“It’s heavy. Weirdly heavy.” I had been eagerly awaiting the arrival of my one-centimeter cube of tungsten metal since ordering it a week ago. I knew it was stupid to be stoked about a tiny block of metal for which I would have no practical use, but I was curious to see what all the fuss was about.
“What fuss?” you ask, like someone who has a life and adult responsibilities. Well, over the past couple months, crypto bros, the reddit retail investing army and others within the alt finance milieu have been buzzing on social media about cubes made of the element tungsten, also known as “wolfram”, a metal 1.7 times denser than lead. They’ve been buying them en masse (so much so that its driven up the price of tungsten) largely, it seems, from the same company where I got mine, Midwest Tungsten Service. I paid $29.99 for my one-centimeter piece but others have spent as much as $2999 for a 4-inch brick, while some custom orders have cost considerably more. “We like the cube!” the Redditors and denizens of FinTwit (“financial Twitter”) declare, in the kind of drunken chant that’s come to characterize the fervid meme culture that sent Dogecoin and GameStop to the relative moon. These are people who come together online to discuss their enthusiasm about the world of “stonks” (stocks), cryptocurrency, and NFTs (non-fungible tokens), all hallmarks and harbingers of the new, intangible, cerebrally daunting, and dizzyingly decentralized digital world. Their new favorite toy? A hunk of metal that does nothing but sit there, heavily asserting its presence.
“We like the cube”
Of late, mankind seems to be accelerating swiftly towards a brave new existence. Facebook recently rebranded itself as “Meta”, a name meant to evoke the metaverse, a hypothetical but increasingly accessible web-based realm in which human life takes place virtually, that is to say in an immersive online netherworld. This is accomplished namely by way of VR goggles inside of which users become avatar versions of themselves (or of whomever they want to be). Other technological trends that seemed silly five minutes ago are taking shape as potentially crucial components in the structure of the metaverse. Much has been made of the ostensible absurdity of NFT ownership, the tens of millions of dollars paid for digital art that by its very nature is infinitely replicable and can only be “owned” in the sense that a purchaser can essentially pay for the right to be recorded on the blockchain as the owner of that file. Some NFTs come with real-world perks — event tickets, clothing, collectibles — but those physical inducements are really just sweeteners to entice the uninitiated into an economy whose purpose is to decorate a digital future. In the words of crypto entrepreneur Olaf Carlson-Wee: “NFTs are a re-imagining of ownership in a digital and gameified environment. The internet generation cares about avatars and profile pictures more than clothing and cars. As we transition to digital lifestyles and eventually, a fully internet-native metaverse, NFTs become the artifacts all around us.” I think this is the most honest explanation I’ve heard from a pillar of the crypto community speaking to those outside of it. Rather than gaslighting the public about the real world uses for blockchain technology, Carlson-Wee acknowledges that what we are primarily seeing is a deliberate and rapid move in the direction of living not as the cyborgs we currently are — walking around with technology in and on our person at all times, enhancing our connectivity and functionality — but as fully virtual beings residing primarily in digital worlds, consuming virtual goods and experiences in a digital economy, and projecting virtual personas.
It all may sound scary for anyone with a trace of Luddite in them or, frankly, for most people without a computer science degree. I’m already personally quite troubled by what I sense my attachment to my phone and computer might be doing to my brain and my life. I see the world through my iPhone camera’s lens, I feel addicted to the sensation of productivity and connectedness (which is different from actual productivity and connectedness) that my phone and laptop provide in a narcotic feedback loop.
I’ve been increasingly engaged for the past year in learning about and participating in the world of cryptocurrency. I spent much of the Covid pandemic’s enforced seclusion learning about blockchain, NFTs and to a lesser extent, more traditional stocks. I soon became convinced (though perhaps years late to the game) that cryptocurrency was the future of finance and that blockchain was the future of the internet. I bought modest amounts of the cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Ethereum as well as a few smaller coins. I’ve been happy with the gains I’ve seen and been emboldened to invest further. I got interested in staking, I explored mining, I created accounts on at least a half-dozen apps and exchanges to execute my flailing strategies, all the while somewhat in awe of those on the cutting edge of this economy, who live in the numbers and speak a language consecrated in the infinite matrix of algorithms and theory that make up the bones of the incorporeal world to come. They are their own gods, and their ritual is practiced entropy — tangible matter in the real world generating vast amounts of energy only to be funneled into the construction of a realm that, strictly speaking, doesn’t exist, but in which we will probably all increasingly live. It’s a one-sided equation reminiscent of the chemistry 101 lesson on the formula for fire.
“When the historians find us we’ll be in our homes/ plugged into our hubs/ skin and bones/ a frozen smile on every face/ as the stories replay/ this must have been a wonderful place.” - Father John Misty “Total Entertainment Forever”
Perhaps to counter the existential dread I’ve felt exploring the Platonic cenote of web-based life, I’ve been trying to read more books. But thanks to undiagnosed adult ADD exacerbated by the infinite buffet of distractions and small dopamine hits I wallow in daily, I’ve had to strike a compromise with myself and listen to books instead. I’ve just finished listening to Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” on the Audible app. I had seen the very sexy 1988 film with a young Daniel Day Lewis, Juliette Binoche and Lena Olin, but the movie fails to fully deliver the novel’s central theme. In the book, Kundera explores the notion of “weight” and questions whether it is a negative or positive, a dichotomy he describes as “the most ambiguous of all”. Kundera invokes Nietzsche, who argued that a life lived once is meaningless — a diss clearly aimed at Canadian rapper Drake who coined the term YOLO — and wrote in support of the concept of eternal return, i.e. that the universe repeats itself and that events recur in a similar way ad infinitum. Einmal ist keinmal, the German saying goes — “once is never”. “Putting it negatively,” writes Kundera on Nietzsche’s idea, “the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.”
Kundera argues, in the end, that life only occurs once, a fixed line forward through space, and that while it can be “unbearably light”, life is not meaningless. He claims that life is both heavy and light, and that it is perhaps ultimately pointless to parse the two. Nevertheless, the book’s main characters each represent weight and lightness in different ways, and the protagonist ultimately gives in to the oppressive, consequential, but beautiful weight of love at the expense of freedom and lightness.
“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”
Our world feels at once heavier and lighter all the time. Technological connection abets our inundation with the news of seemingly endless horrors, fast-tracked to our eyes and ears by social media algorithms that use outrage to drive engagement. Concentrated ever more into groups of shared indignation and deriving from the information filtered to us the sense that the world is an irredeemably sad, dangerous and infuriating place, like fish caught in a weir, we will be cynically presented with a single handy escape: The gift of greater power in personally curating our online experiences, limiting what and who we see, but only if we venture further into the metaverse, a narcissistic utopia where the world one sees will largely correspond to one’s chosen settings, even filtering the way that a user appears to others in the “real world” through preferences broadcast across devices on a shared augmented reality system. It will inevitably become harder and harder to distinguish between what is real and what is simulacrum (some are already convinced that we may already be living in such a simulation, but that’s for another time). Our dreams and memories will soon co-mingle experiences from the real world and the metaverse. We thereby agree to the “terms and conditions”, to experience life from behind a shield, protected from many of life’s inherent perils and indignities and the tragedies of a reality we can’t control. We can’t touch things, but neither can they hurt us. We will, in a certain sense, have been liberated from the weight of consequential existence. It doesn’t get any “lighter” than living virtually. It’s half real at most, and the hurt it inflicts is in the life it saps from us, the accidents and chance encounters it denies us, the spontaneity it circumscribes, the corporeal deprivations it exacts and the discomfort it presumes to prevent. Our absence from the real world will hurt us and it will hurt others, and not just our friends and family who may need us, but those left to live on a planet that these and other practices will help to destroy. But at least we won’t have to watch. If you only live once, is that how you want to live? Heavy, man — and not in a good way.
Holding my tiny tungsten cube, I’m struck by the irony of the most ardent proponents of the virtualization of society, who spend their days submerged in the intangible, inexplicably fixating on an ornament whose physical properties make it so definitionally real. When you hold it in your hand, your brain at first doesn’t believe something that small can be that heavy; it’s so dense it’s like magnets are pulling it back to earth. Tungsten is often used in military technology because it’s so incredibly strong. It has the highest boiling point of any element on the periodic table. But when asked why they’re buying these toys, those who “like the cube” say things like “it keeps me motivated — soon I’ll be able to buy an even bigger one”.
Whenever I’ve taken off VR goggles after time spent in the virtual world, I’ve always had a delayed moment of sickened disbelief, a few seconds of disassociation and a fleeting doubt that I’ve actually returned to reality. I have a similar though less intense reaction to too much time spent combing the internet, editing videos or trying to wrap my head around the intricacies of blockchain as someone who nearly failed high school math. But I understand the powerful undercurrent these crypto bros feel, as I too am drawn further and further out into the sea of the virtual and away from what feels more and more like a hopeless reality. Whatever the given reasoning, these tungsten cubes are really a kind of totem, like the ones from in the movie Inception in which “architects” like Leo DiCaprio’s character use small objects they keep in their pockets to determine by their formal qualities if they’re still in a dream or if they’ve returned to reality. I hope that the architects of our dreamlike future use their new metal toys to remind themselves that before they disappear into the matrix, the physical world could still use their attention. For my own part, I’ll be at home holding mine and muttering “you are here, we like the cube, you are here…”
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