A cognitive gap divides the world as it exists and the new world that is speaking at us, lining the horizon in strange, abstract colors. A sign of this came, dear reader, as we prepared this cover story for you. Our in-house photo team, in the course of their normal duty, wondered how they could “photograph cryptocurrency”. Language can handle abstraction through specialized vocabulary or through metaphors that trace back to the physical world. Digital coins, blocks, chains … and mining. But how do you imagine something that doesn’t exist as a tangible thing? That we would reach the edge of such an ideological gorge could have been predicted. Mail had long gone digital. By the 1990s photography had certainly moved beyond the confines of physical film. Heck, by now, we’re also being dissolved into bits, bytes, and pixels and reassembled as phantoms on the zoom screen. Money was bound to chase them in the ether. Anyway, wandering the digital paths for years, it was predetermined that the object…
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