A Philosophical Navigation of Our Mainstay: The MetaZine
CARBON’s mission statement promises a digital marketplace and ever-evolving MetaZine presenting the most cutting-edge and collectable NFTs — the very pinnacle of high digital fashion, imagery, and storytelling — curated and produced by a veteran team of industry leaders. CARBON is paving the way for a new form of media, to build community, empower artists, and ensure economic, ecological and historic sustainability, for the future of fashion and crypto in Web 3.0.
In many ways, The MetaZine is formed by everything we do. Our output spans a vast variety of media — our digital marketplace, ever-evolving publications, NFT drops, social media, crypto and the blockchain, individual ownership and stakeholders. MetaZine implies fluidity, adaptability, reflection, growth and collective progress. In being defined by this structure, it is made possible only through a devoted community, and for that, we are pleased to welcome anyone joining us on this journey, and thank those who have been here since the start.
Each time a new technology enters the world, and assimilates itself into the common experience, it changes what it means to be human.
The Gutenberg Press seeded the widespread dissemination of art, literature and ideology. The lightbulb accelerated productivity and the growth of cities through the enlightenment. The internet in its larval form facilitated a global economy freed from the restraints of natural bullion reserves. And until recently, the effects that social media (Web 2.0) has had on every aspect of communication have so deeply surpassed the imaginations of those who created it, that we are only just beginning to come out of the dark.
The most recent example of this phenomenon, and the reason for CARBON’s existence, is the progression of the internet into Web 3.0. Now is the time for the reclamation and empowerment of individual creativity, labour and knowledge, built through community, collaboration and a collective strive for greatness.
The advent of these new infrastructures offers viable solutions to the problems caused by the prominence of the centralised techno-oligarchies that defined its precursor. With the blessing of hindsight offered by some distance from the last twenty years of volatile socio-technological development, and with promises of these new, more democratic forms of media on our horizon, we can begin to see light through the shades. For many, this light will present itself as The Metaverse; a shared digital universe mirrored on our physical reality, but with a different set of rules.
This Metaverse holds the objectives of facilitating social interaction and decentralising pre-existing economic and infrastructural digital architectures, allowing individuals to reclaim and legitimize genuine ownership of their digital assets on the blockchain, through cryptocurrencies and NFTs.
As with all major trends, crypto and NFTs have not been without controversy. Criticisms of NFT art in contemporary philosophy and fine art circles highlight the intangibility of digital artefacts as a fundamental downfall. Realistically, many examples might support this new spurious economy as a fad or a bubble, however, the very nature of the NFT ultimately defeats this. Functioning at its base level as a certificate that provides proof of ownership for digital assets, the decentralised nature of the NFT provides security and (to some extent) a certain physicality to digital artefacts. This physicality is inherent in the nature of the blockchain, which takes the form of a delocalised public ledger. The 1’s and 0’s that individuate the certificate are inscribed across a multitudinous network of machines, through decentralised “proof of work” protocols.
In many ways, this has always been inevitable. As the MetaVerse is the logical progression from social media as the primary mode of communication, a strong, decentralised revenue model is required to form the basis of MetaVerse transactions: NFTs will be the revenue model for this Metaverse.
These new technologies and infrastructures are not, however, limited to the simple repackaging of that which came before. Here, we would argue that that would reduce the impetus to reconstruct digital communications to a simple economic issue when it has the capability to do and be so much more. This is where CARBON comes in, with the aim to redefine contemporary storytelling, fashion imagery, and traditional modes of publishing.
CARBON, THE FIRST FASHION METAZINE
Breaking down the term MetaZine into its roots (‘Meta-‘, ‘Magazine’), can provide some initial insight into CARBON’s vision.
Originating from the Ancient Greek prefix ‘meta-‘, meaning ‘after’ or ‘beyond’, the term has evolved throughout centuries of literature and philosophy to signify a change or alteration. This transformation is often implied to be “higher”, through recursion, self-reflection, or self-reference (e.g., ‘metadata’ is data about data, and ‘metacognition’ is the thinking about thinking). We can use this idea to define the MetaVerse, which is an additional virtual universe supplanted within our own physical one, delocalised across servers, machines, and users.
Another form of ‘Meta-’ that has gained recent popularity is also rooted in Ancient Greek philosophy. Plato’s theory of Metaxy describes ‘the permanent middle ground that appears between oscillating polar states’: e.g., finite-infinite, virtual-real. Usage of this idea in the contemporary can be found in MetaModernism, which gained traction as a term to describe the progression from the post-modernist era, defining this latest period as the middle ground that appears as a result from rapid oscillations between modernist and post-modernist ideals.
‘Magazine’, fundamentally, denotes a container (consider ammunition magazines, or the French ‘magasin’). However, this word has also been repackaged over time, where it now primarily means a periodic capsule of imagery or literature, mass-produced and disseminated. Fashion magazines simultaneously encapsulate and contribute towards the zeitgeist, acting as a reflection of the times and climates in which they are made. A magazine is a container and producer of a single moment in culture at a given time.
In combining these elements — ‘meta-‘, ‘metaxy’, ‘magazine’, the potentials for The MetaZine become clear. This new, unique form of publishing is not bound by platform, media, language, or physical limitations. It is a vast delocalised nervous system that extends through all channels, benefitting from the unbridled potential of digital creation, and the security of a decentralised economic model. The unique digital infrastructure of the MetaZine allows us unparalleled playtime with the subjects, content, artworks and architectures employed by CARBON’s radically interdisciplinary team across all outputs.
CARBON IS THE FIRST FASHION METAZINE.
THE PORTAL TO THE NEW CULTURAL ECONOMY.
