A short history of digitization

In 1984, BOSS released its first digital delay guitar pedal. The analog delay had existed since the 50's, relying on tape or analog circuits. The main difference between the two is simple and refers to the concept of decay, a loss of quality over time (decay is not usually something musicians or producers are a fan of, but working with tape offered very little choice). A simple delay consists of two main features: feedback and time. Feedback is how many echoes of the original sound occur, and time is the duration of pause between each echo. Both analog and digital delays share these features, with one major differentiating factor: a digital delay has no inherent decay. This means the delay has the ability to play the same sound, over and over, without loss of volume or quality. The way a digital delay handles this task can serve as an analogy for the digitization of all things; an analog signal is transcribed into byte data (each byte representing an attribute of the underlying sound). In this case, the amplitude and length of the sound wave. While it is important to note that some information is lost in the process, with this digital representation of the information, we are able to make exact copies and generate a repetition as many times as we would like.

Of course, the utilization of digital sound doesn't stop at guitar pedals. Despite massive hesitation around the digitization of music, the predominant method for music distribution in the 90's was the compact disk. Fear of peer-to-peer sharing struck the industry. But we all know how that story ends; early 2000's teens spent many afternoons swapping mixed CDs from zippered cases and even grabbing a fresh stack of CD-Rs to burn the  new album. So did the digitization of sound destroy the music industry? I think that requires us to look closely at how the music industry operated at the time. Acknowledging that the industry we are referring to is an industry that kept artists in the 50's and 60's from making even mild returns on massive hits. An industry that prescribed what the public would listen to and when, an industry built around gatekeepers that controlled the flow and distribution of media. So yes, I suppose the digitization of sound did kill that industry. What it paved the way for is, in my opinion, something much more exciting and far more inclusive: the open dissemination of high quality music produced by any artist willing to put in the energy to create it. Of course this comes with its own challenges but I believe we will grow as a society to address these issues, as we have in the past.

Digital autonomy

So far I have been talking about the digitization of a single entity: the sound wave. We could speak similarly of the light waves and DVDs or more generally, in terms of information: weather data, medical records, or traffic. However, there is a far more impactful example in recent history: the digitization of value.

Through the invention of public blockchains, the bitcoin protocol has successfully created the first decentralized (no single point of failure) and trustless (no single authority) store of value. Then, by extending value attribution beyond a ledger model and generalizing the functionality of a public blockchain, Ethereum created an unstoppable system for computation. It is on this and similar blockchains that a wide assortment of industry disrupting digitization is occurring. We have the internet turned on its head by the proliferation of NFTs - the first use case being in digital art, but continuing to expand, representing the ownership of all kinds of goods, both digital and physical. I cannot understate the importance such a system will have on the trajectory of our societal advancement. But the question must be asked: How might these advancements affect our own day to day? The answer is digital autonomy.

In a physical world, we are able to have autonomy over the things we own for the simple fact that those things exist in our purview (our homes, on our desks, etc). The same cannot be said for the digital objects we own or control. You do not inherently own your instagram handle in the same way you own your reusable water bottle. This is because digital objects exist "somewhere else". Although we interact with our digital items just as much as our physical ones, we do not own them; we rent our digital identities from corporations. The blockchain model presents a solution to this problem: a place to store who owns what, without any single entity having control.

It is easy to see the importance with even a simple example. Imagine if I owned my digital name, @fiigmnt, across the internet. Signing into Twitter, it would innately know I am @fiigmnt. Other apps would recognize me as such, “oh you’re fiigmnt”, doing away with the need to choose a handle at all. Things would certainly be much simpler, and seamlessly connecting our real world and digital world identities would arguably feel more “real”. As we continue to grow our digital identities and digital ownership, this model becomes even more important.

Mixed primacy

"Physical prime: an ideology in which value + meaning only exist to the extent they can be traced to a physical source. Digital prime: an ideology in which value + meaning only exist to the extent they can be traced to a digital source" - David Rudnick 2021

A fantastic way of describing our current state of being is David Rudnick's view of mixed primacy, considering how we are constantly living in both the physical world and digital world. Over the past 40 or so years, we have witnessed the blurring of our digital and physical lives. We now live our lives simultaneously in both physical and digital places. Though the experience of both are quite different, this continuous blurring will increase tremendously over the course of the next decade.

In order for our digital autonomy to keep pace with the growth of digital prime, we must each participate in the stripping of power from today’s mega corporations and help in the migration of digital value attribution to trustless and unstoppable data sources.

Our adversaries

I believe we are currently witnessing a peeling back on the layers of establishment - assisted by the digitization of everything. It is in this process that we are able to closely inspect the repugnant ways our society has incentivized truly devastating methods of growth for growth’s sake.

It is time to accept our responsibility, as actors in this society, to design a new system, one where:

Ownership and autonomy are a default state

The costs of distribution and decimation are shared

There is no single point of control or failure over our lives.

This responsibility for action will greatly expand in the coming years as our digital and physical lives continue to blur, powered by the next great wave of unimaginably impactful technology.

// Fiigmnt