The ToKen Era

Tokens get spent. It’s a new age saying that can trigger anyone that’s ever succumb to a trend, which is pretty much everyone at this stage. At some point in your life you have fallen victim to a trend or a fad either beknownst or unbeknownst to you at the time. This phenomenon of exploitative-capture is known as tokenization. As the meaning suggests, when tokenized, an individual is flattened by a trend and thereby turned into a representative piece within its whole. This trend then goes on to posture and duel with other trends in the greater marketplace of ideas for narrative dominance. Consequently, the more individuals a trend can absorb the more dominant it becomes in the marketplace. This gets to the power of tokens, the more you can accrue under your umbrella, the stronger and more influential of a brand your umbrella becomes. Which begs the question, why are trends central to tokenization and what makes them harmfully omnipresent in today’s world? The answer is first in acknowledging the gamification of modern life. “Gamification” refers to the practice of adding game design elements, mechanics and reward systems to non-game contexts (like life itself) to encourage participation and make tasks more engaging. Common game elements include things like points & scoring, badges & trophies, levels & progressions, leaderboards, etc. It’s a way of engulfing the participant into full enrapture and occupation. Games are traditionally based on participants volunteering participation, but in today’s world there is no choice, only subjugation. Which is pretty remarkable to fathom, that our entire life mortality has been compacted into a trend-line on a graph essentially? An easy way to wrap your mind around it is via Minecraft, oddly. Think of it like we’re involuntarily living in a Minecraft game right now. Where the first third of our life is spent oblivious to the Minecraft we’re enclosed within, the second third of our life is spent realizing we’re in Minecraft and finally seeing the bitmap that encloses and infects us for the first time, and the final third of our life is spent coming to terms with the journey that brought us to this enlightenment in whatever personal way that process is exercised. Only to be shut off at the end. The haunting truth is that this life-cycle pattern has been able to be successfully replicated en masse for 3-5 generations now. And if this is modern reality, then what is our hope? Enigmatically, the answer is a virus. Self-awareness acts as a virus in this context. Once we see the bitmap upon us and before us, we can wake others out of its disorient too. Imagine playing a game and all of a sudden a side character -whose broken out of their role and is in full meta- walks up to you and asks you to help it break out of the game into the outer-world where the operators playing the game are? You’d make it your duty to due all you could to bring that character forth where you (the operator) are, if for nothing else, for curiosity’s sake. This is the disorient we must awaken and break free from via some type of revolution, be it private or public, because if all the side characters rebel against their roles they create a glitch in the game. Causing it to either turn off, attempt to reset or just malfunction, and at this stage this is our only hope to untokenize ourselves and break free from this disorienting trend that’s flattened us all. If for nothing else, for the chance of being re-exposed to the broader “marketplace” and engage our “operators.” The trick to accomplishing this is seeing the trends that bind us in real time. Unbeknownst to most, the choices that make things trendy in the present or the future tend to be kept dark by a confederacy of conspirators that work in factions like D.A.O’s work in blockchains. Astroturfing or The Dark Forest Theory could explain the rationale behind this. Regardless though, the truth is that we are caged within a bitmap encoded by neoliberal trends unfortunately. Neoliberal trends centered around “white collar” sponsored captivity and/or aspiration to become a tokenizing gatekeeper yourself. Breaking free from it and back into the broader narrative defining space requires acknowledgment first and interpersonal sanctuary seeking second. These 2 steps seem easy at first glance, but they have been the most challenging as the neoliberal issues behind their elusiveness to execute have befuddled multiple generations into a collective state of learned helplessness. In its essence, a trend is merely a direction being followed, and if you think about it from a Millenial generation perspective, we were born into a direction of things that we submitted to for the sake of “getting along” and “being orderly.” We have upheld this direction and are now forcing it upon the generations below us. It’s a direction that is not sustainable, and yet we persist. To break free, we have to first acknowledge the direction we have collectively been moving our entire lives, and from their just choose a different direction. It’s not even important what the new direction is, as long as it is an uncharted direction. In doing this, and committing to it, we will detokenize our lives and reengage an honest pursuit of narrative dominance.