Three Things: March 2021

Hello! Welcome to my first post in a series where I write about some of the interesting things I learned in the past month. I'm a slightly obsessive note-taker and general consumer of information, so this feels like a fun way to channel that energy into something somewhat tangible. At worst, I solidify in my mind the things I really care about, and at best, someone stumbles upon this and learns something fun. So no downside! It was a busy month, so let's get started...

Beeple Auction with Christie's

I first learned about NFTs^[1] in mid-January of this year, and I had no idea at the time that I was catching the beginning of an enormous wave that would disrupt the art world and cause people to view the decentralized blockchain world in a different light. On March 11th, a digital artist named Mike Winkelmann (aka Beeple) made art history by selling a digital work of art through Christie's auction house for $69.3 million. This sale was the third most expensive sale of a living artist's work, putting Beeple in the same conversation as Jeff Koons, David Hockney, and Gerhard Richter. Christie's also made history by being the first auction house to sell a purely digital work of art and to accept a cryptocurrency in addition to US dollars.

The decision to accept ETH^[2] is interesting because if Christie's only allowed bidding in USD, I think it is reasonable to speculate that the sale would have been much less. I don't think there is any information about how many of the serious bidders were bidding in USD, but the final two bidders that caused a $40+ million jump in the last hour of bidding were "crypto whales"^[3] that presumably paid in ETH. I wonder if there were any ultra-wealthy bidders with no or minimal crypto holdings that learned enough in the span of a few weeks to be willing to bid millions of dollars on an NFT. It's certainly possible, but given the energy and flood of wealth in the crypto world right now, I'm not surprised that people whose net worth is probably mostly in cryptocurrencies were driving the price up. I don't want to sound like I'm making an inditement on the art's final price. It's not that it's too high or too low; it's just interesting. Anyone with 69 million dollars worth of ETH to spend on an NFT probably has a vested interest in pushing blockchain technology into the mainstream, so in that case, it wouldn't be a bad investment.

During the last hour of the auction, I was able to be in a Clubhouse room with Beeple and other prominent figures in the NFT world. I feel so lucky that I had the opportunity to hear Beeple's live reaction to the auction and the reactions of the smart, creative people pushing the boundaries of blockchain technology. It feels like a "1 of 1" event that I will remember for the rest of my life and something unprecedented in art history. It feels comparable to being a servant in the Medici household in the late 1400s watching Michelangelo work in the courtyard. Ok, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but the Internet continues to prove itself to be truly wild by facilitating this type of interaction.

The rise of NFT's has reignited the argument about the monetary value of art. Why is an NFT valuable if anyone can save the file to their computer? Why do I know deep down that even if I felt a stronger emotional reaction to a mural by a Chicago graffiti artist than Da Vinci's Last Supper, I would still pay more for the latter if I were a billionaire? Art isn't necessarily valuable for any truly pragmatic reason. We care about art because we care about the "story" of humanity, and art represents a time, a place, and an emotion that can connect us to an earlier time. As time passes, one could argue that this shared fiction^[4] has spun out of control as billionaires have bid against themselves to gain bragging rights and a way to hide wealth, but the main point still stands. Whether it's a physical canvas or a JPG hosted on an AWS S3 bucket, art has value, and I think as the story of NFT's grows, the concerns of the general public will shrink^[5]. When art is digital, and a blockchain verifies ownership, it doesn't have to be hidden from the world in a Swiss bank vault, a freeport, or the home of an Italian mobster. For better or worse, digital art can serve its economic purpose for the wealthy and its emotional purpose for the rest of the world. That feels like a step in the right direction, and I'm excited to see how this evolves in the next few years.

The Power of Babel by John McWhorter

I've become a massive fan of learning about linguistics over the past few years. That is almost exclusively due to the podcast Lexicon Valley, hosted by Columbia professor John McWhorter. It has taken me way too long to get around to reading his book, The Power of Babel but I am glad that I finally started. I was apathetic toward learning grammar in school, and the more I learn about linguistics, the stronger my opinion that it's a largely pointless subject becomes^[6]. I'm half-joking, but it's funny that as kids, we're taught how to speak and write English "properly" when the reality is that change is the only constant with languages.

The Power of Babel is dense with amusing examples of unusual quirks of languages and how they evolved to reach that point. I wouldn't say it's an English-centric book either. If you've ever wondered why French requires "ne" and "pas" for negation or how to speak formally in Javanese (haven't we all), you will find some great explanations and anecdotes here. Right now, I live in constant anticipation for a way to bring up some of these naturally in conversation. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Hocus Pocus: What is still a fairly common knowledge phrase today for anything magical or nonsensical, has roots in the European Middle Ages and Latin. During this time, it was extremely unlikely for anyone to learn Latin unless they were from a wealthy family or a priest, yet all Christian church services were still performed in Latin, so commonfolk would have a decent amount of exposure to it. Every Sunday, the priest would hold out a piece of bread and recite "Hoc est corpus" during Communion, which translates to "Here is the body". Communion represents a transformation of bread into flesh and blood into wine, and this phrase started to be used to represent any sort of magical incantation. It's easy to see how "Hoc est corpus" eventually morphed into "Hocus Pocus" over time since the people adopting the phrase didn't speak or read Latin.
• Nickname: This is a perfect example of a word that I had never looked at closely enough to realize was strange. As John put it so succinctly in the book, "Whats 'nick' about the name?" It turns out that in an older form of English, the word was "eckname", with "eck" being the old English word for "also". A much clearer meaning! This change occurred through a process called rebracketing. Check out the diagram below to see how we get to "nickname" over time.

  That's only [an] [eckname].
  That's only [a][n eckname].
  That's only [a] [neckname].
  That's only [a] [nickname].
  

  Repeat "an eckname" a few times to feel how easy it is for the "n" to move from the article to the noun.

I can't fully express why, but I absolutely love how unpredictable yet strangely logical these examples are. We can clearly see how the words evolved, but there is no rule to predict why^[7]. Just because "an eckname" can undergo rebracketing doesn't mean that similar words would evolve in the same way.

In & Of Itself by Derek DelGaudio

If you have access to a Hulu account, I highly recommend checking out In & Of Itself. The beginning of the movie(?)^[8] starts with a suggestion to turn off your phone and silence any distractions. I took this request seriously, and I'm glad that I did. If you deliberately give in to immersing yourself in the performance, you won't miss the phone. It just feels wrong to give anything away about precisely what the show is, and if I had known anything beforehand, I might not have watched it. That's honestly one of the biggest takeaways I got from the show. We live in a world where algorithms put things in front of us that they've calculated we have a high chance of liking, and genuine discovery is hard to come by. Grab a glass of wine, turn off the phone and take a small leap of faith. I think its well worth watching.