Modern/Romance [Spike Art Magazine]
Dopamine is the new heroin(e)
An edited version of this piece was published by Spike Art Magazine #70—Web3, Winter 2021-2022. The electronic version is attached below.
In March 2020, at the onset of the pandemic, I began tracking changes in epochal sentiment. For a year, I obsessively collected them on Twitter under the tag #Kulturinstinkt, a neologism meant to capture a libidinal response commensurate with the Covidian shake-up. Think of it as drive theory to balance not Eros/Thanatos for individuals, but Zeitgeist and Weltgeist on a world-historical scale. Such was the start of Covidian Æsthetics, where “aesthetics” function as an early warning system for incoming Kultur (and outgoing Zivilisation).
Such a conception of aesthetics makes affect, not beauty, its central concern. To expand on the Breitbartian formula: it is not only politics that’s downstream from culture; it’s culture that’s downstream from nerves.
Inevitably, since the centering of affect is itself romanticising, I came upon the most romantic feature of web3: the NFT, where non-fungibility equals rarity equals worth. (Rarity is a romantic value.)
I have described the fundamental tension between certain parts of web3 and the Interzone of the NFT space in terms of a modern / romantic dialectic. Bitcoin is, for example, a high-minded pursuit built around a revolutionary manifesto; eminently modern and conceptual. In its current stage of development, the NFT space is that whitepaper’s drop-shadow; a hedonic hotspot powered by orgiastic individualism (styled as “self-sovereignty”) and intense emotional excitement.
Both theatres of operation coexist, but do not always overlap, within a broader space that may (or may not) be “the metaverse”, the closest precedent to which, imaginally speaking, is the dynamic unconscious in both its collective and associative forms. The metaverse would thus be a) a symbolic base-layer and archetypal repository, and b) an expanding, co-created psychocultural Gestalt of shared representations “not necessarily inherited” or held identically by each individual. In other words, there is no full or clear picture to be had of the libidinal economy, but here we are, nonetheless.
Neither the metaverse nor the unconscious were discovered, and it is irrelevant to think of either in terms of existence. Each was invented to beget new possibility-spaces for symbolic capacity. There is a reason why what started as money is now manifesting as art.
Smart contracts should soon be as ubiquitous as smartphones. Sticky tech, spread through viral channels—with art and entertainment at the poisoned speartip—is how web3 will be leaked into the mainstream.
It’s why I call the cryptoart avant-garde equal parts warlike and artful. An NFT is easy to arm as a high-concentrate dopamine capsule. For every flashy claim of ecocide and money laundering that’s thrown our way we are, respectfully, in the time-honoured drug business—a romantic pursuit if ever there’s been one.
Still from David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, 1991.