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https://warpcast.com/~/channel/bedrock

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@onchaindom.eth

Threading out some ideas from my essay for /bedrock 👇 🪡🧵{1/x}

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@onchaindom.eth

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.

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@onchaindom.eth

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}

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@onchaindom.eth

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.

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@onchaindom.eth

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).

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@onchaindom.eth

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.

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@onchaindom.eth

This style aligns perfectly with the current socio-economic reality of the internet: that a handful of major corporations control the web, and frame the habits and interactions of billions of users. And so if we want a new internet, it will need a new style.

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@onchaindom.eth

And so here is where I simply offer a new, non-Modernist reference. One that maybe better reflects the values and intrinsic possibilities of the decentralized web that onchain builders are trying to create.

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@onchaindom.eth

The Arts & Crafts Movement was a counterculture to industrialization in 19th century England that rejected the aesthetic flattening and dehumanizing work that came with the rise of the factory.

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@onchaindom.eth

Critic John Ruskin was its biggest champion. In his "The Stones of Venice", the chapter "The Nature of Gothic" lays out his inspirations for the movement found in the architecture of Medieval Venice. He argues the crudeness and lack of consistency found in Venetian Gothic are signs of a lively and egalitarian landscape of high agency craftspeople, in contrast to the brutal factory culture of Victorian England.

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