This weekend was the 8 year anniversary of writing this daily blog. It's hard to imagine that it has been this long. Perhaps because COVID has accelerated the last little while and made it difficult to remember what day or year it is sometimes.
I am often asked what the end game is for this blog. What am I hoping to get out of it? The truth is there is no real end game. I like reading and writing. I like being constantly curious about the world. I like discipline. I like meeting and connecting with new people. And I like having my own little place on the internet, however small it may be.
I get dozens of emails each week from people and companies wanting to pay for sponsored posts on this blog. I'm not sure how legitimate these inbounds are, but I ignore all of them. That's not what this blog is for or about.
In the early days of writing this blog it was called Architect This City and the focus was a bit narrower: real estate, design, planning and all things cities. That is still more or less the case, but I do often stray from these topics. Sometimes into personal topics. Sometimes into my photography. And more recently into the world of crypto and blockchains. This is one of the reasons why I decided to move to just blogging under my own name. There's more flexibility.
Sidebar: I recently bought my first NFT -- a CryptoBabyPunk. I'm not at all suggesting that you should do the same. It could be worthless in the future. But I continue to be fascinated by what's happening in this space and I've committed myself to experimenting and learning a lot more.
Writing something each day is extremely difficult. Some days it only takes 15-20 minutes. And other days, when I'm not in the mood or I'm exhausted from doing too many other things, it can take over an hour. It's a big time commitment and on more than one occasion I've questioned whether my time was better spent elsewhere. But then I think about all of the benefits that I derive from this daily practice.
They say that the definition of a habit is that you don't feel normal until you've done it. And this blog has certainly become a habit of mine. It forces me to wake up every morning and consider at least one interesting thing that may be happening in our cities and our world. I don't intend to stop anytime soon. So thank you all for reading over the years.
With every passing year, the Matrix feels less and less like science fiction. With the continued rise of the metaverse -- Zuckerberg is betting all of Facebook on it -- we are increasingly living our lives between two worlds: one is offline and one is online. What this will ultimately mean (for us and for our cities) is of course up for debate. But what is clear is that the traditional trappings of real life have quickly made their way online into the metaverse. Arthur Hayes recently penned this fantastic article about the future of the world (it's the metaverse) and the role of art (including NFT art). In it, he makes the argument that to "flex" is integral to the human experience. Here's what he means by that:
As social beings, the sole purpose of many activities and purchases is to publicly display how much energy you can waste. The nightclub economy is extremely a propos to this concept. Individuals walk into a dark room, listen to loud music (art), dance (a waste of energy akin to a mating call), and pay exorbitant amounts of money to drink liquid. Everyone gets dressed up real nice in articles of clothing that serve no useful purpose other than to demonstrate that the wearer spent a lot of money to display their social status to the rest of the clubbers present.
People go to clubs to flex. In the words of the late Clayton Christensen, that is the "job" to be done.
Why this matters is that many of us are now doing the same kind of things online. Buying a CryptoPunk (an OG NFT) for a large sum of money and posting it as your social media profile pic is a flex. Is this rational or irrational behaviour? Whatever your answer, it is akin to paying several hundred dollars for a t-shirt from some cool streetwear brand. The real job to be done is not that you desperately need a t-shirt to cover your upper torso. It is the signalling that goes along with owning something scarce and valuable. One of the things that is so special about NFT-permissioned stuff is that there's now a simple way to prove and enforce all of these things: ownership, scarcity, and so on.
What's equally fascinating to me is how offline and online will end up interacting with each other. (Arthur refers to our offline world as the meatspace. I don't know if he coined the term, but I'm going to rolling with it for the purposes of this post.) If people end up preferring to flex online instead of offline (and I'm sure many already do), what does that do to our meatspace(s)? And what does it do to our cities and how we build? I have no doubt that these questions are coming.
Photo by Richard Horvath on Unsplash
One of the things about crypto and blockchains is that they are mostly public. Every transaction gets logged in a public ledger, which means that if you know the address of a particular wallet, you can see its balance, all the in and out $/crypto flows, any NFTs that it may own, as well as probably many other things that I am still working to get my head around. In all likelihood you won't know who the wallet belongs to, but you'll be able see what's going on at that particular address.
This is a pretty radical feature if you compare it to the way things generally work today. And what it signals to me is that we are headed towards a world with a lot more transparency and real-time data. Today I learned of a company called Dune Analytics. It is an analytics company built around open blockchain data (there's no proprietary data). At the same time, it's also a community. And it is this community (think of them almost as analysts) that helps to make sense of the open data.
To give you an example, here is a chart from Dune showing monthly volume by NFT marketplace. OpenSea looks to be running away with things right now. And there's no guessing. Here is all of the data.
But, of course, this is just one example. Blockchain data could also be used to generate something like a real-time profit and loss statement for a company, which again, is pretty radical when you compare it to the way (and how slowly) that things are done today. It's hard to not to see all of this and think about the far reaching implications of what's unfolding right now. Everything from healthcare to real estate will almost certainly be transformed by this next iteration of the internet.