WHAT HAS MOON BIRDS GOT TO DO WITH STORYTELLING AND WRITING?
MINDBLOWN
That’s the word I’ve been using lately every time my film producer friend feeds me another dollop of information about this phenomenon known as NFTs. What follows below will be an account of more mindblownness as my poor web2 brain tries to comprehend its meaning.
Starting with MoonBirds.
I was told of people buying them. Are they a new avian species? A mysterious bird that breeds on the lunar landscape? Or some creatures birthed from the fertile imagination of a fantasy writer?
They are actually owls. Why they are called moon birds, is anybody’s guess. In the world of NFT, what a creator labels as a species of bird, is what accounts for truth. If moon birds were crows, then they shall be crows. But they turned out to be owls.
Not the whole owl body, mind you. Just the head. Passport-sized. 10,000 of them. Each head differs from the next head by a trait. And the possession of each owl’s head is a prized commodity. People would pay 192, 600 dollars for it.
Wait, did I say dollars?
In the world of the NFT, there are no dollars. There is only ETH. Otherwise known as Ethereum.
Mind-blown.
I began to understand why it’s an effort to make sense of this whole NFT business. It’s the jargon. We are so used to calling dollars, dollars. Or cents, cents. Suddenly the mind is presented with something called Ethereum. If you think about it, it sounds a bit like Vibranium, the exotic alien metal that only exists in a Marvel movie. Or, Unobtanium, another rare element found on an alien planet found only in James Cameron’s Avatar movies.
All these elements ending in “nium” have one thing in common.
They are figments of the human imagination. So, when I read something like Ethereum, which has a rhyme echo with “nium”, the mind automatically relegates the term under the category known as “Fiction”. It takes a while for me to shift those mental gears.
It’s like I have been writing with feathered quills all this time and lamenting the lack of ink and then someone comes along and tells me that you can write on a thing called a tablet, and guess what, you don’t need ink to write.
Mindblown.
I’ve since learned that going “to the moon” means that your asset will reap gargantuan profits. And since owls are natural denizens of the night, and often appear when the moon is full, calling them moon birds would also imply that these particular owls of the digital variety would bless the owners with insane wealth.
I struggled to make sense of this audacious new world. Then one day, it hit me.
The key to making sense of it all is to compare the glossaries of terms. Under one column is the futuristic, next-level way of labeling products and currencies and then relating them to another column filled with terms we are already familiar with.
Hence
Ethereum = Dollars
NFT = Any asset by a creator.
What has all this got to do with writing or for that matter, storytelling?
Regardless of jargon, and platforms, the basic narrative that humans tell themselves never changes. The rise of the internet, the smartphone, and now NFTs, blockchains, are all essentially telling the same big story, with the same Quest and the same Hero. As a writer, I am comforted by the fact that the old rules of Story still apply. There must always be a quest, a hero, and a prize.
The Quest is for freedom. Freedom from censors, freedom from corporation control, broadcast authorities telling you what you should be watching and what will endanger your souls.
The Hero has always been the Consumer. In other words, YOU.
The Prize? Ownership of the creative content.
There’s an entire universe out there written in digital bits and bytes, veiled by a curtain of mystery. I will from time-to-time peel back a bit of the curtain and decipher some of the intricate warp and weft of its tapestry. As in any universe, Big questions will arise. Who created it? What’s the meaning of it all? For me, the meaning is simple.
There is now within your means the ability to simply create, to simply exult in the joy of creating, without being concerned whether or not it will suffer the wrath of any Authority. The only people a creator has to be accountable to, are his or her fans, as it should be. As a creator, your only obligation is to be entertaining, intriguing, provocative, and tell a good story, as all creators and writers have been doing down the centuries, all the way from the Gospel writers to Thousand and One Nights to the Iliad to the Decameron. Unless you are penning articles in your journal or diary, one does not tell stories in a vacuum, with no audience in mind. A story is meant to be shared, because stories are how humans make sense of anything and everything, and we share stories to benefit from the collective wisdom of humanity.
In the future, it will be about the creator and the fans. It will be about liberating the imagination of the creator and having no other obligation other than to honor the fans. We will banish any need to seek approval from a Board of Corporation Suits on the validity of calling an owl a moon bird or justifying the need to create owls in the first place. In one stroke, the suits are exiled. The days when network executives blood-suck creators and force creators to insert product placements in their works of art are over.
Say hello to the Creator’s Economy, where the Creators and Fans are in charge for once.
Mindblown.