Web 3.0

This is Clearly Money Laundering is a work of art by XCOPY which last sold on April 17, 2021 for 180 Eth, or $436,419.69 at time of purchase. Other works by the artist have sold for millions. NFTs, the tokens that situate these artworks on the blockchain where they are stored, were once referred to as deeds. They could one day be used for passports. The exorbitant prices these NFTs command, and their entanglement in controversy regarding the environmental impact of blockchains, mean that the actual images are often overlooked. Let’s assume that crypto is indeed a scam, and that it is bad for the environment. This, in itself, doesn’t invalidate the art.

When I first came across XCOPY’s work, my opinion wasn’t prejudiced by the above concerns. Still, I hated the art. I found it jarring and obnoxious, obscene even. It felt like it was made to annoy me. My dislike intensified the more it kept showing up as I tried to discover this new digital world. To be fair, much of what was happening at the time was unsettling to me. I had been a smug luddite until 2019, when I finally gave up my Nokia and got a smart phone. At first I did not see the point, and contemplated going back to my burner. But then Covid-19 hit, and I went through a dizzying transition. Within weeks, I had established a life where every day I did things I’d never considered before: I had become a tech enthusiast, and was investing, voting, and collecting art. And wherever I went in this new wild web (as I find myself calling it), XCOPY was there, annoying the fuck out of me.

Gradually, through repeated exposure, I started to look at these artworks. Through my dismay, I managed to notice that XCOPY—a London-based artist who guards his anonymity—was a skilled illustrator. The lines and CMYK colors seemed choppy, but were applied with skill and restraint. I became intrigued by the speed and intensity of the flashing imagery, the violence, and the unhinged rhythm of the movement in them. Soon I found myself staring at these images for the Web 3.0 equivalent of hours. I would switch to full-screen view to try and retain the piece, delve into it the way I would with a Caravaggio or a Zurbarán. I took screenshots and froze the animations. Soon enough, a grainy digital texture came forth, one I was intimate with yet which dazzled me. On top of this texture, crassness and profundity were adjacent; there was vulnerable aggression, and evidence of a thoughtful and harrowed soul. XCOPY’s work exhibits a palpable horror at the state of humanity in the digital age, and a simultaneously flippant attitude towards it. The more I looked, the more enamored with the work I became, especially when I paid attention to the titles: Decay (2021), Man with new iPhone on the Hammersmith & City line (2018), Hayden Adams (2020), Summer.jpg (2021), Proof of War (2021), The Good Men Who Do Nothing (2018). The works and their titles are ripe with references unintelligible outside of Web 3.0. And yet the locality of XCOPY’s work, as with all great art, does not rob it of its universality. In these works, XCOPY brings forth the digital world and raises it on a pedestal for us to ponder, to take a pause as we march headlong into it. Horror and salvation, it seems, are both in the flick of a thumb.

Aesthetics, economics, and the intellectual framework in which they operate are inseparable in the world of NFTs, as they are in every genuinely new art movement. And in that sense, what stops people from grasping XCOPY’s work is what also stops them from engaging with Web 3.0 altogether. It’s a concept that seems too abstract until it is experienced firsthand. There is still no agreed definition of Web 3.0, though its users grasp the concept intuitively. To me it is the culture being built around the infrastructure of blockchain technology, and all that facilitates in terms of transacting, governance, and communication. Another way to understand it is that while in Web 1.0 we consumed content, in Web 2.0 we created it, and in Web 3.0 we own it.

Browsing one night, I came across a tweet by one @TheShamdoo, announcing the launch of their project, Head DAO. At that point I wasn’t sure what a DAO was, but I was encouraged by a few glasses of wine and lockdown boredom.1 In the words of Web 3.0 degens, I aped in, and managed to mint two Head DAO NFTs before they sold out for an amount of money I wouldn’t normally throw at anything, let alone a jpeg. These NFTs had no artistic value per se, they were mere copies of the popular Nouns collection. What I now owned were membership tokens, with corresponding voting and earning privileges. A little later, Shamdoo reappeared online to announce that the collection has raised 1.5 million USD, of which twenty percent went to the founders, and eighty percent to the DAO’s treasury. A link to the discord server was provided, and in I went.

On the Head DAO discord, hundreds of anons were sharing their excitement in a channel so active it would move up fifteen or twenty lines at a time. Together, we owned 1.3 million dollars that we could deploy in any direction we pleased. We started right away. It was agreed through a vote that we should first acquire the holy grail of NFTs, Cryptopunks, a collection of 10,000 pixelated collectibles that have historical value in Web 3.0 lore. (Historical in Web 3.0 means 2017.) I woke up the next day to find I had fractional ownership of CryptoPunk #4744, an avatar with classic shades and a thin mohawk.2 I was thrilled. It was difficult to get any work done that day: instead, I was hanging out with my new buddies in Head DAO, debating the merits of different collections and speculating on where this endeavor might take us. As the days passed, more purchases were made, and our vault grew in value.

At that point, I had become interested in the rise of the coder-artist, in particular Tyler Hobbs and his “Fidenza” series of generative art. In this relatively new genre of visual art, the artist writes an algorithm with certain parameters and attributes. When activated, the algorithm generates works that are often surprising to artist and collector. If you were lucky enough, you would have generated a Fidenza, of which there are only one thousand. Head DAO was the only chance I had of owning one.

I suggested buying a Fidenza in the relevant channel, but was ignored. I tried again, and my suggestion disappeared amidst the deluge of enthusiastic banter. I spent more time in Head DAO discord, and formed some friendships. My confidence grew. I suggested it again more emphatically, until I started getting thumbs ups and :this: emoticons. The more I and others mentioned Fidenzas, the more they were discussed, until someone took the initiative and put it to the vote. We went to snapshot—a protocol for voting on the Ethereum blockchain that verifies your voting rights—and I started seeing the YES votes coming in. A few days later we followed it by a vote on which Fidenza to buy; soon after, we were the proud owners of Fidenza #1415. 3

This was before we had set up a multi-sig access to our funds, whereby any transaction has to be signed off by at least six members of an eight-person committee. Multi-sig solves the problem of entrusting the entire treasury to one person, and also guarantees flexibility. This became more of a priority as Shamdoo, our mysterious leader, wasn’t always readily available. Sometimes we had to execute purchases before word of the vote went out and sellers raised their prices. One time, Shamdoo was needed, and we were told by someone who knew them IRL that they would get back online as soon as they were out on recess. Until then, I had assumed TheShamdoo was some crypto OG who bought bitcoin in 2013 and now flies their private jet all over Latin America. Turns out our enigmatic leader is a sixteen-year-old kid in Ohio, currently sat in math class.

Like many others, a Covid-induced combination of financial anxiety and boredom persuaded me to dive head-on into a world where I’d heard there was opportunity. There is plenty of that, but there are also other things going on: there is culture, there is some pretty good writing, there is art, there are a lot of memes, and there is debate. And since almost everyone is anonymous, the debate is concerned with concepts rather than identities. And yes, while many in the space are scammers, mercenary day traders, wen-lambo degens, and smug libertarians, there are others who are finding fascinating ways to discuss and redefine concepts such as sovereignty and value. The enigmatic and mercurial Murat Pak, for example, investigates conceptions of value in their art, and brings thousands of people along for the ride. By contriving dynamics that require collectors to make decisions, every Pak holder becomes an active participant in their investigation of notions of value. On burn.art, for example, holders of some Pak artworks can choose to burn their art and receive the $Ash currency. If they do burn, the remaining editions of the artwork becomes more scarce, and $Ash more diluted. If they do not, does the value become sentimental? The $Ash token is gaining momentum, and has a chance of becoming the currency for the emerging digital art world, as a growing number of digital artists put #weacceptash in their social media profiles. The point is that the abstraction of value that has been always the exclusive right of Wall Street hoodlums is now being challenged and re-articulated from the ground up, in communities of anons who don’t know one other, but are able to coordinate their efforts in ways previously unthinkable.

These are exciting times. For years now we have been seeking a new paradigm, a new way of doing things, a new force that would unsettle the powers that be. Well, it is finally here. The IMF is fighting it, banks are fighting it, China and Russia are fighting it, and you are fighting it. On the other side are communities of energetic, imaginative, and intelligent anons, discussing how cities can be run and creating new modalities for voting. Josh Rosenthal compares Web 3.0 to the invention of the printing press, and the decentralization of knowledge that ensued. He calls it the crypto reformation, and he makes a compelling argument. A tidal wave is coming, and you can choose to ride it or let it wash over you, like our parents did when the internet invaded their rusty world. Web 3.0 is a new frontier: vast, enigmatic, and dangerous. It is full of scammers, but it is not itself a scam. And yes, a lot of the art is terrible. But nor am I a fan of most of what’s shown in New York or Mayfair. Between the safety and boredom of art galleries, the brightly lit and sanitized world of Instagram, I choose the dark and exciting world of XCOPY. I choose anon.