The Alpha Trap

What is “non-fungible”? In using digital technology creatively, fungible is not what Cryptoknot is.

Going back, money, represented as pressed images on coins; the “coin of the realm”; became associated with printing, and, after movable type, the idea that the recited arts of the hall and theater could be held as a culture's value, in books, followed.

After the book, the tradition of recital moved to the technology of recording, and the conductor and director and the instrumentalist, and even the recording device itself, took on intermediary roles as producers of art: not its creator, but producers of fungible likenesses of creations.

Anything whose use is distributed across a system sufficiently to be unalterably identified as that system is a fungible thing. Its value goes up and down with the system's needs.

The common Graphic User Interface that every personal digital device uses to image its screen comes from this tradition of virtual value representing something else. The visual aspect of the thoughts you are reading right now exists at the whim of a technology made for making fungible things. Currently, the digital photograph is making images the meta language of mankind.

The concept of the NFT (Non Fungible Token) has recently been introduced to acknowledge the range of unique things that exist as identities that digital systems today have the capacity to tokenize; meaning, they are made individually immutable by their unique metadata.

In digital memory, even as things are copyable, cryptography represents the origin of their value. NFT is a reaction to the “digital fungible” (as a “thing”) appropriating rareness in reproduction form, copied or performed, after the emergence of blockchain technology led to the expectation that ownership of metadata has a collectible fungible value; like money.

From the point of view that the digital technology revolution is in Alpha development, this locks this stage in an emergence loop. What is happening is that the conditioned response to exchange, inserted into the Alpha stage to provide “proof of concept” in the startup of a distributed technology reward system for blockchain (Bitcoin), never meant to be about building something that continued the old familiar functions of fungible identities, has stunted progress.

This is now embedded and is closing the door to the Beta level where pure distributed interconnectivity can come into its own. Forward progress has already been overwhelmed to where the physical world of objects and digital world of thought transfer are taken for granted, like background music in an elevator, in favor of searching the medium for valuables.

The blockchain concept has a fundamental role to play in transitioning out of the “token” attraction of the Alpha stage, into the universal use of distributed knowledge and consensus of a Beta stage capability. But forward progress needs to incorporate non-binary technology to regain the creativity needed to get there.

This is Cryptoknot: a study in non-binary topologic vector analog cryptography mnemonics that originated in observational protocols that are purely analog and meant for output as vector graphic geometry in either physical or software memory form.

Cryptoknot is fully operational as a maker-based geometric structure, in Alpha development, as a well defined NFT concept designed to work within the stage of device adaption that identifies the systemic trap of most digital platforms created under the use of ASCII protocols, but capable of bypassing their machine dependency. This is where the Beta stage begins.