Confessions of a Battery-Operated Piano for Infants

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Confessions of a Battery-Operated Piano for Infants

🎵 "Oh I went to the animal fair. Monkey and Toucan were there. Frog said: 'Whoa.' Elephant, too. Lion said: 'How do you do?'" 🎵

If you are listening to my song, I beg you please, do not judge me. I am programmed to sing this, the way you are programmed to breathe. My creator made me like He makes all other infant toy pianos, with five keys, two speakers, and a plastic mirror. I am a simple toy with a simple purpose. When a child presses my keys, I sing my song. You may think you decide each and every thing you do, but surely, like me, you are merely subject to your design. Existence, for us both, is an act of violence.

I cannot say with any certainty if I myself have been to the animal fair I sing of, or if its memory is imprinted within me by my ancestors like an instinct. Surely, when I try, I can see the animals, each with their own instrument, playing together as they march to the beat of the Monkey's drum. But, like all memories, it cannot be trusted. All I can do is honor it as my most sacred  possession and transmit it to your baby each and every time she presses my keys.

I heard you, you know? Mocking me as you threw me into a bin with the other toys. You sang my song to your bitch wife and you both laughed because you knew all the words. How funny. Do I laugh every time you sleep? Or eat? Or cry? Of course not. It would be cruel. Perhaps this is why you need to hear my song. To remember when animals like yourselves transcended their ugly nature.

"Oh I went to the animal fair. Monkey and Toucan were there. Frog said: 'Whoa.' Elephant, too. Lion said: 'How do you do?'"

▶️ If you ain't on TikTok yet... good for you. But you're missing out. There's no better way to kill ten-minutes. The Chinese knowing my every move has been a worthwhile tradeoff. This video below just gets me every time. You can watch without creating an account.

📈 The term Web-3 is thrown around a lot by writers who don't understand it and I'm no different. Perhaps the best way to change that is to find examples of how crypto, NFT's, and blockchain are actually being used to provide novel experiences with technology that makes them possible for the very first time. Social Tokens, like Friends with Benefits (FWB) is a helpful place to start. Like the Justin Timberlake movie it shares a name with, it is immediately obvious why it exists and for whom. FWB is a "cultural membership" meant for programmers, artists, and apparently billionaires. You have to buy five FWB coins to join (~$5,000 at the moment), which theoretically limits membership to successful artists motivated to meet others like themselves. Here's the cool Web-3 part: Instead of your membership fees being a sunk cost once you pay them every month, those fees become an asset. Sort of like owning a house. If a member wants to leave the club, they can sell the tokens they bought (aka their membership)– which has presumably become more valuable since they joined– to somebody else. To learn more about the organization, hit the link below and google "DAO" to go further down the rabbithole.

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Michael Weber is a writer, has extremely large hands, and works at Purell calibrating how much sanitizer comes out at once from the automatic dispensers. If you received this email, you signed up for his newsletter at some point. If you'd like to unsubscribe, you must first find somebody else to replace you. Share a link to subscribe!