CryptoPunks launched in 2017 and changed everything. Ten thousand faces, algorithmically assembled from traits (mohawks, pipes, hoodies, alien skin) and suddenly the world had a new object type: the PFP. Profile picture as identity, as membership, as financial instrument... The Punks were extraordinary for what they represented culturally and historically. But as characters? They are ciphers. They have no names. No jobs. No desires. No story.

This was not a flaw. It was the design. Early PFP culture wanted a blank canvas... something a holder could project onto, brand around, build a persona from scratch. Jenkins the Valet didn't come with the Ape... he was invented by someone who saw in a jpeg the seed of something they wanted to grow. The emptiness was productive. It gave the community room to move.

But blank canvases have a shelf life. After years of communities labouring to retrofit meaning onto images that arrived without any, the creative exhaustion is real. The question the space has been circling... without quite naming it... is whether the next generation of PFPs needs to come pre-loaded. Not with finished stories, but with the conditions that make stories possible.

What strikes me about Tabor Robak's Human Resources is that it arrived pre-loaded. Not just with traits but with context... a fully realised fictional corporation called TabCorp, a class hierarchy spanning C-suite to Crisis Actor, and a visual language that reads less like art world provocation and more like the internal branding of a company you're not sure you want to work for.

The base is a white male mannequin... uniform, interchangeable, deliberately generic. This is not an oversight. It's the conceptual core: the worker as production unit, identity subsumed into function. Where a Bored Ape might look like a king, he has no kingdom. A TabCorp executive has a literal org chart. One is a costume; the other is a function.

In a culture saturated with main character energy... the Ape as celebrity, the Punk as founder... Human Resources offers something more honest... side character realism. The anxiety of the institution rather than the ego of the individual. It turns out that's a far richer seam for storytelling.

The deeper shift is in what the traits actually encode. In most collections, a gold skin is a rarity tier. In Human Resources, a C-suite trait is a power dynamic. The metadata doesn't describe appearance... it describes position. And position implies relationship.

If I hold a Manager and you hold a Crisis Actor, our interaction on social media is already pre-written. The org chart dictates the dialogue. This is the most underappreciated thing about the collection... it's not just a set of characters, it's a whole social graph. The pieces don't exist in isolation. They exist in relation to each other, and those relations carry dramatic weight before anyone has written a single word.

I've been sitting with individual pieces... looking at the traits, thinking about what kind of person lives inside them... and the depth you can access is striking. A single token can generate a complete interior life: the quiet desperation of the mid-level manager who peaked too early, the bureaucratic menace of the compliance officer who has found genuine joy in the role, the strange dignity of the person who has survived every restructuring through a combination of invisibility and patience. The art forced me to imagine specific, tragicomically human backstories. That's not something I can say about a Punk.

IP is the word people reach for when they're trying to describe this kind of potential... and it's not wrong... but it undersells what's actually happening here. IP implies licensing, adaptation, extraction of value from an existing asset. What Human Resources has is something more interesting: a mythology still in the process of being made, open enough that the people who hold pieces are inside the story, not just adjacent to it.

The collection lends itself to short stories, anthologies, longer adaptations... not because someone decided to bolt narrative onto a successful PFP project, but because narrative was always the point. The world came first. The characters are inhabitants of it. Whether the broader culture catches up to what that actually means is an open question... But the evidence is starting to accumulate... and some of it will be visible shortly... 🔔