The Power of Digital / Physical Objects - Pt II
IV. The Hybrid Object and Mandate for Action
The digital object introduces to the physical object a new temporal dimension as well as an expanded field of traceable and evolving relations. This capacity makes it possible to create relationships between a set of objects as well its physical and digital milieu. Further, the capacity to add a number of different types of languages and modes of representation makes it possible to further frame and set up a mandate for relating to the digital and physical object. In the process, it becomes less productive to speak of a distinction between digital and physical objects and more useful to begin discussing hybrid objects.
The hybrid object requires those who encounter and interact with it to have faith in its language, capacity, and mandate. This faith rests on believing that others will relate to the object in a similar manner. This belief is largely driven by feeling that others will see the capacity of the object to act as a tool, status symbol, and token of exchange within a system of hybrid objects and outside of that system with other tokens of value. This faith rests in part on a belief that success in both the digital and physical realms can be combined. The hybrid object is then believed to be effective in both realms simultaneously when united via a common cause or theme that is expressed at the intersection and in translation between the two realms. It is further supported by a belief that economies that exist in each can be enhanced and amplified through their interaction. This is of particular interest as the digital is transforming the labor force through its capacity to make physical objects more efficient both internally through how they are designed with digital adds and integrations as well as externally through how they communicate with each other and with computational devices to make their operation more efficient and ultimately sustainable.
In the next phase of the evolution of this relationship, these objects have to be aligned via energy, activity, labor, synchronicity, efficacy, and sustainability. The generative capacity of the data and of engaging that object will define the difference it can make in the world. In this sense, the true capacity of the hybrid object is to improve quality of life. It must contribute to fulfilling a singular and collective necessity through taking advantage of the capacity of the digital to align different relationships to that differential force. Ultimately, it has the effect of reducing entropy through what becomes legible as a narrative, addressability, and orientation. Such a capacity can be used to integrate disparate people and forces that have been fragmented and denigrated by the current late capitalist system. In this sense, the hybrid object presents the possibility of designing a new system that integrates both dominant economic forces and sources of capital with marginalized people and places. Such a hybrid local and global, physical and digital network would redirect capital to the places where it is most needed while still providing profit for existing stakeholders in the late capitalist system.
A. Tool For Change
Having developed a stance between the physical and digital object, it then becomes possible to see a broader orientation to an expanded hybrid field. This orientation sets up the possibility for acting on this hybrid field. It creates room for understanding one’s purpose and opinion from this point of view. Such purposes and opinions are naturally as diverse as the general population. Even within the context of a particular point of interest such as a cultural genre, these points of view are as varied as the audience of a concert. They do, however, both independently and collectively, define how one fits within this field. They define what one does to make this field one’s own – ranging from carving out a niche or putting on a costume to actively manipulating and even owning portions of the field.
The way in which people do so has particular consequences for others. This is for the most part true if one is in a position of power to exert or affect systemic change. It is in this context that it is important to ask how the hybrid object can encode or mandate a way of acting. It is to ask how the hybrid object can dictate a way of relating to and being situated in the world that might, in some cases, go against how someone could act if left to their own devices. This encoding would occur via how the hybrid object addresses and modifies language. It would do so at a number of levels that range across the digital and physical as well as across different locales and scales. More specifically, it would occur across the following levels: 1) states of hybrid objects; 2) ownership structures and distribution; 3) ways that it is inscribed in time; 4) specific contractual obligations; 5) the language of that object and its content; 5) the meta-relations such as a theoretical understanding; 7) the underlying code that can define future operations and level of automation; 8) the things to which it points in the world; and 9) the means of delivering that hybrid object and where it lives in the broader stack.
Acting on these different levels creates a tremendous capacity for agency. Such a capacity is largely contingent on a sufficiently large number of people being interested in engaging these different levels both in an active manner and passively when engaging a representation of other’s engagement. This latter group is particularly important because they become the consumers of hybrid objects. They become the readers, debaters, and collectors who support a web of meaning around these objects that situate them in the world as they relate to people, real estate, and community. They would have the capacity to validate the work of those who might be setting the terms and creating the mandate for what a hybrid object is and hopes to accomplish. They would, in turn, have the opportunity to represent their collection as well as its consequences in the world. In this sense, they might form a museum of change and the objects that trace that change that ultimately become a currency.
B. Temporality Dictating Behavior, Ownership, Treatment, and Future Accomplishments
Unlike a physical object, a hybrid object’s temporality is not strictly external. It has the capacity to trace an evolving narrative that a human or group imposes. It can embed a set of past and future actions that can actively reflect how people relate to that object as well as how it is valued. This evolution – and more specifically how the object affects and is affected by it milieu – can trigger specific actions. These actions may, in turn, be contractually binding. It could take the overall gain in an object’s value and distribute those gains diversely across space as well as owners of that object. In this sense, the hybrid object could become a highly targeted investment vehicle. Buying an object means both a physical and digital trace as well as the thing, action, transformation that it points to that can ultimately contribute to that object’s overall value. This process would further enhance its capacity to transform both the physical and digital milieu. This process would allow hybrid objects to become new “tools.“ They could reach their full potential through transforming parts of the world that seem unable to progress or address pressing problems that seem intractable.
The architecture of such hybrid objects has yet to be fully elucidated. Significant investment in designing how hybrid objects are structured is required. Such an architecture would have to be designed with an eye towards the capacity of the hybrid object to positively impact conditions in the world in an authentic rather than contrived manner. This would require a broad open space where initiatives, dreams, and representations could come together as objects through collective input. It would be a space where hybrid objects could be collectively owned and authored. Any attempts to adhere to a regime of private ownership of such a creative marketplace would only diminish the value of the objects and their revolutionary potential.
V. Contractual Relationships, Mission-Driven Organizations, and Physical Artifacts
The capacity for a hybrid object to dictate actions through a contract over time would require an organization that would be capable of writing these contracts, selecting a mission, bringing together a community around that mission, and producing a digital trace and a physical trace in the world. This organization would be responsible for the configuration of the hybrid object. The specificity of that configuration in terms of how it relates to the physical world and what physical and digital assets are brought together as part of the hybrid object would play a significant role in determining that object’s value. At the same time, it would be essential to determine the economy of that authoring organization. This would involve determining who and how that object is written and then authorized and exchanged. This would be a matter of putting an investment to work in a hybrid physical-digital milieu with an eye towards a return on investment for the investor and a broader community. This would involve animating the object through events, representation, and action. It would make the object performative.
It will then become essential to locate that performance and it’s current and future home – both physically and digitally. At the same time, it will be essential to structure this relationship. Through that structuring, value will be given to that object as a means of defining, expanding, and giving hierarchy to stakeholders. This in turn will allow for a broader definition of their engagement. Each will be given a different level of access to those traces that are connected to and inscribed in the physical objects and one‘s relationship to those objects. This will ultimately describe an expanded and distributed ownership structure of various components of the hybrid object. This would further revolutionize the capacity of the hybrid object to create community.
VI. Digital Objects as a Tool for Change
In the end, it is essential for those who wish to engage a hybrid object to determine the extent to which they are comfortable with change and, more specifically, whether they really want the current system to transform through the capacity of hybrid objects to operate differently than either physical or digital objects currently do. In this sense, we must ask what we want the politics of the hybrid object to be. This question would follow a history of both how objects are situated within cultures as well as how artists have actively manipulated this situatedness through work that challenges and creates new hierarchies. This process creates room for people to engage at a range of levels and as aligned with their particular belief system and worldview. It is a matter of aligning a specific often local condition with global attention via the marketplace on which that object is exchanged. This relationship becomes a matter of contractual obligation.
Blockchains and tokenization offer a unique opportunity to structure this relationship. On one had, they support creating and maintaining these objects in a decentralized manner. On the other, they offer the capacity for guaranteeing authenticity of the object as well as any additions that might be made. They support a community that comes together around a language that supports enforceability of contracts and value. This community can also come to play a vital role in determining how the impact of an object is measured. In many ways, it will become essential for these communities to define what measurability means and how it relates to the broader value of the object. This can occur in a variety of manners and at different skills, arenas, and levels. It is tied to the broader differential nature of the hybrid object ranging from the capacity to record and track to the capacity to recall the smallest difference. In this sense, change is not monolithic, but can be measured at the level of the individual. Doing so ultimately places some value of the object in its summary capacity. It creates a unified point of focus and representation of a complex situation. In this sense, when the digital object is not just a stand in for a physical object and embraces the full capacity of the digital web of relations, it becomes an expanded object that both tracks and effects everything from the neighborhood and workers that create a work of art to charities that an artist wants a percent of the future sales to go to.
A. Socio-Economic Relations
The hybrid object has the capacity to change the ownership structure of things in the world and alter the authority that issues titles and adjudicates what the relationship between humans and law looks like. This can occur through how risk and reward are distributed across space and time. This capacity is contingent on how the hybrid object is seen by the public and what that public wants out of that object. This can range from a tool of financial speculation to one of contractual obligation. How each is framed and how it is involved in the world is essential. It forms the discourse around these objects and how these objects support discourse. Ultimately, this becomes contingent on how that structure connects to points of exchange where things are valued and evaluated. Successfully operationalizing such objects would require forming a means of translating and connecting a marketplace of these hybrid objects with exchanges where money changes hands at points of sale. This would define the definitive value of that object as a measure of its differential capacity. This might ultimately be a measure of revolutionary capacity as tied to the capacity to provoke, ignite a movement, and imagine a world other than the one we currently occupy.
B. Relationships Based on Identity
Designing, operating, and exchanging the hybrid object creates the capacity to alter relationships based on identity and membership within particular communities. Such relations are ultimately a reflection of an ownership structure. The hybrid object offers an alternative that would be predicated on a desire to actually transfer wealth as well as the capacity to set up a structure to do so. This could occur via property and community development, affordable housing, scholarships, or direct payment. The specific choice would become part of the brand of that object. In doing so, it would essentially link that object to a means of validating how community and economic development occurs. In essence, it would link that object to a capacity to vote for a particular path forward. It would link it to a means of signaling allegiance to what that object can do.
In this sense, the hybrid object could be connected to an operational politics that insists on representation – and representative democracy more specifically – as having an actionable purpose directly tied to a time period with immutable contractual deadlines. Doing so would have the capacity to carve out enclaves where things are otherwise. Within these enclaves, the law would be otherwise. Here, institutional accountability would be as the community desires it to be. This would make it possible for the hybrid objects to be used to put pressure on legacy spaces and systems. Together, they would engender a new space where, through the transparency and evolving nature of the object, it is genuinely possible to trace progress.
C. Health
The ultimate goal of these reflections is not merely to describe a structure relating different types of objects, but to offer ways to link the physical and the digital so that each can benefit the other as well as the people who value these spaces. More specifically, the goal is for this relationship to offer new ways of creating links between highly valued systems and objects and those with less value in the hopes of elevating the value of the latter. In the process, an evolved relationship between subjects and objects will form. This relationship between hybrid objects and subjects will play a significant role in supporting or hindering our health.
The role that the relationship between the subject and object plays in our physical and mental health has a long history that many theorists have attempted to analyze and systematize. Each forms and influences the other in ways that in some cases allow the subject to thrive and in others may make the subject beholden to the object – a mere cog in a machine that reduces the subject to the status of a thing. In the current context, through the value and operationality of a hybrid object, the subject can enhance their own agency through translating and transferring that value to another form of currency.
In many ways, a fully realized hybrid object that utilizes blockchain coupled with tokenization could become the currency of cultural capital. Such a currency would not just rest in the qualitative but could have a specific quantitative value based on the architecture of the hybrid object. It would be derived from how the digital object structures that relationship through contracts and language. Cryptocurrency would be an ideal currency because of the structural and ideological affinity. In the process, a more diverse group of people would be given direct control over their cultural capital. It would become harder for this cultural capital to be appropriated and thus more valuable because it remains in the hands of the creator. It would give these creators more resources to thrive, evolve, and build equity in their personal or collective brand. This would contribute to a broader process of disintermediation and defragmentation that would give more money directly to the individual.
This process in turn could support a healthier lifestyle that would free up more money for self-care. It would require less so-called backbreaking work and less exposure to literal and figurative toxic work environment. Alienation from work would be illuminated via a more direct contractual relationship to what that work is directed towards. It would be predicated on the capacity to develop a direct relationship between people as economic agents as opposed to having to pass through a superstructure that can change intent and serve its own ends. To achieve this capacity of hybrid objects, we need to design objects that fully realize an expanded field and scale in order to draw interest around this mission of transformation. Doing so would require teaching people how to make these digital objects and then would involve giving them the tools to do so independently. This ultimately would require building an expansive exchange that conceptualizes a productive relationship between mature hybrid objects containing physical / digital objects that relate to and help form a system and network of physical / digital subjects. If this work is to serve the purpose outlined here, it must occur under an ethos of liberation.