And this is why the future, be it NFTs or Memoji or the howling existential horror of the Metaverse, looks so ugly and boring: it reflects the stunted inner lives of the finance and technology professionals who produced it. As the visual manifestation of cryptocurrency, NFT art combines the nuanced social awareness of computer programmers with the soulful whimsy of hedge fund managers. It is art for people whose imaginations have been absolutely captured by a new kind of money you can do on the computer. It is also obviously a pyramid scheme, in which the need for a salable commodity is imperative and endlessly renewed, but the commodity itself does not matter because it is useless — not even useless the way all art is useless, because you can get the images and whatever grains of nourishment your hungry little soul might find in them for free, but useless the way a canceled stamp is useless, useless like a receipt or an envelope that has been torn open. NFTs are an occasion for commerce masquerading as art, just as so many ostensibly meaningful experiences of the 21st century turn out to be occasions to spend money masquerading as life.

Technology robbed workers’ of what had been highly valued physical knowledge about a job: the precise way to jimmy a stuck gear, the sound a machine makes when something’s about to break. That knowledge, accumulated over years on the job, had served as leverage over management: if the company refused to come to an agreement with their union, it would take the company weeks, if not years, to find workers with the skills to replace them. The threat of a strike had real power, because workers’ knowledge was precious. Nussbaum’s reply was cutting: “Technology can enhance the work, but that’s not what’s happening for the large majority of office workers,” she said. “I’d be interested to know whether Mr. Walsh increased the pay of any of those secretaries who are now doing the work of some of those managers.” This is the dystopian reality of productivity culture. Its mandate is never “You figured out how to do my tasks more efficiently, so you get to spend less time working.” It is always: “You figured out how to do your tasks more efficiency, so you must now do more tasks.”

If we grant that Arendt is on to something, I’d suggest that it is precisely in the absence of such activities or goods that technique takes on its compulsive, colonizing nature. Optimization becomes an end in itself. I may not know where I am going or why, but I can take some comfort in knowing that I can travel faster and more efficiently. Frenetic activity or compulsive distraction substitute for a clear sense of purpose and commitment. Substantive goals may elude me, but I can take refuge in tracking and optimizing an increasing range of activities and bodily functions.

This wooden wonder might seem like a novelty one-off, a trophy to showcase the local timber industry, only feasible because of the location. But the architects are keen to emphasise that the same process could be replicated anywhere, many hundreds of miles from a forest. “We are currently studying how far we could transport this building without undoing the carbon saving,” says White Arkitekter’s Robert Schmitz. “We think it could probably go twice around the world and still be carbon neutral.” There remain plenty of barriers in the way: the lobbying power of concrete manufacturers, an insurance industry averse to innovation, retrograde building regulations and a construction culture reluctant to change. But as the only truly sustainable building material – with benefits in speed, health and wellness beyond the carbon saving – the future is wood.

scale would have never been a problem if the internet had continued to be small communities of interconnected personal computers instead of corporate kingdoms hungry for critical mass web1: human scale web2: capital scale web3: capital scale ii - financial boogaloo what if “tech” functioned less like expanding empires—instead of a growth mindset everyone had a propagation mindset, planting seeds of new life completely distinct from the host