become untokenable!
bani haykal
at the core of it, a token is an empty shell waiting to be prescribed value and meaning. what is it worth? what does having this token enable? what does it entail? what does it express and what spaces does it allow you into? and most importantly, what does it represent and how long can it hold its value and meaning?
tokens as a means of participation is central to its very nature. participation is complicity—complicity as in: upholding the status quo as to how an individual or a community gains both legitimacy and visibility. by having or becoming a token you are now recognised as a part of the so-called bigger picture, therefore you are granted access to participate in any given world
if you do not have or are not a token, you are standing across the border of Statusquoria, an outsider, a persona non grata, someone or something that is barred access to a desired area meant for those who have traded / converted their currency—your skin included—to be part of the tribe
the token is a testament to a form of solidarity, that by accepting the terms and conditions of holding on to / being the token, everything is deemed equal and fair, you know the risks involved but this is how you are given access; the token is ultimately a flag you carry, and read as a means to represent, a monolith
in recent years the token has, among its other variants, unveiled a new manifestation, one shrouded and attached to speculation. how effective will contact tracing be? what will be the future value of this asset? will the use of diversity enable profit? tokens as a mechanism of generating and speculating on its value, that it is not enough to be a participant—you are now investing in your chances of success in order to continue to live
but are their use cases all that's purported to be? from studies showing the relative ineffectiveness of TraceTogether[1], to the badly designed infrastructure for the safeguarding of non-fungible tokens to the generally well-preserved status quo despite minority representation, tokens seem primed and fit to be tagged as scams in their implementations
noncompliance to the world of tokens excludes you from privileges. you are forced to stake your chances. choose not to have a TraceTogether token? you will not be allowed to enter these premises and access supplies. choose not to be a token minority? you will not be able to find jobs that would fit you into their diversity quota. choose not to adopt the inevitability of web3? your(sic) ngmi
the token as a metaphor has reached a point where it determines your place in the future. do you participate in the further collapsing of political will in the name of techno-optimism or do you accept being excluded from its speculative nature which offers you a seat at the table? maybe it is time for those who refuse to push back harder, against the weight of crushing immutability; non-fungible token minorities unite!
in a time where gamification is rampant, which drives every encounter as a quantifiable transaction, it is perhaps useful to consider the perils of being locked in to such conditions; where our lives are pretty much slated to be computable. what would be the point of being nothing more than another number attached to a database? tokens usher us away from the real, it is only right to resist the fiction of the token.
token this, token that, oh what i’d give tokentut[2] on your face. it is time to refuse a future which has decided to ask us to hold on to tokens as a means to live. to refuse being asked to decide between false dichotomies and the narrow trope of freedom hell-bent on forced adoption tactics for the betterment of society. become untokenable and refuse the very real possibility of a tokenised future.
bani haykal experiments with text + music.
As an artist and musician, bani considers music as material and his projects revolve around human-machine intimacies through various forms of interfacing and interaction. He is a member of b-quartet.
Manifestations of his research culminate into works of various forms encompassing installation, poetry, and performance. In his capacity as a collaborator and a soloist, bani has participated in festivals including MeCA Festival (Japan), Wiener Festwochen (Vienna), Media/Art Kitchen (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, and Japan), Liquid Architecture, and Singapore International Festival of Arts (Singapore) among others.
Notes
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7599064/
[2] “Tokentut” is wordplay, riffing off the word ‘kentut’ in Malay, which means fart.