A reading from the book of 3b3d64:
Recently, I was eating a grass-fed and finished ribeye steak from a local farmer. I found it to be rather lean and tough, which has been my general experience buying beef raised like this. Rather than getting mad about it (the steak did taste good regardless), it made me think a bit. Was this how steaks always were, before the days of industrial feedlots with cows gorging themselves on corn and soy? Was this real beef, what humanity ate for 99.9% of its existence, and what the average person thinks of as steak is an aberration?
There’s a tired hypothesis, especially among people in this space, that we live in a simulation like the Matrix, where we’re all hooked up to computers that show us a false reality. What they don’t realize is that we already live in a simulation. No headjacks required.
Umberto Eco referred to the concept of hyperreality as “the authentic fake,” and that’s a pretty solid description. Imagine a person who visits Paris after going to the France pavilion at Walt Disney World, and finds it less “French.” It’s not as clean, the people aren’t as friendly, and there aren’t beret-wearing mimes in the street handing out free croissants and glasses of Bordeaux to passerby.
There’s a similar concept called supernormal stimuli. In experiments, it’s been shown birds will preferentially incubate fake but “better” versions of their species’ eggs over their own — ones that are bigger, with brighter colors and more markings.
Humans aren’t immune. Pornography features women with absurdly exaggerated sex characteristics. Processed food is made hyper-palatable through large additions of fat, sugar, and salt — all things the brain knows are good for survival (energy and electrolytes), but amplified to unnatural, addictive levels.
This is a glitch in evolution; traits an organism knows to be beneficial taken to an extreme beyond what is found in nature.
We are bombarded by the hyperreal on a daily basis. Social media feeds are curated to present only the best parts of a user’s life. People know so much about celebrities they feel like they’re friends, slotting them into their Dunbar’s number. International conflicts with nuanced causes are presented through the childish good-against-evil lens of Marvel cape-shit.
Our monetary system is hyperreal, a “real without origin or reality” in the words of Baudrillard, who coined the term. We use fiat currency that can be printed infinitely. People see numbers in their account (which they don’t even control) and ascribe value to it. But like porn and processed food, it isn’t healthy and it isn’t real.
Bitcoin may not be backed by anything either, but there is a limited amount of it. In that regard, BTC is more real than its dollar equivalent since it can’t be diluted down to nothing by creating more. When you hold BTC in your wallet, you actually own it — it’s not a line in a bank’s database.
If BTC is a step towards bringing money back to reality, Phonon brings transactions back towards reality. It is the direct digital equivalent of two people making a private, in-person deal. Not a simulation of that, with banks recording every transaction and internet platforms grabbing your personal data. Like eating a grass-fed steak, it may be unusual to us because we’re not used to how things used to be, but we’ll all be much better off sticking with the old ways.