The memes and meaning behind the DOGETalks Cryptoeconomics Summit poster.
Day two of Dogecon is going to focus on crypto-economics, a topic I’m about as familiar with as I am with quantum physics — I know of it, some basic principles, a couple terms and key names and yet I don’t feel comfortable ever saying “Quantum Physics” in a sentence.
A love of anthropology, which I know slightly more about than any kind of physics, inspired me to use icons from the middle east, where some of the earliest recordings of math, ledgers and ridiculous story-telling were made.
Why is this? Well stick out your thumb and hitch a ride forward through human history from the rough sculptures and cave paintings I used in the first event poster, to a time when Cuneiform and Hieroglyphics were widely used. The Sumerians and the Egyptians started writing down damn near everything around five thousand years ago, which is why we have such a well-etched pictograph of their lives and histories. In our new culture of nodes, miners and ledgers, we can truly appreciate some of the archaic basics of information technology everything else has been built upon.
There are two ways to get information to last a very long time, one is to replicate it a whole bunch and the other is to pound it into a giant rock face. We pound and replicate in an effort to relate, whether it’s to show how much money you made from grain sales last year, what happened during the last flood or who has the best king, you need to write stuff down if you want to keep it around.
If you come a little closer in time to Pompeii, you will discover a city where the citizens used the walls of buildings like billboards to advertise their thoughts and feelings about love, politics and other people. One notoriously misquoted example graffiti from Pompeii is thought to have read “Everyone writes on walls except me” but in fact is closer to “I’m amazed, O wall, that you have not fallen in ruins, you who support the tediousness of so many writers” which means that there were shit-posters long before the internet was ever conceived. Along with trolling there were political ads, both negative and positive, as well as rumors and gossip.
Now we have an expansive network of computers that can transmit a message nearly everywhere, but there are still those who are left out. A culture of skepticism and sarcasm has built up around a core community of internet users but what about those on the sidelines? the sort of people who would be utterly confused about what even is Dogecon? Like a philosophy major reading an actuarial textbook, there are just too many levels of experience and information for an intelligent person to understand. At least the walls of Pompeii were freely accessible and visible to everyone going about their daily lives, no matter who they were and as long as they could see and read and weren’t slaves.
I fear the growing divide between those of us who make technology a big part of our lives, know the lingo and can follow discussions, and the people took a different path — like professional skier or package delivery person. I never thought I’d say this, but we might need more walls to bring us together, just not the ones on Facebook.
On a lighter note, delightfully, one of the most commonly written words found in Pompeii is “felicter” which means to wish one well. “Felicter Pompeii” is a common one.
We have our own equivalents - Much Wow, Such Fun is universally positive. Everyone can appreciate a good Doge.
When you realize that the cultures and thoughts of ancient people weren’t too much different from ours you start to appreciate the myths and stories of the era on another level. I included characters on this poster from one of the oldest surviving works of literature: The Epic of Gilgamesh.
Many of the tropes of Gilgamesh transcend the years between the people in ancient Sumeria and us: There’s a wild man who comes out of nowhere and suddenly finds himself after having sex with a prostitute, and I know what you’re thinking — that’s totally catcher in the rye. Then, at some point a goddess gets pissed off and sends a bull to kill the guy who spurned her. This rings true to a common occurrence in dating where, when you turn someone down they then resort to insults. The romantic equivalent of “You can’t fire me, I quit!” but more like “You’re too ugly for me anyway” but back then it was just “You can’t reject me if I send THE BULL OF HEAVEN to KILL YOU.”
Things don’t change, but the way we do things does. For all that crypto-economics has brought to the world I think it needs to remain approachable and accessible in order for everyone to understand how it’s going to change their lives. If this is really as amazing as memes tell me, there should be more people on this ride. After all, how hard is it to find some way to relate?
For more information on the event check it out on our website.
