We’ve been encouraged to venerate personalities and personas, then place those personalities and personas on platforms that first feed off them and then destroy them. Writers must re-establish the primacy of their texts because it is texts, not personalities, that must endure. To strengthen their texts, writers must weaken, then ultimately shed entirely, their identities.
It will come to seem quaint and retrograde that we lived through an era in which artists had no control over their own platforms and production and in which people other than artists were the ones for whom art was most profitable.
Artists and writers have become too dependent on platforms, fixed identities and the game of linear reputation building. The move away from these things, which is vital for the revivification of art, can be facilitated by precisely the kinds of decentralised technologies that are now emerging.
Everyone is very concerned about AI and how it will affect artists but arguably the implications of decentralised, permissionless, censorship-resistant protocols allowing both free and open publication and direct payment are even more significant.
If there is no ego to reward there is no vanity to exploit.
I reproduce myself without ceasing. I multiply my energy in infinite mirrors. (Jodorowsky, The Sun).
“Tying everything you do and every transaction you make to one singular identity is not only unnecessary, it is a recipe for disaster. It is a road that leads to the dystopian hellscape of social credit scores — the orgasmic dream of every dictator and totalitarian ruler that ever lived."
https://dergigi.com/2020/07/21/true-names-not-required/
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"Paradoxically, pseudonyms can be more powerful than True Names. The best example of this is probably Siddhārtha Gautama — the Buddha. He transformed himself into an idea. The Buddha can’t be killed, even if you kill the person currently known as the Buddha. The pseudonym transcends the individual. We are all Buddha, at least potentially, at least in part."
“Tying everything you do and every transaction you make to one singular identity is not only unnecessary, it is a recipe for disaster. It is a road that leads to the dystopian hellscape of social credit scores — the orgasmic dream of every dictator and totalitarian ruler that ever lived."
https://dergigi.com/2020/07/21/true-names-not-required/
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“To be truly countercultural in a time of tech hegemony, one has to, above all, betray the platform which may come in the form of betraying or divesting from your public online self.”
The idea should obscure and outlive the writer.
Literature must burn the writer for fuel.
Linear identity + reputational constraint = intellectual/artistic stagnation.
the most useful identity is one that can be discarded when it is exhausted
Literature cannot be revivified as long as “the author” exists.