Berlin joins cities like Los Angeles, New York, Lisbon, and London as a hub of blockchain ventures. Yet Berlin’s NFT projects, Immersion included, stand out in an important way. Projects elsewhere are typically detached from their physical places of origin, taking on a generic, if not sanitized, aesthetic. In sharp contrast, projects launched in Berlin tend to incorporate their local origins, taking on the city’s famously gritty and countercultural ethos. Some projects even seek to build entire virtual environments in a Berlin style, creating opportunities for virtual avatars to explore, experience, and sometimes even purchase pieces of a virtual Berlin, present or past.
This article was published on Platypus, the blog of the American Anthropological Association’s subsection on Science, Technology, and Computing.
Spencer Kaplan 