Hi Crowd!
Before you read any further go wish my old friend Shepard Fairey a Happy Birthday today. You can do it on his wonderful Instagram post where he talks about how this is also the anniversary of the day he got his first real skateboard and how that changed his life.
Apple Vision Pro is out and while I expect that is something that will change all of our lives I know to avoid first (and second) gen apple hardware so I don't have one yet but I'm loving the videos of people walking around with them looking silly, like they did with Google Glass but worse. Really looking forward to the less obtrusive lightweight model which we know is coming eventually.
Jon Stewart is back on the Daily Show and it's glorious. The opening scene of the first episode of new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm was one of the funniest things I've seen in years. I've been listening to a lot of old Seam and Rocket From The Crypt this week and recommend you do the same.
OK, really, you need to make sure you are on Farcaster. Farcaster is a protocol and it's flagship app is Warpcast. Here's an invite if you need one. If nothing else join and follow the memes channel. This is important, there are channels. So when you join, follow some channels to see people talking about stuff you are into. Farcaster is the sufficiently decentralized social media we've asking for for almost 20 years now. I first mentioned it more than a year ago and it's come a very very long way since then. It's the first post-twitter twitter like application that I think could replace twitter for me, and I've tried all of them because I desperately want a viable twitter replacement. Hilariously this is a post on twitter about things Deeze likes better about Farcaster than twitter. A recent and super interesting development is frames which is essentially the ability to run a tiny app inside of a post, and actually I haven't dived fully in yet because it's a bit technical and I need to be in the right mindset for it and I haven't been in the right mindset for it but all the smart people I know are losing their fucking shit over it and a super simple example is this. I posted the link to my Two Bit Punks post from earlier today (go read it if you haven't because really I spent a very long time putting that together for you) and rather than it posting a link, it embedded a little viewer where people can read the whole article inline, a page at a time, without clicking out to go anywhere. People have made frames to pull in data from elsewhere as well as shops and the ability to mint nfts right there. It's exciting and I can see how it's going to be huge.
Just to drive this point in a little deeper, if you had joined Farcaster when I first talked about it, or even anytime in the following 6 months and just used it a few times a week, you would have gotten airdropped (for free) a Farcaster OG nft which people are currently buying for almost $10k. No one knew this was going to happen, it just did. If you were listening to anything I said back in 2021 about web3, the most important thing was that people were getting paid just for showing up and trying new things, and thats exactly what happened here. And you could be like "oh well too late I missed it" and yeah maybe but what about tomorrow? Show up.
This isn't new either, most people just continue to ignore it. In 2010 you could get 5 Bitcoins sent to you free just for filling out a captcha and putting in your btc wallet address. This week a single Bitcoin would cost you $50k, breaking that 50k barrier for the first time since 2021 and just weeks after haters were celebrating it's death once again. But yes, the days of free Bitcoin are over, and you probably missed them. But what about tomorrow? Being curious is always going to work out better than sitting on the sidelines complaining.
Speaking of Crypto, remember when Elizabeth Warren was saying that Hamas was funded by crypto and a bunch of politicians just bought that story without questioning it because it fits their narrative yeah it turns out that no Hamas is not funded by crypto.
Speaking of Xwitter, I've been so over it for such a long time, but also very lonely and isolated so having a place where you know you have some people you can hang out with online has been nice. And even as greater twitter became a nightmarish hell fire cryptotwitter was still largely positive, but things just keep getting worse and it feels like they are trying to destroy it so for the first time I'm actually seeing a future where I don't use it. A few friends recently have done a "I'm going to not look at Twitter all this week and use Farcaster instead" thing and I think once I get back from Paris I'm going to try that. Honestly I want to just do it right now, but I'm about to release an art project and am traveling for art/tech events and need it to get in touch with people. Related, if you will be at Bright Moments Paris come say hi. I'm also speaking at NFT Paris on the 24th which as you know is my birthday so yeah that's all going on.
Three paragraphs later I realize I had no intention of writing about twitter or farcaster or anything. I was actually going to write about the new OpenAI text to video announcement today which has everyone up in arms either cheering or panicking. And for good reason. Once again my feeds are full of people so excited imagining the possibilities and people throwing a fit imagining the possibilities. Thing is, there's no undo button. This tech is here, our future includes this. And it's not slowing down. The time to wring hands about if it should exist has long past, and it's now about living with it. It amazes me that people who can eloquently explain way drug criminalization doesn't work a think a law can somehow stop technology from existing. Although, on the plus side, I am told that at some point, the sun will run out of hydrogen.
Ceasefire,
-s
