The imagination

[Corpsey]

What's going on there?

 

[Corpsey]

Our blessing and curse

Some times the feast of life and others a shit sandwich

... Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings:
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man that function
Is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not.

 

[version]

It's suffering of late. I was talking to @linebaugh and some other people earlier about how you can't even imagine a new musical instrument atm and computers just seem like the end point of music gear.

Read something last night about the absence of colour from our environment which similarly led me to thoughts of the closing down of imagination.

That being said, maybe it's not so much closed down as being redirected. Your imagination might be drawn from anything creative and instead invested in paranoid delusions about your work colleagues or various illnesses you might have or misfortunes which might befall you.

 

[Leo]

or the Metaverse.

 

[version]

or the Metaverse.

I'd forgotten that even existed.

 

[Leo]

au contraire, version. from yesterday's Times, virtual real estate market predicted to hit $5.3 billion by 2026.

The Next Hot Housing Market Is Out of This World. It’s in the Metaverse.

Despite the implosion of FTX and projections of a cryptocurrency winter, the metaverse real estate market is expected to grow by $5.37 billion by 2026.

www.nytimes.com

Last year, the total value of land in The Sandbox, which is sold via a nonfungible token, or NFT, was estimated to be $167 million. And while land purchased directly from the Sandbox goes for about $400 a parcel, there’s an active secondary market where prices can be many times that. Proximity to land owned by celebrities and big-name brands drives up prices, too: After Snoop Dogg purchased parcels in the Sandbox and christened them “Snoopverse,” one buyer paid $450,000 just to become his neighbor.

 

[Clinamenic]

It’s fascinating, because, from an outside perspective, NFTs are at once total bullshit and totally systemically valid.

 

[Clinamenic]

An NFT is nothing without its issuers ability to assert it as systemically valid, IE the issuer needs either enough popularity or enough of a bureaucratic connection to legitimize their particular contract ID.

 

[Clinamenic]

Why is this string of number/characters more legitimate than than string of numbers/characters. That depends on connections and optics - and from there, NFTs can either be disregarded as ephemeral hype-mongering fads, or valued as systematically foundational standards.

 

[Clinamenic]

The vast majority of activity in the NFT space is noise, because the vast majority of actors in the space are visionless poseurs, but to disregard the foundational technology is blind luddism which the economy will ambivalently leave in its rear-view mirror.

 

[Clinamenic]

Prime example: non-transferable NFTs, which have no speculative value, but which confer a different value altogether, a reputational value, which I argue isn’t as conducive to speculation.

 

[version]

Fuck sake, Leo! You've set him off now!

 

[Clinamenic]

Ye jest, yet ye doth not understand.

 

[Clinamenic]

Some of thee may take issue with the technocratic elitism of leaving the masses in the dust - but art thou willing to parse out the technical distinctions, or am I to baby-feed thou with pre-digested discourse?

 

[Leo]

would you buy make believe virtual real estate, Stan?

 

[Leo]

pretty good profit margin on this stuff: someone gives you $500k to buy a nice virtual house in the Metaverse, you enter some keystrokes on your computer and tell them "hey, here you go, that house is all yours", and you pocket a half mil. not a bad way to make a living.

I mean, it's technically not a scam if buyers willfully hand over the money, and get exactly what they paid for, right? there's no bait-and-switch, no Ponzi scheme.

 

[Clinamenic]

would you buy make believe virtual real estate, Stan?

Admittedly, at this stage, I would not. I’m pretty bearish on all the metaverse projects I’ve seen, even before the bear market.

 

[Clinamenic]

I think we’re still at an awkward stage between video games and video-conferencing.

 

[Clinamenic]

pretty good profit margin on this stuff: someone gives you $500k to buy a nice virtual house in the Metaverse, you enter some keystrokes on your computer and tell them "hey, here you go, that house is all yours", and you pocket a half mil. not a bad way to make a living.

I mean, it's technically not a scam if buyers willfully hand over the money, and get exactly what they paid for, right? there's no bait-and-switch, no Ponzi scheme.

Yeah technically no Ponzi scheme there, just taking advantage of bullish speculation.

 

[Leo]

on the other hand, now's probably the equivalent of when people bought bitcoin at $10. ya gotta get in it to win it!