I just took a first look of a rather "raw" display of the STEEM blockchain over at https://steemd.com/.
It is really worthwhile to take a moment and ingest the brutal and utter chaos of our raw common thread of immutable communication and to admire the beauty and the unforeseeable consequences of what it means to take part in creating the roots of a social blockchain that will last for as long as consensus is maintained (TL;DR here's a screenshot to get you started):
If you have not yet read the Otherland "saga" by Tad Williams; it is highly recommended. Predating the broad consumer market breakthrough for massive online games such as World of Warcraft, this 1996-2001 book series projects a future of extremely fascinating and endlessly confusing online worlds that are explored by interacting through increasingly full-body and full-mind emerging interface technologies. What sets Tad apart from other acclaimed writers on the topic of virtual worlds, such as William Gibson or Stanislaw Lem - acclaimed for ther rhetorical finesse and imaginary ingenuity, as they may be - is his unique grasp on the role of gaming and entertainment that drives the development and adoption of these highly immersive technologies. What we see in the gaming market today, with developments such as full-body motion tracking and virtual reality headsets, or the important role of large game engines as drivers of developments way past the limits of the traditional gaming market, certainly seems to prove him right.
One element in the books, however, did always appear odd to me, and I never really made a connection where I had this feeling of "darn; he is right, and this will be such a radical change" that accompanied my reading of most parts of the books.
Each chapter starts out with a somewhat random snippet of communication data that is presented in a "NETFEED/NEWS" section. This is an example from the first book "City of Golden Shadow":
While this can easily be understood as an anology to the constant blubber of communications through media and especially the web, it always appeared as a somewhat dull and ornamental element compared to the remainder of his writing.
However, for some odd reason, fifteen years after reading the books that have had an enormous impact on my thinking and projections about current and future technological developments, I suddenly found a striking resemblance to the confusing NETFEED/NEWS sections when looking at that blockchain excerpt I showed above. And suddenly, I do find myself thinking "darn; he was right...". He was right in highlighting the enormously important role and the abstract beauty of the underlying texture of data. The snippets he provides are like windows that peek "through" the story and show the bare bits and bytes of communication behind that are so utterly chaotic that they often do not even form any coherent information, or even insight, but that are absolutely constitutional to the way that the future that Williams predicited emerges.
In this way, when we are looking at OUR STEEM chain, that endless strain of social DNA that we constitute, we are looking at the atomic information soup that shapes our virtual universe. This was somewhat possible before, looking for example at bare TCP traffic, but the immutability of that blockchain texture, of these words(!), will allow any future beings to trace back the exact shape and raw form of each incredibly tiny and chaotic element of mind that shapes the ever-growing collective memory of linked databases. This really does leave one wondering; how future tribes will consider cause-and-effect, biases, the independence of their consciousness, and - of course - their freedom of will ... !?
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