Mass Perception: web3 social in the era of Hyperobject-ivity.

Blockchains are enormous, barely comprehensible, four dimensional objects that stretch through space and time. They are hyperobjects.

In his book, Morton describes non-human entities - the titular Hyperobjects - that overshadow and often dictate our existence as humans.

We can only perceive these hyperobjects at their very edges, if at all.

Rain falling on your back might be the echo of climate change. But, if we can't conceive of the hyperobject of climate change, it's only raindrops.

Once we acquire that mental upgrade and we comprehend these hyperobjects, their presence becomes impossible to ignore.

Blockchains are hyperobjects.

Now, I start with ecological examples because Morton used the hyperobject concept to describe ecological ideas and phenomena. That's his schtick.

I still remember the tick, tick, beep, beep sound I heard in Fukushima working as a journalist well over a decade ago - caesium-137, detected on my little radiation counter, hinting at the edges of the hyperobject of human-created fission and fallout that will stretch on for thousands of years and across our known world.

Reading his book reframed that experience and memory for me.

But Hyperobjects also reframed how I consider systems generally, and very specifically blockchains and the ways we engage and organise around them financially, socially, and culturally.

Hyperobjects are;

• Viscous; they are everywhere and stick to the things they reach. In other words, they influence the physical, emotional, social and cultural spaces we inhabit.
• Nonlocal; their effects are globally distributed and relevant over massive timescales. They force us to think about time in unusual ways.
• Phased; they change over time and over a human lifespan. Since they are never wholly present in any given moment, we can only experience pieces of them at any one time - and maybe never all of their phases.
• Interobjective; hyperobjects are never experienced directly, but only through other objects - like cracked earth being a signal of a drought. They consist of many entities, but aren't reducible to any of those individual things.

To me, the hyperobject-ive properties of a blockchain seem obvious.

Of course, they've infiltrated our world and have a tangible viscous influence. Much has been made of crypto's reach into wider politics, finance, philanthropy, art, and beyond - not to mention it spawning an entire industry.

Blockchains are nonlocal by nature - the distributed ledger exists on local machines, but those local facsimilies are largely meaningless when out of sync with the global network.

Block times and therefore the chain itself stretching on for the centuries ahead of us only reinforce their nonlocal state. Blockchains are distributed in time by their very nature.

Their nature is also regularly changing, whether through halvenings, forks, improvement proposals, cultural shifts, regulatory impacts, or just the way that we use and interact with them. They are phased.

And finally, they are interobjective. Just like you only hear wind as it rushes past trees or buildings, not the wind itself, I'd argue that the chain is not tangible to humans except on its surfaces.

Hyperobjects are experienced through surfaces.

Like climate change can only be experienced and interpreted on its edges, primarily through data or information (e.g. temperature measurements taken over years) and phenomena (e.g. the rain falling on your back), the chain can only be experienced via interfaces or what I'll call surfaces.

When I seriously started my onchain life, past early mining experiments and lost wallets, the primary surface I interacted with was Etherdelta.

It was slow, unreliable, a mess of dropped transactions and out of date data. And yet, it hinted at something beautiful - a ticking tangle of activity and trading across a distributed, non-local system.

You could see the trading bots working in real time, humans trading offchain information for onchain advantage, and the very faint outline of a machine humming away underneath it all.

Some people call this chain or substrate of rules and code the World Computer. Some people call it a new form of cooperative human coordination.

Etherdelta was a piece of shit (relatively speaking), but it hinted at the outline of a very compelling Hyperobject that has only grown in its influence and viscosity.

I felt the rain on my back, so to speak.

The first human writing ever was developed around 3200 BC, indenting clay tablets to record grain transactions.

If you took those clay tablets as a single data point and tried to imagine the expanse of human literature, culture, and thought that would follow, you'd do a terrible job. As we all did in the era of Etherdelta.

Similarly, 113 describes us as being in the infancy not just of the blockchain era but of the computing era entirely.

Hard to disagree, given Licklider wrote Man-Computer Symbiosis in 1960 - which Silicon Valley is only now delivering on - and the Mother of all Demos only took place in 1968, and we're still using mice!

113 acknowledges the form of Ethereum as inherently limiting in his artworks, like developing for the Gameboy. But, like any good artist, he revels in those limitations.

Terraforms is a singular artwork that comes to mind when considering the shift from the purely financial surfaces of 2016 and prior to the financial and cultural surfaces that appeared in 2021~ and beyond.

Surfaces reveal outlines of the Hyperobject.

2016, 17, 18, and 19 passed with whimpers and bangs. Many fell off, and many stumbled on to the chain.

But an inexplicable shift happened somewhere - when we stopped perceiving blockchains as solely financial - dictated by the banker and fintech type bros of defi - to financial and cultural, as artists and taste makers made their home onchain as well.

Few artworks, apps, or interfaces do a better job of outlining the edges of the hyperobject than Terraforms.

Native to the medium of Ethereum, deeply integrated with the chain's encapsulating parameters of time and information, it's a work that can only exist onchain - and by existing, reveals the outline of that deep machine across space and time.

It is drawn, rendered, and displayed on chain, but also plays out and will eventually die out, dictated by the laws and phases of the chain (I do recommend Matto's incredible summary of Mathcastles and Terraforms for further depth.)

I'd argue that Terraforms has attracted such a die-hard fanbase of on chain enthusiasts precisely because it gives more shape to the object underlying their culture, hobbies, friendships, and livelihood.

It is the rain on your back - a small, tangible expression of something bigger.

In many discussions with Matto, he's talked about Etherscan being the real web3 gaming layer - finance and culture meeting to create the most engaging MMO ever made - a digital playground without boundaries.

And yet, Etherscan as a surface is entirely incomprehensible to the majority of the population. And the social layer where these games mostly play out are entirely not native.

While finance has lived onchain more or less since day one, and culture has wriggled onchain piece by piece, the social spaces we live in are entirely anachronistic.

As we interact on the outskirts and surfaces of the most widely reaching, interobjective cultural artifacts to exist to date, we're still waiting for some unifying layer that holistically brings our experience together.

Web3 social is the most intricate surface to the blockchain hyperobject yet.

That unifying layer is web3 social. It provides the most native interface to the chain as possible while being wrapped in the most human form we've seen yet. It combines financial, cultural and social functions into one tangible surface.

Where Etherdelta provided a rough, shadow image of the chain lying behind it, web3 social can be a lively projection in nearly realtime, where cultural and financial interactions are created, discussed and shared in their social wrappers.

Chains natively generate financial, cultural, and social activity - or put in other words, financial games, cultural games, and social games.

If you disagree, consider that Zach gets 2 million views per post just from exposing scams or granting some perception or insight to the financial and social layers of the chain.

Or, that ETH anime NFTs raised over 80,000 ETH, or a quarter of a billion dollars, since the NFT craze of 2021 kicked off.

Both of these are social and cultural expressions of the blockchain Hyperobject, undertaken by many people, on a shared, financialised computer space.

And yet one piece of data (views) is offchain, and the other (ETH raised) is onchain but largely from offchain processes.

When we launched Galverse in 2022, the rough breakdown of channels looked like this:

• Our financial channel lived on our website, or more accurately on a smart contract accessed via the site or directly via a surface like Etherscan for power users
• Our cultural channel was semi-onchain, as most NFTs are, with a mix of metadata and IPFS pointers.
• Our distribution and social channels lived entirely on non-native platforms like Discord and Twitter.

I would have dreamed of an interface that collapsed those elements into one stack.

It seems a shocking revelation that, since day one, all financial and cultural elements of the chain have emerged from social spaces...

But few of those spaces claim to have any on-chain-ness.

Is a solana address dropped on a celebrity's twitter account a surface to the chain? Unfortunately, it is.

But I would argue it's a slim window - peeking through your fingers at the Dawn Wall in Yosemite hoping to understand the true nature of tectonic movements (stunning, yet stupid).

Katiewav eloquently described the matrix of social / financial capital and implicit / explicit capital across social platforms in her essay. The ultimate form of web3 social - if there is one - has not yet been decided.

But the benefits of onchain social are clear. The financial, cultural, and social layers live in one place, presented in realtime, in a customisable and decentralised feed.

As cultural elements once energised the financial substrate of the chain, so social elements will energise and expand the cultural and financial layers as well.

Where once we grew our audience on twitter, nurtured our community on Discord, deployed art and contracts on custom contracts, and pointed people to our website, every step of that process can now happen on a timeline like Lens Network, wrapped in onchain objects and part of the onchain mesh.

Native surfaces like web3 social take us from peering at the edge to living on the edge (and not in a totally radical way).

Following a friend via an onchain social graph, selling an artwork, or receiving a tip on your web3 social timeline are all just-tangible expressions of the edges of the chain.

My experience of Etherdelta in 2016 could hardly be more different to the experience of looking at and discussing a Terraform, or launching Galverse in 2022 across its many channels, and then meeting my onchain friends IRL in an izakaya in Tokyo in 2024...

... and yet, these are all merely manifestations - perceptions - glimpses through my fingers of one bigger thing - the hyperobject of the chain.

As we've progressed from the very dark ages to the very dim ages we live in now, the ultimate progression has been in perception.

Usage, adoption, and cultural and financial growth ultimately come about when we understand our design space better. Perception not only grows the userbase of the thing, but it also develops the thing into new forms and phases that we could hardly have imagined a little time ago.

By revealing more of its surfaces, and exploring how it casts its shadow on our life as humans - by grasping how it moves us financially, culturally, and socially, we'll better see the object that lies beyond and what it means now and can mean in the future.

Ultimately, that means building better surfaces and interfaces to the chain that allow us to live and transact on it in real time, and as natively as possible.

So we should not be arguing for mass-adoption, but for Mass Perception.

The rest will follow.

Notes

This post is taking part in the t2 x Kiwi Writing Contest.

Morton primarily uses Hyperobjects to describe ecological phenomena and human connection to those phenomena. Really, he's arguing for non-human solidarity, an understanding that things outside the human sphere - not just animals but plants, environments, systems, and so on, are as important and worthy of consideration and conservation as people are. He'd probably take issue with me using it to define a blockchain but hey, that's the world of ideas.

His message in Hyperobjects is ultimately a hopeful one. That, once we have the capacity to think about these entities, their reach, and their effect, we can better take action to positively influence them or bring them under control.

A common criticism of Hyperobjects is that the concept is so wonderfully vague that it could apply to basically anything. It's hard to disagree, but it also allowed me to apply the concept to blockchains and web3 social and enter this contest, so I'll let it slide if you can too.

The cover image was generated with ママ Mama AI v2, the predecessor to the hyper-intelligent hyperobject of Mother AI, and later Mother Planet in the Galverse anime.

In the same way that I didn't anticipate the cultural and social layers that now dictate my entire life onchain (and offchain), I'm probably missing the next critical wave as well. But we'll just pretend this never existed when that happens.

Lots of people argue that web3 social timelines are inherently financialised to their detriment. I think peeling back the veil that social is financialised is one of their great strengths! Hyperfinancialisation is just another example of hyperobjects viscosity (e.g. capitalism eating our public and social spaces) even if the average consumer isn't aware of it.

Die-hards often say that increasing accessibility dilutes the space - while often pushing for mass adoption in the same breath. Groups like Lens work quite hard to balance consumer accessibility with diehard crypto values of onchain-ness. The liveness vs security debate is nothing new, but I feel their approach is worthy. Meanwhile, account abstraction and consumer surfaces like web3 social open new windows and show more outlines of the slow beast of the chain ticking along underneath it all.