I don’t do fandom properly. Although I’m keen on Steely Dan, and have to a limited extent been for a long time, having liked their singles since the mid-1970s CE, I didn’t really get into them until I was with Sarada, who has a couple of their albums. I was puzzled by Fagen’s ‘I.G.Y.’ and irritated by its apparent optimism, because it seemed so inappropriate for 1982. However, this post is not specifically about the band, although it partly is. It’s also about William Gibson, the Metaverse and NFTs, and ultimately about what could be a coming dystopia, or it might be nothing, I don’t know
So let’s start with:
Steely Dan
Steely Dan are effectively a duo with a load of session musicians, now defunct due to Walter Becker’s death, the other member being Donald Fagen. My brother holds them in complete contempt, possibly because he has better taste than I. There’s a lot to be said about “The Dan”, most of which I won’t be going into here. I’d say they were characterised by cynicism, obsessively high-quality production, a theme of sleaze focussing particularly on incest and child abuse, but also on the criminal underworld and science fiction. They also have this odd habit of name-dropping, as if they’re on the inside and the listener is looking in from some kind of outer darkness which I suspect is illusory, but I can’t be sure. They’re also quite pretentious. But today I want to focus on their early stuff, which tended to sound like Crosby, Stills and Nash, in particular two tracks: ‘Android Warehouse’ and ‘The Caves Of Altamira’.
I’ll start with the second.
I recall when I was small
How I spent my days alone
The busy world was not for me
So I went and found my own
I would climb the garden wall
With a candle in my hand
I’d hide inside a hall of rock and sand
On the stone an ancient hand
In a faded yellow-green
Made alive a worldly wonder
Often told but never seen
Now and ever bound to labor
On the sea and in the sky
Every man and beast appeared
A friend as real as I
[Chorus]
Before the fall when they wrote it on the wall
When there wasn’t even any Hollywood
They heard the call
And they wrote it on the wall
For you and me we understood
Can it be this sad design
Could be the very same
A wooly man without a face
And a beast without a name
Nothin’ here but history
Can you see what has been done
Memory rush over me
Now I step into the sun
[Chorus]
Many years had come and gone and many miles between,
Through it all I found my way by the light of what I’d seen,
On the road as I returned was a green and yellow sign saying ‘see the way it used to be. . .”
And I took my place in line,
Could I believe the sad design could be the very same?
A wooly man without a name and a beast without a name . . .
(The block editor has screwed me here).
The actual caves of Altamira are an archæological site in modern-day Spain into which a girl once crept and rediscovered cave paintings of bulls. The last verse, with the messed-up layout, is omitted in most versions but casts a different light on the same experience. Steely Dan have said that the song itself is about the loss of innocence, presumably of both Palæolithic humanity and the girl in question.
The odd thing about the last verse is that it can also be sung using the tune for ‘Android Warehouse’, which is particularly interesting because for some reason ‘The Caves Of Altamira’ is often used as a title for the other song. There’s clearly a tale to be told here but I don’t know what it is.
The really enigmatic song, though, is ‘Android Warehouse’ itself, whose lyrics go as follows:
Daytime you’re to proud to brag
About the badge you wore
Nighttime you’re to tired to drive
Your change across the floor
All your guns are gone I’m told
Or in the Aerodrome
Did you die the day they sold
The ones you left at home
Hold my hand in the Android Warehouse
Who’s to know if you take a dive
Ain’t life grand in the Android Warehouse
What a burner when you take off your goggles and find?
That you’re alive
That you’re alive
Did you really gobble up
The things they claimed you ate
Were you fit to swallow it
Or scared to clean your plate
Have you tried to calculate
The hours they’d applaud
I would guess it’s somewhat less
For just another fraud
Hold my hand in the Android Warehouse
Who’s to know if you take a dive
Ain’t life grand in the Android Warehouse
What a burner when you take off your goggles and find…
That you’re alive
That you’re alive
That you’re alive…
This was written some time between 1968 and 1971. I should point out that I have a very strong tendency to read meanings into lyrics and texts generally which are unique to myself. As Al Stewart once said:
And some of you are harmonies to all the notes I play
Although we may not meet still you know me well
While others talk in secret keys and transpose all I say
And nothing I do or try can get through the spell.
Steely Dan lend themselves much more to this than many other bands though. Even so, I find ‘Android Warehouse’ to be particularly startling. It’s said that the band itself were actually going to be named Android Warehouse at one point, so it seems to be more than just another song. The crucial lines for me are:
Ain’t life grand in the Android Warehouse
What a burner when you take off your goggles and find?
That you’re alive
So then: imagine an android warehouse. A place where physically inactive humanoid mechanical bodies are stacked up. And they’re all wearing goggles. Are they seeing anything through those goggles? If they take them off, they discover they aren’t androids after all, but are alive, and this shock burns them.
Does this remind you of anything?
Now the idea of the Matrix does seriously pre-date both Keanu Reeves and Steely Dan. It dates back to Indian ideas of Maya and the Western Gnostic tradition. But the idea that it was controlled by a giant machine or collection of machines is somewhat newer. It connects to Cyberspace. Note the capital.
I think ‘Android Warehouse’ is about the dehumanising effect of living in virtual reality as a metaphor for modern life in the industrialised world, and that the metaphor is quite vividly developed. In 1971 at the latest. This might be thought of as mere coincidence and reading meaning into things which aren’t there. The only thing is, Steely Dan were fans of a certain author.
William Gibson
Gibson invented cyberpunk, and I was there at the birth. As I mentioned in 1982, that year was the only one I read the magazine OMNI in, and the July edition saw the first publication of his short story ‘Burning Chrome’, which contains the first occurrence of the word “cyberspace”. Google ngrams shows the following:
“Cyberspace” is a heck of a lot more popular than “cyberpunk”. Cyberspace was originally a hacked computer called the Cyberspace 7, used to access a VR-represented version of the internet. It’s also known, to Gibson himself, as the “matrix”, described as a consensual hallucination. Its foundations look like the classic wireframe plane of squares as seen in countless CGI renderings from the 1970s, and it subjectively develops out of the phosphenes a sighted person experiences when she closes her eyes in darkness. Megacorp and military sites look like the coloured polyhedra familiar from high-end raster scan graphics of the time. There’s also ICE, Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics, which are arranged as “ICE walls” to protect data in the same way as fire walls now are in what might be called the real world. This includes “Black ICE”, which causes fatal seizures. Black ICE is a precursor of the later concept of David Langford’s Basilisk, an image which crashes the human mind fatally, but that wasn’t arrived at until his story ‘Blit’ in 1988.
The Sprawl universe defines cyberpunk, and was in its turn influenced by ‘Blade Runner’, which came out the same year as ‘Burning Chrome’. The basic features of the sub-genre consist of a dystopian computerised world which many people choose to escape by living in virtual reality. The central characters are usually marginalised poor people forced to live on the edge of society. There is a strong Japanese influence on the culture and the US has collapsed but the Soviet Union hasn’t. The Sprawl itself is a thousand-mile long conurbation stretching all the way from Boston to Atlanta. ‘Blade Runner’ seems to posit a second megacity on the west coast of the former US, and I use the word “Megacity” advisèdly as Judge Dredd’s Megacity One is quite similar and seems to be one inspiration for it. The film version of ‘Minority Report’ is set in the Sprawl too. It’s very common. The use of the word “punk” is clearly inherited from the then very recent punk movements of Europe and America.
The Sprawl trilogy contains numerous references to Steely Dan. For instance, there are bars called ‘The Gentleman Loser’ (from Midnite Cruiser) and ‘Here At The Western World’, a love interest called Rikki (Rikki Don’t Lose That Number) and Razor Girls (as in ‘Razor Boy’). Steely Dan is pervasive in the Sprawl, and Gibson has himself written about them. There are characters called Klaus and the Rooster (Here At The Western World). The general atmosphere of their music and Gibson’s fiction is the same. Incidentally, I fully acknowledge the influence of William Burroughs on both, but I’m not as familiar with him as the other two.
But here’s the thing. It doesn’t stretch my credulity at all to see the song ‘Android Warehouse’ as the inspiration for cyberspace. If that’s true, Steely Dan’s impact on the world is largely obscure but absolutely enormous.
The Metaverse
“Metaverse” is a word with a history. It wasn’t coined by Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg, but by Neal Stephenson in his book ‘Snow Crash’, which I haven’t read. I could at this point post a spoiler warning for ‘Snow Crash’ even though I haven’t read it, but the problem with that is that unfortunately the real world of the 2020s is a spoiler for the novel. I do not know what possessed the people who name Facebook stuff to use the word for this, because its connotations are absolutely appalling read in context. It looks like a sick in-joke.
‘Snow Crash’ is a cyberpunk novel published in 1992. Snow Crash itself is a basilisk in Langford’s sense. It’s a computer virus which can infect and destroy hackers’ minds. Although this might not sound very original given Gibson and Langford, the novel scores on being remarkably prescient. It popularised the term “avatar” in the online sense. Second Life has an annual reënactment of the novel because its existence was inspired by one of the main ideas and settings of the story: the Metaverse. This takes the form of a virtual world comprising a featureless black planet bisected by a road 65 536 kilometres long accessible via VR goggles or cheaper black and white terminals. It’s an urban environment a hundred metres wide. Countries have collapsed and been replaced by corporations. The entire book is supposed to be a parody of the cyberpunk genre, which is probably why the central character is called Hiro Protagonist. There’s a lot of other stuff, such as the Sumerian language being the machine code of the human brain, but for now I want to concentrate on the Metaverse. It is not a good thing. It’s controlled by amoral corporations and seems to be essential to living a bearable life. The entire setting is dystopian. I’m afraid I’m letting myself down here through not having read it, but the Metaverse is clearly not a good thing.
Then we get Facebook and Zuckerberg angling to incorporate his soul-sucking demon of a social networking site, to which I and many others are of course addicted, into his virtual environment and actually calling it the Metaverse without a trace of irony! Facebook aims to build an all-encompassing VR environment over which it has total control. Past experience has shown that FB is harmful and that they know themselves to be harmful, to the mental well-being of its users, and the likes of storming the Capitol shows very clearly that it has a malevolent influence on the human race and the planet. It has itself researched the harm it does. Their position is now analogous to the likes of tobacco companies and the fossil fuel industry lobbying and paying off people in “power” (I should explain those quotes at some point) in order to defer or completely erase their bad reputation.
What this amounts to, despite Zuckerberg’s claim that he will only provide the infrastructure which other corporations will use, is an attempt to privatise reality. There is arguably no problem with a virtual space of this nature provided there is public control over it, or perhaps individual control. There most definitely is a problem with this space being owned by a multinational, because to quote Revelation 13:17 –
καὶ ἵνα μή τις δύνηται ἀγοράσαι ἢ πωλῆσαι εἰ μὴ ὁ ἔχων τὸ χάραγμα, τὸ ὄνομα τοῦ θηρίου ἢ τὸν ἀριθμὸν τοῦ ὀνόματος αὐτοῦ.
And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
I am in no wise claiming that this is prophecy of this specific occurrence. I tend towards an idealist interpretation of the book of Revelation and believe that its contents can be applied to all places and times. Nonetheless I find it sinister that this seems to be a situation where you have to sell out in order to have a livable life in mainstream society. You have no choice but to be on Facebook having your intimate personal data mined and sold to megacorps. There is a reason why this Bible verse has such resonance and applicability.
In order to make the next point, it’s helpful to digress into a different high tech area. The replicator seems at first to be some kind of magical genie lamp which you can rub to wish away scarcity. It isn’t, because technological change can always be recuperated by capitalism. There is nothing special about the replicator or its real predecessor the 3-D printer which solves a political problem which wouldn’t’ve been solved by the industrial revolution or the plough in the right social climate. We have a device which can manufacture anything we want in whatever quantities we want. This is a potential hazard to the survival of capitalism, so there are two possible approaches to address this. One is just to make the raw material prohibitively expensive and out of reach of the average consumer so that only the super-rich or their money vampire machines called multinational companies can afford it. The other, and I’m not saying they wouldn’t do both, is to slap a patent, copyright or some other kind of intellectual property thing on the design of the product, then cripple the machine so that it will only produce it if you’ve got some kind of authorisation or payment for it. That way, order is restored and we can all rest safely in our beds knowing the world will continue to be completely crap forever or at least until the oil runs out.
The thing about the Metaverse is that there can be such things as virtual outfits, cars, furniture, apartments and so forth in it, all of which will have to be paid for, or if not, the free stuff will be given low status by people who are rich enough to afford the “nice” stuff. Don’t believe me? Just think about NFTs.
NFTs
Right, now we’re back in the Metaverse, where we want to buy and sell things, or rather Meta wants us to buy things from the various faceless sociopathic organisations that rule the world and damage by stealing our labour and money, also known as the ordinary world. However, any large organisation which does stuff is more likely to do bad stuff because it’s big and some of it is bound to be bad by the law of averages, so maybe it’s more an emergent property of large scale organisations. Whatever the cause, in an economy which runs on scarcity such as our own, the potential abundance afforded by the internet and ICT needs to be reined in for economic and political purposes. Bill Gates was one of the first people to realise how easy it was to copy software when he wrote his “Open Letter To Hobbyists” in 1976 regarding the piracy of Altair BASIC. His claim, from which almost everything he’s done since in the business world stems, was that piracy discouraged people writing software from putting in the work to develop it and therefore stifled information and in fact the whole burgeoning software industry. Against this lies the more abundance-based attitude of GNU, the Free Software Foundation, the original IMDb, Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg, among many others, which has enabled the internet to flourish and provided us with the likes of Android (there’s that word again).
The fact is that it’s very easy to reproduce software which has not been protected in some way, either legally or by a more technology-based method, and as technology advances also to reproduce text, music, video and other media. However, our economy can’t allow that to happen, so various methods are used to restrict that. There are videos on YouTube of “rare” or “lost” episodes or pieces of music, such as Android Warehouse itself, but once they’re on YT, unless someone comes along and has a copyright strike issued, they cease to be rare in most meaningful senses once they’ve been uploaded. Anyone who wants to can listen to Android Warehouse:
If the economy was catholic, i.e. maximised the number of sole traders, there would be a strong moral case for protecting individual artists’ works in some way. Even as it stands there’s a case for it.
In the non-virtual world, rarity doesn’t have to be invented. Stamps can be misprinted, coins can be issued for a short-reigned monarch such as Edward VIII and there are unique artworks by the likes of Picasso and Dalí. The latter in particular exploited this in an interesting way. Instead of paying for his meals in restaurants, he used to draw sketches on pieces of paper and hand them over like cheques. In order for the same kind of thing to happen online, methods need to be devised to create scarcity. Although on the one hand this seems morally bankrupt and perhaps even evil, on the other we live in a world where many of us provide free “content” without any prospect of being renumerated for our labour. The word “content” used in this setting makes me think of containers into which art, music and text is poured without regard for the kine “which” secreted it and the adverse effect it has on their bodies and lives.
Enter the NFT. This isn’t the only solution. Another might be quantum cryptography, but in any case right now the NFT is a very hyped option. NFT stands for “Non-Fungible Token”, and once again I find myself in a quandary because I have no idea whether they’re well-known or not. Fungibility is more or less another word for replaceability, and NFTs are an attempt to create non-replaceable resources online. They’re based on cryptocurrency and the blockchain, specifically on the Ethereum one, the second most popular cryptocurrency after Bitcoin.
Both cryptocurrency and NFTs are subject to being hard to understand, in such a way that they remind me a little of confusopolies. This is Scott Adams’s word for the situation which used to exist around mobile ‘phone contracts and others (e.g. utility services) where there were so many different options that many people just plump for one at random because they don’t understand the differences between them and consider them trivial. This allows providers to camouflage their deals and compete successfully because it makes it less likely that really good deals can be noticed, and it also puts people off thinking about them too hard. That repellence, and the feeling that life is too short, is a good way of getting away with nefarious activities. With cryptocurrency and NFTs an additional layer of complexity is introduced by the fact that both are currently subject to bubbles. Most people seem to be into cryptocurrencies as a means of making money rather than as a means of exchange, leading to the artificial inflation of their value, but at the same time it would be understandable if the risk to the authority of the likes of banks were to be countered by causing Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) in the minds of the public. For people of my generation there could be a further layer of complication due to the feeling that anything which has been invented recently is suspect. There also appears to be a vast environmental issue with both.
Leaving all that aside, how does an NFT work?
An NFT is a single token stored in a blockchain indicating exclusive rights over an item, usually a digital asset of some kind. If you buy an NFT, you get to “own” something like an image, a URL, a film, a piece of music or perhaps an asset in a game such as a weapon, a skin or an area of land in a virtual world. These last few are what links NFTs to the Metaverse, since that’s a virtual world like Second Life or World Of Warcraft. However, they become more significant to the rest of us if Zuckerberg succeeds in his leverage.
A blockchain is a ledger held by participating computers over a wide area. Some might say “all over the world”, but I’m not sure that includes most of it. When a transaction is made, that is, buying and selling, a record of that is made publicly on this ledger which can be read by all participants in the system. This is what guarantees the security of the system and allows it to be independent of banking. This threat to the authority of banks could conceivably lead to negative propaganda and manipulation, but at the same time NFTs and cryptocurrency don’t actually seem to be good things for other reasons and those who want to profit from them benefit from talking them up.
The big problem with cryptocurrency and NFTs, environmentally speaking, is that they’re generated by carbon-hungry “busy work” on computers. The problem centres on “proof of work”. As far as Bitcoin is concerned, it works like this. Every ten minutes, the computers connected to the network do a difficult and complex calculation which proves that electricity has been used. It must not have a useful purpose. The data resulting are evidence that the work has been done. These are then submitted and the winner (it’s like a lottery) then gets to verify all the transactions done in the last ten minutes. The more electricity you use, the more likely you are to win, and this is also how Bitcoins are created. Bitcoin miners therefore congregate in areas where the climate is very cold (to cool their computers doing the work) or where electricity is cheap, which usually means a massive carbon footprint. Something like 0.5% of the carbon footprint of the species is due to Bitcoin mining and the blockchain alone.
Ethereum uses a process known as “proof of stake” instead, where a random process is still used, but is based on the investment an individual participant makes, giving them the chance to validate everything. This still makes it easier for richer people to make money but potentially avoids the concentration of power which occurs with Bitcoin. Approving fraudulent transactions brings penalties. Ethereum is also being upgraded to “Ethereum 2.0”, which aims to reduce the risk of a “majority shareholder” dominating the network, increase the bandwidth of transactions (more per second) without increasing the size of nodes and making it more environmentally sustainable.
It really bothers me that anyone would even consider inventing a new technology which automatically has a large carbon footprint this far into the twenty-first century. Ethereum doesn’t seem to have this, but it has other problems, in the nature of NFTs, which are based on Ethereum.
There are various pieces of data, some of them very large such as feature films, which are linked to NFTs. The cost of an individual NFT is usually very high. In the Metaverse one probably won’t have any choice but to use them, and at this point I am reminded of the ‘Black Mirror’ episode ‘Fifteen Million Merits’, and in particular this crowd at the Hot Shots talent show:
Don’t you just know that the skins, faces, hair and clothing of those avatars were bought at a premium rate set by the network? In 2022, and in connection with the Metaverse, all of these things are likely to have NFTs. Moreover, in this screenshot it’s clear that they’re supposed to look artificial, low-quality – somehow “plasticky”, which is what they will be. But the chances are you won’t have a choice to opt out of using crypto or NFTs.
Things may change, but right now NFT-associated property looks similarly vapid, ugly and uninspiring. Here are some examples:
Lazy Lions:
Bored Apes:
Cryptopunks:
Just to choose a few random prices, one Lazy Lion costs £9 816.12 and there’s also one for almost a million quid, a Bored Ape is typically cheaper, maybe about £40, and Cryptopunks are each valued particularly highly, seeming to average well about a quarter of a million pounds sterling apiece. One of them appears to be worth £300 million. All of these appear to be arbitrarily generated by software in a lazy manner, and they all feel seriously soulless. It’s possible that at some point this bubble will burst and there will be more stuff which actually seems to be worthwhile, and this also links to the idea of artworks which are only worth something if they’re in a gallery. If you visit the websites these things are sold on, the focus is solely on investment. Nobody seems to care what they look like.
I find this rather distressing. I find it all the more distressing that I can easily see that this low-effort trash will not only continue but become unavoidable if we’re all forced to participate in the Metaverse.
Conclusion
I’m not really sure where this is going. I believe Steely Dan may well have had an invisible hand in today’s world through their song and it’s widely acknowledged that William Gibson did. Facebook, or rather Meta, may well fail in their attempt and could have overreached themselves in creating the Metaverse, which could in any case be a distraction from their other nefarious influence on society, but that won’t stop someone else from doing it. Zuckerberg seems peeved that he doesn’t have control over hardware and therefore the whole path from his central stuff to the end-user. The Metaverse is also nothing new, and is more like him nicking it from the common ownership it has currently and making it his own. Finally, NFTs may come to nothing, and are a continuation of what’s long happened in other ways, but right now, to this four-and-a-half-dozen-year-old, they look like something which would’ve happened in the last days of Rome before the Goths came swarming in, or in this case pandemics and anthropogenic climate change.
Seriously, I dunno. They changed what “it” was I think.
A Box Of Chocolates 