Social Relevance of Phygitality

A non-fungible token (NFT) confirms neither ownership nor authorship. Its value is purely speculative. Buy for less, sell for more is all one can do with it. Hence the lack of its social function.

And this situation cannot be rectified from within the digital domain. For replacing a single bit in the original piece will replace it entirely. Such an operation (call it a fictitious transformation) will generate a new token with a new URI (Uniform Resource Identifier). Unfortunately, two beings that are identical for a human are different for a machine.

The immutability offered by the blockchain applies exclusively to the records in it. Yet there can be arbitrarily many such records. There can also be arbitrarily many fictitious transformations of some entity. If so, nothing prevents us from recording there either references to the latter, or it itself arbitrarily many times. As a result, get many technically distinct tokens for legally one element. This would violate the rights of either its authors or its rightful possessors.

Nevertheless, if a digital object were linked to a physical one, its fictitious transformation would be impossible. If an identification chip is embedded in this latter, its duplication would be hardly feasible.

In such a case, the web3 infrastructure will finally be able to guarantee ownership. This will require dual registration on the blockchain, namely for the digital and physical state of one asset. A special protocol will ensure that they are connected, so that any amendment in one will result in the same for the other.

Due to such a connection, a non-fungible token would be able to fulfil social functions previously inaccessible to it. Items from virtual worlds could be meaningful in the actual one, and actions in one could be continued in the other. For example, artists could trade their works on web3 platforms with no fear of both counterfeiting (since it will require to forge the physical copy and the chip at once) and loss of authorship (since it can be written in the metadata of the published artwork). Creators of games could bring what happens in them beyond the computer. The list is open and limited by our imagination alone.

One of the foundations in our society is recognition. However, a growing part of our lives is not here. It is being integrated into the network, and the further, the more. Therefore, it is existentially important today that the evaluation of us and things received there be valid here as well.

Phygitalisation is the sole way to fulfil this requirement. It not only overcomes the social failure of NFT, but equally addresses the more global demands of Internet culture.