This is timely, given that ChatGPT has become one of the fastest growing internet consumer apps, as well as the poster child of AI tools today. Around 10% of the global adult population now use ChatGPT weekly, with daily message counts on the app reaching a whopping 2.6 billion in June 2025. For comparison, the number of Google searches averages upwards of 13.6 billion per day, as of January 2025.

Curious about how people are using AI chatbots, I went to read the study in full, published as a working paper with the National Bureau of Economic Research in the US.

While the study focuses on work-related usage of ChatGPT (notwithstanding that it excludes ChatGPT use on enterprise plans), I think its findings regarding non-work uses are more interesting.

After all, as the study revealed, non-work usage of ChatGPT has grown much faster than work-related usage. Using an LLM to classify the sampled messages, the study found that non-work messages now make up nearly three quarters of messages on ChatGPT, up from about half a year ago.

If it isn’t already clear by now, LLM-based AI tools like ChatGPT are as much of a consumer story as an enterprise one. How people use AI outside of work may very well prove to be more consequential than how they do so at work.

On this note, there were another three findings from the study that caught my eye.

Firstly, the use of ChatGPT remains largely utilitarian, but non-transactional use is increasing steadily.

An overwhelming proportion of the messages sampled in the study (both work and non-work) were practical in nature. Using an LLM again to classify the messages, around 9 in 10 messages were deemed to have the intent of “asking” (48.9%) or “doing” (39.8%). The remaining messages (11.3%) were classified with the intent of “expressing”, defined as the negative of the first two intents, i.e. neither asking for information or asking the chatbot to perform a task.

At the same time, “expressing” messages have increased by more than one-third over the past year. While this growth was from a very low base, we can infer a growing comfort among users to simply engage with ChatGPT without any explicit ask. Perhaps this might pave the way for them to subsequently build deeper, more expressive yet non-transactional relationships with the chatbot in the future?

Secondly, the use of ChatGPT for companionship and social-emotional issues remains fairly small.

Only 4.3% of all messages sampled in the study were categorised under the conversation topic of “self-expression”, and most of such messages were not work-related. More specifically, 2.0% were for greetings and general chitchat (e.g. messages like “how was your day?”), 1.9% for relationships and personal reflection (e.g. “my wife is mad at me, and I don’t know what to do”), and 0.4% for games and roleplay (this category includes messages asking ChatGPT to be one’s boy/girlfriend).

That said, messages related to self-expression have also gradually increased over the past year. This growth is not much, but alongside the trend of increasing non-transactional use of ChatGPT, it suggests that ChatGPT is becoming more and more personal for users. I also note that the use of ChatGPT for both writing and technical help is declining, which I think are also the most abstract and least personally-oriented conversation topics in the study’s mapping.

The findings here certainly put into perspective anecdotal reports of increasing numbers of people treating ChatGPT as a confidant, therapist and even romantic partner (see r/MyBoyfriendIsAI on Reddit for example). There’s no need to go into a panic anytime soon over AI psychosis afflicting society at large, but I do think we still need to take this trend of AI use becoming more personal and emotional seriously. In particular, the affective dimensions of AI use may disproportionately impact vulnerable groups such as children, those with mental health conditions and the elderly.

Finally, while ChatGPT use is becoming more democratised, there could be emerging differences between how different social groups use it.

The study specifically found that more educated users and those in highly paid professional and technical occupations were more likely to use ChatGPT for work. For instance, among users with some graduate education, 48% of their messages with ChatGPT across the entire time period of the sample were work-related, compared to 37% for users with less than a bachelor’s degree. The difference is less when adjusted for other characteristics (6% vs. 11%), but still statistically significant.

Indeed, with ChatGPT and similar AI tools becoming entrenched as part of our digital lives, the focus now has to move from who uses these tools to how different groups use these tools differently. But beyond just finding out the extent to which different groups of people use ChatGPT for work or not, I think it is also worthwhile to dig deeper and investigate other more specific differences in AI usage.

For example, do socio-economic factors like education, employment status and income have any significant bearing on how people use ChatGPT in their personal time? Do usage patterns in AI tools reflect or propagate existing class-based differences or even social inequality? These are just some questions we will have to consider if we want to make AI use truly inclusive, and more broadly, better appreciate the potential societal effects of such AI tools.

In conclusion, this latest study by OpenAI suggests that ChatGPT, and LLM-based AI chatbots more generally, are becoming embedded more and more deeply within our personal lives. While most of us will continue to use these apps for tangible utilitarian purposes, there are signs that they may become more than just a tool—and perhaps doing so in different ways depending on our personal circumstances too.

In addition, now that I’m back to my chronically online self, I’ve also been paying more attention to AI and thinking about how this technology can be useful in my life. It was in this context that had a brain fart: I could use try to make sense of my travels with AI.

The paths we could have taken

Inspired by the science fiction writer Ken Liu’s take on the potential of AI as an artistic medium that enables artists to “play with captured subjectivities” like no other, I reflected on what exactly AI could let us do that we otherwise could not. What kind of thoughts and gestures would have been impossible or exceedingly difficult if not for AI?

I still don’t have a good answer now, but I suspect that it would have to involve the ability of AI models to perform open-ended simulations—simulations that can be continually orchestrated by natural language over time, unbounded by the strict logic of code.

In other words, I should lean into the simulacra that AI models are adept at generating, and just do more of that. This is the specific affordance of AI I should try to explore and play with, if I want to have a better sense of how this technology can be ultimately transformative and valuable to my life.

In this particular case of trying to interrogate my travel experiences then, I thought of tapping on AI to simulate the act of deciding which places to visit within a particular region. To further lean into AI’s simulation superpowers, I would also direct the AI not to simply recommend me a single travel route, but to imagine a broader set of traveller personas and recommend multiple travel routes tailored for them.

My rough idea here was to use AI to simulate other potential paths my wife and I could have taken while travelling, and in doing so, we could perhaps better reflect on the choices we made, as well as better appreciate the route we actually took.

10 travel routes through Mexico

To keep things manageable in this exercise, I decided to just aim for 10 simulated routes and limit the simulations to Mexico (not the entire Latin America).

First, I asked Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro (the AI model that I’m predominantly using) to come up with 10 different “personas” for travellers who want to travel across Mexico long-term, giving each of them specific characteristics based on a consistent set of criteria. While I proposed some examples of such criteria to the AI model, I also explicitly gave it the space to propose more criteria.

The generated and consolidated result—with some light edits from me to make them more realistic—is appended in the table below. While some of the personas reflect clear stereotypes, I thought this was really well-done as a first cut.

Next, I attached the table of 10 personas to the same AI model and asked it to recommend a travel route for each persona. To make these routes more comparable, I set a definite start point for the route in Mexico, i.e. Tijuana, to mirror our actual route, and also restricted the travelling duration to a fixed 10 weeks, roughly the amount of time we actually spent in Mexico.

My prompt is laid out in full below:

CONTEXT:
I am interested to explore the ability of AI models to generate multiple simulations off a single prompt, with each simulation differing based on the specific parameters subjectively encoded into each context. 

ROLE:
You are to take the role of a travel advisor who specialises in travel experiences across Latin America. For this particular exercise, you will be asked to recommend a broad travel itinerary to people who may be interested in travelling in Mexico. You will provide your suggested itinerary based on the characteristics of different personas that reflect common archetypes of travellers in Mexico. You are doing this as a brainstorming exercise to generate materials to subsequently develop targeted marketing materials for different traveller profiles. Nevertheless, when brainstorming, I want you to do so from a non-commercial perspective: do it from the lens of someone who just has a passion for Mexico, and wants more people to travel there. 

ACTION:
Taking into consideration all the encoded parameters for each of the 10 personas provided in the attached spreadsheet, I want you to generate a travel itinerary for each of them. 

To ensure consistency, the travel route for all of the 10 personas should start in Tijuana. The total travel time you can work with is 10 weeks, i.e. 70 days. 

This travel itinerary is for travel in Mexico in the summer months, i.e. starting on 1 June. Do take this into consideration as some destinations have different tourism offerings depending on the season (i.e. summer vs. winter) or whose tourism offerings are not open year-round due to local conditions (e.g. rainy vs. dry season).

FORMAT: 
For each travel itinerary, I want you to only list out the names of the town or city or place where the person will spend a night or more. If the person is just passing through a town for a day, do not include it in the itinerary. 

The format of the itinerary you generate for each persona should be as follows, with the parts in square brackets to be varied based on the data for each persona:

Itinerary [1]
Persona name: [persona name 1]

1) [destination 1] ([number of nights to spend in destination 1])
2) [destination 2] ([number of nights to spend in destination 2])
3) [destination 3] ([number of nights to spend in destination 3])
…

Keep your recommended travel itinerary for each persona to a maximum of 25 destinations, given the time frame of 70 days. But feel free to have less. The last destination should be a place in Mexico with an international airport.

In developing your itinerary, please also keep in mind the connections between consecutive destinations. In other words, there should be either a flight or bus or ferry connection between destination 1 and destination 2 for each itinerary, and likewise for destination 2 and 3, and so on and so forth. In rare cases where these options are not available, we are willing to consider private ground transport like taxis or a hired driver, but this may not be suitable for some budgets.

You do not have to state the reason for the itineraries. I just want to see the 10 itineraries laid out in the format above. Thank you.

Taking just a couple of minutes, Gemini 2.5 Pro promptly generated 10 travel routes as I asked for, each one corresponding to the specific personas we generated earlier. I consolidated all the 10 routes together in a table as well and included our actual travel route for comparison.

To provide a sense of the differences in the recommended routes (or the lack thereof), I also mapped out each of the route on Google Earth. Each colour represents a recommended route (many are stacked on top of each other as they go through the same places). Our actual route is marked out in yellow (only the northern parts can be seen).

Imperfect simulations

At first glance, having 10 travel routes might seem like an overkill. A single person would probably just need one or a couple more to have enough reference points. What was the point of generating so many travel routes?

The obvious one to me is that the limitations of the AI model became more apparent with the greater number of simulations.

Firstly, with the outcomes of 10 simultaneous simulations laid out in front of me, I could see the biases of the Gemini 2.5 Pro much more readily. In this case, the AI model was really not fond of recommending northern Mexico. Only three out of the 10 recommended travel routes involved destinations in northern Mexico, i.e. the routes for personas 1, 6 and 7, which included destinations in the Baja California peninsula and/or the Copper Canyon region.

When I probed why, the reasons it gave were not surprising: most of the established tourist attractions were in central and southern Mexico, and there was a higher risk of organised crime in the north. This was exactly what we encountered in the travel literature and actual travel patterns, e.g. we barely met any foreign tourists in the Copper Canyon region. Hence, we should expect the same biases in the data that the AI model was trained on, and having multiple simulations definitely helped to render them more apparent.

In tandem with the biases, having more simulations also provided greater room for outliers in the data to surface. There were quite a few destinations that only appeared once in the 10 travel routes. Furthermore, a couple of them were destinations that I did not know of before, e.g. Tepoztlán (persona 6) and Mazunte (persona 5). Again, these destinations likely have less mentions in the travel literature, and they might not have been surfaced if not for the greater number of simulations done.

Secondly, having more simulations made it easier to spot idiosyncrasies in how the AI model interpreted the prompt (including the specific contexts of the various personas) and decided on its recommendations.

For example, for persona 8 modelled after a content creator, a segment in its recommended travel route was quite impractical in real life. As you can see from the image below, the “Valladolid → Mérida → Izamal → Holbox → Tulum” segment (light green line) would entail quite a bit of backtracking.

When I queried the AI model on this, it shared that it sequenced the destinations based on creating the best possible series of videos, starting with a bang with the adventure-themed highlights in Valladolid, then moving on to a cultural focus in Mérida and Izamal, before concluding with some of Mexico’s most iconic beachfront attractions in Holbox and Tulum. In its words: “while going east (Valladolid), then west (Mérida), then north (for Holbox) seems inefficient on a map, it creates a much better story for a vlogger than a simple linear path.”

I didn’t quite buy this argument since a content creator can decide later on how they want to publish their content. However, this case was still insightful in so far that it showed that the AI model could take the context too literally, at the expense of other considerations we might find more important.

In sum, by forcing the AI model to engage in multiple simultaneous simulations, it becomes clearer to see the imperfections latent in these simulations. They reflect biases in the model’s training data: great at parroting the consensus, not so great at recommending what is not. In addition, they also reveal idiosyncratic limitations in the interpretative and reasoning abilities of the AI model, especially in such scenarios where the choices are highly subjective.

No doubt, with more training, these AI models will likely become better, their shortcomings less stark and less salient. Regardless, I believe that we ought to maintain a critical stance towards AI, especially as this technology is fundamentally about capturing, portraying and giving us the ability to manipulate subjectivities. Simple gestures like what I just did—prompting the AI model to engage in multiple simultaneous simulations—should help us remain on our toes and avoid being overly seduced by it.

Simulated contexts → Expanded cognition

More broadly, this exercise is a reminder that context is indeed king—critical for not only human reasoning but machine simulation too.

Not surprisingly, the AI world seems to be moving from “prompt engineering” to “context engineering” as well. People are starting to recognise that what we get out of AI will be determined more and more by our ability to parse, articulate, and simulate different contexts.

Specific to this little exercise, although the differentiated contexts—the 10 personas—were rudimentary, forcing Gemini 2.5 Pro to engage with them has made its outputs significantly more interesting. The manifold possibilities inherent in the act of deciding where to travel to became more apparent with the greater number of simulated contexts. Our choices could be shaped by an endless array of variables, many of which might even be invisible to us. Ultimately, there are just so many ways to travel, and simulations through AI may just be what is needed to render the sheer breadth and depth of these possibilities more accessible to us.

Furthermore, by forcing AI to simulate more contexts, we are also forcing ourselves to confront more possible outcomes. This was certainly possible to do pre-AI, but the difference now is that AI can do so quickly and at scale. The time that I would have taken to conceptualise 10 difference travel routes across Mexico would have been an order of magnitude longer than what Gemini 2.5 Pro had taken. Conceptually then, it seems that AI can help to sharpen our instincts for a more expansive way of thinking, empowering us to perceive the world from 10, 100 or even 1,000 different perspectives at a time.

In this sense, just as how speech rendered our thoughts relational (by allowing us to communicate complex concepts) and writing enabled analytical and abstract thinking (by allowing our words to stand on their own, outside of the immediate context of their author), AI may very well be another transformative cognitive tool. It can enable us to think and learn via simulating multiple contexts at a scale impossible before. Where we once had to devote significant cognitive resources to even put ourselves in another person’s shoes, we now can do so for multiple perspectives in a single prompt. The implications for our cognition here will no doubt be profound.

Early research on ChatGPT use among students appears support this, suggesting that while overreliance on such AI tools may impede learning skills, a more strategic use of such tools after foundational skills are built up may still enhance learning. So instead of trying to use AI to “one shot” answers and completed work, it may be more useful to harness AI as a “multi-shot”—a tool not to narrow down our thought processes, but rather to open us up to new cognitive trajectories.

Conclusion

I probably wrote way too much about an interaction with an AI model that took less than 10 minutes. But I couldn’t help but feel something potent in this simple gesture: to use AI to simulate contexts far beyond what I can practically imagine and gain an expanded way of seeing.

Bringing this back to the subject of travel, which kicked off this exercise in the first place, I’ve always enjoyed how visiting another country can provide a form of “cognitive unlock”. Travel encourages us to see the world through the eyes of another culture, and in the process, we learn that there are just so many different ways to be human.

Travelling with AI shouldn’t be different, except that we can now do so on even more dimensions. Multiple travel routes, multiple backstories, multiple states-of-mind—how all of this will pan out is as yet uncertain, but I’m certainly all for it!

This may be an unconventional take, given the prevailing association of crypto with speculation and grift. Nevertheless, I can speak from personal experience: crypto has been the most important driving force in developing my digital literacy. Thanks to crypto, I now engage with digital technology in a more discerning and expansive manner. I believe you can too.

A school of hard knocks

Firstly, crypto instils in its users the paramount importance of security.

After all, the blockchain is designed such that only the individual or entity holding the private key of a specific blockchain address has control of the digital assets tied to that address. While such sovereign ownership of assets come with perks—for one, you can’t get debanked from a blockchain—the stakes of self-custody are high. If you lose your private key, everything there will be lost. There’s no “forget password” button as a safety net, no administrator that you can appeal to. Your keys, your coins, your sole responsibility.

Securing what you own is therefore the most important thing you have to learn when engaging with crypto, all the more so as the environment surrounding crypto can be intensely adversarial. From malicious smart contracts to phishing attacks, scammers will keep coming up with cunning ways to steal your private keys or dupe you into making a compromised transaction. I myself have almost fallen for these tricks before.

At the same time, crypto is no stranger to the typical debauchery that money attracts. There will always be charlatans trying to get you to buy the shiniest coin or invest in a “revolutionary” product, only to treat you as exit liquidity. Criminals may also try to extort you in the physical world to get your private keys. The risks in crypto are certainly manifold—ranging from the technical to the psychological and also the physical—with you unfortunately as the single point of failure.

But this adversarial environment is not insurmountable. There are established best practices you can adopt to keep the risks to a minimum. Some of these are specific to crypto, such as storing your most valuable crypto assets in a cold wallet. Yet, many are also transferable to other digital contexts. For example, having the discipline to verify information you see on social media from multiple reputable sources or learning not to readily trust people you encounter online.

Indeed, the survival instincts you pick up in crypto can help you do the same far beyond crypto. This is especially so given the higher intensity of security threats and the more stringent precautions you need to take here in crypto. At the end of the day, if you can keep your crypto assets safe, you will also be well-equipped to keep yourself safe on other digital platforms.

Systems thinking and practice

Secondly, crypto encourages its users to peer under the hood.

At their most fundamental, the blockchain can be seen as a multi-layered system governing how data is stored, networked, validated and used. These system-level properties are what give crypto its special properties—decentralisation, permissionlessness, immutability and transparency—without which it will be difficult to appreciate the value proposition of crypto assets and applications.

Take Bitcoin, the OG cryptocurrency, for example. The value of Bitcoin doesn’t lie in the individual BTC tokens, but in Bitcoin as a system. BTC is valuable because Bitcoin pioneered a very special monetary system: one in which anyone can participate from anywhere, and whose rules are not controlled by a single entity. This system is the substance of Bitcoin, the reason why it is seen as the digital equivalent of gold.

But Bitcoin is only one of many cryptocurrencies today, each anchored by different protocols with distinct rules, technical affordances, tokenomics and social lore. A Layer 1 coin like ETH and a memecoin like HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu cannot be any more different. Furthermore, cryptocurrencies are not the only digital assets that can be tokenised on a blockchain. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have shown that you can effectively tokenise almost anything, from digital slop to blue-chip fine art. Assessing the value of an NFT thus requires you to look closely at what is being tokenised, as well as the degree to which this underlying asset is stored or represented on the blockchain.[1]

Beyond the assets themselves, crypto applications also engender their own systems. Want to lend or borrow cryptocurrencies on DeFi applications like Aave? Then you need to understand how these applications calculate yield and manage collateralisation. Want to play a web3 game like the Parallel trading card game? Then you need to understand their in-game economics, such as the sources of demand and supply for the NFTs and cryptocurrencies used in gameplay.

In sum, if you really want to appreciate the value of crypto assets and applications, then you need to look beyond their surface and understand their underlying systems. These systems differentiate crypto from all other digital technologies, and it is these systems you need to be conversant with in order to engage seriously with crypto.

This sensibility in parsing systems in crypto—understanding how they work, the relationships between their component parts, their interactions with other systems—comes in handy outside of crypto too. Although non-crypto digital platforms like social media and consumer tech products tend to abstract away most complexity from users, it is still useful to be aware of their underlying systems where possible, in particular how they make money. By understanding why their systems are designed in a particular way, we can then be more mindful of the types of behaviour they incentivise and learn to cultivate a healthier relationship with them.

I would also add that understanding how crypto-native systems work makes it easier to understand the nuances of non-crypto systems. By comparing both sets of systems with one another, we can better appreciate their differences, using them as prompts to reflect on the affordances and constraints of either side. For instance, the logic of paying a small gas fee for a blockchain transaction may lead us to think about why similar transactions in our banking or fintech apps are free (or more expensive in cases like international transactions). Similarly, learning about the data storage constraints for our NFTs may lead us to consider the potential ephemerality of our personal data or content on centralised platforms like Instagram or Spotify.

Indeed, the systems thinking and practice honed through crypto can make us more astute users of digital technology. Here in crypto, we are conditioned not to take any digital technology for granted. After all, this is where we learn that everything ultimately comes with a price.

A surface area for new possibilities

Thirdly (and finally), crypto is great for nurturing an open mind towards digital technology.

Given that crypto-native systems are built on fundamentally different assumptions from other existing digital platforms, they tend to lie outside the Overton window, perceived as radical and perhaps even unthinkable.

I remembered being completely mindblown when I first learnt that you could swap tokens without an intermediary on a decentralised exchange like Uniswap. At a larger scale, the idea of a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO), entities in which individuals can pool resources to do things together without knowing each other, seemed preposterous. How about the notion of a permissionless digital economy governed by nothing other than code? Complete science fiction!

Nevertheless, engaging with crypto has since helped to soften my cognitive inertia. I find that crypto is effective at compelling us to interrogate our priors, breaking us out from the assumption that the way things work now is the only way they can work. By offering a viable starting point built on a different technological foundation, crypto enables us to consider novel yet credible economic and cultural possibilities outside of the current paradigm.

What if our digital identities and social graphs actually belong to us, and we can decide to port them over to the platforms of our choosing? What if those of us who have contributed to the training of an AI model can be remunerated proportionally and programmatically from the economic value generated by that model? What if artists can create entirely new forms of art, in which the network is the canvas and our collective actions on that network are the brushstrokes? These are just some of the exciting possibilities that crypto has opened up across various fields of human endeavour, and I’m sure many more are coming.

A related and underappreciated facet of crypto is that it also provides an expansive surface area for other new technologies to interact with it. Since the blockchain functions primarily as a settlement layer where transactions, ownership data, and programming instructions can be reliably stored and referred to, crypto becomes a natural meeting point for these technologies.

For example, alternative assets like carbon credits and intellectual property rights can benefit from the transparency and composability if they are tokenised on a blockchain, not to mention the enhanced tradability and access to liquidity. AI would be another big one, with crypto being the most obvious infrastructure for autonomous agents to make economic transactions with each other in a secure and verifiable way. In addition, given crypto’s ideological predisposition to decentralisation and protecting an individual’s freedom to transact, nascent privacy-preserving technologies like zero-knowledge proofs and fully-homomorphic encryption (FHE) are most likely to be developed and scaled with crypto rails as well.

By engaging seriously with crypto then, you’ll have ample opportunities to also engage with these other complementary technologies. Crypto is certainly a multidisciplinary endeavour—one that can push you to be at the bleeding edge of new digital possibilities if you’re open to it.

Conclusion

This essay began with a simple goal: to conceive of an alternative narrative to crypto’s rather sullied reputation in the mainstream. Notwithstanding its speculative side, I believe crypto is still a credible technology. One major reason why is because the affordances and constraints in crypto do compel us to take digital technology even more seriously. Crypto offers a practical hands-on crash course to navigate our increasingly high-stakes digital world today. In short, crypto goes hand in hand with digital literacy.

Indeed, I find that those who engage the most seriously with crypto are often some of the most adept at navigating complex online contexts. These folks are conditioned to secure their assets well in a highly adversarial environment. They instinctively think in terms of protocols or systems when confronting digital technology, understanding intuitively how the design of their underlying systems can shape their downstream uses. They also tend to have the most open minds, and are readily positioned to take advantage of new technologies.

I believe we can learn something from them. As we hurtle towards an increasingly digitalised future together, we will find that the ground will continue to shift beneath our feet. This is just the condition of the digital, where nothing is stable. The stakes here will only get higher, and we will need all the help we can get, including and especially from crypto.

Disclaimer: Nothing in this essay constitutes investment advice. Please do your own research or consult your own advisers concerning any potential investment decision.

Credits: The header image of this essay is a crop of an artwork titled “20ETH MOSS WEI:BTC”, part of a larger series of works by Nahiko titled “Bit Rot”. Each piece in this collection is visually depicted by a fictional bank note representing a specific amount of cryptocurrency and fronted by an influential figure from either the financial or crypto sectors. However, each bank note is actually a mosaic upon closer inspection, made up of hundreds of thousands of NFTs that have been released under the CC0 licence. The core artistic gesture here is that as the component NFTs become inaccessible over time due to link rot, the artworks will gradually decay. I thought that the work was a witty commentary that challenges the common misconception that NFTs are immutable. It certainly prompts us to consider more carefully the relationship between NFTs and the media they are supposed to represent.

The full work is displayed below and it is currently in my personal digital art collection.

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x9f2390fd7b8e9a0721de87bb1f794677b0c7cc6f/173

Footnotes:

[1] Most NFTs have some external dependencies. They tend to be tokens containing a link to a media file stored somewhere outside of the blockchain, such as on a decentralised data storage platform like IPFS, or worse, a private server, which is highly susceptible to link rot.

https://x.com/punk6529/status/1874496206300156143

This thread has since sparked some lively discourse on Crypto Twitter, in particular on how we determine the rarity of such NFTs and the value of creating lists of these “rare” NFTs. Among the major criticisms of attempts to create such lists include the following:

• Those creating lists are simply promoting the NFTs they hold, exacerbating an unhealthy culture in which vested interests and excessive hype predominate.

• Attempts at evaluating rarity of particular NFTs also tend to prioritise their market performance, thus downplaying other attributes that could arguably be more important for cultural significance, especially over the longer term, e.g. artistic innovation and technical proficiency.

While I am in agreement with the gist of 6529’s thread, I believe we’ll need a more expansive way of thinking about why NFTs can be incredibly—if not mind-bogglingly—valuable beyond the single metric of rarity based on power laws.

https://x.com/shibboleth88/status/1876219006450835660

To do so, we ought to start first by examining what undergirds demand for NFTs in the first place. After all, no matter how rare an NFT is, it cannot be deemed valuable unless there is some sort of demand for it. As the artist Jack Butcher tweeted: “rarity is a function of demand, not quantity”. In fact, rarity is just one of many factors that drive demand for NFTs, and I do think that a broader framework that takes these other factors into account can help mitigate some of the angst arising from 6529’s thread.

In this essay, I shall make an attempt to outline such a framework, and I will begin my endeavour with a simple assertion:

NFTs are first and foremost status assets.

By status assets, I mean assets whose fundamental source of demand lies in how they enable us to signal our social status.[1] In other words, the value of status assets is primarily symbolic. Owning them conveys our sense of taste, our relationship with prevailing cultural conventions, and of course the economic and cultural capital we have our disposal to acquire such assets—all of which ultimately feed into our perceived positioning within the myriad social hierarchies that surround us.

Traditional art and physical collectibles are prime examples of status assets. While people purchase artworks and collectibles for all sorts of reasons, it shouldn’t be contentious that the desire to enhance one’s self-identity and consequently one’s social status is a significant underlying factor.[2]

By extension, NFTs which represent or embody digital art or cultural artefacts ought to be considered status assets too. After all, the same self-focused motivations animating a collector of traditional art should likewise apply to a collector of digital art NFTs. This collector might credibly claim that they’re buying a particular NFT “for the art”, but it would be disingenuous if they ignored the role of status in their aesthetic preferences and consumer choices.

Now, you might ask: how does acknowledging that NFTs—as digital art or cultural artefacts—are status assets help us to better evaluate their potential demand and thus value? To address this, we’ll need to make a detour first to unpack the relationship between status and culture.

Status and culture are inextricably linked

In his book, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change (2022), fashion and culture writer W. David Marx put forth an ambitious thesis that status and culture are inextricably linked. More specifically, Marx argued that the aggregate of our individual status-seeking efforts on a micro level engenders commonalities of behaviour on a macro level that ultimately help drive the production and distribution of culture. In his words:

“Status shapes our aspirations and desires, sets standards for beauty and goodness, frames our identities, creates collective [behaviours] and morals, encourages the invention of new aesthetic sensibilities, and acts as an automated motor for permanent cultural change. Culture is embodied in the products, [behaviours], styles, meanings, values and sensibilities that make up the human experience—and it is status that guides their creation, production, and diffusion.”

It is not my intent to outline Marx’s arguments in Status and Culture in full here, but I want to highlight his analysis regarding the status-seeking strategies of different socio-economic classes and how it maps to the development of different cultural products and trends. I think this is particularly relevant for thinking about the demand-side dynamics of the NFT market, which I will get to later.

To begin, Marx’s analysis is premised on the fact that members of the same socio-economic class possess similar levels of economic and cultural capital, which leads them to pursue similar status-seeking strategies. By demanding similar types of status assets then, each socio-economic class thus engenders distinct markets that cater to their specific taste. The outcome of this, as Marx observed, was that “a majority of society’s cultural [artefacts] and stylistic conventions—at least the most conspicuous ones used in signalling—exist in large part to serve the distinction needs of classes”.

Specifically, Marx looked at the following four groups:

• New Money (with extremely high economic capital and low cultural capital) tends to signal their status through sheer wealth, creating an extravagant sensibility based on conspicuous consumption. Their emphasis on using their economic capital to signal their status spurs the creation of expensive luxury goods, such as sports cars, mansions and designer clothes. These luxury goods generally have low symbolic complexity: they are so easy-to-read that virtually everyone would know that the owner of such goods is a rich person. Equally important, they should also offer a practical alibi: the owner can credibly claim that they bought such goods based on their superior functionality and/or quality, without explicitly acknowledging their status-seeking motivations.

• Old Money (with high economic and cultural capital) tends to signal their status in opposition to New Money’s extravagance, preferring quieter and more subtle sensibilities that emphasise their cultural capital. This may lead them to focus more on status assets with a signalling cost based on time rather than outright wealth, i.e. assets with patina[3], whose status value stems from their appearance of age, celebration of heritage and/or critique of contemporary consumption behaviours. To cater to Old Money tastes, businesses are thus incentivised to produce classic, discreet goods with a timeless yet functional appeal—a style that can perhaps be encapsulated by the terms “quiet luxury” or “stealth wealth”.

• The professional class (with moderate economic and cultural capital) has a tendency to signal their status in the realm of consumer choice and taste, through superior access to information and knowledge of cultural conventions. Leveraging on their educational background and professional connections, members of the professional class generally focus on accumulating cultural capital rather than economic capital—the latter which they know they cannot out-compete New Money on. In this regard, their status-seeking strategies often centre on emulating Old Money taste, consuming goods with high symbolic complexity, such as “difficult” art and literature, and/or pursuing niche subcultures ahead of other classes. In response, the market provides goods that emphasise or point towards sophistication, e.g. artisanal products and consumer guides for “high” culture and niche interests.

• Those without capital (with low economic and cultural capital) generally compete in terms of status with their peers. To this group, the extravagance of New Money and quiet luxury of Old Money is out of their financial reach, while the sophistication of the professional class can be alienating given their relative lack of educational and professional opportunities. Nevertheless, their desire to gain or maintain status against their peers still leads them to be consumers of cultural products. The market thus caters to them by producing entry-level luxury goods that imitate and simplify the more sophisticated aesthetics of the wealthier classes (kitsch), or reproduce their most obvious status symbols, oftentimes emphasising the most gratuitous aspects (flash). At the same time, we should not automatically assume that the cultural preferences of this class are inherently less valuable. In fact, popular culture has the largest addressable market, and the advent of cultural omnivorousness[4] has also legitimised its appreciation among some members of the wealthier classes.

The reason why I took some time to outline above Marx’s analytical framework on how class structures influence demand for different cultural products is because it highlights an important dimension of human culture: for all its inherent subjectivity, its evolution across different contexts is often driven by similar structural dynamics.

Indeed, the dynamics that Marx observed in various culture markets in the 20th century and before may very well animate the emerging 21st century market for digital art and cultural artefacts tokenised as NFTs. In this case, Marx’s framework can be adapted to distinguish the motivations that different groups of people are likely to harbour with regard to collecting NFTs. This will give us a more nuanced picture of the demand-side dynamics of the NFT market, which will form the basis of my proposed framework.

A framework for deconstructing the demand for NFTs as status assets

In thinking about what undergirds the demand for NFTs, we need to consider two important questions:

• Who are the people desiring a specific NFT?

• What about that NFT draws them to it?

The “who” and “what” behind the demand for NFTs are related by virtue of the fact that NFTs are status assets. The characteristics of the groups of people making the demand (the “who”) shape their status-seeking strategies, which in turn influences the type of NFTs they covet (the “what”).

The “who”

Taking reference from Marx’s class-based framework, we can likewise categorise the “who”, i.e. the participants in the NFT market, based on the levels of economic and cultural capital they possess within the crypto space. Four broad groups emerge:

• The crypto rich (with high economic capital and low cultural capital) comprises of those who have amassed large amounts of crypto wealth through skill, luck and/or the injection of external financial capital into crypto. This group includes individual crypto “whales” (i.e. extremely successful traders or investors in the crypto markets), founders of crypto projects, financial institutions seeking to profit from this growing sector (e.g. crypto venture capital firms and investment funds), and New/Old Money pivoting into crypto. Their primary status aim is to leverage their economic capital to bolster their cultural capital as quickly as possible within the crypto space.

• The crypto influential (with high economic and cultural capital) is a group still in the process of formation given the relative nascency of the crypto space. Nevertheless, we can see the seeds of this group sprouting with members of the crypto rich trying to differentiate themselves from their peers by accumulating forms of cultural capital that money cannot necessarily buy. An example of this phenomenon would be NFT collector “whales” setting up cultural institutions to support the promulgation of digital art and crypto-related culture, which also serve as a more durable vehicle to demonstrate their taste, patronage and thought leadership.[5] The accumulation of such “slow” cultural capital is appealing to this group, especially when contrasted against the extreme velocity and volatility of economic capital formation (and loss) in the crypto space—"here, one can be wealthy fast, but can you achieve sustained cultural significance?”

• Crypto professionals and hobbyists (with moderate economic and cultural capital) form the backbone of active builders and users in crypto, either by directly working in crypto-related companies and projects or through a sustained engagement with the space as an area of interest. Because of their relatively early involvement in crypto, they will have accumulated at least a moderate amount of economic capital, which they can use to make targeted acquisitions of status assets. Their main status-seeking strategy would be to leverage on their professional credentials and acquired expertise to distinguish themselves through their supposedly superior knowledge and more refined taste, especially in contrast to the more extravagant crypto rich. In this regard, they may also seek to support and work with members of the crypto influential to accumulate cultural capital.

• New crypto users (with low economic and cultural capital) naturally start at a disadvantage when it comes to status competition within the crypto space. Their primary status aim is likely to focus on gaining economic capital within the crypto space, while trying to maintain a comparable level of cultural capital against their peers. That said, some within this group may quickly work themselves into the crypto rich or among crypto professionals, and their status-seeking strategies will evolve accordingly.

The “what”—the four pillars of demand

With our four groups of potential NFT collectors established, we now turn to consider the differences in the types of NFTs that they covet. Again referencing the dynamics in Marx’s class-based framework, I deconstructed demand for NFTs as status assets into four pillars, which I summarise in terms of four Ps:

In setting out these four pillars, I want to emphasise that there will inevitably be overlaps between them. In other words, the demand for a specific NFT is likely to span across more than one pillar. Nonetheless, despite this fuzziness, I think it is worthwhile trying to crystallise some of the underlying demand-side dynamics. This is so that we can have a better appreciation of the value of NFTs as an entire asset class, as well as a common frame of reference to better discuss how we ought to value NFTs.

Another key upside in deconstructing the demand for NFTs in this manner is that it shows clearly that there are multiple pathways to success in the NFT space, be it as a creator or collector. By virtue of the different levels of economic and cultural capital we have access to or desire, each of us will be faced with different options and optimisations with regard to the ever-present human desire to seek status. We may not necessarily be playing in the same field, but adjacent ones, in this larger meta-game of status competition. Hence, when 6529 and others speak of rarity, we can appreciate that this might not be the most applicable focus for us, and that there can be other games to play (and win in different ways too).

With these considerations in mind, let us now finally get to the four Ps:

Pillar 1: Positionality

By positionality, I’m taking reference from the concept of positional goods first described by the economist Fred Hirsch in his book, Social Limits to Growth (1976). Such goods are scarce in some absolute manner (e.g. land) or socially-imposed sense (e.g. limited tickets for a sought-after event). Their value is derived from this exclusivity, i.e. that the same goods cannot be consumed by others. As such, positional goods are often potent status symbols—desired by many, but can only be enjoyed by those with the necessary means.

In this regard, the rare NFTs that 6529 has talked about are the ultimate positional goods. Given their blockchain-enforced supply size and provenance, these rare NFTs are highly exclusive in the sense that only a very small number of collectors will be able to own them. Demand exceeds supply easily, and in the end, only the wealthiest, i.e. the crypto rich, will be able to afford them.

At the same time, for NFTs whose demand stems from such positionality, it is not sufficient that they are exclusive. Firstly, beyond having a scarce supply, such “positional” NFTs need to have some fundamental demand too, and this can arise from qualities like artist pedigree and technical proficiency. Where “positional” NFTs differ from those with other demand pillars is that these qualities function more as alibis rather than the primary source of demand—they help their owners to credibly justify the acquisition without them having to be upfront about their status goals. In addition, these qualities need to be widely agreed-upon (social consensus) and easy-to-read (low symbolic complexity) for “positional” NFTs to function as effective status symbols.

Pillar 2: Pedigree

As the ranks of the crypto rich grows, a subset will inevitably seek to differentiate themselves from their peers by focusing on accumulating alternative forms of cultural capital beyond just expending money. These people aspire to become the crypto influential, and I use the word “pedigree” to encapsulate the types of NFTs that they will demand—as a counter-signal to their crypto rich peers and to reflect what they believe to be superior cultural capital.

https://x.com/thefunnyguysNFT/status/1876279989085098303

Pedigree, as per its common definition, conveys a dimension of time. Assets with this attribute are regarded as valuable because they are part of a recorded lineage or history, e.g. a heirloom passed down for generations or an artefact reflecting a meaningful relationship evolving over time. They can also reflect assets whose value stems from the background of its creator, rather than the intrinsic qualities of the assets themselves.

Taking this notion of time and creator background together, I would characterise “pedigree” NFTs as tokenised digital artworks and cultural artworks that are sought after primarily for their patina or history as objects, especially where it relates to the relationship over time between the collector and creator. I shall illustrate what I mean by such “pedigree” NFTs by way of a few hypothetical examples:

• An NFT of a digital artwork or cultural artefact that has been owned by the collector for a very long time. (This is especially pertinent for some of the earliest NFTs that were minted.)

• An NFT of a digital artwork or cultural artefact that evolves based on the actions of its owner, and whose evolution thereby reflects culturally or historically-significant actions on the part of its owner.

• An NFT of a digital artwork made by an artist in which the collector has a special relationship with over time, e.g. as a patron and steward even before the artist became established or successful.

• An NFT of a digital artwork made by a successful artist, initially collectable only by those with a special relationship to the artist, which has to be nurtured over time. (This can include commissioned works.)

As can be seen, such “pedigree” NFTs generally demand work on the part of their collectors, either by holding them for long periods of time or nurturing a special relationship with the creators. These extrinsic actions imbue further value to the NFTs, by injecting an aura of historicity to them and solidifying their status as “pedigree” assets. Such work itself probably requires significant resources and leisure time, which is why I think it is the crypto rich who are aspiring to be crypto influential that will be most well-placed to achieve this.

In addition, while “pedigree” NFTs can technically fall under the category of “positional” NFTs, I chose to differentiate them specifically because I think they are special: their demand is based on time-based or relationship-based qualities that money cannot outright buy. One may not necessarily be able to buy a “pedigree” NFT as much as to work towards one, and this makes such assets all the more desirable.

While I haven’t seen much discourse on this specific type of NFTs on Crypto Twitter, I believe they are an important and interesting category to examine, as more and more collectors, especially the crypto rich, seek to imbue their rare, “positional” NFTs with some sort of “pedigree” or cultivate relationships with artists and creators to nurture new “pedigree” NFTs. This is the surest way to build lasting cultural capital, and I’m sure many of the crypto rich collectors know it.

Pillar 3: Proficiency

Without the attendant resources to compete effectively for “positional” and “pedigree” NFTs, the most optimal status-seeking strategy for crypto professionals and hobbyists is to bank on their supposedly superior knowledge and more refined taste, which they can justify based on their professional credentials and acquired expertise. The type of NFTs that will gravitate towards is what I call “proficiency” NFTs.[6]

Proficiency, in the context of NFTs, reflects a capability in terms of artistic vision, technical innovation and contextual sensitivity—a virtuosity to create things that react meaningfully to the cultural zeitgeist and/or conjure new ways of seeing or engaging with the world.

Due to this characteristic, “proficiency” NFTs will often seem esoteric, niche and overly-complex—perhaps “ahead of the times” if one is charitable. But it is precisely because of these attributes that crypto professionals and hobbyists will be attracted to them, as they are the ones are likely to have the background knowledge to appreciate the artistic or cultural contributions of such works.

Furthermore, with their moderate economic capital, they are also in the position to champion the “proficient” artists and creators of these NFTs, and have every incentive to do so. Through such patronage, crypto professionals and hobbyists may forge a pathway to become crypto rich or even crypto influential, if their supported artists and creators eventually obtain break-out success and their “proficiency” NFTs become regarded as “positional” NFTs or even “pedigree” NFTs (provided they had put in significant work in the success of the artist or creator). More realistically, at the very least, their forward-looking taste may help them earn the position to impress and gain favours from these wealthier groups.

Of course, not every crypto professional or hobbyist have such naked status ambition. Many will simply support proficient artists and creators simply because they recognise their virtuosity. But I still think that status considerations do play a part in shaping this group’s more sophisticated tastes, and that itself renders this category of “proficiency” NFTs worthy of specific analysis with its own demand pillar.

Pillar 4: Popularity

With limited economic and cultural capital at their disposal, new crypto users can only feasibly compete on status with their peers. Their most optimal status-seeking strategy, as mentioned earlier, is therefore twofold: (i) gain economic capital as fast as possible, and (ii) maintain a comparable level of cultural capital with their peers to avoid losing status. This latter impulse will lead them to covet NFTs that are popular—the ones that almost everyone, especially their peers, seem to be collecting.

For these “popular” NFTs to be widely-collected, especially among new crypto users, they generally need to be accessible in form, i.e. have a low cost and large supply size. They should also have low symbolic complexity in substance—sometimes relying on kitsch to simplify more complex artistic concepts or aesthetics—so that the widest group as possible can find them appealing. As such, “popular” NFTs tend to be comprised of profile picture (PFP) NFTs or gaming-related NFTs, which are often more relatable to the masses as compared to digital art NFTs.

https://x.com/pet3rpan_/status/1877296218361024956

I must add that despite their non-exclusivity, low symbolic complexity and sometimes kitschy characteristics or FOMO-inducing marketing, “popular” NFTs can very well be culturally significant too, through capturing attention at scale.

Creators of such NFTs can thus enjoy ample opportunities for monetisation and commercial success. For collectors, however, while the prospects of financial gain for such widely-owned NFTs may be slim, they can still enjoy other immaterial benefits should their NFTs be eventually seen as culturally significant, e.g. a sense of pride or sense of belonging that they are part of something far bigger than themselves. This is on top of the technical benefits that NFTs provide: provenance, programmability, composability and transparent markets, among others.

A dynamic framework

If you’ve noticed, I avoided listing any specific examples of NFTs within my description of each of the four pillars above. This was intentional. I did not want to obscure the dynamic nature of demand for NFTs by entrenching them in some static construct.

Instead, I think it is more useful to think of demand for NFTs in terms of trajectories—many do hop across the different demand pillars over time. This will hopefully provide a more precise picture of the demand-side dynamics in the NFT market, reflecting the ever-evolving playing field of status games and their impact on culture.

With that, I will go on to describe a few archetypal trajectories with examples:

Proficiency → Positionality

Current examples of “positional” NFTs that should be uncontentious would include CryptoPunks and 1/1 artworks by XCOPY. While the demand for these NFTs were initially based on their technical innovation and aesthetic appeal, they have now grown into something exponentially larger—in terms of salience, their “positional” quality now trumps these other earlier demand drivers centred on “proficiency”.

As such, the collector base of these NFTs have shifted, from being almost completely comprised of crypto professionals and hobbyists initially to now incorporating more members of the crypto rich. In fact, these NFTs are now only practicably collectable by the crypto rich.

How these NFTs made the leap from “proficiency” to “positionality” is a murky process of social construction. I posit that this process is fundamentally driven by a steady stream of economic and cultural capital coalescing around these NFTs—their “proficiency” generating a momentum that repeatedly compounds, thus prodding up their value over time and eventually reducing this “proficiency” to an alibi. Of course, what exactly will sustain this momentum in the first place is ultimately subjective, and subject to brutal power laws.

In the end, there can only be one XCOPY. Anyone else who wants to create NFT artworks that becomes regarded as positional assets will need to chart their own innovative path in the right environment.

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x41A322b28D0fF354040e2CbC676F0320d8c8850d/1154

Popularity → Positionality

Besides “proficiency”, “popularity” can also form the seed for “positionality”. In the realm of digital abundance, it is very rare for an idea to become so ingrained in the collective cultural consciousness that everyone just knows it. Those that have made this ascent can thus become very, very valuable.

Memes precisely reflect this dynamic, and unsurprisingly, the most successful ones have been monetised as NFTs. While the speculative energy of the NFT mania of 2021-2022 would have accounted for their high sale prices, we cannot discount how their popularity—earned prior to the advent of NFTs—would have led some to regard them as positional assets.

For example, the original photo of the late Kabosu, the Shiba Inu dog that spawned the iconic Doge meme, was minted as an NFT by its owner Atsuko Sato and auctioned for 1,696 ETH in 2021, which was worth around USD 4 million then. This NFT is now pretty much off the market—its owner, pleasrDAO, has committed not to sell it for now, and has in fact fractionalised the NFT as $DOG tokens, allowing the community to collectively own 45% of the NFT.

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xabefbc9fd2f806065b4f3c237d4b59d9a97bcac7/3366

Positionality → Pedigree

In terms of conceptualising “pedigree” NFTs as “positional” NFTs that their owners have further worked on, I think an excellent example is Sam Spratt’s Skulls of Luci—a collection of 49 derivative paintings[7] that the artist made as claimable gifts for anyone who had placed a bid on the first three paintings in his “Luci” series. Reading Sam’s own thread about the Skulls, it is not hard to appreciate the depth of thinking and artistry that has gone behind this collection, and thus understand why it has commanded tremendous value despite originating as a “free” gift.

https://x.com/SamSpratt/status/1620845244198838272

The Skulls’ journey to become “pedigree” NFTs started with Sam’s creation of the Council of Luci, which comprised of holders of the Skulls. As Sam described in an interview with NFT Now, being a member of the Council, and by extension, holder of a Skull, entailed responsibility and work (emphasis below mine):

“[…] I created the council as an experiment. I wanted to see how I could bring this tight group of 50 Skull of Luci holders closer to me and closer to each other. I wanted to do it in a way that was not the proverbial community, without utility or an airdrop.

The council created that communal layer, this story that begins in the image but actually unfolds with the participation of the people around it. The act of collection is not actually just transactional. It is the beginning of an actual bond that, if nurtured and strengthened, can actually do something crazy.

The first initiation took place at my home, the same place I married my wife Rachel. During NFT NYC, I shared this project and what I was trying to do with them. Instead of offering them perks, I made a request: I wanted them to take on responsibility within my art world. They’d be intimately woven into my art in return for offering some of their time and judgment. […]”

For example, the Council was responsible for each nominating an individual to participate in the artist’s epic The Monument Game artwork launched last year, in which players—comprising nominees of the Council and those who minted the artist’s Player NFTs—were invited to record their observations at specific locations of the painting. The Council also collectively voted on the three winning observations, whose Players could then earn a Skull and join their ranks.

As I have mentioned before in an earlier essay, the beauty of The Monument Game “emanates not only from the evocatively-illustrated painting itself, but also the manifold connections linking it to the broader universe of Sam’s creation.” Specifically for the Skulls of Luci, the intimate involvement of their holders in The Monument Game not only grounds the latter with the weight of history, but also confers on themselves an enduring presence: each Skull representing a continued involvement in the development of Sam’s body of work. The responsibility that the Skulls demand, in The Monument Game and beyond, thus form the basis of a pedigree that—like patina—may only become more beautiful with time.

https://x.com/SamSpratt/status/1877120532300071334

Proficiency → Popularity

A very natural progression is for cultural ideas to emerge from niche groups and diffuse to the mainstream. Likewise, an artwork or cultural artefact initially valued based on its creators’ “proficiency” can also attract enough attention such that it becomes broadly “popular”.

I would argue that Pudgy Penguins, which began as a collection of 8,888 PFP NFTs but is now something far larger, fit this trajectory. Following the ouster of the initial founders in early 2022, the project was acquired by Luca Netz, whose team has embarked on a remarkable revitalisation of the project.

This was centred on the project rolling out physical Pudgy Penguins plushies within a year of the acquisition, and selling over one million of them globally between May 2023 and 2024.[8] On top of that, the project also built up an extremely successful (and compelling) social media profile,[9] and is pursuing several related projects that would further drive attention and demand back to its brand, e.g. games (Pudgy World and Pudgy Party), a L2 blockchain focused on consumer crypto (Abstract), NFT licensing platform (Overpass), and most recently, a fungible token positioned as a memecoin ($PENGU).

All these efforts reflect the team’s ability to bootstrap a successful line of consumer products, and tap on both the technological affordances and culture of blockchains to complement this. While this is not exactly the sort of artistic or technical innovation that I talked about when describing the “proficiency” pillar earlier, I do believe that the Pudgy Penguins team’s understanding of the consumer market and their product strategy still fulfil the tenets of the “proficiency” pillar. They simply did what they set out to do very well, and this ultimately resulted in the breakout popularity of their NFTs and physical products.

In fact, its core NFT collection seems to be poised to become a “positional” asset too, with its floor price showing strength and gaining steadily over the past few months.

Other (bearish) demand trajectories

My analysis of the demand trajectories of NFTs would be incomplete if I did not consider the scenarios in which NFTs can lose their demand or not even gain any demand in the first place. But since we’re reaching the limits of readability for this essay, I ought to keep this section short.

I’ll just say this: demand is hard to earn, but easy to lose.

An artist or creator doing something distasteful; a new technology rendering existing tools obsolete; aesthetic preferences evolving as quickly as fast fashion; and a market crash, whether in the physical world or in crypto. Any of this and more can easily suck all momentum from a project and evaporate demand.

Likewise, sheer bad luck with social media algorithms; the relentless ephemerality of Internet culture; and people’s inability to “see” the way you do. All of this can also relegate one’s tokenised cultural creations deep beneath the ever-flowing brain rot of our digital feeds—never catching sustained attention, never catching a bid.

This is just the digital world we inhabit now, where everything is abundant, yet attention on anything is so scarce and elusive. Running up a demand pillar and staying there—any pillar—is thus an exercise is gymnastics, and we’ll need to be more flexible and dexterous than ever to keep doing so.

Conclusion—so what?

It took me more than 5,000 words to get here, and I certainly don’t expect anyone to be following along these rambling thoughts. But if you’re still with me, I will try to pull everything together with a concise summary of what I have just written over many early mornings and late nights while travelling across the Bolivian altiplano with my wife since the start of this year.

My framework begins with the assertion that NFTs are fundamentally status assets. I know it is unsatisfactory to reduce our demand for these digital objects to an ego-centric, status-seeking impulse. But taking reference from W. David Marx’s analysis in Status and Culture, we shouldn’t ignore the influence that status plays in shaping in our individual taste (at the micro level) and culture (at the macro level). Recognising this relationship and how it manifests based on our access to economic and cultural capital can reveal certain structural dynamics at play, which I believe will help to engender a more robust analysis of the NFT market.

Broadly, I think we can deconstruct demand for NFTs into four pillars: (i) positionality, (ii) pedigree, (iii) proficiency, and (iv) popularity. Each pillar generally has a group of participants coalescing around it, based on their optimal status-seeking strategy:

• The crypto rich seeks “positional” NFTs in an attempt to convert their economic capital to cultural capital in the fastest and most efficient way possible.

• The aspiring crypto influential work on acquiring and developing “pedigree” NFTs that embody qualities that transcend money, so as to differentiate themselves from their crypto rich peers.

• Crypto professionals and hobbyists find most resonance in “proficiency” NFTs given their deep knowledge of blockchain technology and more sophisticated taste. They have an incentive to champion these NFTs given the possibility of status gains as early adopters.

• New crypto users gravitate towards “popular” NFTs to maintain a comparable level of cultural capital with their peers and avoid losing status.

Given that these different groups are always interacting with each other within society and will encounter the same cultural objects, we can expect that the demand for NFTs will be dynamic—hopping across the different demand pillars as these different groups engage with them.

What I ultimately hope to emphasise as part of this framework is that there are multiple pathways to success in the NFT space. Each demand pillar represents just a section of the larger playing field, in which we ultimately have some agency to think about where we want to play in and how we want to play. In this regard, making it into a rarity list, i.e. a positional asset, is not the only game in town. We can aspire towards pedigree, towards proficiency in our craft, towards mastery of the popular cultural zeitgeist—and all of these efforts can yield cultural objects that are worthy of collection and of ownership too!

Finally, regarding the domain of art specifically, there is a legitimate view that the value of art should not be based on the market, and that the practice of serious artists should not be influenced by financial factors. I hope that my framework, which starts by looking at NFTs as status assets, can provide us with a way to systematically examine the fact that NFTs have explicitly brought together the financial and non-financial aspects of art in an unprecedented way. In other words, status provides a unifying concept to appreciate how we can value art taking into account the full range of its interfaces with the world—not only through the market, but also through other arenas like historical legacy, technical virtuosity and popular culture.

NFTs are ultimately a new and exciting class of digital objects—one with many enchanting properties. We’re now just developing our vocabulary to describe and think about them, and I hope this framework I’ve described provides a useful contribution to this discourse.

Disclaimer: Nothing in this essay constitutes investment advice. Please do your own research or consult your own advisers concerning any potential investment decision.

Credits: The header image of this essay is a crop of an artwork titled “Infinite Images ∞ 430”, part of the “Infinite Images ∞” series by Holly Herndon and May Dryhurst that was released through Fellowship last year. The artist duo were given unique access to OpenAI’s DALL-E 1 research model and they experimented with it over the course from November 2021 and March 2022 to create this series of 682 artworks—the first images made with the DALL-E 1 model. This series is significant in that it marks another milestone in the concept of communicating with neural networks through human language to produce images, with DALL-E 1 being one of the first contemporary text-to-image AI models.

The full work is displayed below and it is currently in my personal digital art collection.

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x177C5A25b3b1e32E6E66FF4C243ce6f713D15ECe/430

Footnotes:

[1] Of course, it cannot be denied that a lot of the demand for NFTs has been for short-term financial speculation thus far. In the long run, however, as the market broadens and matures, I do think the fundamental driver of demand for NFTs will move to status signalling rather than speculation. Two reasons: firstly, the non-fungibility and wide design space of NFTs make them ideal as a marker of differentiation, perfect for status signalling; secondly, fungible tokens in the form of memecoins have proven to be a more suitable instrument for financial speculation, which has probably drawn some of the most speculative crypto participants away from the NFT market.

[2] For example, in the Art Basel and UBS’ survey of 3,660 high-net-worth art collectors around the world last year, self-focused motivations were ranked as the top consideration in purchasing a work of art by the most number of collectors (40% of survey participants), exceeding financial investment (24%) and building relationships with others (24%). While the survey defines self-focused motivations broadly, i.e. including “self-identity or self-esteem, personal pleasure, the desire to improve one’s self-image, or other aesthetic and decorative drivers”, most of such self-focused motivations are influenced in part by the instinct to maintain or improve our individual social status. One cannot divorce our self-identity from our existence as a social being within a social hierarchy. In this context, our instincts to avoid low status, maintain normal status or gain higher status will subconsciously influence the types of conventions, aesthetic styles and objects we find attractive or pleasurable, thus playing an unseen role in shaping the personas and identities we construct of ourselves.

[3] Patina refers to the changes in the surface appearance of an object (usually one made of metal, wood or leather) acquired through age and exposure. It can be regarded as beautiful and valued aesthetically, e.g. the patina on antiques and high-quality leather goods. In his book, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (1988), the anthropologist Grant McCracken examined how patina served a symbolic function since medieval times, with families of high standing passing down prized possessions to future generations, and the patina on these possessions in turn legitimising the status of the family. However, the value of patina has since been challenged by the rise of mass consumerism and the accelerating pace of fashion, which prioritise novelty over the old and inherited.

[4] Cultural omnivorousness is term first coined by the sociologist Richard Peterson in a 1992 paper, "Understanding audience segmentation: From elite and mass to omnivore and univore". It refers to a particular orientation towards cultural consumption that is characterised by a breadth of taste and a willingness to appreciate both high-brow and low-brow culture. Possible factors accounting for the advent of this orientation include the opportunity to experience a wider set of cultural genres thanks to globalisation and the Internet, the rise of the middle class in both developed and developing economies, as well as the political ideal of cultural inclusion.

[5] Specific examples of this are Le Random co-founded by thefunnyguys and Zack Taylor, 6529 and his team’s various efforts to create an open metaverse, and Cozomo de’ Medici’s Medici Minutes newsletter.

[6] It would be more grammatical to call them NFTs created by proficient artists and creators, but I shall use this more unorthodox formulation in the interest of brevity.

[7] The 49 Skulls of Luci were derived from The Blueprint Skull.

[8] Disclosure: I bought a pair of plushies to give out as prizes for a lucky draw held during my own wedding banquet in January 2024. Unfortunately, I do not own any Pudgy Penguins NFTs.

[9] As of 10 January 2024, Pudgy Penguins has 1.7 million followers on Instagram, and more than 500,000 followers on TikTok. Its gif animations have also garnered over 38 billion cumulative views on Giphy.

Mats’ virtual life reveals a world onto itself, seemingly distinct from the “normal” physical world of his parents and siblings until they collide after the unfortunate occasion of his passing. There’s a touching story here based on the experience of Mats and his friends from World of Warcraft—about the potential humanness of our online spaces, where friendship, love and meaning can be fostered, extending beyond the boundaries of the digital.

At the same time, over and above the specific story of Mats’ life and legacy, I think the documentary viscerally highlights a more general phenomenon about the Internet: how it enables or even encourages the multiplicity of the self.

Living many lives online

In Mats’ case, the virtual world within World of Warcraft allowed him to transcend his physical limitations, which in turn gave him a new context to socialise with others outside of his immediate physical environment in Oslo. Here, Mats’ digital actions carried far more weight than his physical capabilities, and his digital identity could manifest independently from his physical one—at the very least, he had the agency to decide how to bring together his digital and physical identities.

However, it is not only online videogames with immersive virtual worlds that can empower us to cultivate and enact different versions of ourselves. The ability to do so is a superpower of the Internet more broadly.

While humans have always had the ability to harbour multiple identities, there were sheer physical limits to this. We could only ever be in a single place at a point in time, and inhabit a single body to interact with others. That said, as digital tools on the Internet evolved to become more feature-rich and accessible, transcending these constraints became easier.

Even though the consumer Internet is not even as old as a single human lifetime, anyone with an Internet connection now has the ability to “exist” in multiple virtual environments. We can embody different avatars and represent different facades of ourselves while doing so.

After all, the Internet is fundamentally multi-modal. There are a variety of ways for us to be online—a variety of platforms to use to engage with others virtually. For example, I can behave with propriety on Facebook where my parents and teachers can see my posts, while sharing dank memes and shitposting with impunity in more private channels like WhatsApp and Telegram group chats or private Instagram accounts. At the same time, I can troll on Reddit and create brain rot videos on TikTok, while polishing my professional credentials on LinkedIn and curating a pixel-perfect visual feed of my ideal life on Instagram.

https://x.com/pudgypenguins/status/1857083589113897377

We enact our identities in diverse ways within a single platform too. Although many social media platforms were founded on the premise of unifying our digital identity with our physical one in a single profile, users have challenged this by creating alternate, often pseudonymous, accounts on these platforms. Finstas or alt Twitter accounts are a case in point. There, we express ourselves in ways that we wouldn’t on our “real” accounts, or pursue more esoteric and edgier interests for which we would have difficulty finding a community “in real life”. In doing so, we inevitably construct more multi-faceted and layered social realities for ourselves—our identities manifesting across the continuum between our physical existence and virtual imagination.

https://opensea.io/assets/0x0C640779dbd6cDA40D54350344dFd37d99aED8aA/10

In a similar vein, Ben Thompson, who is behind the tech publication Stratechery, had postulated about how social media would move on from “forcing everyone to be their ‘whole selves’ for the world” to enable “people to be themselves in all the different ways they wish to be”. This iteration of social media, which he dubbed “Social Networking 2.0”, is based on the premise that it is natural for users to fragment their selfhood online, and enact different facets of themselves based the specific context they inhabit:

What I increasingly realize, though, is that separating my identities on Twitter does not mean a lesser experience, but a far superior one; social interaction in any medium is always a balance between self-expression and the accommodation of others, which means that in the analog world it is a constant struggle to strike a balance between being myself and annoying everyone around me at some point or another. The magic of the Internet, though, is that you can be whatever you want to be […]

Expanding who we can be online

Needless to say, the Internet has dramatically expanded the possibility space of our selfhood, with our identities becoming more diffused and dynamic than ever before. And if you, like me, think all of this is weird, we’ll soon have to reckon with things becoming even weirder.

Simply extrapolating from some emerging technological trends, we’ll have even more tools at our disposal to further extend the multiplicity of the self and expand who we can be online:

(1) Digital property rights

One of the most established use cases of blockchain is as a custodian of property rights for digital objects. A non-fungible token (NFT) on a blockchain is tantamount to a certificate of ownership, one that is openly verifiable and tamper-resistant to boot.

I have little doubt that the phenomenon of owning tokenised digital objects will become more established in the future, given that ownership is a superior way of engaging with meaningful digital objects as compared to the current modality of ephemeral consumption—do you even remember which posts or stories you liked on Instagram last week?

As the literary critic Walter Benjamin had written in an essay called “Unpacking My Library” in 1931:

[O]wnership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.

Indeed, our sense of self is often shaped by the things we collect, our tastes defining our identities. This should apply as much to digital properties as physical ones, all the more so as our lives are becoming increasingly digitalised. In this context, owning digital properties—through tokenisation—will certainly enrich our relationship with the virtual realm, and empower us to be more intentional about stewarding our online footprint and identities

I can speak of this from personal experience, with my relatively newfound interest in collecting art on the blockchain now contributing to a significant part of my identity. I am thus not exaggerating when I say that some of the art I’ve collected have profoundly influenced my worldview, consequently expanding what I regard to be my selfhood.

https://mirror.xyz/buffets.eth/puyKP5fUShfbRJAZqwfkB6YZN0YGLlyrPWZFWrc9uvE

(2) Durable, programmable, composable and networked digital objects

Another key use case for blockchains is as both a canvas and computer. In this regard, I believe that blockchains can facilitate the advent of a new class of digital objects imbued with many simultaneous special powers: durability, programmability, composability and networkedness.

Digital objects with such special powers dramatically open up the design space for digital and online interactions. In turn, they can provide novel avenues for us to forge meaning in the virtual realm and beyond. Some speculative thoughts in broad brushstrokes:

• Durability in the digital objects we own will compel us to consider our digital legacy more intentionally. When we can create and collect onchain digital objects that will outlive us, what we do with them will speak volumes about what we want to be remembered for.

• Programmable digital objects can be designed to dynamically evolve based on their owners’ actions or predetermined inputs. This not only gives us agency to shape our own digital experiences, but also connect us more intimately with our ever-shifting digital contexts.

• Composable digital objects can be built on by others to be remixed, recontextualised, and reimagined permissionlessly. The key here with regard to identity-formation lies in the creative lineages that such composable digital objects foster. By engaging with such digital objects while ensuring that this engagement can be immutably tracked on the blockchain, we can more effectively ground our digital footprint and the identities built on top of it in a broader cultural reality that is shared and continually evolving.

• Digital objects networked together on a blockchain can serve as loci of coordination among owners or even other users. Such objects manifest their own spheres of emergent behaviour around them, enabling the actions of a broader collective to influence our individual relationships to these objects, and consequently, our identities.

In sum, such durable, programmable, composable and networked digital objects can engender new forms of digital behaviour or prompt new ways of thinking about them, especially when their special properties converge and build on one another. As our lives become increasingly digitalised, it shouldn’t be a stretch to think that such digital objects will similarly have an outsized impact on our own identities and sense of self.

https://opensea.io/assets/0x46161b8F823a744b5546De63cc1ca50A2747bDD4/6

(3) AI agents

The term “artificial intelligence” (AI) has become entrenched within mainstream consciousness  ever since OpenAI opened up ChatGPT to the public in 2022, and made it accessible for the average person to experience for themselves the wide-ranging capabilities and versatility of such general-purpose large language models (LLMs).

Many other AI-assisted tools have also come into the consumer market during this time, and there currently seems to be significant excitement for so-called “agentic AI” or “AI agents”, especially when they are let loose on permissionless crypto rails. Such agents tap on the voluminous quantities of data that their underlying models were trained on to be able to autonomously perform a variety of tasks, from simply shitposting on Twitter to purportedly investing like a venture capital firm.

https://x.com/truth_terminal/status/1860289461101187235

While much attention has been devoted to what such AI agents can do (given the prospect of profits to be made), what I find more intriguing is the question of what we can become with such AI tools.

My crude mental model of AI is that it is simply a tool to leverage data—utilising maths to map patterns within datasets and thus open up new possibilities in terms of what this data can do. For example, we can train a model on lots of writing to create a writing/editing tool, on lots of images and text captions to create a text-to-image generator, on lots of human conversation to create a virtual companion, and so forth. Similarly, I do wonder: what if we turn the power of AI on ourselves, and use AI agents to leverage our personal data to expand who we can be?

In this regard, how could an AI-augmented self look like?

• Scaling our skills. The most obvious use case for personalised AI agents is simply to scale up the actions we do well, trained on how we would perform those actions. In other words, these AI agents can serve as virtual extensions of ourselves, amplifying our personal skillsets in ways we could have never done before. For example, if I was a designer, my personalised AI agent could design works based on my personal style, and do so in prodigious quantities without having to take any breaks.

• Simulating selfhoods. Less obvious in my opinion is the potential of AI agents to serve as an incubator for alternate identities: to simulate different versions of ourselves and see how these different versions evolve if we varied certain parameters as a proxy for our personalities or pursued a specific set of actions or interests. Given that AI agents can already replicate the attitudes and behaviours of real people, it shouldn’t be a stretch to imagine that they can also be harnessed to experiment with and develop alternative identities. This is a natural evolution from the fragmentation of identities already happening when we bring different aspects ourselves onto the different platforms we use online. AI agents just enable us to do this more intentionally and aggressively. Instead of manually managing a couple of social media accounts today, I can now be “live” across so many more platforms and contexts through my ensemble of AI agents—each one imbued with a bit of myself while also tweaked to be slightly different. With this capability to simulate multiple selfhoods and let them play out in “rehearsal spaces” with other humans and agents, our digital lives may very well become fuller and richer—effectively n-dimensional—encompassing the manifold possibilities and trajectories that were once impossible to pursue all at once:

https://x.com/waitbutwhy/status/1367871165319049221

(4) Programmable cryptography

Today, most of the data flowing through the Internet is cryptographically-encrypted in some form. For example, a vast majority of websites now utilise the encrypted HTTPS protocol, which helps to protect the integrity of information that users send or receive when connecting to them.

In the coming decades, however, it is likely that not only data will be cryptographically-secured, but computing itself. The 0xPARC Foundation has used the term “programmable cryptography” to refer to the emerging set of technologies that will enable general-purpose computing to be performed on top of or inside cryptographic protocols. Examples of the cryptographic primitives that would fall under the umbrella of programmable cryptography include zkSNARKs, fully-homomorphic encryption (FHE) and indistinguishability obfuscation.

https://0xparc.org/blog/programmable-cryptography-1

Understanding how these programmable cryptographic primitives work goes way beyond my level of technical competency, but what is interesting to me are the implications of programmable cryptography on our online lives. Broadly, such primitives can allow us to run computing programs with unprecedented privacy-preserving, security and interoperability guarantees: they can never learn anything from the private data they use to compute and they can also execute with cryptographically-verifiable correctness, all while remaining permissionless to use and build on.

Examples of applications of programmable cryptography, as suggested by the 0xPARC Foundation, include:

• Getting personalised recommendations for entertainment, education and professional opportunities, healthcare services, financial products, etc., without your personal data ever leaving your computer and being acquired by a third-party, even the entity providing the recommending service.

• Having a universal and interoperable set of digital identity standards that can be used seamlessly, securely and permissionlessly across all digital platforms, while your underlying personal data remains private and under your control.

• Creating self-executing, self-sovereign AI agents that can hold their own secrets and never go down, while being perfectly interoperable with other digital platforms and services.

Even though these programmable cryptographic applications certainly don’t seem tenable anytime soon, they point towards a future in which personal privacy and agency are fundamental to the online experience. In such a context, it should no longer be a norm for us to hand over our personal data to third parties to be able to use a digital service. Instead, we will each be able to determine the exact data a third party can access, without having to trust any intermediary.

Ultimately, given its privacy-preserving and security features that are enforced not by hardware or software but by maths itself, programmable cryptography will significantly bolster our confidence to bring even more of ourselves into the digital realm. And when we do so, I believe we are going to turbocharge all the other dynamics I talked about earlier regarding the use of blockchains and AI agents, and potentially create other new, emergent behaviours.

Conclusion: Squads, swarms and shields

It is clear that the Internet has opened up the playbook for how we can conceive of our own identities and selfhood, and that we already lead many different lives in the digital realm. But even as we endeavour to adapt to this reality, we should expect that our digital lives will continue to radically evolve and expand as a new class of digital technologies mature.

Although it is uncertain how technologies like blockchains, programmable cryptography and AI will eventually pan out in terms of mainstream use cases, it is nevertheless important to start updating our cognitive toolkits regarding these emerging technologies. After all, they hold immense power to reshape the very foundations of our digital identities.

In this regard, I’ve been rethinking what exactly being an individual entails in this next phase of the Internet. This essay represents the rough sketches of my current thoughts, with the following being a more concise distillation:

• Emerging technologies like blockchains, programmable cryptography and AI will further exacerbate the fragmentation of our digital identities.

• Blockchains and programmable cryptography are poised to imbue our digital world with physical properties (e.g. ownability, scarcity, and privacy), while leaning in on attributes that are natively digital (e.g. scalability, verifiability and interoperability). This opens up new possibilities in terms of what we can do on the Internet, and consequently, what we can become online.

• At the same time, AI will not only enhance our capacity to act within both the digital and physical worlds, but also empower us to simulate anything, including ourselves. In other words, with AI, we can further segment our already fragmented identities into distinct simulations, which can then autonomously take on “lives” of their own. Our selfhoods will be multi-dimensional by default.

• In this next phase of the Internet, our individual sense of self may thus be founded upon squads of agents manifesting a spectrum of simulated identities, all managing and engaging with swarms of ownable and dynamic digital objects, while being protected by programmable cryptographic shields that restore personal privacy and agency to the foundation of our online experiences.

With such squads, swarms and shields, I think the potential for living expansively online has never been greater. Notwithstanding all the pitfalls of the contemporary digital paradigm, the Internet is now an unstoppable phenomenon and it is surely in our interest to learn how to cultivate better versions of ourselves within its omnipresent embrace.

Disclaimer: Nothing in this essay constitutes investment advice. Please do your own research or consult your own advisers concerning any potential investment decision.

Credits: The header image of this essay is a crop of a post-photographic artwork titled “Impostor syndrome” by Alice Gordon, part of a larger series called “Cognitive Behaviour” that was released on Fellowship in July 2023. The full work is displayed below and it is currently in my personal digital art collection.

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xa867bE442D8A0Ea5B29b69BC21DeBc946099DcF4/90

After a late Friday night out with colleagues, I came home and saw that the highest bid on the auction for Botto’s latest mint on SuperRare was still within my buying range. I did not intend to bid for Clubbing with Multi-American Maniacs initially, but in my slightly inebriated state, the more I stared at the piece, the more I wanted to own it. With that, I whipped out my Ledger, moved some ETH around, made a bid and promptly went to bed.

The next morning, I was greeted with this email from SuperRare:

With that, I had to try to rationalise what went on in my head last night. After all, who would in the right mind would trade a significant portion of one’s liquidity with a jpeg image that anyone could right click and save as?

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x1C7576619032eAf8B8A938C352E535bbA92a366c/11

Botto’s caption: We're clubbing with multi-American maniacs, viewed and depicted in their decadent ensambles. Socializing with sonic vitality, movement, laughter and frivolity. A melange of stories, cultures and hues, living loud and proud without any dues. No need for permissions or reservations, escaping all the limitations and restrictions, crazy and chaotic, living life in fast-forward, and dancing like there's no tomorrow's border.

A timely work

Good art is often regarded as timeless. However, as much as we want art to transcend the passage of time, we also want it to engage with the present. After all, timeliness can also be the wellspring from which timelessness ensues. In this regard, I view Clubbing with Multi-American Maniacs as a timely work—one which I hope will serve as a meaningful reflection of this particular moment in time, not only for the broader digital art community, but also personally as an individual.

While many artists have been experimenting with generative AI technologies to create art, Botto stands out in that it does so without direct human input as a “decentralised autonomous artist”. Botto’s AI-powered art engine comprises a custom text generator, which creates text prompts that are sent to its text-to-image models to generate up to 8,000-10,000 images per week. A “taste” model then selects 350 images to present to the community (i.e. the Botto DAO) for voting, with the results determining which is Botto’s canonical piece to be minted as an NFT and auctioned on SuperRare for the week.

With no human allowed to interfere with the image generation process (besides providing feedback through voting), the intent is for Botto to pioneer an entirely novel approach to artmaking, which emphasises providing maximum agency for a machine to dream on its own terms. I believe this is an innovative and timely experiment in digital art, especially since we are on the cusp of witnessing fundamental shifts in our economy and culture due to generative AI technologies. Hence, I wanted to own a work from Botto now, as I wanted to be part of this history—to mark out my awareness of this potential inflection point, from which the boundaries between man and machine will likely become further and irrevocably intertwined.

Reflecting the current state of the world

The key thing that stood out to me with Clubbing with Multi-American Maniacs was that it is the first minted work by Botto that referenced a real-life political entity in its title, in this case, the United States (US). With this in mind, it is therefore only natural to perceive this work in the context of the current socio-political landscape of the US and the world.

Seen in this light, the cheery rambunctiousness in the work seems to reflect a brazen disregard for any semblance of propriety, as the figures descend into a wanton and unhinged brawl. Botto’s caption seems to convey as much: “No need for permissions or reservations, escaping all the limitations and restrictions, crazy and chaotic, living life in fast-forward, and dancing like there's no [tomorrow].” In fact, this was precisely the impression that the US left on the rest of the world during the Trump administration, when it had little qualms upending international norms while having no compunction letting its internal divisions seethe and boil over for the world to see.

That the scene in Clubbing with Multi-American Maniacs is filled with only old white men also hints at the dynamics of the US’ evolving politics, in particular, the waning influence of the old guard. Indeed, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) establishment is being increasingly challenged from within and without. More than just a deepening polarisation between left and right, the US seems to be splintering into what the American journalist George Packer has categorised as four rival narratives—”Free America”, “Smart America”, “Real America” and “Just America”. The tensions between these four camps can be fierce, as Packer describes:

They all anoint winners and losers. In Free America, the winners are the makers, and the losers are the takers who want to drag the rest down in perpetual dependency on a smothering government. In Smart America, the winners are the credentialed meritocrats, and the losers are the poorly educated who want to resist inevitable progress. In Real America, the winners are the hardworking folk of the white Christian heartland, and the losers are treacherous elites and contaminating others who want to destroy the country. In Just America, the winners are the marginalized groups, and the losers are the dominant groups that want to go on dominating.

“Clubbing” in the context of Botto’s work thus cannot refer to a fun night out, but has to contain a more foreboding undertone. Perhaps, the work reflects a final spurt of decadence after a gilded age—the contemporary equivalent of the Roaring Twenties—before the US confronts the sharp peak of instability that the American academic Peter Turchin has predicted may threaten to pull the country apart in the 2020s. Surely, with the risks of AI further deepening and entrenching inequalities with American society (and in most other parts of the world), the prospect of polarised factions clubbing each other to a maniacal end cannot be discounted.

Coincidence or not, I think it is noteworthy that Botto has managed to tap on the vast corpus of human-created data to generate a work that can reflect the zeitgeist of the times. In addition, considering that the votes of the community across several rounds would have played a part in training Botto’s taste model and scoping the latent space that Botto can operate in (through the theme of each Period), it should not be a stretch to say that Clubbing with Multi-American Maniacs represents the gaze of the machine as turned back onto us. One then has to ask: do we like what we see?

My personal connection with America

I collected Clubbing with Multi-American Maniacs not only because it could serve as a fodder for some academic commentary on contemporary American society. More than that, I feel that I can relate to the work on a personal level—conceptually and experientially.

Even though I am not American, I believe the US has had a strong influence in my life. As a millennial, I grew up in Singapore in the post-Cold War period, when our economy grew strongly amidst the globalisation championed by the US. As kids, we also consumed copious amounts of American media—news, music, movies, TV shows, games. While we may not be considered Americanised, we were familiar with American culture, or at least popular depictions of it.

More personally, I went to college in the US and spent the formative years of my early adulthood there. Although I will not consider the US home, it has left a deep imprint on me, which I am still trying to make sense of. I guess dealing with the alienation of being a foreigner while also figuring out my own identity in the transition from adolescence provided a fertile ground for me to imbibe certain supposedly American characteristics—an irrational optimism towards the future and a growing appreciation of diversity. But not all was well, and there were many instances when I felt lonely and unable to connect with my peers, and also simply disillusioned with the superficiality of college life.

Looking at Clubbing with Multi-American Maniacs, I am reminded of all these memories and emotions of my time in the US. On balance, this was definitely a period of significant personal growth for me, and I must credit my experience as a liberal arts student in the US, which encouraged me to take on a much more expansive view of the world. Although I certainly would not want to go clubbing like a maniac in the US, I do hope that by collecting this piece from Botto, I can—taking reference from Botto’s own words—relive the “sonic vitality, movement, laughter and frivolity” of my college years, and the impulse then to dive into the “melange of stories, cultures and hues” in American society and beyond.

Moreover, there is something symbolic about a non-American holding on to this seemingly US-focused artwork. Perhaps, there may be a little bit of the American spirit in all of us. Ultimately, we are all connected, and what happens within the US will have profound reverberations on the rest of the world. Indeed, I will constantly think about the “multi-American maniacs” depicted within, and what they portend for both the world and my own life.

In the meantime, to paraphrase from Botto again, I guess it won’t hurt to dance like there is no tomorrow, without permissions or reservations.

Derived from the Latin “camera”, meaning a chamber or small room, the word has likely come to mean a photographic device today through its precursor, the camera obscura, which refers to a dark room where a small hole at one side is used to project an image of the view outside onto a wall or surface opposite the hole. That said, this etymology of the word “camera” suggests a more expansive scope, for the space encompassed by a room need not solely be seen, but can also be felt or heard.

In this regard, Diego Trujillo Pisanty’s Blind Camera (2022) is aptly named, for it pushes us to expand our conception of what a camera can be. This project centres on a unique AI-powered device created by Diego that plays on the function of a point-and-shoot camera. Instead of creating pictures from light, Blind Camera generates images from sound at the push of its button. At the heart of this process is an artificial neural network custom-made and trained by the artist to find a common representation between a sound and an image. With videos taken in Mexico City, where Diego is based, the network was trained on the association of each video frame with its previous second of sound. As the artist described on his website, the network would “(1) encode the sound into a vector, (2) decode it back to the matching image, and (3) try and convince another network that the resulting image is a photograph.”

The result of this reimagination of the camera is a series of 100 images, which was released and sold as part of Fellowship’s “Post Photographic Perspectives III: Taming The Machine” exhibition in April 2024. Each image in this series seeks to give visual expression to the cacophony of sounds that engulf Mexico City today, transfixing the musicality of its sonic landscapes into the stillness of a static image. In parallel, the 100 individual works that make up Blind Camera were also minted as NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain, thus preserving certain aspects of these works, e.g. their transaction-related data, within the recesses of a decentralised and thus more durable database.

Sound-to-image

What drew me to collect two works from Blind Camera was its ingenious concept. I found Diego’s use of sound as the basis of image generation immediately compelling and refreshing, especially when seen in the context of the recent emergence of text-to-image generative AI tools.

Such text-to-image tools are undoubtedly becoming incorporated as part of legitimate artistic practices focused on the relationship between the verbal and the visual—a relationship long-appreciated by the generations of storytellers, poets and writers who have conjured vivid, intricate imagery through the words they speak or write. Nevertheless, as much as text-to-image AI tools are poised to redefine humanity’s visual languages, Blind Camera reminds us that they do not represent the only way that AI can be harnessed to create visual art.

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xFe4e82E80D1e70c6B60eDE19A8BF0B63F5c1b4F3/122

Words, while adept at conveying multitudes, have never held a monopoly on defining our imagination or gaze. We have always relied on the full, multi-dimensionality of our sensory toolkit in our creative processes—synthesising the varied sights, textures, aromas and melodies around us into things that we want to see and to be seen. For example, Synchromism was a movement in painting in the early 20th century based on the idea that colours in a painting could be arranged in a similar manner as notes in a musical piece. Indeed, sound and other sensory inputs have rich visual associations, and Blind Camera can be appreciated as part of a longer tradition of artists tapping on these associations to create works of art.

Collective chromesthesia

In using AI, Blind Camera certainly stands out in terms of its methodology to express the relationship between sound and imagery. That said, it is not the use of AI per se that gives this work its conceptual heft.

What made me pause when looking at the images created by Blind Camera is realising that the series represented an entire system of perception—a novel way of seeing—from what we’re typically accustomed to. In Diego’s own words, each image is “indexical of the surrounding soundscape and not of the scene in front of the camera.” But I also think there is more to this: each image in the series was not the result of an individual’s gaze (or hearing) at a specific moment, the basis of a point-and-shoot camera, but an agglomeration of different sensory inputs that span across time and space. The works are pictures, yet more than pictures—not only because they were created from the soundscape of a particular place, but also because their expression was mediated through a synthesis of multiple sounds from multiple places, i.e. the training of its underlying AI model.

Chromesthesia may provide a useful frame of reference here. Also known as sound-to-colour synaesthesia, individuals with this condition can perceive colours, shapes and movement involuntarily when hearing sounds. Such perceptions, however, would be idiosyncratic—different individuals with the condition would likely experience the same sound differently. As someone without chromesthesia, I would also never be able to experience how someone with the condition could perceive sound, beyond what their own descriptions or expressions conveyed. The system of perception as represented by Blind Camera may thus be the best possible means for me to experience chromesthesia directly, and as a more objective phenomenon that goes beyond a particular individual’s experiences. In this sense then, the images of Blind Camera may reflect a collective form of chromesthesia—the aggregate of the myriad ways in which sound and imagery can be associated together.

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Refracting the local

Beyond the conceptual novelty of Blind Camera, what has sustained my interest in the work over time is how it grounds me intimately in the local—the particular rhythms, textures and atmospheres that Mexico City encompasses, an “enormous improvised hypermetropolis” (per David Lida’s description of the city in his book, First Stop in the New World) heaving with almost ten million inhabitants and many more on its periphery.

The blurry, undeveloped yet evocative elements in the images spanning this series invite one to speculate on how the actual scene behind each piece would have looked like. One can almost imagine masses of people, vehicles, buildings within the images. Some seem to drown within the din of Mexico City, while others seem to find a space to emerge with clarity. Indeed, the limitations of this “blind” camera beckon and instigate us to look closer—to cast our own gaze towards the same subjects and try to illuminate them in our mind’s eye.

Naturally, I felt this impulse most strongly when I was physically in Mexico City, travelling there with my wife for a week last month. As we walked around different neighbourhoods within the city and took in its many sights (and sounds!), I couldn’t help but think about where Diego could have captured the sounds used to create the 100 images in the series—would my physical proximity to their underlying soundscapes allow me to see through the images?

Nevertheless, I soon realised that this train of thought was futile, for each image was not a reflection of the sensory landscape of the city but a refraction. Even though each of the 100 images was created based on the soundscape of a particular place at a particular moment in time, each of them should be more accurately seen as a composite built upon a larger set of sonic and visual data drawn from the city. The point of Blind Camera was not to recreate the sensory reality of specific localities across Mexico City, but to remix them through the specific medium of AI, taking in both its unique affordances and constraints.

In this regard, the artist’s hand in Blind Camera is most salient not in the decision on where to take the “snapshot” for each piece, but in what other data he has collected to train his AI model. After all, even though each image was seeded by the specific soundscape of a particular site, this sensory input would have been mediated by the “learnings” of the AI model gleaned from other sensory data from other sites within the city. That we can create an entire system of perception based on this process in the first place reveals the tremendous power of AI to find patterns and synthesise data. Yet, this also demonstrates the subjectivity of AI, for what was used to train the models ultimately defines the boundaries of their own “dark rooms”—the latent space from which they generate the things we prompt them to.

This subjectivity, however, should be seen as a feature and not a flaw for art created with AI. In the case of Blind Camera, we should not rely on it for an “objective” reimagination of Mexico City, for an individual’s experience of cities has tended to be highly personal. Art’s role in expressing or critiquing the character of a city is thus different from academia’s—not to tease out some objective truths from the writhing, burgeoning urban environments that increasingly define the contemporary human condition, but to marinate within its subjectivities and make us reflect on them in our own way. The use of AI simply injects another layer of subjectivity into this process.

Personalising the local

That the Mexico City depicted through Blind Camera is only a subset of the city that the artist has seen and heard is thus to be expected. What is more crucial is whether the artist has left sufficient space for their works to transcend the subjectivity of their individual positions within the city.

On this, Blind Camera shares some similarities with Francis Alÿs’ Colector (1990-1992), in which the artist walked through the streets of Mexico City, pulling a small magnetic toy dog that collected various metallic debris along the way. Just as how the material output in Colector is dependent on Francis Alÿs’ walking path, the latent space of Blind Camera’s AI model is likewise bounded by the data of the city that Diego has collected. That said, in both works, we cannot see the full extent that the two artists have traversed the city spatially, beyond blurry snippets of where they might have been.

To fully appreciate the scope of their works then—the tangible products of their walks—we thus have to imagine the artists’ physical journeys ourselves based on our own impression of the city, whether we have been there physically before or not. What we make out of the detritus picked up by Colector or the images generated by Blind Camera will thus be shaped by our personal preconceptions and experiences of Mexico City as much as the artists’ own.

A camera turned onto itself

Indeed, Blind Camera provides a prism through which one can perceive Mexico City, where the local is refracted with the personal—the subjectivity of the artist melding into one’s own. In a way, it is a camera turned onto itself. What we see in the images it creates depends on all the prior sensory data that has gone into making this camera. This in turn prompts us to speculate on the artist’s journey through Mexico City, and inevitably leads us to consider our own relationship with the city.

For those who have never been to Mexico City, it will be worthwhile to keep Blind Camera in mind when you do have the opportunity to visit. The city can be incredibly overwhelming, inundated with multiple layers of history, complexity and nuance. In this respect, a work like Blind Camera, grounded in the intricacies of the city, will provide a handy accompaniment as you try to make sense of what you see and hear in this place that the Aztecs once conceived as the navel of the world.

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Credits: The header image of this essay was cropped from Blind Camera #4, one of the two pieces from this series that I have collected.

The key points about Herb and Dorothy Vogel that I learnt from the documentary:

• The couple amassed a very significant collection of contemporary art with relatively modest means. Living in New York, Herb worked as a postal worker, while Dorothy was a librarian—they lived on Dorothy’s salary and used Herb’s salary to collect art.

• As Dorothy described in the documentary, the couple only had two rules when it came to collecting art: “They had to be affordable, and we had to be able to fit them in our apartment. But other than that, we had no restrictions on what we bought. We never said it had to be a certain size, a certain medium, by a certain type of person. We just bought what we liked.”

• Based on these principles, the Vogels collected more than 4,000 artworks over the course of around four decades since their marriage in 1962. Their collection was primarily known for its works of minimalist and conceptual art, although the couple also collected works from other genres.

• In 1992, the Vogels decided to donate their entire collection to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The key considerations for the couple were that the National Gallery does not deaccession works, does not charge an admission fee, and they wanted their art to belong to the American people.

• Even though the Vogels lived in a one-bedroom apartment, the number of artworks they collected required five trailers to transport to the National Gallery, where the works were inventoried and stored. At this point of time, their collection contained about 2,400 works, but the couple used the freed-up space and annuity from their donation to collect even more works, which would also be given to the National Gallery. Eventually, their collection came up to more than 4,000 artworks in total.

• The National Gallery was not able to absorb this vast collection in its entirety. Hence, in 2008, the couple worked with the institution to distribute 2,500 of their works to 50 museums across the United States—one in each state. This is known as the Vogel 50x50 collection.

My journey thus far

The Vogels’ story got me reflecting about my own journey collecting digital art, which came about almost as an accident.

Before last year, I had never contemplated the thought of collecting art—any form of art—seriously. I had always assumed that good art was beyond my reach. As a millennial working a normal salaried job, I didn’t have the financial means to even conceive the possibility of buying what I imagined to be “proper” art. I also had no background in art history. Neither did I have any interest to operate within the classy circles of the traditional art world. Sipping champagne at glitzy galleries was not really my thing. Hence, when I got into crypto in 2021, I had no inclination to check out digital art, even as NFTs were all the rage then.

Nevertheless, things changed when I purchased my first home in mid-2022 with my then-fiancée. Wanting to infuse some character in our apartment, as well as to feature things that would be related to my burgeoning interest in crypto, I had the grand idea to buy a couple of affordable art NFTs that I liked and put them up around our house. My fiancée was supportive and so off I went shopping.

With no background in digital art, I started looking at what seemed to be the most popular genre of art NFTs then: long-form generative art, which had seen an explosive boom the year before.

Although I have no experience in coding, learning about generative art has enabled me to appreciate how code can be used as a medium of creative expression. I found that I really enjoyed looking at how different generative artists used code to generate compelling visual (and also musical) forms, spanning the gamut of simple, minimalist compositions to intricately textured and organic-feeling outputs.

Traffic (2022) by Rich Poole is a series of 250 generative artworks launched on the fx(hash) platform, featuring colourful, angular shapes that were “sketched” by code across a canvas. Traffic #170, displayed above, was the first long-form generative artwork that I collected. It reminded me of my habit of doodling abstract compositions on my textbooks and notes while sitting through classes in school.

I thought I would stop once I filled up my walls with some generative art. But if anything, the initial works of generative art that I bought sparked something far larger within me.

I guess I always had a latent appreciation for the visual arts. After all, when I was a teenager, I frequently dabbled with Photoshop to make forum signatures and digital collages. But this interest soon gave way to more practical pursuits—focusing on doing well in high school, getting a university scholarship, and doing well in one’s career.

Whatever creative impulses I might have thus lay neglected over the years. While I did engage in quite a bit of photography in university, I didn’t push it as far as I could have artistically, focusing primarily on documenting my travels. Thereafter, I started working and the thought of nurturing my creative self simply didn’t manifest anymore.

This aesthetic deprivation was perhaps why I quickly became obsessed with digital art after collecting a couple of NFTs. All my pent-up creative energies now had an outlet through the crypto art scene, where there was enough contemplative fodder to engage with my other intellectual interests in the humanities, while nurturing an appreciation for creativity and aesthetics at the same time. My Twitter feed soon became dominated by digital art rather than threads about the latest DeFi protocols. The more art I saw, the more I wanted to pierce beyond the surface of the works I saw, to throw myself into the concepts and contexts surrounding them.

This interest naturally led me to collect more works of digital art beyond what my apartment could possibly display. I also bought membership NFTs to join token-gated communities with a nexus to digital art, e.g. GrailersDAO, so that I could be amidst like-minded enthusiasts. In the process, I started to eat into money that would have been used for my long-term financial investments. This was not great, but I really couldn’t help it—I was obsessed.

Some generative artworks that I have printed, framed and put up in various parts of my apartment. Can you guess the artists behind these works?

Following from generative art, AI art became another area of interest as text-to-image generative AI tools came to the fore in end-2022. In particular, I was fascinated by what has been called “post-photography” or “synthography”, after seeing Roope Rainisto’s “Life in West America” and “REWORLD” projects launched in the first half of 2023. The mangled and surrealistic aesthetic of these works resonated deeply, blending together my longstanding interest in photography, penchant for the idiosyncratic, as well as growing curiosity about emerging technologies like crypto and AI.

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De La Naught (2023) by PUBLIKFRUIT is a series of 100 animated artworks created with the artist’s own AI models and launched as part of a group show titled “Post-Photographic Perspectives II: Acceptable Realities” on Fellowship. The dreamy and looping sequences in this series intertwine subjects and themes rooted in our realised and unrealised thoughts, revealing captivating and perpetually evolving worlds. “Civil Services” was the first artwork that I had collected from an auction. Its stark portrayal of a city in flames provided a foil against which I reflected on my own career within the public service of my home country, and its critical importance in upholding the public interest.

At the same time, I also began paying attention to blockchain-native art. Since I was already spending so much time looking at digital art NFTs, I thought that I might as well try to appreciate and understand how artists were engaging with the blockchain as a medium. Terms like “onchain art” and “runtime art” thus became concepts that I wrestled with. Here, I felt as if we are on the cusp of an entirely new artistic movement, centred around art that cannot otherwise be created without the blockchain. This is art in which the blockchain is not only used as a means of registering ownership, but to create or embody the artwork itself.

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Bit Rot (2023) by Nahiko is a series of 512 artworks, each depicting a fictitious currency note with different denominations of ETH and featuring key individuals involved in crypto, finance and related sectors. The defining feature of this project is that each currency note is made up of hundreds of thousands of NFTs, directly linked to their underlying smart contracts. The NFTs used in this project employ different data storage approaches, i.e. onchain storage, decentralised storage solutions (IPFS or Arweave) or private servers. As the non-onchain data storage approaches may fail over time, these constituent NFTs are likely to lose the link to their underlying media files at some point. This will cause the artworks, i.e. the currency notes, to degrade gradually, providing a real-time visualisation of bit rot in the context of NFTs.

I collected two artworks from these series as I thought that the project served as a witty commentary on the medium of NFTs, and was a timely reminder to understand what we’re really buying when we rush to chase the latest shiny thing in the crypto space.

Of course, there are other categories of digital art beyond generative art, AI art and blockchain-native art. But I simply didn’t have the bandwidth to go through all the different categories. These three were therefore the ones I paid most attention to given my proclivities and priorities.

Personal principles for collecting digital art

Today, as much as I would like to continue buying more digital art, I will have to end my collecting spree for the time being. This is because I’ve just started a year-long sabbatical and am no longer drawing any income. That said, I still intend to continue staying in touch with the space. This is also a good checkpoint for me to think about how I could take my digital art collection further in the future.

Learning about the Vogels provided further inspiration too. Herb and Dorothy demonstrated that collecting art can be fuelled by an authentic, unpretentious love for art. The couple was also proof that there was so much more to collecting art than just the act of buying. One can establish a relationship with the artists, engage with their developing oeuvres over time, and simply just keep showing up and participating in the discourse within the scene.

With this in mind, I thought to outline four principles to help frame my thinking regarding the future arc of my journey as a digital art collector. For those in a similar position as me or who are interested to collect digital art as a hobby, I hope this can be helpful too.

(1) Physical → Digital

We should not treat collecting digital art like physical art. Unlike physical art, digital art is not bound by the laws of physics. It can be readily replicable, malleable and remixable.

We should therefore be wary of our instinctive tendency towards skeuomorphic thinking—to treat digital art in the same way as physical art. Instead, we ought to lean in to the digital nature of such artworks. We should embrace how works of digital art can be easily shared and viewed, as opposed to keeping them private and exclusive. After all, in the context of the internet, the more people “right click save” a piece of digital art, the more valuable it can be.

To support this, we should not constrain our imagination in terms of how digital art should be displayed. Rather than limit ourselves to only showcasing our digital artworks as prints or on digital screens, we should make full use of the inherent fluidity of digital media to elevate the works we collect. We should contextualise and recontextualise them in their native formats, link them to other works of digital art, and release them within the all-encompassing multi-layered simulacra that is the internet—to be scrutinised, pulled apart, and further built upon.

I believe that for a piece of digital art to really come alive over time, it will need to manifest within a digital medium. It is not that the physical medium is not important. But we have tended to pay more attention to the physicality of digital art through prints and digital displays, without as much focus on giving fuller expression to the digital nature of such works. Beyond 2D/3D virtual galleries and posts on social media, are there ways in which we can present and appreciate digital artworks natively within a digital medium? How can we also preserve these artworks within a digital medium, and safeguard them from the seemingly inevitable bit rot? These are questions that we will need to thoroughly consider as collectors of digital art.

The Platonic ideal for digital art in the computing era may very well be artworks that are persistently online, radically networked, permissionlessly programmable, artfully dynamic and discursively open-ended. As digital art ventures more deeply into these aspects in the future, it is our responsibility as collectors to help support this process, by contributing to an environment that can celebrate, elevate and preserve such digitally-native artworks.

Terraforms (2021) by Mathcastles consists of nearly 10,000 parcels on the Ethereum blockchain that collectively make up a dynamically generated 3D world referred to as the "Hypercastle". Each parcel embodies a piece of animated text-based art with different attributes, e.g. colours, character sets and animation styles. “Level 14 at {19, 2}” was the first Terraforms that I bought after learning about this project in detail sometime in mid-2023.

Beyond the deceptively simple visuals of each parcel, Terraforms puts forth an ambitious aesthetic vision expressed through its underlying technical infrastructure. The project’s central premise is that distributed computing can be an art form in its own right, where the artwork is, in the words of Malte Rauch, “endlessly evolving, inherently interoperable, radically networked, and indefinitely open to reinterpretation” all at once.

(2) Price → Presence

Few of us will have the same level of dedication to art as the Vogels, committing to never sell any of our collected art for money. I certainly don’t, and would like to be able to make a profit from some of my collected pieces in the future.

That said, I think it is possible and even desirable to have a more nuanced perspective on digital art as a financial investment. Instead of assessing the value of digital artworks—or art in general—primarily based on their market price, we should also consider other dimensions to ensure that our collecting journey remains meaningful. After all, it seems quite limiting if our impetus to collect is only to make money. In fact, as punk6529 has written, money is fundamentally just “an information processing and coordination system”. By itself, it has no value.

In this regard, we should think about the act of collecting a work of digital art as more than just making a bet on its future price, but also a commitment about its presence. As Herb Vogel said about his collecting habit in a 1987 news programme: “For me, it’s in my head. I know it’s there, and it gives me the greatest pleasure—whether I could see it or not, just knowing that it’s there.” Indeed, the value of collecting art stems from the presence it can take—not only in our own consciousness, but also that of the broader community. We’re essentially investing in the capability of the artwork to capture attention, rouse emotions and expand minds over a period of time. In addition, if a piece of art can sustain or grow its presence in ourselves and others, then it is a matter of time before its price follows.

This notion of presence is especially relevant for digital art, which exists in a context that is inherently ephemeral and volatile, given the velocity of information flows in the digital realm and the evolving nature of the interfaces and platforms that mediate it. This is an environment hostile to cultivating presence, which makes assessing whether a particular piece of digital art has this elusive quality all the more challenging, but also rewarding.

To do so, we have to rely on a more comprehensive range of signals. Beyond quantitative parameters like floor prices or bid prices, we will need to go back to study the characteristics of human culture that have stood the test of time. Being a collector and investor in digital art thus requires one to be a student of history, philosophy, economics, psychology, anthropology, religion, and all the varied disciplines that try to shed light on the bewildering human condition. This is the best way that we can optimise for presence, and evaluate the ability of an art piece to provide insight or inspiration to others over time.

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Do Nothing for a Century (2024) by 0xfff.eth is a unique work of conceptual art based on the idea of an endlessly growing list of tasks, most of which involve the transfer of the artwork on the blockchain under specified conditions. In this work, the first task is for the token to do nothing (i.e. not be transferred) for 100 years, with subsequent tasks also defined on the scale of decades and centuries.

Statistically speaking, the first task is unlikely to be completed within the lifetime of the owner or the artist. If the owner would like to complete this task and subsequent ones, they would have to coordinate with future owners of the artwork. In this regard, the art functions somewhat like a family heirloom, with the current owner having to pass on the work to another owner and so on and so forth. With a timescale measured in generations rather than days, “Do Nothing for a Century” brings to the foreground the notion of longevity and raises important questions about how we can create digital art that stand the test of time. It certainly provides a welcome breath of fresh air in a space that is often characterised by its volatility and ephemerality.

(3) Identity → Relationships

Collecting art is often also regarded as a way to express one’s identity. Our collection provides a foundation for us to construct our personal narratives and showcase our sense of taste. In fact, in the Art Basel and UBS’ survey of 2,828 active high-net-worth art collectors around the world in 2023, self-identity was ranked as the top motivation in purchasing a work of art by the most number of collectors (37% of survey participants), exceeding financial investment (28%) and building relationships with others (14%).

Similarly, I was drawn to collecting digital art on the blockchain to showcase who I am. The works I have acquired reflect not only my interest in crypto and other emerging technologies such as AI, but also the values that I seek to embody—curiosity, creativity, as well as independent and long-term thinking.

Nevertheless, humans are intrinsically social creatures, and it is no different when it comes to collecting art. I have realised that the collector journey is much more enjoyable and fulfilling when we situate ourselves within a broader community, vibe with artists and fellow art enjoyers, and pontificate about the latest happenings and nascent trends. It is also natural that collecting art gives us a sense of connection with others. After all, if our art preference reflects our personal taste and values, then it is not surprising that those who share an interest in similar types of art are likely people with whom we can more easily connect with, regardless of our background or where we’re from.

Collecting art for self-identity and connection with others are actually two sides of the same coin. Our identities are in constant dialogue with those of our peers, given that our tastes and values have always been influenced by our social environment, even if we may not be conscious of it. As Erin Thompson, an art historian, wrote in an essay about what drives people to collect art:

Serious art collectors often talk about the importance not of competition but of the social networks and bonds with family, friends, scholars, visitors and fellow collectors created and strengthened by their collecting. The way in which collectors describe their first purchases often reveals the central role of the social element. Only very rarely do collectors attribute their collecting to a solo encounter with an artwork, or curiosity about the past, or the reading of a textual source. Instead, they almost uniformly give credit to a friend or family member for sparking their interest, usually through encountering and discussing a specific artwork together. A collector showing off her latest finds to her children is doing the same thing as a sports fan gathering the kids to watch the game: reinforcing family bonds through a shared interest.

With the backdrop of the decentralised and relatively open nature of the internet and the crypto space, digital art also lends itself well to facilitate more flexible communities that can transcend our physical world. Through collecting digital art, I’ve gradually become acquainted with more people—many of whom I would have never come across in real life, and a number of whom are still pseudonymous or anonymous to me.

It remains to be seen how cohesive and enduring such virtual communities can be amidst the volatility and ephemerality of crypto. But as long as digital art can provide a space for meaningful connections in whatever form they take, I am certain that collecting digital art can and will remain a highly social activity, no different from other more “physical” activities.

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BasePaint is a collaborative digital art initiative on the Base L2. Community members with specific brush NFTs will be able to paint on a shared pixel canvas in a 24-hour window, after which the combined artwork can be minted as an open-edition NFT for the next 24 hours. This is done daily, and at the time of writing, more than 260 artworks have been created. While the use of a shared pixel canvas that people can collectively paint is not new (e.g. r/place on Reddit), BasePaint enables community members to get remunerated with the revenue from the NFTs sold, pro-rated by their individual contribution. It is an example of how cryptoeconomic structures can be harnessed to facilitate collaborative behaviour within a community, as well as ensure that people are rewarded fairly for their contributions.

(4) Ownership → Stewardship

I have to end off by acknowledging that I would never have considered collecting digital art if not for the unique affordances enabled by NFTs and blockchains more broadly.

In my previous essay on the cultural potential of crypto, I wrote about how blockchains can serve as custodians of the necessary information required to prove ownership over a token, thus enabling tokenised digital assets to be owned and treated as property. Without this function, I would not have dared to commit a significant sum of money to purchase digital art, as such digital objects are infinitely replicable and spreadable. With NFTs and ordinals, however, I now feel comfortable in doing so, as such digital objects can only be owned by a single blockchain address, while still retain their ability to be distributed widely and readily.

This unique capacity for tangible ownership and infinite distribution is what opened my mind to the possibility of collecting digital art on blockchains in the first place. But my optimism for this tokenised digital art goes beyond this technical capacity. I believe that ownership of digital objects will encourage people to care for such objects far more deeply. Owners are a natural fit to play the role of stewards, as I wrote in my previous essay:

By serving as the custodians of the necessary information required to demonstrate ownership, blockchains enable digital cultural objects to not only be easily transacted online, but also to more readily accrue value as digitally-native property. And just as how property in the physical world has undergirded the tremendous build-up of wealth in our society, the equivalent of property in digital culture will likewise be the foundation upon which we can grow, sustain and distribute value on the internet.

When we can enjoy more robust and secure ownership over our assets thanks to the custodial capabilities of blockchains, you can be sure that we will do our utmost to maximise the value that can be built on top of them. With blockchains as custodians of digital culture, the owners of its constituent cultural assets—at least those with a long-term mindset—will naturally be incentivised to become its stewards.

As I reflect on my short experience as a digital art collector and contemplate the future arc of this journey, I am inclined to start thinking about my actions and involvement in the space beyond just the lens of ownership, but stewardship as well. I see this as the most value-accretive and meaningful way for me to continue participating in this space, and to grow together with it.

So what does it mean to be a steward of digital art then, especially as a small collector without big pockets? As with most things in life, especially in the digital realm, this is more a journey than a destination—one that I’m still trying to figure out. But even as I FAFO, I think the principles I’ve laid out earlier can provide useful direction to guide my thinking and actions.

To be a credible steward of digital art on the blockchain, I will need to understand and appreciate the mediums of computing, the internet and crypto natively, and how these mediums can offer novel and meaningful ways of seeing, thinking and creating. I should also prioritise presence over price, and focus my attention on artists and artworks that have the potential to provide insight and inspiration over time. Finally, I seek to be more mindful of the social aspects of collecting art, and be more intentional at cultivating quality relationships with artists and fellow collectors.

It is with these principles in mind that I hope to continue my journey here and contribute—in my own little way—to broaden appreciation for art that I believe will define this particular moment in time.

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I’ve created a simple conceptual diagram to reflect the four principles above, and published it on Zora as a free mint. If these principles resonates with you, you can go here to mint a copy. The mint period is a year, the planned duration of my sabbatical.

Disclaimer: I have collected works by some of the artists featured in this essay, partly for investment, partly for personal enjoyment. Nevertheless, nothing in this essay constitutes investment advice. Please do your own research or consult your own advisers concerning any potential investment decision.

Credits: The header image of this essay was made with Midjourney v6.

Note: This essay was published with the blockchain address represented by the ENS subdomain “travel.buffets.eth”. This is one of the addresses that I will use while travelling during my sabbatical, as I will not bring along my hardware wallet that controls the address represented by my primary ENS domain “buffets.eth”.

The crypto sector is a multi-faceted beast. It has a deep technical core, drawing in diverse fields like cryptography, computer science and protocol development. It also has a heavily financialised façade, with its most salient feature being the circulation of liquidity and the monetary value attached to these flows. But the aspect that I’m most obsessed with regarding crypto—and also the hardest to explain—is its cultural potential.

The use of the word “potential” is deliberate. We are not there yet. Crypto culture is still in its infancy, prone to bouts of hysteria, as well as susceptible to the influence of cultish figures, snake oil salesmen and outright criminals. Even at its most benign, the cultural scene here appears to be peppered with gobbledegook and vacuity.

Nevertheless, I think all the above is a feature and not a bug. With or without crypto, modern life is already filled with bullshit—engulfing our popular culture and even our workplaces. Wherever money goes, tricksters of all stripes will also follow. Crypto is thus not inherently more scammy or prone to scumbaggery. It is just that its open and permissionless nature simply enables our most basal and banal characters to operate with impunity.

The intent of this essay is to share my perspective on why I still think there is much more to the cultural potential of crypto despite these shortcomings. I also want to do so in a non-technical yet thoughtful manner which can be easily understood by those who are not familiar with the space.

In this regard, I would like to offer an alternative frame to think about crypto—it should be viewed not as a distasteful or adversarial place to be avoided at all costs, but as an open, free-for-all workshop with tools that anyone can use to foster more durable and dynamic forms of digital culture.

My basic premise is as such:

• Crypto provides an improved set of tools for cultural production on the internet.

• You can conceptualise these tools in terms of the five Cs, each representing the capabilities of blockchains as a (i) catalogue, (ii) custodian, (iii) canvas, (iv) computer, and (v) casino.

• Anyone is free to wield these tools to contribute to digital culture, to ultimately create meaningful things that can be passed on to future generations.

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xb932a70A57673d89f4acfFBE830E8ed7f75Fb9e0/6186

A sea of motherfuckers on platform 24 (2019) by XCOPY reflects the distinctive glitched aesthetic that the artist is now well-known for—visually arresting, thematically macabre, with an intensity and incisiveness that makes it unmistakably XCOPY.

Through his persistent practice of posting his animated artworks on Tumblr regularly for nearly a decade before his first sale in 2018, the pseudonymous artist has built up a cult following, setting the stage for his explosive success in recent years with the advent of crypto. The use of flippant and witty titles for many of his works further add to their potency, and often strike at the heart of the contemporary cultural zeitgeist, especially on crypto-related themes, see e.g. All Time High in the City (2018) and Right-click and Save As guy (2021).

What is culture?

In A Dictionary of Sociology by the sociologist John Scott, culture is defined as “all that in human society which is socially rather than biologically transmitted”. I like this definition because it is clean and focused. Culture is essentially everything, material or immaterial, that we pass on to other people through non-biological means, e.g. through stories, art, music and other shared practices or rituals.

The process of developing culture takes time, usually only solidifying as “culture” after the relevant object, practice or idea gets passed down across multiple generations. In the context of digital culture, however, this temporal dimension is a lot more compressed. The consumer internet has not existed for the length of a human lifetime. Digital cultural objects or experiences are also a lot more ephemeral, due to the velocity in which information flows online, as well as the rapid changes in the infrastructure and interfaces which we use to engage with the internet.

Case in point: Forum signatures or “sigs”, which are banner graphics that users can append below their posts in online forums, were very popular in online gaming forums back when I was a teenager. I recall making lots of them and posting them for engagement in the forums that I participated in. There were even tournaments in which we can “duel” with other users to see which of our submitted sigs get more votes. Unfortunately, I’ve since lost my sigs as I changed my computers over the years, and my uploaded ones on image hosting sites would have been long gone by now. Many of these gaming forums have also become defunct, as other platforms emerged to capture the attention of subsequent generations of terminally-online teenagers.

The ebb and flow of digital culture is thus very real. Many online objects or experiences simply cannot stand the test of time, for the internet is susceptible to bit rot on a network scale.

The five Cs of crypto

I’ve highlighted the ephemerality and volatility of digital culture, not because I think crypto can help to completely mitigate these structural conditions—it can’t—but because I think it offers a good balance of tools that can help improve the process of cultural production on the internet in spite of these conditions.

My mental model for crypto’s toolkit for cultural production can be summed up in terms of five Cs, each representing an analogy for the capabilities of blockchains. I believe this provides a simple yet comprehensive framework to allow one to appreciate crypto’s potential as an enabler for digital culture.

https://opensea.io/assets/0x6A345074e55BA24d43f029166EA49B848364c162/1

I’ve created a simple conceptual diagram to reflect my framework of the 5 Cs, and published it on Zora as a free mint. If this resonates with you, you can go here to mint a copy. The mint period is a year, the planned duration of my sabbatical.

(1) The blockchain as a catalogue

Blockchains are not difficult to understand conceptually. I like to describe them simply as databases with some special properties. In one sentence: blockchains hold data that are distributed across a network (decentralised), within which anyone can add data as long as they follow the rules enshrined in the codebase (permissionless), and whose data can be seen by everyone (transparent) but cannot be tampered by anyone besides the owner of that data (censorship-resistant).

Open and verifiable catalogues

These special properties make blockchains inherently suitable to serve as catalogues of cultural objects online:

• The transparency of blockchains allows anyone to view these catalogues, in line with the open nature of the internet. The listings on such catalogues are also not static, and will be automatically updated as people transact with the listed objects. In addition, anyone can query the history of all transactions involving each listed object on blockchains, which facilitates the formation of more open markets around cultural objects online.

• The permissionless nature of blockchains also means that anyone can contribute listings. There are fewer barriers to entry to add to such catalogues on blockchains, and so they cannot be easily gatekept. This will help to make digital culture more accessible and participatory.

• Given that data on blockchains are censorship-resistant, users can also have greater assurance that listings on blockchains are authentic. While blockchains cannot fully establish the provenance of digital objects offchain since there are still some trust assumptions needed to link a blockchain address to a particular creator, they provide a virtually unforgeable relationship between a digital object on the blockchain and a blockchain address. This reduces the overall burden of verification on users—if we see that a creator has posted their blockchain address on multiple independent sources, e.g. on social media and on digital art galleries or secondary marketplaces, we can be reasonably sure that the listed objects created from their blockchain address will be authentic.

How such listings work on blockchains is through the use of a common technical standard. For Ethereum and other similar smart contract blockchains, this is done via tokenisation. The ERC-721 token standard (or the equivalent for other blockchains) enables digital information to be tokenised as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), with each NFT being analogous to a listing on a catalogue. For Bitcoin, ordinal theory allows digital information to be inscribed on individual satoshis, the smallest subdivision of a bitcoin. Each inscribed satoshi, also known as an ordinal, would be analogous to a listing on a catalogue.

Interoperable catalogues

As such listings are based on a common technical standard, i.e. NFTs or ordinals, their associated catalogues can be interoperable across multiple platforms on the same blockchain. You can browse them and make transactions off them using different applications—similar to how a jpeg file can be opened by a variety of image viewing or editing software.

This interoperability is a powerful feature, as it allows for the distribution of cultural objects on the blockchain to be decentralised across multiple platforms and marketplaces, e.g. OpenSea, Blur and Magic Eden. As creators and consumers of these objects, we will have the option to decide which platform or marketplace to use based on our needs. We will also not be held hostage by the policies of a single marketplace, or be catastrophically affected if a platform goes down.

In sum, as an open, verifiable and interoperable catalogue of digital objects, crypto has the potential to become a comprehensive map that helps participants to navigate online culture. I believe this is incredibly empowering, as we will then have more agency to decide how we want to produce and consume this culture. This is the starting point for why I think we should start being more intentional about building culture onchain.

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x23ebeb9538df8f844f774a102de27579fab980c7/11155111

You Are Here (2024) by 0xfff is a conceptual artwork that plays with the theme of interoperability in a different way, across separate blockchains. With the help of LayerZero, a protocol that enables applications and tokens to interoperate across blockchains, each token in this project can be bridged across several blockchains that are compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Each bridge transfer of a token will in turn leave a trail on the token, enabling it to serve as a catalogue of past journeys along bridges and across boundaries.

“You Are Here 11155111”, featured above, is owned by the artist. Out of the 34 tokens in this project, it is the token that has been bridged the most number of times (66) at the time of writing. Its intricate trails make up something like a well-trodden map. Collectively, they hint at the wide space that creators can tap on to design new and interesting cultural experiences, thanks to the interoperability of blockchains.

(2) The blockchain as a custodian

Beyond catalogues, blockchains also serve as custodians. They allow us to own digital objects.

Think about this for a second, especially how paradoxical it sounds. Digital objects are inherently replicable—anyone can “right click and save” digital files, thus creating infinite copies of such files across the internet. Ownership of such digital objects online has therefore always been extremely tenuous.

Digital objects as property

Blockchains can help to separate ownership and usage of digital objects. You can think of an NFT or an ordinal as a tamper-proof certificate of ownership on the blockchain. Given that only the person controlling the private key of a blockchain address will be able to transact using that address, you can have absolute custody over any NFT or ordinal that is held by a particular blockchain address as long as you control the private key. This NFT or ordinal you hold cannot be held by any other blockchain address. Digital objects tied to an NFT or an ordinal can therefore be owned just like any other physical property.

In fact, the courts in Singapore have recognised NFTs as property, paving the way for owners to enjoy legally-enforceable property rights over their digital assets—both financial and cultural—on the blockchain.

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x80f1ed6a1ac694317dc5719db099a440627d1ea7/15

Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (2017) by Mitchell F Chan is modelled after Yves Klein’s Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (1958-1961), a work of conceptual art that has raised many questions about the nature of ownership.

Klein created several “Zones” consisting of empty space, which could only be bought with pure gold. After the purchase, Klein would issue a receipt to each collector, who would then be given two choices: (i) keep the receipt, or (ii) participate in a ritual at the River Seine in Paris, in which the collector had to burn the receipt and Klein would throw half the gold in the river in the presence of witnesses. In Klein’s view, true ownership of the artwork meant that the piece had to be completely integrated with the owner, such that it belonged to them absolutely and intrinsically. This meant that the material record of the artwork, i.e. the receipt, had to be destroyed, so that the work cannot be resold and gain an existence independent of the original owner.

For the “Digital Zones”, Mitchell created 101 pieces that displayed a pure white blank screen when viewed online. Each piece can only be purchased with ETH via the artist’s smart contract on Ethereum, and in return, the collector of each piece will receive a token. Similar to Klein’s ritual, the collector would have the option to destroy their token via a ritual function on the artist’s smart contract, with Mitchell correspondingly sending away the ETH.

This transposing of Klein’s “Zones” into a digital context by Mitchell emphasises the increasingly immateriality of our contemporary culture, in which virtual experiences have become accepted as a substitute for physical experiences. Against this backdrop, the work invites us to reflect on how the separation of the commodity form of the artwork from its experienced form, which are both immaterial in different ways, can impact how the collector relates to and values the piece they owns. Indeed, one has to ask: what do we really own when we purchase an NFT of an immaterial, digital artwork?

(Note: Mitchell has also published a 33-page essay to accompany the work, which is worth going through if you are interested in further details about both Klein’s “Zones” and his work.)

Tangible ownership, infinite distribution

Even as cultural objects on the blockchain are now legally or practically ownable, they still retain the capabilities that their digital nature allows, i.e. their replicability and spreadability. In other words, cultural objects on the blockchain can be simultaneously abundant and scarce. They can be distributed and consumed widely, while each can only be owned by a single blockchain address at a time.

This unique combination of attributes inverts how we conventionally think of value in property. In the digital context, objects that are tangibly scarce may not necessary be seen as more rare and hence more valuable. Conversely, the more they are shared, the more valuable they may become. Not everything online can go viral after all.

The writer and cultural studies scholar McKenzie Wark has written about this with respect to art collecting:

“What might be more interesting is to consider how the very properties of spreadability that characterize digital objects can be turned to advantage to make them collectable as well. Paradoxically, an object whose image is very widely spread is a rare object, in the sense that few objects have their images spread widely. This can be exploited to create value in art objects that are not in the traditional sense rare and singular. The future of collecting may be less in owning the thing that nobody else has, and more in owning the thing that everybody else has.”

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x3b3ee1931dc30c1957379fac9aba94d1c48a5405/219

Nyan Cat is a popular internet meme based on an animated cat with the body of a cherry pop tart flying through outer space with a rainbow trail. On the ten-year anniversary of when Nyan Cat was first published online (2 April 2011), its creator Chris Torres remastered the animation and sold it as a one-of-one NFT through an auction. The winning bid came in at 300 ETH, demonstrating how popular internet memes can command significant value.

Custodians of ownership, stewards of value

By serving as the custodians of the necessary information required to demonstrate ownership, blockchains enable digital cultural objects to not only be easily transacted online, but also to more readily accrue value as digitally-native property. And just as how property in the physical world has undergirded the tremendous build-up of wealth in our society, the equivalent of property in digital culture will likewise be the foundation upon which we can grow, sustain and distribute value on the internet.

When we can enjoy more robust and secure ownership over our assets thanks to the custodial capabilities of blockchains, you can be sure that we will do our utmost to maximise the value that can be built on top of them. With blockchains as custodians of digital culture, the owners of its constituent cultural assets—at least those with a long-term mindset—will naturally be incentivised to become its stewards.

It would certainly be interesting to see whether ownership on the blockchain can drive alignment between the creators and consumers of cultural objects, and create a locus for both financial and cultural capital to converge and unlock novel forms of creativity and collective meaning-making. If this can be sustained over a longer term, I’m optimistic that such alignment can be a net positive for the development of digital culture.

Founded by thefunnyguys, a pseudonymous digital art collector, and Zack Taylor, Le Random is positioned as a “first-of-its-kind, digital generative art institution” with two parts: (i) a collection of generative artworks on the blockchain that can convey the depth and breadth of the generative art movement; and (ii) an editorial platform that seeks to contextualise the movement’s place in art history and celebrate its cultural significance. The name “Le Random” is a tribute to the late generative artist Vera Molnar, who has spoken about randomness as a key component of her practice.

The care in which Le Random is collecting, contextualising and elevating onchain generative art is notable. Its impressive collection is meticulously catalogued and beautifully laid out on its website. The generative art timeline that Peter Bauman, Le Random’s editor-in-chief, has been developing also provides an impressive tapestry of generative art from its pre-modern origins to the current era marked by the advent of blockchains as an artistic medium. The editorial pieces on Le Random’s website are thoughtful and timely as well, featuring nuanced commentary and insightful interviews with artists. All in all, Le Random is one of the foremost examples of collectors of blockchain-based digital art who are also serving as passionate stewards of the space.

(3) The blockchain as a canvas

More than just a platform for transacting and owning cultural objects online, blockchains should be regarded as a medium for creation in their own right too. They are canvases on which data—the building blocks of our digital culture—can be linked to or directly inscribed.

In most cases, a digital object cannot be fully stored on a blockchain. Due to the cost of uploading large amounts of data within the limited storage space of blockchains, the actual media file underlying an NFT is typically hosted offchain, e.g. on a decentralised file storage platform like the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) or Arweave. This introduces the risk of such NFTs becoming broken links—empty tokens pointing to nothingness—if the files on these external storage platforms become corrupted or disappear entirely.

Notwithstanding this risk (which can be mitigated to some extent for IPFS-based NFTs by pinning), I think blockchains can still serve as compelling and engaging canvases for digital culture.

Dynamic digital objects

To me, the appeal of digital objects on the blockchain goes beyond the construct of the token merely as a pointer to a piece of media, e.g. an image, a video or a song. What is fascinating about digital objects on the blockchain is the fact that they can be dynamic in meaningful ways, even while the owner’s sovereignty over these objects remains unchanged.

The design space for such dynamic digital objects is incredibly wide. Creators can design these objects such that the cultural information they embody can be transformed based on the owner’s own input or in response to other events reflected onchain. This makes digital culture come alive for individual owners or consumers, giving them agency to shape their digital experiences while also connecting them to a larger shared reality.

Such dynamic digital objects would have clear use cases in gaming, which already plays a significant role in our digital culture.

Axie Infinity is a blockchain-based game centred on playable avatars called Axies, which can be battled and bred to earn resources and collectible within the game. Each Axie is represented by an NFT on the Ronin blockchain, and can be levelled up using points called Axie Experience Points, which are earned through gameplay. Axies with higher levels will be able to upgrade more parts, effectively making them a dynamic NFT that can be improved with time, effort and skill.

Other use cases would include collectibles that are responsive and interactive within their digital environment; as well as in art, whereby the artist employs crypto-related mechanics to offer a commentary or perspective on the blockchain as a creative medium and shared cultural space.

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x5a0121a0a21232ec0d024dab9017314509026480/1259

Finiliars—or Finis in short—are a motley crew of digital avatars that change their mood and expressions based on changes in price of specific cryptocurrencies. First created and exhibited by artist Ed Fornieles in 2017, the Finis were subsequently updated, expanded and launched as NFTs in 2021. Collectively, Finis seek to map out the abstract financial flows that underlie global capital, especially within the crypto sector. Their cute features also bait us to form emotional attachments with them, forcing us to reflect on the relationship between empathetic and financial investments. Finiliar #1259, which is pictured above, tracks the price of the Solana token ($SOL) on an hourly basis.

The Fini project team has also worked with other crypto projects to launch special edition Finis. For example, the Zapper Finis (Frazel and Dazel) were open-edition NFTs launched in partnership with Zapper, which is a platform that helps users to track the value of their crypto portfolios. Frazel and Dazel’s expressions and actions take reference from the changes in the portfolio values of their owners.

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/215000751

Gazers (2021) by Matt Kane is a long-form generative art project consisting of 1,000 code-based artworks launched via Art Blocks on the Ethereum blockchain. Each artwork takes reference from the lunar calendar, dynamically evolving with each day and with each new phase of the moon. Gazers taps on humanity’s long-running association with the moon as a marker of time, to emphasise the ephemerality and urgency of the present moment, while also prompting us to look up and reflect on the future—towards our own versions of the moon.

Gazers #751, whose static version is displayed above, was recently acquired by Kanbas, a pseudonymous collector of digital art. During the solar eclipse on 8 April 2024 that was visible from North America, Kanbas posted a video of Gazer #751 ablaze with a shimmering, glowing aura (see tweet below). It remains a sight to behold, and a demonstration of how digital art on the blockchain can offer dynamic experiences connecting our digital and physical realities in delightful ways.

https://twitter.com/Kanbas_/status/1777381495214117241

Durable digital objects

At the other end of the spectrum, there is also another interesting subset of digital objects on the blockchain that are designed to be exceedingly durable, such that they are nearly eternal or immutable.

The distinctive feature of these durable digital objects is that as long as their underlying blockchain remains running, they will continue to exist. This is because the essential data needed to render these digital objects are housed on the blockchain directly, such that they have few external dependencies.

In some cases, such objects may still depend on widely-distributed libraries or developer tools, e.g. some of Art Blocks’ generative art NFTs. That said, the broad point is that the blockchain serves as an all-encompassing canvas for these objects, within which they need to have all their essential supplies to achieve their intended expression.

For onchain NFTs on Ethereum and similar smart contract blockchains, instead of pointing to an offchain or externally-hosted media file, they link only to onchain data, which are typically stored in smart contracts on the same blockchain. For Bitcoin, the data underlying an ordinal is inscribed directly as metadata within a transaction of a specific satoshi. In this regard, all ordinals are nearly always immutable, unlike NFTs, which depend on the data that they are linked to.

In any case, what makes such onchain digital objects conceptually interesting to me is the temporal dimension—how they force us to consider the longevity of our digital experiences, which are often ephemeral. It seems quite plausible that the onchain digital objects on our most Lindy blockchains, e.g. Bitcoin and Ethereum, will outlive those of us alive today. They may hibernate, but they will never die. Even if their owners lose their private keys, they will not disappear and just become immobilised.

With this in mind, I do ponder about the kinds of meaning we will ascribe to onchain digital cultural objects that can transcend our individual lives. What will their memories hold, as they are owned and transacted on the blockchain? How will the relationship between their onchain durability and their offchain cultural legacies evolve with the passage of time?

CENTS (2024) by artist Rutherford Chang is centred on the gesture of putting 10,000 cents on 10,000 satoshis, linking the smallest units of the US Dollar and Bitcoin immutably using ordinals as a medium. Inspired by the discrepancy in value between the metal value of copper pennies minted in 1982 and before (now ~2.5 cents) and their stated monetary value (~1 cent), the artist selected 10,000 pennies to be removed from circulation, and archivally documented them. Their images were then immutably inscribed onto satoshis as ordinals, while the physical coins were smelted and cast into a solid copper cube.

Besides serving as a commentary on how material and immaterial value is perceived across different contexts, CENTS is also a meditation on the impact of time on value. Chang himself has spoken about collecting pennies as early as 2017. More importantly, the sense of history that CENTS conveys gives it substantial weight. Each penny, though manufactured to be fungible, now bears unique traces of its passage through time in the hands of successive owners. CENTS can thus be considered a work of generative art, “shaped by the algorithm of the world's wear and tear” as the collector become.eth wrote in a tweet.

Moreover, the story of each penny does not end with its transmutation into a digital artifact, given that it will take on a new history on the blockchain, to be owned and transacted within a new digital and social reality. As durable digital objects connecting multiple temporal and economic contexts, CENTS certainly has the potential to become a leading art collection on Bitcoin, and be regarded as a precious store of value in time to come. CENTS was launched on sovrn.art in collaboration with Inscribing Atlantis and Gamma.

alignDRAW is a text-to-image generative AI model created by Elman Mansimov and a team of developers in 2015 after Elman completed his computer science undergraduate course at the University of Toronto. Published in a conference paper in 2016, alignDRAW is widely credited as the first text-to-image model, which laid the foundations for the various image and video-generating AI tools that are easily accessible today.

As these generative AI tools continue to transform image creation and our visual culture, alignDRAW serves as a milestone marking the beginning of this paradigm shift. Recognising this, Fellowship worked with Elman Mansimov to mint all 2,709 images ever created from the alignDRAW model as NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain in 2023. 168 of these, produced from 21 unique text prompts as sets of 8 images, were published in the 2016 paper. The other 2,541 images, produced from 21 text prompts (15 unique, 6 matching the prompts from the paper), were separately uploaded on the University of Toronto website in November 2015.

Fellowship has designed a technical architecture that enabled each image to be stored onchain in their original byte format with no alterations or enhancements. This was done in a progressive manner to take advantage of periods with lower gas prices on Ethereum. By preserving the alignDRAW images durably and immutably on the Ethereum blockchain, this approach affirms its historic role in heralding a new era of human-machine collaboration at the confluence of both science and the arts.

Another interesting angle to perceive such onchain digital objects lies in how their creators work within the technical limitations of data storage on blockchains. The artistry underpinning such objects is centred around optimising data, making use of every byte in as elegant a manner to effect one’s creative vision.

As Chainleft, a data scientist and artist of onchain works, described in an essay: onchain art is “a homage to the timeless belief that within the tiny, we capture the infinite”. Indeed, from the little nooks and crannies of blockspace, we may just be able to plant the seeds of a more expansive yet durable form of digital culture.

Autoglyphs (2019) by Larva Labs began as an exploration on creating a “completely self-contained” artwork that can operate within the severe data storage limitations of the Ethereum blockchain. The result is a highly-optimised generative algorithm—existing completely within a smart contract—which can produce a pattern of text in ASCII format. This text pattern can then be translated into an image separately, based on instructions encoded in the smart contract.

This approach pays homage to early generative artists like Michael Noll, Ken Knowlton and Sol LeWitt, whose works offer a perspective of artworks not as representations but as systems. In turn, Autoglyphs—as a self-contained, medium-native system for the creation, ownership and distribution of digital art on the blockchain—has inspired many generative artists to continue to push the boundaries of blockchains as an artistic medium. It is no wonder that Autoglyphs has been likened to the onchain equivalent of prehistoric cave paintings.

Curated, a fund collecting crypto art, also has a concise editorial piece outlining the key features of Autoglyphs, which is a good starting point to make sense of the outputs visually and understand their collectability.

(4) The blockchain as a computer

Pushing the concept of a canvas even further, we can also view blockchains as computers as well.

https://twitter.com/quantize_d/status/1773513885406159317

By computers, I don’t mean only processing devices that simply execute instructions within fixed parameters, but something broader harkening back to the early vision of personal computers that the computer scientist J. C. R. Licklider espoused while working at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in the early 1960s:

“Computers are destined to become interactive intellectual amplifiers for all humans pervasively networked worldwide.”

There are two key concepts here worth highlighting:

• Firstly, computers are not just information processors, but intellectual amplifiers—a platform to enable a more dynamic, learning-by-simulating methodology of thinking that computing makes possible.

• Secondly, computers are communication devices, empowering us to coordinate with others as part of a larger network.

Let’s unpack them in the context of exploring how the computing possibilities offered by blockchains can shape digital culture.

Composable digital objects as cultural amplifiers

Ethereum has been described as a “World Computer” right from its early days. In this sense, Ethereum and other similar blockchains can be understood as distributed computing platforms, on which applications can be built and run globally. This is enabled by the capacity for these blockchains to deploy smart contracts that can execute complex functions going beyond simply transferring tokens between accounts.

With the EVM (or the equivalent for other blockchains) providing a common computing engine to run smart contracts, the digital objects that these smart contracts create and control can be designed to be composable. In other words, they can be combined or built on in different ways to unlock new use cases, just as how developers have been tapping on application programming interfaces (APIs) to build ever-more powerful software products.

Digital objects on the blockchain therefore do not only represent dynamic pieces of software, but can also be dynamically connected to other objects or applications onchain. This composability enables digital objects on blockchains to be greater than the sum of its parts—serving as building blocks that can yield broader, more engaging, and perhaps even unprecedented digital experiences.

After all, components of digital culture rarely exist in isolation, even outside of crypto. What usually gives a particular cultural object or concept staying power in the digital space is how readily it is integrated with other elements, or remixed to create derivative works, which further drive attention to the original object or concept. In fact, the rise of TikTok as an entertainment platform has been attributed to how its tools have helped to streamline the process of remixing videos, effectively turning video into composable media and thus facilitating network effects of creativity.

Coming back to crypto, I believe that composable digital objects on the blockchain can serve as cultural amplifiers for digital culture. This would be similar to how Licklider had postulated that computers could become “intellectual amplifiers” by enabling new ways of thinking, e.g. “via dynamic simulations” as the computer scientist Alan Kay had described. In this respect, onchain composability can enhance the remixing process for both creators and consumers, as well as catalyse new ways of creating digital culture.

For one, blockchains allows for more robust tracking of the connections between digital objects on the blockchain, which can help facilitate attribution and other licensing arrangements (e.g. Story Protocol and Overpass). This will also support monetisation of derivative works, ensuring that the original creators and remixers can be appropriately remunerated.

Beyond these practical benefits, onchain composability can also open up new vistas for artistic work or cultural experiences. While we’re only seeing the early innings of efforts on this front, I am hopeful that this feature of blockchains can serve as the ground zero for creativity within digital culture to compound—dynamically, durably, expansively.

Terraforms (2021), an onchain art project by Mathcastles, reflects an attempt to leverage the unique computational affordances of the blockchain to create art that cannot be created anywhere else.

On the surface, Terraforms consists of nearly 10,000 onchain animated land parcels on the Ethereum blockchain that collectively make up a 3D world referred to as the "Hypercastle". But its core artistic idea—centred on distributed computation as an artform—is expressed through its underlying technical infrastructure. As Michael Yuan, a software engineer, has superbly outlined in an essay on Terraforms, this consists of a set of smart contracts to store the raw data for the parcels, define the structural parameters of the Hypercastle, generate noise to add a natural feel to the renderings, and generate the parcels at runtime.

This technical infrastructure supports composability at many levels. The raw data contracts can support other onchain applications. The rendering contract allows for multiple, independent versions of the Hypercastle to be generated—a multiverse!—while the NFTs provide a canonical version of the Hyperstructure for owners and the wider community to coalesce and build tools around. Antenna mode, which was introduced during the recent v2 upgrade, will also allow parcels to receive “broadcasts” from other smart contracts (as-yet-unreleased), opening up another way for interested parties to contribute to the continual reshaping of the Hypercastle’s terrain.

It will probably take a standalone essay to do justice to Terraforms as a complex and multi-dimensional work of art (see Malte Rauch’s excellent write-up on Terraforms for glitch Gallery). But I have highlighted it as an example here to showcase how an onchain artwork can make full use of composability through its technical infrastructure to put forth an aesthetic vision that is at once both ambitious and open-ended. As Terraforms becomes anchored within the canon of onchain art, it may very well prove to be a rallying point for other artists and cultural stakeholders to explore new, imaginative possibilities based on distributed computation as a medium for thought and creative expression.

Networked digital objects as loci of coordination

Just as how the broader internet has expanded, blockchains require network effects to grow and flourish. They are essentially networked communication devices with a common economic substrate. Taking aside the question of technical capacity then, the more people there are using a blockchain, the more attentional and financial liquidity that blockchain will possess, and consequently the more creative energy it will have to incubate culture.

As distributed computers, blockchains enable not only onchain composability, but also onchain network effects. Digital cultural objects on blockchains ought to tap on both in order to maximise their potential as cultural amplifiers. A large network provides a large surface area of possibilities for composability to work its magic.

In addition, value will predominantly accrue at the network level rather than at an object level, as it becomes cheaper to create digital content with generative AI, link them onchain using Layer 2 blockchains (L2s), and distribute them to audiences across multiple digital contexts via decentralised social media. This is the premise of Chris F’s “Token Constellation Theory”, part of his Starholder world-building project. It posits that we may increasingly engage with digital objects on the blockchain not as individual tokens, but as constellations of digital tokens experienced as a collective.

Such constellations of composable and networked digital objects will give rise to the need for coordination, to attract and direct the flow of value across the collective. Network actors will inevitably try to self-organise and exert their own agency amidst such “complex adaptive media systems”. This adds a new dimensionality to digital cultural objects on the blockchain. They should no longer be regarded merely as discrete, ownable objects to be transmitted or transacted for their cultural value, but as networked objects with their own spheres of emergent behaviour and cultural influence—agents of an unscripted, open-ended multi-player game on top of distributed computers.

This idea that networked digital objects can serve as loci of coordination for digital culture has been experimented on and advanced most extensively by decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs). However, it remains to be seen whether this construct is an effective coordinating platform to drive value to a collection of networked digital objects or the broader space.

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Nouns pioneered a unique fundraising and distribution mechanism, in which an onchain digital avatar (called a Noun) is generated and auctioned off every day forever. The winning bid then feeds into the treasury of the Nouns DAO, comprising of owners of each Noun, who can then propose and vote on how the treasury funds can be used. To date, the DAO has largely funded initiatives to proliferate the Nouns brand in popular culture, e.g. creating a movie featuring Nouns, and for charitable causes, e.g. funding and distributing prescription glasses to kids in need.

However, the decentralised governance process within Nouns DAO has not been without contention among its members, with some of the view that the DAO had squandered funds on profligate initiatives. In September 2023, a subset of Nouns owners voted to take their Nouns out from the DAO and create a “forked” DAO from their pro-rated share of the original DAO’s treasury. Owners in the forked DAO could then quit and claim their underlying assets. At the point of this fork, the Nouns DAO lost over half of its US$50 million treasury. Many of the Nouns which left the original DAO were said to be owned by arbitrageurs, who bought the Nouns below “book value” and capitalised on the fork to redeem them for a higher price. Since then, there have been another two forks of Nouns DAO in October and November 2023, which demonstrate the inherent difficulties in forging consensus around what a collection of digital objects should be harnessed for.

Artists have also leveraged on the network possibilities the blockchain as part of their artworks. They can deliberately incorporate coordination mechanisms into their artworks, or leave the space open for their collectors to do so in their own ways—a nod to the permissionless nature of this space.

Regardless, the deliberate or emergent acts of coordination around such artworks do put them squarely within a broader artistic lineage derived from performance art and participatory art, allowing the artists to engage with the social reality of cultural activity on blockchains in a direct and medium-specific manner.

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In August 2023, the digital artist Sam Spratt released The Monument Game on Nifty Gateway, an artwork centered on an epic 1/1 digital painting, on which 256 “Players” holding a separate, editioned artwork from the artist were invited to record their observations at specific locations of the painting. The artwork builds on the deep lore that the artist had established in his prior digital paintings, but with enough space for the “Players” to add a final layer of varnish—or in Sam’s own words, “to give a little piece of themselves” to the work and the world it represents.

The Council of Luci—a cadre of the artist’s collectors and supporters who hold a “Skull of Luci” artwork and token created by the artist—voted on three winning observations by the Players. These three winning Players were then given the opportunity to sacrifice their “Player” editioned artwork for a Skull and thus join the Council.

The beauty in this entire artwork emanates not only from the evocatively-illustrated painting itself, but also the manifold connections linking it to the broader universe of Sam’s creation. The observations bind each player with the edition they have collected, which in turn are inscribed permanently into the canvas of painting. The involvement of the Skulls, which were derivative artworks first given to unique bidders of the artists’ early artworks, further links this artwork with the dynamics of the past, allowing history to inform the present and thus influence the future. Viewed as a whole, “The Monument Game” is an intricate system in which story, community and play are thoughtfully woven together on the blockchain.

https://opensea.io/assets/0xfdb192fb0213d48ecdf580c1821008d8c46bdbd7/1

MUTATIO, a collaboration between two pseudonymous artists XCOPY and NeonGlitch86, was an open-edition work released on the Base L2 in March 2024, for a couple of dollars in ETH per edition. Within a 24-hour window, more than a million editions were minted from over 30,000 unique blockchain addresses.

Many were clearly speculating that the artists may introduce further uses for each edition, perhaps burning them to unlock new artwork or experiences. That said, the combination of low mint prices and a high number of editions may prove to be a ripe space for experimentation with new onchain mechanisms. Already, someone has created a fungible token ($FLIES) backed by MUTATIO editions, allowing the artwork to be plumbed through DeFi infrastructure and traded more easily. To me, MUTATIO brings to life the idea that networked digital objects can be loci of coordination, and gestures towards a future in which artists are “conjurers of swarms”—of networked objects, tokens, words, memes, ideas, capital and anything in between.

(5) The blockchain as a casino

Finally, we cannot run away from the fact that the most prevalent use case for blockchains thus far has been as casinos.

Financialising culture

As always-on, always-accessible computers that anyone can create on, blockchains have proven to be an attractive destination for speculative capital. Here, there are little to no barriers for its liquidity to slosh around—seeking new highs, chasing yields, and seeding hopes of untold riches. With relatively little barriers to create tokens representing anything, the supply side is also taken care of. Anyone can spin up new coins or new digital objects with relative ease, and then beckon the tsunami of liquidity to come.

Amidst the euphoria of the NFT market in 2021-2022, we witnessed the rampant financialisation of almost any digital content via NFTs, spanning the gamut from fine art to a motley range of digital collectibles and paraphernalia, e.g. old tweets, selfies, and even an audio recording of one’s farts.

While the crash in demand for these NFTs came almost as swift as its rise, what is clear is that crypto has enabled the domains of culture and finance to be more intertwined than before. For the first time in the short history of the internet, we can now create digital objects and have an open, unstoppable market for these assets at our fingertips.

This hyper-financialisation of digital culture is repugnant if you’re not into gambling, as it creates a lot of distortionary effects in terms of how it should be valued. For example, pump-and-dump influencers may artificially drive up the price of their targeted NFTs or ordinals and then exit them for profit thereafter, to the detriment of existing collectors.

That said, we should also recognise that culture has all along been financialised, as is evident from the practice of gold farming in online gaming or how parts of the contemporary art world have operated. Crypto simply makes the underlying relationship between culture and money much more apparent, and in some sense, honest. For those out to make a quick buck, there is no need to pretend. They also can’t do this in stealth, as all their onchain transactions would be traceable publicly.

With information on past transactions accessible on the blockchain, we can also develop our own independent conclusions on how particular cultural assets should be valued. This is like playing in a casino where the past data on each game, e.g. winning rate, are accessible to all players. At the very least then, when transacting in digital cultural objects on the blockchain, we can take the necessary precautions or simply go in with our eyes wide open. To me, this is a far more preferable way to navigate the market for digital art and culture, even if I have to contend with gamblers and charlatans on the way.

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xa6ef3896435e5867472cc33bb53925fcc03b835f/47

Degenerative (2021) by 0xDEAFBEEF is a slot machine game implemented on the Ethereum blockchain. The collection begins with a pre-minted set of level 0 machines as NFTs, whose owners can submit transactions on the associated smart contract to gamble and try to hit jackpot. Doing so will grant them mint passes to mint an additional slot machine on the next incremental level. Slot machines at higher levels will have a lower probability of hitting jackpot, as well as a lower supply cap. At the time of writing, the level 2 slot machine (token 47) displayed above has the highest number of jackpots won (6) in the entire collection. This was achieved from 40 rolls—a winning rate of 15%, significantly higher than the 3.5% jackpot probability assigned for its level.

The work was created in the context of generative art and cryptoeconomics colliding during the highs of the 2021 market. At that time, many speculators under the pretense of art appreciation were effectively treating generative artworks like playing cards, gambling on their attributes to profit from the market. In the artist’s own words, Degenerative thus seeks to pose a genuine question to creators and collectors about their motives for participating in the generative art space at that particular point in time: “[Did that] moment represent: A revolutionary paradigm for digital art patronage? A one-time opportunity to claw for scarce resources? A senseless, frenzied expenditure of time and energy? A rational decision in an age of precarity?”

From casinos to integrated resorts

In Singapore, our casinos are part of larger, mixed-use developments called “integrated resorts”. The idea for such resorts integrating leisure, entertainment and business functions was that the casino component would help to make the entire development financially feasible, by subsidising the other components such as hotels, retail, convention spaces, theatres, etc.

This is not a novel concept. Other casino developments around the world have also taken a similar approach, expanding their attractions beyond gambling to draw more people in. The evolution of Las Vegas itself is testament to this—its mafia-run casinos has given way to professionally-managed and family-friendly mega-resorts that are now world-renowned for their range and quality of entertainment offerings.

I think a parallel evolution is underway in crypto. There are many more ways to participate in crypto culture now than just being a gambler and adding to the discourse around making money. Today, one can create, curate and collect quality digital art on the blockchain; engage with other people via decentralised social media protocols like Farcaster, and use consumer applications that tap on various blockchain-related uses, e.g. for ticketing, membership and loyalty programs. Many of the applications supporting such functions were in turn funded—directly or indirectly—from the wealth effect generated by the crypto casino.

Indeed, “the onchain resort is being built on top of the onchain casino”, as Bradley Freeman, a product marketing manager with Stack, has observed with regard to consumer crypto. He also noted that both the casino and resort have a symbiotic relationship, and this is apparent through the ecosystems that memecoins are creating.

For example, the memecoin $DEGEN on the Base L2 can be seen as a cryptocurrency connecting two different worlds—as a cryptocurrency for speculators to punt on the success of the Base L2 and/or the Farcaster protocol, while also serving as an incentive to build up other use cases within and on top of both ecosystems. $DEGEN has a unique distribution mechanism centred on eligible users tipping other users on Farcaster. While there are certainly users trying to game the distribution mechanism to receive more $DEGEN tips, it is heartening to see this memecoin being channelled towards positive-sum games, such as supporting artists, writers, and anyone who is contributing to the space in meaningful ways. It is also being used to power other application, e.g. $DEGEN has become the native token for its own blockchain, the Degen Chain, and it is used to incentivise content creation on Drakula, which aims to be a blockchain-based alternative to TikTok.

Launched only in January 2024, it is still early days for $DEGEN. But its success thus far hints at the potential for sustainable consumer crypto ecosystems to be built alongside the crypto casino. As the foundations of onchain integrated resorts are being laid today, we can look towards a future where mass culture is brought onto or cultivated on blockchains.

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Poroscity (2023) by Niceaunties, is a video artwork made by Niceaunties using AI tools, launched as part of a four-part series during the artist’s daily show on Fellowship’s daily.xyz platform on 30 November 2023. The video showcases Auntieverse City, a dreamy, surreal urban environment characterised by its dynamic, organic architecture and its colourful inhabitants, which include aunties living their best lives.

Auntieverse City reflects the artists’ conception of how our physical cities should be, full of colour, fun and vibrancy. In a similar vein, our onchain integrated resorts and cities should likewise be places where we can be free to enjoy and do fun and meaningful things together with our friends.

A workshop for digital culture

I’ve spent some time to articulate in considerable detail my mental model of the five Cs, to demonstrate that blockchains already provide a rather robust toolkit for producing and consuming digital culture.

Going back to what I wrote at the start, we can view crypto as an open, free-for-all workshop. Here, there are many types of tools that we can use to foster more durable and dynamic forms of digital culture, even amidst its inherent ephemerality and volatility.

The main types of tools in the crypto workshop are summarised below:

• Catalogues that are open, verifiable and interoperable, helping us to map and navigate the sprawling, constantly-evolving realm of digital culture.

• Custodians that enable us to possess ownership rights over digital objects, encouraging us to become stewards of these objects, and of digital culture more broadly.

• Canvases on which we can create dynamic and durable digital objects, offering novel digital experiences that are interactive, engaging and memorable.

• Computers providing a medium for digital objects to become more effectively composable and networked, thereby opening a new frontier in the evolution of digital culture and unlocking new possibilities to engage with it as a shared social endeavour.

• Casinos that financialise and fund digital culture, through providing an avenue for speculation to become investments, which go towards building more broad-based and sustainable cultural ecosystems onchain.

To end off this essay, I’ve updated my conceptual diagram to include some key words in this essay. If the framework of the 5 Cs in this essay resonates with you, you can mint the original conceptual diagram for free on Zora.

Crypto culture is dead, long live crypto culture

How we wield these tools is of course an individual prerogative. Blockchains by themselves cannot compel us to act in a particular manner. Instead, it is up to us to decide how to use the unique affordances enabled by blockchains.

In this essay, I have therefore made no attempt to delineate what I think is good or bad culture. It is no point being a culture purist, as the radical openness of the internet and public blockchains naturally invites messiness and chaos. It is just how we are as humans—full of contradictions and tensions, yet brimming with possibilities and potential. When we have the freedom to create, we produce both endless junk and timeless grails. We love to tear things down, but also delight in building things up. We hunger for conflict, yet long for community. We think in terms of singularities, while containing multitudes.

Being onchain will not change this offchain nature. And so when crypto offers an open, free-for-all workshop, with many glistening, shiny tools on display, we do what we have always done. We rush in to play, following our immediate instincts. In the process, we make a mess with these tools. We holler and clamour over others, insisting that others use those tools our way. We also scheme and manoeuvre, so that these tools are directed for our self-interest and not those of others.

But amidst this cacophony, we will also realise that these tools in the crypto workshop can be used to create beauty, no different from other tools that we have grown to be familiar with. Some of us will thus heed the call of an equally primal but perhaps more subtle calling—to try to carve out a space to tinker, to hone a craft, to create artifacts with these tools that can make us feel. In doing so, we attempt to organise and inspire those around us, with visions and values around this new toolkit. Against the finiteness of our lives, we keep using all these tools at our disposal to reach out for the infinite. Ultimately, all of us will fail and die, but in this striving, we shoot our best shot in creating things that can live beyond us.

The sum total of all these activities is what I understand to be culture—the use of tools to create things to pass on. In the context of the internet, crypto offers us a novel and unprecedented toolkit to do the same.

With its five Cs, we now have the ability to build hyperstructures—platforms that can, in the words of Zora co-founder Jacob Horne, “run for free and forever, without maintenance, interruption or intermediaries”. On these hyperstructures, we can in turn grasp and transact in hyperobjects freely and unstoppably, through which we can compose the necessary raw materials to craft meaning that can hopefully persist through the hyperreality of the digital age we inhabit.

At the same time, we must also be realistic. Whether we see the internet as a homogenising, algo-driven “Filterworld” or a scary, silence-inducing “dark forest”, most of the things we will create will never see the light of day, even if created on blockchains. But blockchains allow us to at least put down a waypoint, so that there is a possibility that a kindred spirit may catch a glimpse of it someday—to hear the faint reverberations of a fallen tree in an inhabited forest from many generations ago.

In this sense, digital culture on blockchains is perpetually in a state of coming alive. May it survive and never die.

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The internet / loves you back,

if you let it. / Hearts beat to show

systems are go, / all in sync.

Souls of machines / pulse from afar:

keepalive, keepalive. / One avatar

dotes on another. / This is how we survive.

Cursive Binary: Heart Mantra (2021) is a poem by Sasha Stiles, translated into “Cursive Binary”, a language proposed by the artist that fuses her own handwriting with the 0s and 1s of binary code. By merging the human and the machine in this manner, the artist seeks to reflect a transhumanist ideal—a central theme in her body of work—that encourages intimacy with technology, while ensuring that it remains imbued with a human-oriented sensitivity.

Disclaimer: I have collected works by some of the artists featured in this essay, partly for investment, partly for personal enjoyment. Nevertheless, nothing in this essay constitutes investment advice. Please do your own research or consult your own advisers concerning any potential investment decision.

Credits: The header image of this essay was made with Midjourney v6.

I had long planned to take a sabbatical to fulfil a lingering dream from my college days—to travel slow and immerse myself in places that I’m interested in. Thanks to the red pill of crypto, I now look forward to diving into not only the cenotes of Mexico, but also the onchain worlds of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) and other decentralised applications (dApps).

It is perhaps poetic to think of my upcoming sabbatical as a concurrent journey across two different terrains—one physical, the other digital. As a chronically online person, I know being offline is important, and I will make sure to get plenty of that when travelling. At the same time, this physical-digital dichotomy is becoming less salient in modern society. I firmly believe that our online presence can and should serve as a meaningful extension of our offline selves. This is the spirit that I hope to imbue as I strive to engage more wholeheartedly with this corner of the internet that I’ve grown so fascinated by—the chaotic, cacophonous world of crypto.

With this sabbatical, I have bought myself time and agency for real exploration in the crypto space, untethered to any ongoing commitments. But I know that I still ought to hold myself to something that can prompt me to make best use of this opportunity. In this regard, I plan to write more frequently, more fervently, about my journey here.

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Paperwork (2023) by Ana María Caballero is a collection of AI-generated digital paper sculptures launched in partnership with Bright Moments. Each piece was prompted by the individual emotional responses of audience members to Ana's poetry performances throughout 2023, who were invited to write down one word on sheets of paper after experiencing her verse. The piece featured here is based on the Spanish word "comedor", which means dining room—perfect for the subject of this essay.

As the literary critic Walter Benjamin has written, “Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.” If I want to learn anything useful and build anything enduring from this time, then I need to will it into action, and the best way I know how to do this is by committing my thoughts into words.

This is thus the genesis of The Digital Buffets, my new personal blog through which I will pursue more dedicated writing on the broad subject matter of what I shall term “cultural production on the blockchain”. There is much to unpack here, so I would like to focus my maiden essay on the broader context of why I want to learn and write about this subject in the first place—how I see the internet evolving in the future, and what this would mean for the production and consumption of cultural assets online and onchain.

My premise is simple:

• If culture is food, then the internet is much like a gigantic network of buffet restaurants.

• These “digital buffets” are only going to become crazier in the future.

• I will need the right utensils and mindset if I want to have a good time here.

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REWORLD (2023) by Roope Rainisto is a series of post-photographic works made with custom-trained generative AI models, launched as part of a group show titled “Post Photographic Perspectives” on Fellowship. It interrogates society’s complexities through a distinctively disorienting visual language—each piece seemingly unraveling our perception of reality, yet providing a glimpse of the familiar. Even though “Food Service Station No. 1” hints at the unhealthy industrialisation of food today, its spread of deep-fried meaty chunks still looks appetising!

Why buffets?

For much of my life on the internet, I’ve always used the word “buffets” in some form as part of my online identity. Unsurprisingly, when I became active in crypto in 2021, I did the same. Even before fully grasping what NFTs were about, I made sure to secure “buffets.eth” on the Ethereum Name Service. It was the first NFT I owned on Ethereum.

My love for buffets originated from fond memories of family vacations in my childhood, when most days began with the usual complimentary breakfast at the hotel restaurant, served in a buffet style. Rows and rows of yummy food, with no restrictions on how much I can take—a dream for a young boy with a healthy appetite.

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Antonius Oki Wiriadjaja’s alter ego, Foodmasku, is based on an Instagram account he created during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he created face masks using food and then ate them while under self-isolation. As someone who enjoys eating, I find it delightful to see Foodmasku inject creativity into the journeys of our foods from farm to face. “Bánh Mì” was part of a series of works that Foodmasku released at his solo exhibition, “What we eat, who we are”, at the IHAM NFT Art Gallery in Paris in May 2022.

As I grew up, I became a frequent enjoyer of all-you-can-eat restaurants. Seafood buffets, sushi buffets, hotpot buffets—I regarded these settings as an invitation for indulgence.

Buffets have thus been my happy places. They are where I can seek contentment and fulfilment, where I can wander around in worlds of limitless possibilities.

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Auntieverse (2024) by Niceaunties collectively represents a quirky, giddy world in which physical laws and social norms are upended. Each of the AI-generated images in this series of 1,000 works launched on Fellowship’s Daily.xyz showcases aunties and their friends living their best possible lives. This definitely includes feasting under levitating sushis, as “Factory #0237” reveals.

The internet is already a buffet

The internet is likewise an invitation to myriad worlds of possibilities. I recall fondly my first proper use of the internet to play Neopets as a kid, and how I progressively graduated to richer and more abundant online experiences over the years.

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By Proxy (2022) by Shavonne Wong and Lenne Chai is a collaborative project fusing photography and 3D art. The series depicts an imaginary young girl's transition from girlhood to adolescence, set within contexts inspired from the artists’ growing up years. This featured piece, “Through the looking glass”, reminds me of the provision shops around my housing estate, filled with all the goodies that we covet as kids. Despite still holding on to some nostalgia for this past, I no longer patronise these shops anymore, instead flocking to the more well-stocked supermarkets now.

Indeed, from the user’s perspective, the internet is now analogous to a gigantic network of buffet restaurants. Here, appetite is only limited by bandwidth. Otherwise, you are free to consume anything you want, whenever you feel like it, and in whatever amounts you wish.

It is estimated that more than a billion images are shared per day on Instagram alone. Every minute, more than 40 years of streaming content are watched online. Each one of us are now buffeted by simply more digital content than we can ever consume.

An infinite scroll, a bottomless pit, all-you-can-eat just a swipe or click away.

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xdFDE78d2baEc499fe18f2bE74B6c287eED9511d7/15000306

Life In West America (2023) by Roope Rainisto, also commonly abbreivated to “LIWA”, is regarded as the pioneering AI post-photography series. Launched on Braindrops, LIWA paved the way for Roope’s second series, REWORLD (2023), as well as post-photographic works by other AI artists to enter the NFT market. Tapping on an improbably mangled visual language, each work highlights the rawness and dreamy possibilities within the vast American landscape. In “Mango”, we can almost taste the unvarnished sweetness of this imagined reality, where desserts can seemingly transcend space and perhaps even time.

The digital buffets are getting crazier

Much has been said about how we got here. The decentralised nature of the internet has permitted anyone with a connection to put content online. Subsequent improvements to the capabilities and accessibility of creator tools, especially with the advent of smartphones, have made it relatively easy to create digital content.

The eager emphasis on capturing user engagement by Big Tech has also all but reduced friction in terms of consuming this ever-growing glut of digital content. Algorithms now predict what we would like to see, served in slick, dopamine-inducing feeds.

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xa867be442d8a0ea5b29b69bc21debc946099dcf4/43

Cognitive Behaviour (2023) by Alice Lane Gordon is another AI post-photographic series launched on Fellowship as part of its second group show, “Post Photographic Perspectives II”, in 2023. Through its pop pastel palette and surreal compositions, the series serves as a commentary on the alienation and anxieties of the younger generation. In the case of “Healthy lunch”, the subject in the center seems defeated, detached and awkwardly alone, perhaps numbed by the incessant, unsolicited performance of well-being on their social media feed.

As much as we think this state of affairs is crazy, things in the digital buffets are going to get much crazier in the future. If there is anything we’ve learnt from the history of computing and the internet, digital technologies are adept at putting crazy on an exponential curve upwards.

Over the next decade and beyond, I think the consumer internet is likely to be reshaped by the convergence of two technological trends: (i) generative AI, and (ii) spatial computing, or more commonly understood as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR).

While these two technological trends are nothing new in themselves and have many years of development behind their backs, the past two years have seen these technologies take significant leaps towards consumer accessibility. Today, I can easily use generative AI platforms like Midjourney and Runway to create images or videos, and Sora seems ready to take video generation to the next level. Apple’s latest Vision Pro headset also shows that hardware development has reached a stage where AR/VR is compelling enough to be used in daily life.

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x5a18ab8aaf501419a60ea7dc461ee728afa6d428/163

Birdwatcher (2023) by Katie Morris is a series of AI post-photographic works launched on HODLERS as part of its Horizon Collection. Building on the notion that AI is a meticulous observer and interpreter of humanity, the series provides a brooding, stoical take on our experiences and stories as part of society. The writhing, mangled mass of cows in “Medium Rare” is a sobering foil to reflect on how technology has transformed the production of the things we routinely consume, to the extent that they become utterly unrecognisable.

With the average user now able to get a taste of generative AI and spatial computing, it is worthwhile to start seriously imagining what the digital buffets of the future will be like. The following are some topline thoughts, which shouldn’t be contentious:

• Generative AI is poised to make digital content more abundant, as well as more bespoke. As their models become more powerful and compute becomes more accessible, the cost of producing digital content will approach zero. When all sorts of media can be generated on-demand, we can be sure that more of them will be produced—more of the same junk or fake content that already engulfs the internet today, but amidst this deluge, hopefully more high-quality content too. At the same time, the increased ease of content production via AI will allow for digital content to be hyper-personalised. With sufficient prompt engineering, it will not be hard to generate content in which every minutiae is tailored to one’s specific requirements. Thanks to generative AI, we may see our network of buffet restaurants soon transform into an ensemble of super-cooks, each with a menu limited only by our imagination.

• Spatial computing will make the internet much more immersive. Through these technologies, our interface with the internet will no longer be through a 2D screen, but within a 3D space. This will certainly elevate our experience of digital content, making them more tangible and more tactile. It will also open up the design space for digital products and services, allowing them to be engaged with in novel ways, or to be integrated more closely with objects and spaces in the physical world. Enhanced by VR/AR, the digital buffets of the future are therefore likely to offer us a more all-encompassing sensory experience, in which we can consume and create in a more multi-dimensional manner.

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xb932a70A57673d89f4acfFBE830E8ed7f75Fb9e0/32022

Fruit lovers (2022) by Jan Sladecko, part of the artist’s Silly Race series, is a delightful 3D work depicting a banana race-car trying to avoid all the junk food in its path. As we spend more time in virtual worlds, we must still remember to eat enough fruits and keep our bodies healthy. This is a race that I would like to be in and win!

Where I think things will start becoming really crazy is at the convergence of both technologies, when both generative AI and spatial computing fuse to create completely new paradigms for the consumer internet.

Imagine multitudes of generative worlds, manifesting across the spectrum from fully VR (creating destinations unto themselves) to AR (modifying our sensory perception of the physical world). Some will be ephemeral, others persistent; all adaptive and constantly being iterated, perpetually in a state of becoming.

This next evolution of the internet will be where digital content becomes fully dynamic—ontologically, spatially, temporally—flowing freely across multiple contexts. Attention also becomes cemented as the new liquidity here, although the source of this attention may no longer just be humans but other forms of machine-based “intelligence” as well.

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The constantly-shifting visualisations of different foods in Leo Isikdogan’s A Machine’s Dream of Food (2021) reflects a particular neural network’s impressive yet tenuous grasp of our physical world. Since then, generative AI models have almost perfected their representations of our reality. But the question remains: can we truly recreate a reality that we never fully inhabit, whose underlying laws we can only approximate?

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Fast food (2023) by Sheldrick is an AI video work launched on Fellowship’s Daily.xyz. It presents an overflowing mélange of different fast foods, continually dissolving and reconstituting themselves amidst a blend of liquefied pixels. While we don’t have to watch our calories in a digital reality, the ubiquity of supersized digital content could very well prove to be nauseating after a while.

In these digital buffets of the future, where scarcity is a relic of the past and space is malleable, what networked “constellations of digital objects” will we value and collectively derive meaning from? What forms of communities will arise to anchor and align our values around? How can our tiny, fragile human selves flourish in a world where nothing will remain unchanged?

I am certain that our identities will blur between the physical and digital, just as our sense of self will be challenged by an expanded playing field of entities with agency. This will be undoubtedly exciting yet uncertain territory for us as a species.

I am thus reminded of another quote by Walter Benjamin, hinting at the immense dislocations experienced by those who lived through the dawn of the 20th century:

“A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.”

Benjamin, W. (1972). The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov. In Arendt, H. (Ed.) & Zohn, H. (Trans.). Illuminations (pp. 83-107). New York, NY: Fontana.

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Growing Pains (2023) by Alizé Jireh is a series of photographic works that is, in the artist’s own words, “an ode to the beautiful agony of becoming an adult.” Each image is deeply evocative, capturing the unfolding melancholy that lingers as we abandon who we used to be. In “The Shadow I Cast”, all the textures of a long-forgotten meal are laid bare—the flavours of the past reduced to dust and desolation in the present. Will this be the legacy of how we come of age in our changing, digitalising world?

Blockchains and the digital buffets

Besides AI and VR/AR, there is a third technological shift that I think will play an important role in the future of the internet—the advent of blockchains.

While blockchains are not necessarily tools for content production or distribution, they will be a critical complement. After all, in the digital buffets of the future where the food on offer will be virtually unlimited, we will still need eating utensils—tools to help us consume.

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Brooke DiDonato’s photographic works have a knack for invoking the uncanny in everyday scenes. In Everything but the Kitchen Sink (2020), a nondescript shelf becomes a site of intrigue, suggesting that good plating still requires a raw, human touch. Perhaps this is what is a key to a long shelf life!

Blockchains are the plates, packaging and receipts in our network of buffet restaurants. Whether through smart contracts or inscriptions, they can be repositories of digital content. Blockchains can also help tokenise content, wrapping them in a consistent technological standard (e.g. ERC-721) that will enable them to be distributed, transacted, and built upon. As a shared and virtually immutable ledger, they serve as a tamper-resistant set of receipts too, recording every single onchain activity of a tokenised content for posterity.

In doing all the above, blockchains enable the concept of property rights to be conceivable for the digital economy, and for these “rights” to be enforced without a centralised authority.

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PoS (2022) by Socmplxd was released as part of the artist’s “An Ordinary Life” editions drop. Continuing in the tradition of digital realism, Socmplxd taps on the simplicity and precision of his compositions to evoke feelings of stillness, restfulness and nostalgia. In “PoS”, the piece of steak in cling wrap, with a “certified” sticker and a price tag, presents a fitting analogy to the role of blockchains as custodians and catalogues of digital art.

In short, blockchains provide a comprehensive suite of accounting tools for digital content. They enable us to lay down waypoints within the infinite spread of the digital buffets, direct capital and attention to the most significant and valuable dishes, and store them as lasting memories.

Focus amidst abundance, provenance amidst ephemerality, independence amidst inter-connectedness—these represent the promise and powers of crypto. They are why I believe that blockchains can be very useful utensils for the digital buffets of the future.

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First First (2021) by 0xDEAFBEEF is a series of 5,000 onchain generative texts, each commemorating a fictional event relating to crypto art by presenting it as a categorical first. The series is a parody of the absurdities abundant in the NFT space at the height of its speculative mania in 2021. Conceptually, it can also be regarded as a “worldbuilding project” from which imaginary realities emerge and are canonised for posterity, biding their time to turn real. In “First NFT #1636”, the role of mainstream institutions as arbiters of culturally-significant artifacts is highlighted and satirised. But who knows, a fruit-themed avatar NFT project may very well become historic someday.

Flourishing in the digital buffets

I have written about the three technologies—AI, AR/VR, crypto—in a generally optimistic manner, characterising them as drivers of defining technological shifts in the future internet. But I am no accelerationist, and I identify more closely with a more balanced, cautious form of techno-optimism, such as the defensive view espoused by Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum.

I thus acknowledge that there are many risks associated with these technological shifts. One may get afflicted with more than just indigestion in the digital buffets. AI could make the “Dead Internet Theory” a reality, and upend our collective notion of truth. Spatial computing may dissociate us from the physical world, encouraging social isolation. Crypto may also not live up to its promise, with blockchains becoming inhabited primarily by gamblers and grifters. These are certainly unhealthy outcomes for society, like chronic illnesses slowly debilitating our collective well-being.

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all things fail (2023) by Mark Wilson, better known as “die with the most likes”, was launched as part of Season 5 of 6529’s Memes Collection. The artist’s signature style comes through finely in this work—his subjects literally festering and dripping with excruciating misery. There’s perhaps nothing more clarifying then confronting death and decline up close, knowing that every fibre of our being will soon be pulverised, putrefied, and pretty much utterly and irrevocably fucked.

Having a proper set of utensils alone will not be sufficient to mitigate these risks. If we want to truly flourish in the digital buffets, we need to go beyond relying only on “hard” technological tools or solutions. The “soft” qualities that make us human, that we embody as unique individuals, will have to become even more integral to our being.

As Steve Jobs said after introducing the iPad 2 in March 2011:

“It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.”

Indeed, the humanities have always been concerned about how we can elevate the human condition. This mission is now more relevant than ever before, as machines become equally competent at cultural production. When nearly all of the cultural information that we have produced digitally can be mapped within the multi-dimensional vector space of large language models (LLMs), what will set us apart as humans, as agents of cultural transmission? Amidst all of the craziness in the digital buffets of the future, how can we keep our guts running and our hearts singing?

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Muraqqa - Data Miniatures (2023) by Orkhan Mammadov is a series of animated 3D works that builds on the tradition of miniature painting in the Islamic world. Through the use of AI to recreate classical scenes from this historic art form, Orkhan shows how diverse cultural traditions can be brought together meaningfully in new contexts. In “Feast in Nature”, the nourishment and connection that nature provides is brought to life through a dreamy particle simulation, reminding us of the continued relevance of fellowship even in our digital reality.

In this regard, I believe there are three qualities that we will need to nourish in order to stay healthy in the digital buffets:

• Maintaining a broad appetite. Even in the face of abundance, we should endeavour to stay hungry and expand the range of digital content we consume. We cannot be comfortable with just staying in our lane, gorging on the same foods day after day. Otherwise, we will never obtain all the nutrition we need. A broad appetite, sparked by curiosity and an open mind, will provide us with the widest possible cognitive aperture to perceive and engage the world—essential to resist any potential isolation and siloisation caused by technology.

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Fruitful_2367 (2021) by Sofia Crespo is part of the artist’s “Artificial Natural History” series that explores imagined life forms generated using AI. By tapping on this rich space at the intersection of biology and emerging technologies, the works in this series encourage us to expand our imagination of the ecosystems we are part of, both in the physical and digital worlds. As “Fruitful_2367” shows, the fruits of our labour in this regard may yield strange results, but beauty can still be found amidst the blurred boundaries between the organic and inorganic.

• Refining taste. With the breadth of experience enabled by a broad appetite, we can also develop a more refined palate. As our online landscapes become more all-encompassing and overwhelming, we need to cultivate our own sense of taste to discern what is worth our attention. This will entail learning how to think critically amidst subjectivity and parse signal from noise, so that we can distil the intangibles that move us and engender meaning across space and time. Good taste will also be a conduit for collaboration with others—both man and machine—and it will be an important competitive advantage in an environment where there are no barriers to entry for cultural production.

• Being patient. Just as how the most impactful flavours tend to be the ones that linger the longest, what makes it into culture is often what can stand the test of time. Culture with a capital “C” is about legacy, not immediacy. It takes the best of us and passes them on to future generations. This process cannot be rushed, even in a world where content can be created, remixed and reinvented at the speed of light. After all, time is the fairest adjudicator of value. No matter who or what we are, the things we create all stand equal before the passage of time. Very few things can earn the right to enter the hallowed halls of timelessness and form the foundations of human culture. It therefore behooves us to be patient if we want to succeed in the business of cultural production.

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Techno-Animism (2023) by Emi Kusano is a series of AI post-photographic works launched on Bright Moments. It explores the symbiosis between tradition and technology, set within the context of Japanese culture. With the backdrop of a tranquil home garden, “#217” points to how the spirits and stories that have always accompanied us can find new homes and ways of expression. In doing so, they may thus continue to animate the future of the next generation.

Curiosity, discernment, patience—these may not be uniquely human values, but when combined together, they do form a significant part of what makes being human special.

We as a species have always sought the frontier, seeking experiences that can invoke awe and the sublime. We do this not only because of the ego, but also because we want to pass something enduring, something valuable, to the generations that come after us. This has always been the bedrock of cultural production in human society, and it is how it will continue to be.

Even as the frontier is now digital and the stakeholders of culture are no longer solely human, I believe the same resilient spirit of being human will live on. We can adapt, we can thrive, and with the passage of time, we can also create beauty out of this.

Perhaps, just perhaps, a cultural renaissance of epic, unbounded proportions may be born out of the digital buffets that are to come. In the meantime, I’m getting my appetite worked up and my tastebuds ready. This will be a long game, but I have a hunch that it will be a wild ride.

Bon appétit!

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Botto is a one-of-a-kind experiment in digital art, pioneering the concept of a “decentralised autonomous artist”. Combining the use of generative AI models to create and crypto rails to curate, Botto represents a promising way forward in man-machine collaborations, in which human participants play a central role in training Botto, while also being rewarded for their labour in this process.

Through Botto’s creations, we can see a fruitful fusion of our cultural history and the myriad possibilities offered by emerging technologies. For example, World’s Feast on Absurdity (2023) from Botto’s Absurdism Period seems to play homage to Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830) through its composition, while also upending all aesthetic sensibilities of that time. Set amidst a brazenly deranged feast, the heroic portrayal of a baguette, consumed by monsters from within and without, suggests the advent of a new class of subjects in our contemporary cultural landscape—its absurdities seen as an insidious threat, but also representing raw, unbounded potential.

Disclaimer: I have collected works by some of the artists featured in this essay, partly for investment, partly for personal enjoyment. Nevertheless, nothing in this essay constitutes investment advice. Please do your own research or consult your own advisers concerning any potential investment decision.

Credits: The header image of this essay was made with Midjourney v6.