Web3 is an Emergent New Medium
Author’s bio:
A web3 and DeFi native, Tim also has a decade of experience in media, including as a former filmmaker and distributor. The first film he produced, Here and There, won the Critics Week Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
Movies are as much a projection of moving images on a silver screen — as a projection of the minds of the audience. And the storytelling imperative, that audiences must be able to imagine themselves in the story, holds across all mediums. New media paradigms are created when technological change drives business model change, and together they catalyze a new dominant experience. Regardless, audiences chase their own imagination and desire the entire time, from bigger to ever smaller screens.
Web3 is beginning to fundamentally alter existing relationships in a conceptual sense — between creator, audience, artwork, and forum. This shift in relations amounts to an emergent new medium. We will all recognize the masterpiece of the new medium when it arrives, because it will do the equivalent of allowing regular people to imagine themselves as Luke Skywalker.
Cinema
The silver screen was once larger than life. People once clamored over one another into theatres just to catch a glimpse of moving pictures.
One of the most poignant films about this lived experience is Cinema Paradiso.² Giuseppe Tornatore foregrounded and captured the magic of cinema as a subject, by immortalizing what the medium meant to the regular people of Sicily and to his own coming of age in Bagheria. Tornatore understands that cinema actually lives in the way a young couple on a Friday night feels their desire in the love story on screen.
As a former filmmaker, I’d assert the following provocative statement to you — cinema is, really, the art of captivating the audience with what is “not” on the screen. Imagination. Desire. I’d suggest to you that this may even be the biggest “part” of a movie. Cinema is as much a projection of moving images on a silver screen — as it is a projection of the minds of the audience. Its connection to the philosophy of mind runs deep.
Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, one of my all-time top five, once said in an interview around the release of his film Shirin:
“I believe the identity of the silver screen hinges on audiences, in such a moment that it sees its audience…In other words, at a certain juncture, audiences and the movie become one.”³
And one of my favorite film quotes is by French director Robert Bresson, another of my all-time top five, who wrote, very obliquely —
“The Great Battles…General d M. used to say…are nearly always begun at the points of intersection of the staff maps.”⁴
This is one of the great riddles to follow for the way in. It is cinema’s version of a Zen koan.
Charlie Chaplin could hardly be more different from the poetic Kiarostami or the ascetic Bresson, but he also understood these ideas in a different way. In addition to directing his own films, Charlie was the biggest movie star of his day, and not only because of his enormous talent as a physical actor in the age of silent movies. He also made people laugh in a time of depression. He also almost always played the everyman. He was of the people. The audience identified with and imagined themselves as Charlie.
Universally beloved, Chaplin was also a master of the medium of his times. Cinema is, fundamentally, an analog filmic medium designed for projection. It once was, but no longer is the medium of the times. Cinema Paradiso is not only a film about the magic of projected cinema, it is also a film about memory and the meaning of the past. As such, it can’t help but express nostalgia for time passed and the inevitability of loss, despite the scene near the end admonishing the protagonist — “Don’t give in to nostalgia. Forget about us”. And in 1988, Tornatore must already have at least instinctually sensed the inevitable decline of cinema as a medium. By that time, the first golden age of television had already occurred, a new one powered by cable adoption was just on the horizon, and video was rapidly proliferating in the videotape format war.
The Series
As the small screen slowly took over the limelight from the big screen, through cable and videotape adoption, a new medium began to emerge around the convergence of these technologies. Unshackled by advertisers and censors, HBO pioneered the premium cable series and was the first to harness lightning in a bottle and create masterpieces like The Sopranos. These works elevated the medium as an artform. But as a former filmmaker, again I’d assert a somewhat provocative statement to the contemporary reader — “the series” is resoundingly not cinema. It shares some of the characteristics of cinema as a related visual storytelling medium, in particular the imperative that regular people must be able to imagine themselves in the story. They still must be able to identify with flawed but altogether human antiheros like Tony Soprano or Heisenberg. But the series is its own medium designed for the small screen.
But perhaps the most important distinction is that premium video series are the dominant medium of the mass market subscription-based business model. Cinema is not. Indeed, the series was originated by this business model and continues to be sustained by it. And with the rollout of broadband, web2 then optimized the medium toward its logical telos. Netflix is the apotheosis of the dominant business model of subscription-based premium video in the broadband web2 media paradigm. It is critical to recognize that the subscription business model drove the medium from the very beginning. One might go as far as to say the subscription business model sometimes incentivized the medium toward addictive behavior in way that cinema did not, openly acknowledged in the rise of binge watching.
As Marshall McLuhan wrote, “the medium is the message.”⁵ So, to continue to pull the thread further, it is also worth interrogating why subscriptions have been the dominant business model for premium video. One partial explanation is that the frictions of legacy payment rails and repeat point of sale, as well as the far greater bankability of recurring revenues combined to drive the media industry to converge on the subscription model. Emerging web3 technologies challenge several of these financial premises. But another compelling explanation is that digital media proliferation created so much distraction, and new push-and-pull dynamics, that discovery became the crux of the problem and made the creation of persistent brands and recognizable franchises the dominant general strategy of capturing attention at scale.
A New Medium
Nevertheless, Netflix’s share price is now down over 65% from all-time highs reached less than a year ago⁶, indicating that the media paradigm it symbolizes is long in the tooth. McLuhan also wrote of “that great pattern of being that reveals new and opposite forms just as the earlier forms reach their peak performance.”⁷ Social media and gaming, including their integrated forms, have been undeniably winning in the market share for attention. But it is hard to assert that that either have reached a similar apogee; rather they seem likely to only increase in influence in a future that is both more interactive and more immersive. Likely, they will continue to integrate with other rapidly growing technologies. It also seems likely that the continuation of the trend toward mobile as the primary screen will increasingly call the dominant medium into question, including through the convergence of web3, 5G, and perhaps even AR technologies.
To some readers, this may be starting to sound like a description of the metaverse, however that is not the intention of this essay. The metaverse has been described by leading thinkers as “real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds…experienced persistently…”⁸ As discussed today, the metaverse is often envisioned as a persistent, seemingly all-encompassing continuation and even acceleration of the fragmentation of reality described by postmodernism. This essay is rather focused on something much more specific and much closer at hand, visual storytelling as an artform and the similarities and differences of its expression across the dominant mediums of the times. It is an attempt to explore how to break through the noise and connect to human beings at scale in a new medium, and in a coming world that might be even more fragmented and disorienting than the present day.
Web3 alone, by presenting fundamentally new possibilities for business models, and by incorporating internet communication technologies to elevate community, is beginning to fundamentally alter existing relationships in a conceptual sense — between creator, audience, artwork, and forum. This shift in relations is likely to catalyze fundamental changes in the media paradigm. And a new paradigm will have its own native medium. Over time, that native medium is likely to become dominant, and it will likely be mobile-first, repeating the pattern of the last shift from bigger screen to smaller screen.
It is hard to have awareness in real time of such transformations in the way we experience reality. David Foster Wallace phrased this type of phenomenon memorably in the following parable:
“There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys, how’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?”.⁹
We aren’t yet fully aware of what this emergent new medium will look like, or what new types of human experiences it will create. What we do know from history is that when a work in the new medium is expressed masterfully, it will captivate the masses of its time as Charlie Chaplin and Tony Soprano did. It will be so compelling that it wins over sceptics and heralds a new age. It will also share characteristics of other visual storytelling media, as well as something very old and universal. In creating Star Wars, George Lucas famously distilled and internalized Joseph Campbell’s anthropological study of comparative mythology across cultures.¹⁰ Star Wars works as a movie not only because it tapped into this epic storytelling structure deeply ingrained in human nature. It works because the audience also imagines themselves on the hero’s journey as Luke Skywalker. The masterpiece of the new medium will do the equivalent of allowing regular people to imagine themselves as Luke Skywalker.
With the emergence of NFTs, web3 is just starting to break into the mainstream cultural consciousness. But it is still struggling mightily with narratives around mass adoption. It is fair to say that, in general, regular people do not yet care about web3. And if we are being honest, it is even fair to say that some of them actually hate web3. As a former filmmaker, I’d assert that they don’t care because they do not imagine themselves in the story. They do not yet see it as their story.
Enabling them at scale to start to start to see it as their story will require a few things at least. It will require escaping the pure pay-to-play model. It will require giving them the power to express their authenticity. And it will require artfulness in allowing them to imagine they are on the screen, on the stage, or on the field. Technologically, this means new primitives as well as new applications. Combined with existing web3 infrastructure, these new technologies will go some way toward creating new types of human experiences — and ultimately a new medium for the masses.
FRIDAY is working on several unique technologies and tools to continue to advance this new web3 medium forward.
- Charles Chaplin, The Immigrant, Lone Star Corporation. 1917.
- Giuseppe Tornatore, Cinema Paradiso, CristaldiFilm. 1988.
- Khatereh Khodaei, “Shirin as Described by Kiarostami”, 2009.
- Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematograph (Notes sur le cinématographe), 1975.
- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Chapter 1, 1964.
- NFLX: Time of Writing: 236.98 9/20/2022 | ATH: 700.99 11/17/2021
- McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
- Matthew Ball, Framework for the Metaverse, 2021.
- David Foster Wallace, This is Water, 2005.
- Joseph Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1949.
