance to either driving or riding; we’ll inhabit a space that only coincidentally happens to be in motion... The time once spent in vehicles inertly waiting to arrive could now be filled with the same activities we’d be doing if we were already there — or had never left..." https://reallifemag.com/perpetual-motion-machines/

“The lens through which (consciously or not) my generation comprehends the intricacies of techno-social systems with, has its roots in one of the most significant social technologies of the 20th century. Dungeons and Dragons. Before D&D and the elusive shift of the 1970’s it was rare for people to encounter systems of any kind (let alone games) that produced narrative. There are some exceptions of course, the iChing, Tarot, Wargames etc. But think about Monopoly, Battleships, even Chess. Kinds of rule bound simulations yes, but narrative engines they are not. Today it’s rare that a game doesn’t include or produce narrative.” https://www.thejaymo.net/2023/04/15/301-2313-lore-as-lens/

“Cataloging is a specific type of writing that co-evolves with technical communities and plays an active role in shaping the destiny of a given technology or set of tools. Catalogs themselves are ephemeral and cyclical, rising and falling with the scenes they cover. But the skill and importance of cataloging springs eternal.” https://davidlang.substack.com/p/the-catalogers

Our will is embedded in the technology we use. Today we have a fairly technical write-up of Ethereum,,, with really good nuggets of wisdom on the relationship between the will of a community and the protocols it maintains: “Protocolising is an act of commitment, and the commitment is certainly weaker whenever the mechanism embodying the commitment is non-credible” “Credibility is fully obtained whenever it is clear that the community is willing to defend the protocol’s preferred outcomes in the last resort” “So, rather than the protocol not being able to defend what it cannot see, we may counter that the protocol must only see what it is absolutely willing to defend, lest we be mislead into thinking the protocol ultimately represents our will.” https://open.substack.com/pub/barnabe/p/seeing-like-a-protocol

Algorithmic Values Our oracles are intentionally trained,,, but on a specific standard. We should be acutely aware of this and consider what it means for the diversity of cultures from around the world — as well as what it means to have AI as a public good. “There are wide reaching impacts to the political bias of artificial intelligence tools. ChatGPT is a technology that can already be used to draft articles, academic papers, poems, screenplays, and legal briefings. Political and cultural catechisms restrict the potential opportunities this can create, constantly interfering in favor of affluent social progressives against the wishes of ordinary Americans or foreigners of all stripes.” https://cactus.substack.com/p/openais-woke-catechism-part-1

Digital Homelessness In 2021, Venkat wrote what I consider a prescient article on a concept of digital homelessness: "The web has had “home pages” for 30 years, but only now are we beginning to understand what it means to be at home online, and perhaps more importantly, what it means to be homeless online. Not merely more offline than online, which makes you a sort of frequent visitor, but Very Online and homeless." "Homelessness is about more than lacking a base that offers protection from the elements and material security. It’s about lacking an integrated identity, a “home” persona that is contained and shaped by, and active within, the home as a psychological boundary." This is particularly relevant given the recent Twitter / Substack news, and how creators are constantly being either exiled or shadowbanned by the platforms they rely on for trade and connection. https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/digital-homelessness PS: A big thank you to Venkat for making this essay available to us even though it was for paid subscribers. If you enjoy it I'd recommend subscribing to Ribbonfarm.

“When people exit from the algorithm-friendly way of understanding societal norms and enter these micro-instances of collective spirit, they find themselves better understanding what they think they want, even when that means biting the bullet with regard to certain more stable political ideas and aversions” https://donotresearch.net/posts/algorithmic-alienation-and-transcendence

“Dissensus describes the emergence of incompatible differences. Among peer-to-peer technologies, blockchain stands out as a set of ideas that explicitly seek to resolve dissensus through consensus protocols” https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fhumd.2021.641731/full

Cultural Media. This is a continuation of our conversation on community as media and how it intersects with the mass-manufactured production of cultural assets and narratives. Here, we have an in-depth look at models for culture-producer-communities: “By getting off the ‘take treadmill’, and focusing on core-niche groups of shared interests, producers can create regenerative collective social spaces and new thought. Supporting these new spaces and the cultural outputs of such should be the primary goal of any digital organisation.” https://thehmm.nl/models-for-culture-producer-communities/

Adda: a practice of connection in sharp contrast to networked broadcast. Group-focused, fluid, with no compulsion for production. “Adda is a beloved pastime that's unique to Kolkata. Markedly different to small talk or chatting, it is best described as an informal group conversation that's long, fluid and relaxed in nature. While "adda" can loosely be translated as "hangout", this loses the nuances and oversimplifies the action.” https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210812-adda-the-secret-to-bengali-conviviality