Whole Earth Theory

There used to be a single gargantuan landmass where everything took place. The supercontinent of Pangea saw the first land-dwelling lifeforms crawl out of the murky depths and evolve into everything we know.

And then, as all things do, Pangea was unbundled. It broke apart into the continents we know today, and the critics have clamored for its return ever since.

I’m starting to see a lot of conversation around super-apps out there: from Elon attempting to place every interaction of our lives under X’s yoke to Zuckerberg’s failed play at holding the metaverse hostage, even our own subtribes of regens, degens, and decentralization maxis devolved into tribalism in the darkest points of the bear market. For once, it’s been abundantly clear that web3 doesn’t fix this.

Is this all a natural progression for new ideas? Or is this continental drift towards the centralized, or consolidated, an issue of the mind and soul?

Does the theory of the Super App, be it X or Ethereum, hold any water?

Capture (Convergence)

You know what today’s internet looks and feels like. The ads, the subscriptions to everything past toilet paper, the struggle to make a genuine connection with anyone but the algorithms’ favored few. That part we all know.

It is also the internet of diversity, for good as well as bad.

I see people realizing that the only thing left once automation takes over the world will be the storytellers: X threads, TikTok memes, even DAOs; they’re all our collective effort at saying, “My story is worth sharing.”

We built an economy around attention, and we’re starting to see the consequences, compounded by a looming global financial crisis. People are swarming around everything they might consider unique or noteworthy and latching onto it with everything they’ve got.

We’ve been through this before. And I don’t mean just as humans. We’re back in Pangea, baby; when the continents drifted far enough apart to cut off communications among them, we saw a similar situation to what our society is currently experiencing.

Australia and Madagascar, more specifically, as two of the most isolated locations, saw an explosion in diversity, followed by a consolidation into what has since become these locations’ otherwordly fauna and flora. Look at a Lemur or a Baobab tree and find anything in common with a Koala and a Gympie-Gympie; I dare you.

Speciation is a powerful driver of innovation, media, and money, and that’s because it’s the perfect petri dish for the two main forces at play when we talk about anything creative:

• There’s the divergent stage where we try new shit out (like a new interaction beat, a new sound, or a new aesthetic),

• Then there’s the convergence of identifying and doubling down on the stuff that works.

So, when our supercontinent broke apart, it makes sense that the places with the least influence from other locations (i.e., the islands) would be the most “creative” to find their unique identity. Similarly, that’s how urban tribes have worked ever since the first greaser grabbed a tub of hair wax.

The online niches of today are the same as last century’s urban tribes, just quicker, more deeply characterized, and fueled by the hitherto unheard-of speciating power of memes. The real punks wish they had the memetic power of internet aesthetics like Frogcore. And it’s because of this new medium, that we can diverge and converge around beliefs and vibes at Mach speed.

I’ve often alluded to nature and planets in these pieces because I’m a firm believer in the storytelling power of the places we inhabit. A city, a mountain, an internet forum, or a zine shape us in the same way we shape them. The end media is but a reflection of our transitory micro-hiveminds.

I don’t think the Whole Earth Catalog would’ve had as significant an impact on today’s culture had it not been for the million other Zines it inspired to launch. As I’ve said in the past, the real power of tastemakers comes from awakening the same voice in other people, not their own words in particular.

And for the WEC specifically, I think what they started goes beyond their identity as a cultural magazine. Sure, there had been other zines before, but what Stewart Brand et al. launched went beyond just commenting on their ideas and projects. They made the “Zine” a thing. What I mean by that is that they created the "what" and "when" of Zine identity and their accompanying micro-hiveminds (otherwise known as subcultures, urban tribes, etc).

Without the Whole Earth Catalog, I wholeheartedly believe cultural magazines may never have evolved into the entirely different concept that is a Zine. And without those, there’s no medium to propagate and align urban tribes. The distribution vehicle is the alignment that ties these tribes together and shapes their identity. We need a centralizing force, the convergence, to offer a vehicle for these movements.

But this also comes with a fair measure of gatekeeping, clique behavior, and exclusion. It’s well known how urban tribes can absorb a person to the point of them sarificing their identity as a whole to the collective, or the opposite, yet equally common scenario where some people aren’t seen as “cool”, “revolutionary” or “pretty” enough to join in the first place.

Does it need to be that way? Are we Geeks destined to wait in line as the sociopaths come in and bleed our cultural movements from the inside?

https://x.com/rafathebuilder/status/1668946959917367299?s=20

Bringing this back to the super-app conversation, are we supposed to let the platforms capture our attention, scrolling time, and behaviors instead of branching out into new and better places?

Culture (Divergence)

Yeah, I’ve also read Peter Thiel’s “Zero to One,” and it is true that under the conditions we’ve nurtured in our society, every place for capture, be it financial or of power, will tend to centralize around the biggest players.

It is also true that no one accounted for Culture as a driving force because, when it was written, it was hard to measure and harness. Things have changed since; we now have a way of quantifying and wielding media and culture beyond just the attention metrics.

If there’s one tangible good thing to come out of web3, it is the suite of tooling that enables open-source software (communities included) to proliferate, branch off, and monetize their activities in a way that’s actually sustainable and attributable to them.

Splits, multisigs, transferrable ownership, gated experiences, onchain royalties, and many more; all of these, even if not used to their max today, have made the life of subcultures a lot easier, more understandable, and immensely more scalable.

And that’s because culture in itself is a decentralizing force, in contrast to the centralizing force of capture that I explained with the Zine example above.

The “getting it wrong a thousand times, so that one may work” part of culture building can be harnessed and measured through proper tooling, and it helps communities tap into the good of consolidation, without having to gatekeep their benefits in fear of losing their edge.

In other words:

1. A Zine starts a subculture, and that subculture grows, until it’s monetizable, and it almost immediately loses its charm when tribalism and tokenism rear their ugly faces. That’s the way it used to be.

2. Today, whenever a subculture (like a DAO, an urban tribe, or a meme) scales to the point where this conflict arises. We have the right examples and understanding to unbundle the community and its value so that there are now two instead of one, or negative one.

We needed the consolidating force to have culture and capture in the first place, but we need the branching off so that the tribe doesn't cave in on itself.

https://x.com/peace_node/status/1793305669925286154

Capture and Culture are opposing forces in this whole song and dance that we call innovation (of ideals, of experiences, of products). They’re the friction to use a new platform and the drive to migrate when all your friends have started using it. They are both needed and play crucial roles in everything we do. And up until recently, they were the two forces dictating the game.

But I believe LLMs have accelerated a new player that we hadn’t been able to crack in centuries.

Pangea Ultima

It’s been predicted that one day, today’s continents will converge into Pangea Ultima, a new form, yet familiar. The supercontinent will be back, and the cycle will probably begin anew.

https://twitter.com/K41R0N/status/1637641225242066944

So, too, will the current moment drift and clash into a new generation of super-apps, the most promising of which is the new interpretation of a front-end-less internet thanks to LLMs. What happens when you no longer need to anticipate someone’s friction points to drive conversion to your website? How can retail and software brands compete when it’s all going to be driven by OpenAI’s favored few? (Notice how history rhymes).

The answer, same as always, will be the stories we tell around brands. I have hammered this point home several times, and every passing day, I watch it unfold. But for the non-marketers out there, here’s why you should care:

When was the last time you wore your Versace sunglasses? Don’t have a pair of those? How about Prada? Or Ray-Ban? I’m more of a Persol guy myself.

If you know anything about the sunglass industry, you’ll know I’m talking about the same company behind all of these frames. The only reason we prefer one over the others is how we see ourselves in their brand.

But, as I mentioned above, as a result of culture, Brand is almost impossible to measure reliably. Ask a thousand marketers what they think a brand is, and you’ll get 999 different answers, and that’s only cause the last one read the first one’s blog.

We can’t put a finger on it the same way we’re finding the tooling to channel culture, and we probably never will. That’s because a “brand” means something different to every beholder. It speaks to each of us at a personal level and promises us the solution to problems only we know we have.

Not everything is lost, though. Similar to how creator and community tooling are driving the decentralizing force of culture to allow for smarter and quicker vehicles, I believe the medium for Brand is also around the corner.

I’m talking about the protocol: the DeFi code, DAO governance, and even the data language that allows us to read the same email on 6 different platforms. I believe the infrastructure and app layers are converging towards a point that also allows for culture and capture to become the same.

Which means our ways of telling these stories will inevitably need to become structured and composable, like software, to allow us to pool around our tribes and evolve them in a way that lets something else shine through:

For example: What makes Metalabel’s drops different from the Whole Eart Catalog we talked about above or your run-of-the-mill contemporary Zine like “Where is the Cool"? The Protocol.

It’s in the name; Metalabel has created something entirely new and different from previous attempts at proliferating Internet media thanks to a unique combination of culture and capture devices:

• It’s the way the drops are announced through every participant and community.

• It’s in the way splits are distributed among creators and how they even left the door open for new ones in the future.

• It’s in the New York-meets-Berlin vibe they carry with them wherever they go.

They have everything a Zine should have, but protocolized, understood, and replicable ad infinitum. They have managed to build a moat for neither culture nor capture, but for a brand protocol anyone can build on top of and still “belong” to their clique.

When discussing my CAPTCHA moments piece a couple months ago, I noticed most people would misunderstand what I said and think I was saying “Capture”, which, in retrospect, end up being just about the same.

So, I chose to reframe my thinking around what capture actually means, not just in the context of crypto and web3, but as an overall measure of how the internet runs.

In the end, I defined Capture as any activity that flows from the participant to the platform (DAO, ML model, Social Graph, Community, etc.)

With that in mind, it felt fair to think of how this relationship is rarely one-sided. We use our platforms for a reason: we seek to connect, to learn, to enjoy, or to transform the world. Above all, our way of using platforms can only be defined as the Culture we create both in them, and through them.

You’re seeing how this loose collection of thoughts started to take shape into this piece. At the moment of writing, OpenAI just released a suite of tools and integrations that promise to unravel the internet we’ve been used to, new framing devices for an ever-compounding amount of information. It’s going to be exciting to behold.

But leaving it at just that left a sour taste in my mouth; it’s not only about who builds the most seamless or nurturing experiences, but who learns to tap into both culture and capture to open up new ways to engage online (and onchain).

With Elon’s release of Grok, I had the final piece of the puzzle. Twitter has effectively transformed from the internet’s town square into a church of sorts, where we all gather and find new meaning in the interpretation of the words that we speak into the void, albeit in the cringiest way possible.

The Protocol is about who can codify their moat the best and who’s the most thoughtful in adopting the new behaviors and ways of connecting we’re constantly in search of.

Whether you agree, disagree, or outright despise the era we’re getting into; there’s no denying there’s gonna be a lot of power in understanding what makes your particular watering hole special and unique.