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It’s official: the full title of our upcoming book is “Real Fake – Playing with Reality in the Age of AI, Deepfakes and the Metaverse”.
“Real Fake” is our take on synthetic media and the follow-up to our 2008 book “Me the Media”. Real Fake is about how humans continuously manipulate reality and how new digital technology tools enable us to go one step further in this ancient game. This includes modern phenomena like conspiracy theories such as QAnon, Deepfakes, and fake news, but also virtual humans such as CGI Influencer Lil Miquela and virtual worlds like Fortnite.
Will DAOs Replace Corporations?
“If DAOs really are the future, if they end up supplanting joint-stock corporations as the best and most common way to organize economic activity, then I believe key early experiments like NounsDAO have a good shot at retaining their value. […] DAOs are basically the opposite of this. They believe “ask the audience” is the winning strategy, and if you set up the right decision-making systems, collective wisdom is greater than individual vision.”
Interesting read about the NounsDAO and why DAOs might replace corporations.
The NFT Scammers Are Here
“Collectors have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of NFTs; sometimes, the community helps claw them back […] It seems almost paradoxical that a space whose users are generally fluent in traditional cybersecurity can become victims so easily. But in the NFT space, where a culture of community, vibes, and clicking fast on good deals rule, it is the socially-minded scams that are the most compelling. Scammers, whose ploys all depend on gaining a victim’s trust, exploit the same instincts that make the NFT space more a tight-knit community of friends than an assemblage of individual traders.”
Where there is money to be found, criminals will try to steal it . So no surprises here. I guess will hear a lot more about these scams in the upcoming year.
TikTok Trolls Are Creating Deepfakes
“A network of inauthentic TikTok accounts claiming to be “transracial” are using stolen videos of young creators and deepfakes – deceptive videos created or altered with artificial intelligence or machine learning – in order to promote transphobic and racist sentiment on the platform.”
Tokens Are a New Digital Primitive
“Tokens are digital primitives that can be generalized to represent almost anything– money, art, photo, music, text, code, game items, control, access, and whatever people dream up in the future. […] Tokens are the atomic unit around which a new era of the internet is organized.”
Great stream of thoughts by Chris Dixons about why we are still in the early days of tokens.
On The Internet We Are Always Famous
“Never before in history have so many people been under the gaze of so many strangers. Humans evolved in small groups, defined by kinship: those we knew, knew us. And our imaginative capabilities allowed us to know strangers—kings and queens, heroes of legend, gods above—all manner of at least partly mythic personalities to whom we may have felt as intimately close to as kin. For the vast majority of our species’ history, those were the two principal categories of human relations: kin and gods. […] But now consider a third category: people we don’t know and who somehow know us. They pop up in mentions, comments, and replies; on subreddits, message boards, or dating apps. […] The Era of Mass Fame is upon us. […] The Star and the Fan are prototypes, and the Internet allows us to be both in different contexts. In fact this is the core, transformative innovation of social media, the ability to be both at once.”
Important article. The idea that everyone wants to be famous on the Internet is not only a psychologically destabilizing experience but also a power we should not have.
MUST READ: Why Are NFTs Important?
Andrew Steinwold, managing partner at Sfermion, the world’s first investment firm focused on non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and related infrastructure, posted an interesting thread /presentation on Twitter that answers the question “Why are NFTs important?”
Contact
Playing with Reality is a weekly newsletter in which SogetiLabs’s Research Institute VINT examines the future where synthetic reality becomes part or our objective reality. We investigate the impact of new technology on people, organisations and our society. If you have any questions or comments, do not hesitate to contact us. You can reach us at vint@sogeti.com.
