A Productive Break

The fact that there has been a concentrated interest in the writing non-fungibles alongside music NFTs, and experimental arts NFTs recently is an indication of on-chain progress in culture-making, community-design, and arts at large.

Wut mean?

Those who are old enough to recall the rise of blogs, and micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter would get what I mean right away—and, yes, we dubbed Twitter as a micro-blogging platform among the friends; and, the rise of thread reading & writing platforms such as Typefully, Readwise, and the like prove us right.

𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖗𝖊 𝖜𝖎𝖑𝖑 𝖇𝖊 𝖎𝖓𝖙𝖊𝖗𝖋𝖆𝖈𝖊𝖘

RSS feed providers, content streamers, productivity wrappers… All that jazz is going unto the chain—on-chain. In the near future, the geeks among us will measure their PoMoDoRo with reference to per block time. Think about that.

Now, rewind, and rethink about what befall the publishing & music recording and distribution, and the writing itself from late Noughties into the mid-2010s.

Blogs that hosted several authors turned into global publishing houses, and online content. Bloggers that leaked Rapidshare links on their blogs became of record label owners.

Music NFTs.

Writing NFTs.

NFTs.

Types

There has been myriad attempts by different artists on the production of NFTs that offered pieces of written art from novels to poems to short stories to generative texts in any form—I myself love to think of Autoglyphs as pieces of asemic writing NFTs. I also locked content behind Rarible NFTs, token-gated channels, prolifically “published” .txt and .md, and at times .pdf, files on Zora, had to opt for writing on .jpegs and .pngs for this and that collection. However, to be able to run a publishing house of your own—which every self-acknowledged author from the Alt Lit era dreamt of—, you need a suite with which you can join any decentralized finance, and crytographically secured art, craft, culture and ownership elements. That is what Mirror offers, and why I am writing this piece on the Writing NFTs as a piece of Writing NFT a day after they announced the subscription option—which is a Lens-level importance for community-designing for cultural data curation and management tethered to digital and cultural written objects of importance regardless of their quality.

Trail Blazers

In my humble opinion, there have been three important pieces that have defined the direction of writing NFTs so far.

Scissor Labels—John Palmer

This was back in January, 2021. It was the first crowdfund ever to fund an essay in itself with a LP pool thereof. According to the other, “scissor labels are categorical terms that happen to be maximally divisive.” The concept is thus loosely based on Scott Alexander’s ‘scissor statement.’

This essay, and its crowdfunding period was the tipping for the emergence of writing NFTs as an asset, and cultural and digital object class on-chain—even though it wasn’t possible to mint native Mirror posts as writing NFTs, which itself is rather a very fresh feature.

Matthew Ball’s Original Metaverse Essays—Matthew Ball

Ball’s book’s hardcover version in its bound & print form has just landed in my library although according to Amazon it was cancelled due to the fact that shipment provider could not process it in Istanbulite customs. Maybe, alongside the rise of writing NFTs, we also need DAOs that tackle the shipment limitations by insuring and handling them, and in actual tracking. It is an arduous process to get a shipment without any time lost if you are living in almost the West but definitely not the East. Also a DAO that minimizes the visa process, bliz. Anyways, those things are a thing of the betaverse that precedes the metaverse. Qu’est que la Metaverse?

However, few are aware of the cultural and digital object that is but an .html file that was rendered off an .md file:

“The Metaverse: What It Is, Where to Find it, and Who Will Build It” is an essay that sold for 100 ETH on February 21, 2022.

It is in its all entirety, and naturally, a writing NFT.

ethereum://0xabEFBc9fD2F806065b4f3C237d4b59D9A97Bcac7/6.825917417574406e+31

Writing Token—Gabagool.eth

Gabagool’s Writing Token is acting as as a connector among people from myriad backgrounds for, in and through the freshly emergent writing NFTs plane where plastic money legos metamorphose into cultural joineries which hold together in an architecture thriving upon pattern thinking a constellation of communities that should not necessarily be DAOs themselves in the beginning.

It is a vast collection of a Mirror edition of 1000/1000 on Ethereum mainnet unlike the writing NFTs on Mirror that are on Optimism. An experiment, it is. You should peak into the Library channel in Discord.

Bonus track: ZORA #0 by ZORA

A classic, and I mean it. .txt mode is hotter than Depeche Mode.