bedrock

Bedrock 004 is now in your inbox! We covered:

- "A New Style for a New Internet" by @onchaindom.eth 
- Creator coins @zora 
- @base Batch Demo Day
- @seedclub 11AM cc @peacenode.eth 
- Software is content is TikTok

...and more!

Read and subscribe: https://paragraph.com/@bedrock/Mbxcy6dBVPlmtmrZ1GOg

Threading out some ideas from my essay for /bedrock 👇

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The essay argues that the tech industry is lacking in the way that it thinks about styles, causing a drag on its ability to adapt and bring about new culture.

Architecture for example has a robust, theory-generating culture of critique. It sees style as a moral-aesthetic orientation that manifests and embeds values into our world.

This is why styles in architecture align with social, cultural, and economic paradigms:

Renaissance > early capitalist city-states
Baroque > mercantilism
Neoclassicism > early nation-states
Modernism > industrialization/international socialism

{See Patrik Schumacher's writings on this}

I love the way this meme by @nstlgiaxpress gets at this. Dominant tech aesthetics and references are overwhelmingly Modernist. There's a straight line from Dieter Rams to Jony Ive.

In the essay I note Virgil Abloh is a lone exception, yet its telling his Postmodern ideas have not really been adopted in a meaningful way, as they directly oppose the fundamentals of Modernism (Dada in the Apple Store).

In architecture the height of Modernism was The International Style, which brought us the skyscraper and countless Soviet-era apartment blocks. I argue the interfaces of most Web 2.0 mega-platforms fall into the same patterns of centralized aesthetic flattening and dehumanization.

I argue tech is still stuck at Modernism — a style which architecture rejected in the 1970s as dehumanizing, authoritarian, and fascist. And that this style doesn't fit with the social and cultural potentialities of the new internet being built onchain.