Why Immutability Matters
How blockchains grant symbolic immortality
gm, and welcome to Letters to Web3, a newsletter exploring web3 with philosophy!
The lived human experience increasingly takes place online. This is where we do business, create culture, and hang out with our friends. But the fleeting, ephemeral nature of web2 creates a deeply demoralizing experience.
Picture this: you spend years cultivating your own profile on a social media site. You share your thoughts, your intimate moments, your artwork. Then, without warning, it’s all gone. BAM. Years of interests, likes, memories, connections, wiped away with a page refresh.
Web3 projects frequently tout immutability—the inability for things to be changed, deleted, or altered. But why is this feature so important? Could it be that it helps confront our oldest, most primordial fear: our own inevitable deaths?
The Denial of Death
Remember that old saying, “only two things in life are for sure: death and taxes.” Before we invented the government ~5,000 years ago, it was just death.
Knowing that death is always around the corner is, well, kinda traumatic.
In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker argued that humanity is haunted by the looming shadow of death anxiety, the tragic awareness that, one day, we will die.
And there’s nothing we can do about it.
Becker wrote, “What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression —and with all this yet to die.”
In order to cope with this bleak reality, we need what Becker called hero mythologies. These are narratives, stories, or worldviews that provide meaning to our otherwise meaningless lives. “Heroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death.” Instead of living in the desert of the real1 - where everything is random chaos and you’re destined for death- we spend our lives in these symbolic worlds of invented meaning.
Just about any narrative can qualify as a hero myth, often explaining who you are, what you’re doing, and why it matters.
This drive for meaning and permanence is deeply embedded in our psyche, and it's this drive that makes immutability a subconsciously compelling selling point. However, this is notably lacking in web2.
Web2 and Recurring Digital Death
We’re currently living through a revolution without a revolution2: the abandonment of real life in favor of the internet. We’ll refrain from making any value judgments on that for now, but the digitization of life comes with serious consequences.
Our actions have the potential to scale like never before. Yet, it’s often difficult to comprehend the actual impact. What does it mean for 50,000 people to read your article? You can’t see the effect your actions have on others, and thus, have difficulty connecting it back with your hero myth. This alone makes the internet a somewhat frustrating experience, but it gets worse.
Your actions can disappear into the void in an instant, for no reason. Forever.
Web2 is owned and operated by centralized corporations that store most of our digital lives in siloed databases. They maintain these databases because it’s profitable. The second it’s no longer profitable, those databases will be shut down, along with all the human experiences within them.3
I remember spending countless hours on Vine crafting short, quirky videos that captured my youth and humor. When Vine shut down, it felt like a part of me was erased. It wasn't just my videos that vanished but the memories, friends, and a slice of my identity. We’ve seen this happen with MySpace. We’ve seen it happen with Google+ and soon, we could be seeing it with TikTok.
This tragically recurring theme of web2 social media isn’t just a trivial inconvenience, but a profound existential wound. Our digital lives are where we write our stories, share our moments, and build our legacies. When these carefully crafted digital worlds vanish, it’s a stark reminder of our own impermanence. Becker tells us that humans have always sought to transcend the finality of mortality through symbolic immortality—leaving behind something that outlasts us, be it art, ideas, or connections.
The deletion of our digital footprints strips us of this vital mechanism. It’s not just our data being deleted. It’s our quest for meaning and permanence being undermined.
In the fleeting world of web2, we’re left grappling with a digital death that highlights and heightens our deepest fears of oblivion.
Your real death is inevitable, but there is no reason you should endure a barrage of involuntary4 digital deaths on the way there!
On-chain Immortality
Web3's blockchain technology ensures that once data is recorded, it cannot be altered or erased, offering a permanence that is unmatched by anything in web2.
The desire for human actions to remain, to be visible to the senses, to continue existing despite the ephemeral being who performs that action, is an innate human desire.
As our lives become increasingly digitized, it will become necessary for our actions—our lives, artwork, culture, thoughts, and ideas—to become immutable too.
Web3 is quite simply the only feasible possibility of that becoming a reality. By ensuring that our digital actions and creations can endure, web3 provides a way to achieve a lasting impact, even after death.
In a world where everything is increasingly online and transient, web3 offers us the chance to build a digital legacy that will last longer than we will.
And in doing so, it helps us overcome death anxiety in a uniquely modern way.
By desert of the real, I’m either referencing The Matrix, Baudrillard, or, God forbid, Zizek. Pick your favorite. That’s the one I’m referencing.
Now that this is a philosophy newsletter, I’m fighting the urge to reference obscure bs nobody has ever heard of but I just couldn’t help myself here. In this case, Asef Bayat’s conception of social non-movements as defined in his compelling work, Revolution Without Revolutionaries.
You can technically keep backups of everything you do online but this is simply not feasible for 99% of people, leaving most of us vulnerable to a digital death experience.
While a digital death can be a depressing experience, you should also have the right to digitally die if you so choose - keeping in line with the right to be forgotten. This will be a very important feature to include in web3 social platforms.
This is an awesome lens.
It makes me think that gas costs are effectively a market price on permanance.