On skeuomorphism, language, and web3.0
Skeuomorphism.
As a non-designer, I hadn’t heard this word until listening to an episode of Tim Ferriss’s podcast. The brilliant Chris Dixon described skeuomorphism as iterating on the current design, and using it as the framework, or the means of understanding the iteration. By this definition, an example of a skeuomorphic term is “horsepower.” This term was invented to describe the power of a car engine. Why? Because prior to motor vehicles, horse-drawn carriages were the most similar form of transportation.
Horse-drawn carriages were the framework for cars. The term “horsepower” provided an easier-to-grasp format for people to begin to understand this new thing: cars and engine power. Even though horses have nothing directly to do with car engines.
I’ve also read skeuomorphism described as adapting the analog version of a thing to a digital version, and using the analog version to describe its digital recreation. Dixon used the example, “A website is like a brochure” in the podcast. When advancements in technology enabled the existence of websites, people had to find a way to describe what a website even is. So they took the analog (a brochure — a physical artifact with information on it) as the framework for describing the new.
We’re in a skeuomorphic period, according to Dixon, of web3.0 (blockchain, NFTs, DAOs, etc). This new technology has people asking, “What can we do with it?” Well, when we’re at the cutting edge of innovation, the only way we humans have figured out how to wrap our minds around the new thing is by taking what we already understand and comparing it.
On the same podcast, Naval said, “What can you do with NFTs? Well, you can put a website in an NFT.” But his point is that this is a skeuomorphic use case. Where the brochure used to be the framework, the website has become the framework. But as all web2.0 users are aware, a website can do so much more than be a digital source of information. It is so much more than one iteration of a brochure. It is its own thing.
The book Metaphors We Live By shows us that language is not just a tool of communication — it is a construct of understanding. We use language to perceive and understand the world, not to merely describe it.
New language will continue to be developed as we pioneer into web3 (take “NFT,” or non-fungible token, as an example. Or even “web3” itself). That new language will be both a creator and a creation of web3. Both a tool and a projection.
Look back on the creation of the word “website.” Everyone in modern civilization knows what a website is, and for many of us today, it’s hard to imagine a world where websites don’t exist. But this word wasn’t even first used until the 1990s — quite recently in the grand scheme of history. When the concept of websites began to exist, a void of understanding took hold until the term website developed meaning. “Here is a new thing, we’re calling it a website, you don’t have to know what that means yet, just look at it, use it, and if you’re scared, just know it’s like a digital brochure.”
A word by itself has no meaning. Words are labels that are intended to point towards concepts.
And because new concepts are being created, new language will have to be created.
Now, no one is still thinking about how websites are like brochures. A website is a website. The term has established its own meaning.
Currently, we are using what we already understand from web2 to understand web3. This is the skeuomorphic period Dixon spoke about.
The point is, we can’t begin to imagine the things web3 will be used for. All the use cases, new inventions, new problems, and new solutions to those problems, are presently unfathomable to us because they are leaps and bounds beyond our current understanding of the internet’s capabilities.
And perhaps language limits us in this creative endeavor. Perhaps we struggle to imagine the world ahead because we are chained up by the logic of our current understanding. If the next iteration of the internet will be something we haven’t ever experienced before, then the words to describe it remain uninvented. And if the terminology of the next iteration of the internet has yet to exist, how will you imagine what comes next?
What if you dismiss language all together as you imagine what the world will be like in the next iteration, and a dozen iterations from now? If you try to imagine what’s yet to be created using only words that already exist, is it imagination at all?
Instead of trying to iterate on what we currently have, using language that already exists, construct. Someone is going to figure out what web3 technology will do for us in the real world. Why can’t it be you?
Don’t iterate. Imagine.
Thanks to Girl with red hat for the photo
