There was this great show I used to love called ‘flight of the conchords’ if you’ve not seen it then I highly recommend it while you are in isolation.
Billy, Tod and Tommy, yep, I’d say the majority of ‘blockchain’ projects are run or governed these days by the nerdiest/geekiest often slimy middlemen who come back with a shelve of colours manuals (yes, even that ugly red one that doesn’t fit on the shelf) — hardly a great ground to market from.
I mean, don’t get me wrong here, the technology IS potentially ground breaking and the way it works that we all are NODES in the network and it’s the upkeep of that network that keeps the data flowing, it protects itself, it’s a wonderful thing, it’s like slicing an earthworm in half and giving it time to grow back.
It spontaneously fragments into five to 10 pieces, each of which grows a new head and tail
The blockchain is the ultimate hydra therefore, slice of a head and another one grows back over there, looks like we don’t have enough seed nodes, no problem, I’ll spin one up, in a way it’s the ultimate expression of distributing wealth but instead of oil we are building another freeway lane of data.
But like any project out there in the world, the bigger you get, the more focus that get’s diverted to you, the more the glaze of someones eyeballs land on your surface the more the attack vector increases.
What I’m saying is, when you have a brand and a name, sure you have started a journey of growth but also at the same time you have also triggered a slippery slope down to the bog of eternal stench. Just ask artax, he got so depressed he died in the swamp of sadness.
Ain’t nobody got time for that.
Which got me thinking what the future of blockchain technology is and I’ve realised after five weeks of consideration that it’s NAMELESS — the same way that hackers, albeit the alias and nicknames are effectively nameless in the spaces they frequent — can’t hack if everyone knows it’s you, that defeats the object.
So it hit me square in the ballsack, agnostic blockchain usage, I don’t need to be in camp A or camp B — I don’t need to mention the name of the blockchain, I just need the technology it provides. I don’t need to hitch my wagon to one logo design over another.
I don’t need to convince friends who have followed me for three years who see the hostile take over of blockchain A by someone in blockchain B which ended up spawning a brand new blockchain C — I mean, after all, I might have to explain that again right to my friends or clients when we see fork number three into blockchain D.
You keeping up here right? Sweet.
What I’m getting at is that maybe there is another 5th dimension to the way that we can utilise and interact with blockchain technology — that there is another way to perceive the way we connect and community in our so called ‘tribes’ and ‘communities’ in a albeit fragmented but truly decentralised way instead of being in CAMP A over CAMP B.
Which is why from now on I’ve decided to interact with ‘blockchain’ technology as basic and plain and easy as that. No longer will I discuss NAMES of technology, because the technology does not have a name, it’s just something that someone attaches to it giving tribalism a meaning, where there is a tribe, there will be another tribe looking to bring it down.
Instead of doing videos about the ‘name’ we should be concentrating of the application of the code in an agnostic manner — just imagine if people instead of having to sign on the dotted line of membership to one headstate and sheep thought mindset you could just exist within the tribe as a decentralized voyeur.
Still giving it credence, still supporting it by being an active tx/rx record in the ecosystem, still able to frequent, visit, like a library pass for every library in the world, removing and revoking all membership to a logo or a name and instead to the base line code.
What if you could then take that code and remix it to take the best parts that serve you that centralised platforms did not, what if you had an ethic, a mantra, a consideration, an evolving journey that dictated how the frontends and extensions to that code base evolved like some kind of polymorphic organic breathing ruleset that adapted in real time.
I feel liberated.
All this time I assumed we had to love what litecoin did, or the way that dash managed to help sell more chicken strips in venezuela, I’d been focusing on the notion of the ‘brand’ in the way that centralised platforms did it — the way we went from ‘hot or not’ in a dorm room to end up at facebook, the way that ultimately, the bigger you got, the bigger the target because your digital journey was attached to a name.
The way startups spin up and get bought in a few years, the way the creativity is acquired for you to ultimately take your cheque while being butt fucked with your pants around your ankles like this was your expected outcome instead of the passion and creative spirit you had when you started.
Now it’s all so clear.
The future is a blockchain that is agnostic, it has no name, no branding, I can utilise and wield it’s power from within as a simple node, tx record after tx record, frequent and exist in the slow lane until I can afford to build my own driveway to the fast lane.
I don’t have to name it. I don’t have to ignore camp A over camp B, I don’t have to swear allegiances and I don’t have to fit in, I can resist being moulded or questioned on entry by the border police of malformed mental health and I can pass freely as a front line blockchain worker.
I have never felt so excited about the potential of a life lived as a tenant inside the codebase of blockchain technology.
__humble x