When you see these BAYC monkeys, what are you thinking?
Are you quickly calculating the value of 1 BAYC JPEG = 200 ETH and 1 ETH = $2000 in your mind? Can the future NFT blue-chip market return to its peak? Or are you full of confidence/disappointment in the other blue-chip NFTs you hold? Investors, please don't rush into the rabbit hole of NFT price analysis. Let's take a break and come back to the present, back to ourselves.
After seeing this symbolic image, what kind of landscape does your mind create? Go and see what your mind has generated, just like the random images generated by the generative image AI Stable Diffusion, but this time it's the other way around.
Dig into your preconscious and unconscious: see what your mind is thinking, how it turns the images of BAYC into price charts, "a way of life," "wealth," and how you transform these mental landscapes into understandable cues and express them. Wealth, money, abstract, dope, real, or the remaining memories of the popular hip-hop elements from a few years ago, BApe...
Similarly, when you open the map of The Sandbox, countless memes, logos, and icons flood into your brain.
Symbolic Consumption in Life#
Today, the landscape formed by symbols is everywhere.
When you step into a large upscale shopping mall, you are attracted by the magnificent architecture reminiscent of the Roman basilica. This design is not only breathtaking, but also a miracle of human creativity and capital. Although this is an obvious capitalist concept, in our minds, it is a hymn to human creativity.
As you walk, a faint fragrance slowly infiltrates your consciousness, neither too hot nor too cold, neither too fast nor too slow. You seem to be immersed in the street view from the floor-to-ceiling windows of a high-rise apartment in Manhattan, the aroma of coffee on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, and the fashion sense of Milan Fashion Week. You can't help but imagine yourself standing at the top of the Tower of London, overlooking the entire city.
At this moment, soothing music begins to caress your auditory system. You snap out of your admiration for human creativity and fascination with fragrances. Symbols of various luxury brands come one after another, where leisure and wealth intertwine equally. You know that you can finally indulge in your consumer desires in this basilica, just like them.
These free symbols of aesthetic order, a landscape of consumerism, permeate through smells, sounds, images, and various symbols that stimulate desires, leaving no gaps.
And this constitutes our symbol-consuming society today. In this society, people's consumption is not only to satisfy material needs, but also to satisfy spiritual needs - shaping their social status and identity, a way to escape around nothingness and find identity.
Stepping into the Imaginary Realm#
To further understand the power of these symbols, we can turn to Jacques Lacan, the proponent of the three realms theory. Lacan, based on Freud's psychoanalysis (but with many fundamental differences), has had a significant impact on contemporary psychoanalysis and left-wing philosophical theory with theories such as the mirror stage.
Lacan is most famous for his three realms theory - dividing the world into the "real realm," "symbolic realm," and "imaginary realm." Today, let's focus on the symbolic and imaginary realms. Regarding the imaginary realm, Bruce Fink, a well-known Lacanian scholar, explains it in his book "Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely" as follows:
Lacan calls it the imaginary not to emphasize the dimension of illusion, that is, a dimension that does not really exist, but to emphasize the importance of images for humans and the animal world. Lacan's writings are based on a wide range of disciplines, not limited to psychoanalysis, but also involving experimental psychology, behaviorism, anthropology, and even optics. In exploring the shaping role that images can play for humans, Lacan refers to species closer to us than the chimpanzees mentioned earlier... Chimpanzees obviously played with their own image in the mirror for a while, but they were not fascinated by it, nor were they ecstatic - they quickly exhausted what Lacan called the "uselessness (meaninglessness, emptiness) of the image" and turned their attention to something else.
The biggest difference between humans and animals in this example is that humans become fascinated and repeatedly fascinated by countless images. This pursuit is endless and relentless. Consumers are not only pursuing the images themselves, but also the "jouissance" behind the images. Of course, we won't delve into the concept of "jouissance" today. If you find it complex, understand it as attachment in Buddhist philosophy or desire in positive psychology.
A New Perspective on Web3 Analysis#
Let's conduct a thought experiment. What if we eliminate and disconnect the attributes of the real realm from the goods that are strongly characterized by the symbolic realm? This is something that today's 2D and video games can do, but the gap with the real realm is still too large, and the violence of the real realm reminds you that this is not real. Just like the initial reaction of many "ordinary people" who have not fallen into the rabbit hole of video games: the graphics/game is not realistic enough.
Connecting this visual landscape into a seamless surface - shifting from ideological, reality-based symbolic consumption to holistic, flawless visual consumption with the help of the metaverse. And this doesn't necessarily have to be based entirely on VR/MR/AR, just make the trauma of the real realm less accessible. The images become fuller, the desire for love becomes empty, and the cracks of trauma become smaller and less accessible.
Just like the story in Season 1, Episode 2 of "Black Mirror" titled "Fifteen Million Merits": This episode tells the story of a person living in a virtualized reality world (which can be understood as a mixed reality (MR) world) in reality. In this world, people accumulate tokens by watching advertisements and pedaling exercise bikes to generate electricity, and use these tokens to purchase necessities and entertainment activities. After accumulating millions of tokens, the protagonist decides to spend them to participate in a talent show, hoping to change his life. In the talent show, he meets a girl whom he likes, but she eventually gives up her real dream to become a porn star. The protagonist decides to rebel against the system of this virtual world but is ultimately forced to join it.
When we dissect this story, we can see many interesting things:
🪙 The protagonist accumulates millions of tokens.
📺 Even when lying in bed and wanting to sleep, he is forced to watch advertisements because "your time is very valuable."
💰 The advertisements depict loved ones being objectified and objectifying themselves, selling their bodies and souls.
🚫 This world is like this, and no one can escape.
🏗 Although everyone is unhappy, they are all contributing to this imaginary world.
Does it look familiar?
This deconstruction and nullification of trauma in the real realm may also lead to a reaction similar to the protagonist in "Black Mirror": although the trauma is there, people unconsciously, due to the powerlessness of reality, enter into a cycle of love and desire, pursuing the unattainable jouissance. It's not about changing the system, but about further alienating oneself and joining the system.
So most of the time, no one cares about the utility of meme coins themselves; whether the project behind JPEGs is doing something important is not that important either; whether the metaverse can "empower" the physical economy is not that important. Supply and demand do not always need to correspond one-to-one, especially in postmodern capitalist society, which is often referred to as "premium," "belief," or other spiritual structures.
What matters is not what the creators want to express, nor what the project wants to do. We can also look at our own preconscious and unconscious and see what they have generated. Fundamental analysis is important, but by approaching these topics from a psychological perspective, we can discover more intricate connections and analytical paths.