Facebook fought for Metavalse, announcing that it would invest $100 billion in the metaverse in 2022, and even changed its name to Meta. So, is the metacosm a bubble or a future? Whether Zuckerberg is a robot is more worth thinking about.
Facebook's name change event has once again brought the world's capital to the metaverse concept, why did the metacosm appear at this time? Is its emergence capital to fill the bottleneck period in the value of the Internet, or does it truly represent the needs of the future world? Is it the tulip of this era or a turning point in human history?
Without the emergence of blockchain and NFT technology, there is no meta-universe today, only technology is of course not enough, Facebook renamed the day before, the seventh Wanxiang Blockchain Global Summit was held in Shanghai, as a benchmark for the domestic blockchain industry, this conference has been held for 7 years, there has been little voice in the humanities until 2021 ...
"It takes people to decide"
Wang Yuwei
"Bayc this group of monkeys is the NFT project of the fire in the field of avatars, and its two founders are both artistic backgrounds, and have been very eager to participate in the world of crypto since 2017, suffering from the fact that there was no context and channel at that time, when crypto was completely technical and financial attributes. Until the emergence of the NFT phenomenon, founder Gargamel said in an interview: There is finally a place for culture on Ethereum. So he wanted to create a community where these creative people got together and did something in the world of crypto, even if it was just a ridiculous monkey club. ”
The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) project was launched in April 2021.
This is the story shared by Wang Yuwei, vice president of Wantong Holdings and art commercial publisher, at the 7th Wanxiang Blockchain Global Summit, representing the birth of NFT technology, which allows art and humanistic content to begin to enter the virtual world built by blockchain technology.
To determine whether the metacosm is a bubble, it is better to judge whether the NFT is a bubble first.
The theme of Wang Yuwei's speech was "Value Revolution? The rise of NFTs and digital assets," she said: NFT as an information carrier, the current value is mainly reflected in display and transaction, but the real challenge is how to carry out the value revolution of NFT to the end. An NFT has two aspects of value, on the one hand, it is the monetized value carried in the form of token (token), which enables the NFT to circulate and introduce huge social resources, the problem is that all monetary values are actually homogeneous; on the other hand, there is a need for social, economic, and cultural development to form a truly pluralistic value system. Both of these values are essential for the sustainability of the NFT ecosystem. If we only focus on the Token level. Then the uniqueness of NFTs is only formal, not substantive. The value of an NFT can also be easily replaced by other NFTs of the same type.
Also at the summit, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin argued that NFTs give creators a whole new business model, but it can't be said that NFTs are economically sustainable in their current form, and NFTs need to go through multiple winters: "We've seen a lot of NFT projects perform well in 6 months to 1 year, but after 1-2 years they will become nameless, and it is necessary to understand what it will be like to be sustainable in the long term. ”
The institutional architecture of the NFT is going through a very early and rapid period of change.
"The Monetization of Social Capital"
"At present, NFTs reconstruct the two very key concepts of uniqueness and scarcity in the digital world. The uniqueness of NFT is not a natural attribute, but a data structure built based on a distributed network of blockchains, and based on the consensus of the whole network, a certain objectivity and authenticity is obtained. But on the basis of this uniqueness, from the motivation of people to collect, I want to have this unique thing. From a show-off point of view, I want others to know that I have this unique thing. From an investment standpoint, I'm sure there are a lot of people who want to have this unique thing. At the same time, it has also changed the concept of scarcity, that is, the scarcity of works of art has changed to the scarcity of digital ownership.
CryptoPunks can be downloaded and spread at will on the Internet, but the person who owns CryptoPunks does not care how many people own this asset, and even says that the more people have it, the happier he is. Because of the amount of communication, popularity, and fan economy formed around it, these social capitals can be monetized based on NFTs. So in a world where products are greatly abundant and the cost of reproduction is getting lower and lower, the so-called scarcity of materials, that is, the logic of less and more valuable, has been replaced by the scarcity of attention, that is, the logic of the more famous and the more valuable. ”
"Things are precious"
Qiu Zhijie
The emergence of NFT technology has allowed culture to enter the virtual world built by blockchain, but the shift in value did not begin with the invention of NFT.
Qiu Zhijie, dean of the Experimental Art College of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, mentioned at the summit that in traditional art works such as printmaking and photography, the smaller the number of versions and the more scarce the price, but his "Tattoo 1" in 1994, because it is quite famous, there are reproduction versions of different sizes, and the number of versions is very large, but the original version of this work is the highest price in his prints and photographs. Qiu Zhijie later tried to copy only two of the other works, but there was no market.
"From 'things are scarce and expensive' to 'things are expensive', into the era of attention economy, today's people who buy paintings do not seem to care so much about the scarcity of the work, or he cares about scarcity to a certain extent, but he wants to use the plural printing of the work to have the spread."
The change in the value of scarcity is also reflected in the development of artificial intelligence, "the current artificial intelligence is enough to produce works of acceptable quality, infinite quantity, and can meet the needs of society." Regardless of whether they are artists or emotions, people are still willing to accept these works. If it is required to have emotions, ideas, and even the impulse to actively want to create works of art, the current artificial intelligence will certainly not be able to achieve; if at the operational level, only the supplier of the artwork is required, today's artificial intelligence can obviously meet such a demand, depending on what our definition of art is. ”
Technology that changes the form of art
Works of art that enter the market in the form of NFTs are also called crypto art, but Qiu Zhijie does not quite agree with this statement. He looks at crypto art today from two threads: the history of creators signing their works, and the history of artists getting paid. "The emergence of the NFT is closer to the emergence of galleries and auction houses for me, which is to influence art production by influencing the art market, which may make digital art works that were difficult to sell in the traditional art market in the past become marketable, but it does not directly affect art production, unlike photography and video. Therefore, the "crypto art" that the art world clamors for today is not a valid concept, there is no crypto art, but all art can be placed in the logic of crypto. ”
If the NFT is currently changing the market level, will the operation of the market affect the motivation and way of artistic creation? To answer this question, it may be necessary to compare artistic creation with labor methods.
Is playing games labor?
NOVA Talk Theme "Metaverse's Return Mission"
The Marxist theory of labor holds that labor and the natural world together constitute the source of all wealth. Nature provides materials for labor, and labor turns materials into wealth.
When we migrate from material civilization to digital civilization, who will provide materials, and how to turn materials into wealth?
For example: Is playing a game labor? After all, human exploration of the metaverse begins with the game.
NFT project River Man
For the digital age, games and video are the broader medium of cultural communication. In the game Minecraft, there is a star architect team National Architecture Cthuwork & NA, this team is built in the form of a community, with more than 5,000 creators and 750,000 fans on the B station, but it is not easy to monetize game videos until the emergence of NFTs. As the chairman of the community, NOVA has participated in the construction of most of the community systems and assessment standards, and has also shifted from content creators to the role of market architects, and in 2021, the "Qingming Upper River Map" built by Guojian in "Minecraft" extends the NFT project Heli people, and the 10,000 pixel avatars generated are sold within 3 days, which may be the best result in China at present on Ethereum. If there is no NFT, the video they spent half a year to make, the degree of value conversion may be far less than the video that others spent 3 days to make, in the Universal Summit Roundtable Forum: "The New Humanities of Digital Media Construction", NOVA shared:
"This is an era of traffic economy, eyeball economy, attention economy. You may send a very good work, but his attention is only maintained for two weeks, and after two weeks, there will naturally be countless more eye-catching things, burying you in the ocean. We need to look for some better means of making our labor recognizable. Even if it is a child (playing games), when he works, he can really gain something, which is my original intention in building the whole community. In the past, in the Song Dynasty, there was a famous traitor named Gao Taiwei, who was a master of playing football. Who would have thought that thousands of years later, playing football would become one of the highest paid industries. With the evolution of the industrial revolution, what we originally thought were playful practitioners, their behavior was recognized by us, recognized as labor. From this point of view, labor is based on the idea of social consensus. ”
If playing games is labor, what value does the person who plays games create?
The metaverse needs meaning
Chen Junhong
Chen Junhong, founder of Cloud Neutron Technology, believes that there are two lines in the core of the metaverse: code and substance, and uses these two lines to make the coordinate axis of human cultural development, from the axis point of view, we are still living in the code world, and it is still very far from settling in the metaverse, "We want to travel through the entire universe, but we have not even separated from gravity." Chen Junhong believes that the word "metaverse" has many inaccuracies, and he is more accustomed to using Metavalse to indicate the process we have to go through:
"To what extent should Metaverse take shape?" My point is that it's very highly virtualized and far from there yet. At the same time, its degree of substance must be very high, and its influence on you is that you "live by it", "live by it" or "find the meaning of survival". Therefore, the first step is to have a virtual society; the second step is to have a virtual economic system; the third step is to develop a virtual political system; and finally a unique virtual cultural system will be developed. ”
In the axis of his design, the humanities belong to the highest level, the reason is that it is difficult to imagine that the humanities can be designed, "the humanities are emerging, from the perspective of engineers, the emergence depends on the system and system elements." ”
Compared with the speakers in the technology and financial fields at the Wanxiang Summit, the voice of the humanistic dimension is more rational, and even a little pessimistic, Qiu Zhijie said that there is no "crypto art" at present; NOVA mentioned that the NFT projects he participated in have no consumers, and the influx of investors; Chen Junhong said that the current meta-universe has only progressed by 1%.
In this new universe that currently needs humanistic construction, the search for long-term value has become particularly important, with this goal, Wantong Holdings and Art Business have established a "Digital Above Innovation Lab", we hope to link up with content creators in the scientific and technological innovation and cultural and artistic industries to explore digital humanistic content with long-term value and sustainability.
So what digital humanities works do you think have long-term value? Leave a message to us
The 7th Wanxiang Blockchain Global Summit full video link:
https://www.blockchainlabs.org/week2021wx/#/playback?lang=zh-CN