Folklore began in August 2019, to gather like-minded folks interested in how the internet is shaping culture around the world. Folklore crowdfunded more than ~20k USD, all of which has been used to commission new essays (8 to be exact), create an proof-of-concept community LLM chatbot called ARK ("Authentic Record of Knowledge", short for Archive), and developing a working onchain-to-RSS feed for collective curation.

It has been an incubation hub, experimenting with ideas that will inevitably become common products in many other communities. And like many journeys, they often find a place to pause, and to settle. Gilbert and I will be using the remaining funds to organize the vast set of curated links and digitized books and synthesizing them into a commemorative item (likely digital). In this way, anyone can re-create ARK or continue the curation.

Thank you again for your support. Happy New Years 2025.

May you be blessed by the awakening algorithmic gods.

Austin, just like several other southwestern American cities, is not built for walking. However, after several years of becoming familiar with its terrain (primarily through driving), I discovered discrete pockets up and down the superfluous city grid that run against this popular notion. I was fortunate enough to find a home in one of these blocks, where I can walk to a grocery store, a coffee shop and a bar within 15 minutes, but my luck has run out. The little co-op grocery store I walk to is closing its doors at the end of 2026. One of the several reasons for the closure given by the co-op board stood out to me because of the deadpan irony — construction for Austin's federally funded 9.8 mile light rail extension will block easy access for pedestrians, cyclists and most importantly trucks making restocks at the grocery store.(1)

Austin Transit Partnership (ATP), the local government corporation created to build the urban rail extension, estimates the cost to be $7 billion and the first ride to happen by 2033. After you factor in the long delays faced by such large infrastructure projects, my chances of riding one of these trains is quite slim. Of course, I am neither alone, nor the first person to be in this predicament.(2)

The 100-mile Washington DC metro which was signed into law in 1965, broke ground in 1969, and was estimated to cost $1.8 billion. After several delays, the metro was declared “complete” in 1985 — even though construction for the green line (part of the original plan) would begin only in 1991. When the green line opened in 2001, the project was estimated to have cost a total of $10 billion.

In the 20 years from 1965–1985, one generation of DC residents lived through the construction of the metro without seeing its benefits, while bearing the moderate inconvenience of persistent construction activity and traffic snarls. During these years, the bureaucratic machinery, even though backed by the supposed strong arm of the federal government in DC, ran into several delays and demands by interest groups. These are documented in The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro:

The peak years of Metro construction — 1973 to 1976 — highlighted the difficulties, and expense, of macro engineering in a crowded city. Every park, every historic structure, every sidewalk could become an obstacle. In one case, engineers had to shift the route to spare a single, historic oak tree. Amid fights over individual segments, broader debates highlighted the tensions inherent in any public transit authority.(3)

In addition to macro engineering challenges, there are social engineering obstacles to big infrastructure projects. In Florida for example, Brightline, the privately run high speed rail that connects Miami to Orlando has been plagued by pedestrian deaths and accidents.(4) A high proportion of these are caused by drivers or pedestrians underestimating the speed of the train while negligently cutting across railway crossings (freight trains that the Florida man is accustomed to runs at 40mph compared to 100 mph average speed of the high speed rail run by Brightline).

While the pain of large infrastructure projects can be put into statistics — number of years delayed and billions spent — the cost of such projects is ultimately personal to the people working on them and the citizens frustrated by the lack of payoff to their tax dollars and mundane suffering. I want to make sense of the lifecycle of such large infrastructure projects — how are they planned? What factors determine if they will be successful or not?

Infrastructure challenges are not equally distributed. Since 2008 China has put into operation over 25,000 kilometres of dedicated high-speed railway (HSR) lines, far more than the total high-speed lines operating in the rest of the world.

The Chinese HSR network has been built at an average cost of $17 million to $21 million per km — about two thirds of the cost in other countries — even though many Chinese lines have a high proportion of their route on viaducts or in tunnels. The Medium and Long Term Tail Plan (MLTRP), developed in 2004 by several state owned stakeholders and modified in 2008 and 2016, along with complementary five year plans, played a key role in the success of the Chinese HSR. The plans, once approved, were never changed, thus providing economic and physical certainty about the future state of the HSR construction. A World Bank paper claims that setting a plan in stone for five years is an idiosyncrasy that is possible only in China.(5) They don't expound on this important claim but I will try to answer the question — why do some countries build rail infrastructure much faster than others?

Increasing complexity through the ages

Modern paved roads in Britain have their origins in the alienating, desolate landscape of the Scottish Highlands. In the 1720s, England was policing the Scottish clans which had threatened to install Charles Edward Stuart as their sovereign. The Scottish mountains were inhabited by free people who resisted English governance. Mountains were traditionally hard to govern and this is why people who did not want to be governed chose to live there.(6) The only way for the English to govern the highlands was to change the landscape in their favour. In his report, commanding office General George Wade wrote: “Roads and bridges alone could render Scotland subject to English power.” In Roads to Power: Britain invents the Infrastructure State, Jo Guildi writes about the first centrally coordinated large scale road building project, designed to rein in the Scots:

They totalled about 250 miles of road, averaging sixteen feet wide. After the second rebellion in 1745, another round of roads connected Dumbarton Castle, Stirling Castle, and Loch Lomond with the Bridge of Fruin and Duchlage. All the construction work was carried out by military labor, and soldiers continued to maintain the roads until 1815, when maintenance was transferred to a parliamentary committee. By this point almost 900 miles of roads had been built, created, and maintained by parliamentary grants of £4,000 to £7,000 a year.(7)

In the process of constructing these roads, the military synthesized the best methods and protocols for road construction. For example, the staggering mountain landscapes of the highlands made sighting and route-planning hard. One of the reports describes the experience of looking out and seeing mangled roads disappear behind hills as “... a kind of whimsical disorder.” This led to many advances in the fields of routing and sight planning, introducing concepts such as vanishing point and educating surveyors in contemporary theories around perspective and vision. The practice of using large boulders as landmarks along roads has its origins here. It seems that this practice is still used in British road construction — I remember coming across such landmarks in the British-constructed roads in Kerala, India, where I grew up.

By 1830, Parliamentary road construction dominated over military road construction in Britain. The Parliamentary roads were funded by the state and led to the formation of the bureaucratic state that was responsible for planning and maintaining the infrastructure. Prior to Parliamentary roads, the advances made by the military in road planning had led to construction of parish roads and turnpikes. These were roads that were maintained by lords in smaller towns, often collected tolls, and were plagued by corruption. They were often disconnected from each other, used different construction methods and varied in width. The Parliamentary roads, on the other hand, were centrally planned.

A critical role here was played by individuals who planned roads and presented them to Parliament for funding approval. This involved advances in data visualization, and standardization of processes and materials used. The synthesis of these skills eventually became the field known as civil engineering today. One of the most important of these standardizations was called Macadamization, after John Loudon Macadam, a proponent of centralized planning of roads.(8) Macadam proposed that all parliamentary roads should be built using the same materials and following the same specifications . This proved to be much more expensive than the prevailing method which emphasized using materials that were local to the area where the road was constructed. The parliament adopted Macadamization nevertheless, because it provided much more legibility to plans and costs than other methods. The high capital cost of parliamentary roads can be considered the cost of legibility.

There was growing opposition in Britain to centrally-planned parliamentary highways in the late 1800s — the strain of high costs on the parliamentary budgets being the primary reason. This led to a comeback for turnpikes and privately maintained toll roads which, once again, proved to be inefficient and expensive for citizens. Parliamentary planning was eventually resurgent, and despite mixed success in the late 20th and 21st century, has remained the preferred modality for planning projects.

One of the bigger innovations in large infrastructure projects in the 20th century has been the utilization of project finance.(9) Starting in the late 1980s, a significant proportion of infrastructure projects (primarily road and rail) follow a project finance model in which the government spins off a private company, with the government as its largest stakeholder. Project finance offsets the risks of defaulting on loans and also enables the private company to enter into contracts with several contractors — providing more financial and incentive legibility to the project. The project finance model creates a “single wringable neck” for the delivery of the project. It also enables the project to raise funding from several sources such as international banks or sovereign wealth funds.

Even though the technology available has increased exponentially, the planning protocols for large infrastructure projects still remain recognizable to someone from the 1800s — project finance being an exception. The fate of Britain's 21st century high speed rail project shows how these protocols are not suitable for the hyper complex environment of today.

Planning and Distrust of Planning

The British high speed rail project was announced in 2009 as a Y-shaped network from London to Birmingham with spurs to Manchester and Leeds. The budget was set to $20 billion. In 2023, after several revisions and re-scoping, the project was reduced to a single line between London and Birmingham.(10) Initially planned to open in 2026, the single West Midlands leg of HS2 is now delayed to between 2029 and 2033. A budget of $55.7 billion was set in 2015 for the whole Y-shaped line, but the initial leg alone is now estimated to cost between $53 and $61 billion.

Critics of the project have pointed out that several aspects of HS2 lack any coherent planning. HS2 was launched as a charismatic political project by Gordon Brown’s Labour government. The stated goal of the project was to connect the economic center of London with the deprived north of the country. The planning process appears to have worked backward — instead of understanding the problems and then scoping the project, the project was scoped first. The “planning” phase essentially involved hand-picking data that fit the assumptions of the project.

For example, HS2 was marketed by the government as a much cleaner and environmentally-conscious means of transport compared to car travel. This was later found to be based on hand-picking a single study about a French rail line.(11) Studies commissioned by another government body, the Department of Transport, suggest that when construction is taken into account, high speed rail journeys from London to Manchester will produce 60% more carbon than conventional rail and 35% more carbon than car journeys.

It appears that even route planning for the project was haphazard. After the route for HS2’s now-canceled eastern leg was published, it emerged that the line cut right through a brand new housing estate. It turned out that engineers had worked from old maps that were made before 2011, prior to the estate’s beginning construction in 2012.(12)

The business case made by the government for the West Midlands leg which is under construction is that the project produces benefits of $32.3 billion with a cost to benefit ratio of 2.7. Most of the benefits produced appear to come from estimated amounts of time saved by passengers, the calculation of which appears “frightfully complicated”, according to government sources.

In their paper Governance Regimes for Large Complex Projects, Roger Miller and Brian Hobbs studied 60 large infrastructure projects and found that the front end of these projects, which includes planning and discussions with all stakeholders, took close to seven years on average and were often expensive (up to 33% of the total budget).(13) They also found that this phase was critical and showed more impact on project performance than management of the engineering, procurement and construction phases.

Under the present conditions, unless you live in a monarchy or under an authoritarian regime, seven years is longer than the length of an average political term. This means that if a project is primarily politically-motivated, such as is the case with HS2, it is likely to be dead in the water before planning is done, or its planning is done in such haste that endless mistakes are discovered once the budget is “approved” and machinations for the project are underway. In such cases, the budget is in fact just an imaginary number that sounds about right to someone. The death by thousand budget cuts of the HS2 project was complete when the conservative government of Rishi Sunak canceled the northern leg of HS2, which had been the cornerstone of the project as envisioned by the Labour government which initiated it.

Ill-planned, charismatic projects such as HS2 also compliment and fuel inefficient bureaucracies. In the paper From Weber to Kafka: Political Instability and the Overproduction of Laws, Gabriele Gratton et al. argue that political instability leads to production of legislation that is not properly planned, which the bureaucracy struggles to implement, which then leads to Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmares.(14) The result of this, as the paper notes, is that “bad bureaucracy drives out good politicians”, and the cycle of bad legislation continues. Gratton et al call this cycle Gresham's Law.

The transition from Weberian efficiency to Kafkaesque nightmare can be due to three reasons that the paper points out: shorter parliamentary terms, large number of reform opportunities and — ironically — a technocratic government (too many competent people producing too many laws). In the case of HS2, the subsequent parliaments since Gordon Brown’s have gradually lost interest in the project. It is also worth noting that Britain has been going through high political instability, rotating through four prime ministers in the last six years, in addition to Brexit and euro bloc instability since around 2015. High political instability is combined with a large number of reform opportunities as a result of a rotating cast of prime ministers whose terms of office are too short to properly implement policies.

Chinese Exception

One of my fond adolescent memories, growing up in a country which struggled to build new infrastructure, is my father telling me about his visit to China, and the time he got to ride a high speed rail line. He said,  “You don't realize how fast the train is moving, then the tour guide tells you that a train is going to pass in the opposite direction and that the relative velocity at that point would be greater than the speed of sound — it happens so sudden, blink and you miss.”

China has built 25,000km of high speed rail line since the year 2008.

A key role in the development of China's HSR is played by the MLTRP. This plan, first approved in 2004, with revisions in 2008 and 2016, looks up to 15 years ahead and is complimented by a series of five-year plans. These plans are rarely changed once approved. The initial long term plan envisioned 12,000km of high speed rail by 2020. The 2016 revision aims for a network of 30,000km by 2020, 38,000km by 2025 and 45,000km by 2030.

The planning for these high speed rail projects is a mix of highly aligned centralization and incentivizing stakeholders at all levels. For example, both central and local governments have equity in the high speed rail projects — the former through capital and the latter in the form of land provided for the project.

Private participation in the projects was low at the beginning because the relatively low fares of the HSR made cost recovery hard. But since the high speed rail project began, the per capita disposable income of Chinese urban residents has risen from Y14,000 to around Y34,000, thus allowing for fare increases in some routes, leading to more private participation in running these routes.

In addition to keeping the prices low, the Chinese government also implemented legislation that prevents airlines from changing fares for routes less than 800km — the distance range within which high speed rail competes with airlines. These regulations have also been relaxed in the last couple of years — showing signs that the government is loosening its grip on transportation and letting free markets play more of a role.

All of the above shows the high pedigree of synchronized execution of legislation and highly detailed planning that is needed to make large infrastructure projects possible.(15a/15b)

The Chinese state also does not risk becoming a Kafkaesque bureaucracy yet — the legislature term is long, the successions are planned, the state tries to quash or manage instability early on. Perhaps the biggest risk China runs into is the third one: becoming a highly centralized technocracy. In short, the nature of infrastructure projects in China appears to be the Weberian ideal of bureaucracy combined with an Orwellian dystopia of control.

Is it possible for large scale infrastructure projects to be planned and executed in the absence of a highly centralized technocracy?

Plans as Autonomous Worlds

As Ludens writes in Autonomous Worlds, “A World is a container for entities and a coherent-enough internal ruleset about how they behave. When a system of entities and rules comes to life, it becomes a World.”(16) A large-scale infrastructure project is a world of its own. The entities of this world are bound together by legally binding contracts which define the rules of their behavior and roles within the world. An entity is considered to be part of the world if it follows the introduction rule of the world. Introduction rules define the boundary of the world that you are dealing with. For example as Ludens writes, “In the World of Harry Potter, the introduction rule is very simple: if an entity is included in a story written by JK Rowling and published under the Harry Potter series, it is diegetic. Otherwise, it isn’t.”

In the case of the Chinese high speed rail, the introduction rule is the MLTRP. An entity is part of the world of Chinese HSR if it follows the rules defined by the MLTRP.

Projects with well defined introduction rules fare better than ones with more loosely defined introduction rules. A clear introduction rule creates hard boundaries that are easier to enforce for a competent bureaucracy. In their paper comparing the governance of two nuclear reactor construction projects Olkiluoto 3 (Finland) and Flammanville 3 (France), Inkeri Ruuska et al look at the efficiency created by well defined contracts and roles.(17) They find that even though both projects run into troubles, Flammanville 3 fares better because of the well defined relationship between the entities. Another factor that the paper points out is the existence of a previously defined relationship between the entities working on Falmmanville. Entities such as construction companies and governance agencies are worlds of their own, so it makes sense that the existence of a previous relationship makes the entities more aware of each other's internal rulesets and protocols.

Clearly defined introduction rules are also part of the reason why efforts to quash infrastructure projects find more success than building them — the only introduction rule for stopping HS2 or passing zoning regulation in a large city is “are you opposed to the plan or not?”

Coordinated action within blockchain has been largely successful in achieving goals in projects where the introduction rule is simple and well defined (such as constitutionDAO: buy the constitution), or in the case of large multiplayer games (such as memecoins: number go up and have fun with friends) which do not require complex coordinated action other than “should number go up or down?” Perhaps the concept and tools of autonomous worlds can enable more complex coordination on high stakes projects.

Infrastructure Planning Game

A couple of weeks ago, at Edge Esmeralda, Arb from 0xparc brought up Twitch Plays Pokemon in a sidebar conversation. It is a game played on Twitch where the actions of the main character in the Pokemon game are crowdsourced from inputs received in a chat room. Initially the game was designed in such a way that all inputs were tallied and reflected in gameplay. After receiving several complaints about slow progress and confusion, the broadcaster introduced democracy mode and anarchy mode for gameplay. In democracy mode, the inputs from the previous 30 seconds are tallied and the input with a supermajority is played; while in anarchy mode, the inputs are tallied and the winning input is played without any requirement for supermajority. This got me thinking about an equivalent of Twitch Plays Pokemon for planning infrastructure.

The objective of the game could be to build a railway line between any two points within a region (the larger the region, the higher the budget and larger the uncertainty). The players have to come to a rough consensus on the routes for the trains. The budgets are calculated based on the route and there is a budget cap that is arbitrary or decided early on. They have two modes of playing — The Benevolent Dictator For X mode (BDFX) or Democracy mode.

BDFX mode is a play on BDFL, a term that is commonly used in open source communities when referring to people like Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux — leaders who are burdened with making the final decision when everyone else has come to an impasse. They generally tend to occupy this role for life or until they rage quit. In BDFX mode, everyone has to lead some of the time but not all the time. Here’s Venkatesh Rao writing about BDFX:

BDFxing is a pattern that has emerged (not surprisingly) in the crypto world, and in adjacent spaces that use the ideas, if not all the technologies, like Discord-based groups. In these spaces, many worthwhile activities and initiatives often fall into, and languish in, the no-man’s-land between theatrical or real BDFLs on the verge of failure, and collective action mechanisms that are incapable of acting. And since bleeding-edge protocol technologies literally don’t work if you can’t make the leadership model distributed too (see: Conway’s Law; many people have to run all these “nodes” these architectures rely on), BDFxing emerged as a way to semi-ironically announce that you’re unilaterally taking the initiative to lead an activity through a challenging regime where it would fall apart without leadership, and actually doing it sincerely, and then quitting when the need has passed.

Just enough leadership injected, when it is needed, where it is needed.(18)

For the purpose of the game, in BDFX mode, a single user can capture the flag of BDFX and for the next thirty seconds — or until the flag is captured by someone else — make decisions about the routing of the train.

Democracy mode would work similar to its namesake in Twitch Plays Pokemon — all players input their decisions on what route the train should take or what the budget allocated should be, the inputs from the previous 30 seconds are tallied, and the input with the supermajority is taken.

Decisions for routing the train should be based on:

1. Expected returns in the next 10 years: This includes revenue from fares and other realized gains such as taxes on land from increase in land value along the route

2. Environmental assessments: A highly stochastic variable in the game, such as locals protesting the removal of a tree or a park

3. Expected political value: Unsure how this should be calculated but I imagine it would be something along the lines of, more constituents who favour urbanism being served by rail line more the increase in your political strength.

The game ends when the budget cap has been reached.

It would be interesting to compare the routes that are created in democracy mode and BDFX mode. My bet is that the BDFX mode will be the right mix of entertainment and efficiency.

Conclusion

Planning and completing large infrastructure projects has gotten harder over time. In the early years, planning for infrastructure projects was militarized, with the objective of providing more legibility and control for an empire.(19) When parliamentary planning took off, it borrowed heavily from the standardized practices of the military and technological advancements made in route-sighting and planning. The push for a more standardized method of building out large infrastructure projects led to the formation of the field of civil engineering. Standardization, such as Macadamization in the case of the British highways, allowed infrastructure that is used by the public across provincial borders to be much easier to manage, while also providing a better experience for the public.

The project finance model, popularized in the 1980s, was an attempt to bring the efficiency and incentive alignment of private enterprise into building infrastructure. This has had mixed success — because a government still remains the largest shareholder in a private company spun off to build an infrastructure project. The project finance model enables a government to have limited financial liability and allows it to enter into contracts with private contractors, which would have been cumbersome in the previous system.

The ossification of western democracies has led to what Jo Freeman called a tyranny of structurelessness when it comes to large infrastructure projects.(20) In her paper, Freeman studied women’s movements in the 70s. The anarchist, anti-structure movements worked well to bring people together but failed when it came to actually taking action. While the context is different, the same cycle seems to happen in the case of politically motivated infrastructure projects: first, informal coalitions of politicians and bureaucrats emerge, with unclear norms and unwritten rules. The authority within the group is then concentrated to a select few elites. Status games will ensue as individuals in the group jockey for position. Once this happens, the group loses focus on its original goals, making progress next to impossible. High political instability (such as four prime ministers in six years) means that neither politicians nor bureaucrats are able to provide the stability required to finish complex projects. The exceptional performance of China here is the proverbial exception that proves the rule.

While high authoritarianism is offered as the primary critique of the Chinese model, it seems to me that 25,000km of high speed rail would be hard to construct without some BDFXing at various levels. High authoritarianism is over-theorized and BDFXing is under-theorized. The Chinese exception requires further study and perhaps more conversation with people who BDFX such projects successfully.

The Infrastructure planning game could possibly be an experiment to familiarize people with the concept of BDFXing and getting an intuition for it.

In the time that I’ve written this essay, Britain had another general election, Austin’s urban light rail plans have run into legal hurdles,(21) and China’s bullet trains have raised prices due to debt concerns.(22) Planning for large complex projects keeps getting harder and weirder in a world where information and decision cycles are faster and more unpredictable. Responding to this probably requires a new model of planning that is as influential as Macadamization, project finance and China’s MLTRP. Studying emerging models and analyzing their efficacy could be a fruitful area of study.

***

Thanks to Josh Stark and Tim Beiko for their feedback on this essay. Thanks to the Ethereum Foundation for supporting my work with a small grant.

No one knows how to repair a spaceport.

This is because spaceports primarily exist as a fiction. Spaceports imply the existence of inter-Solar System, if not intergalactic, infrastructure. Our existing international infrastructure already strains under its own weight.

Existing space stations have a varied history. The Soviet Union launched the first space station in 1986 with the name Mir, which some translate as peace, world, or in pre-revolutionary times, society. They assembled it in orbit, and in its later life, it hosted several international visitors. Over a decade after the launch of Mir, five countries and a number of intergovernmental treaties oversaw the launch of the currently active International Space Station (ISS) in 1998. The ISS makes sixteen earth orbits per day, with peak visibility during twilight.

Like Mir before it in 2001, the ISS is set to meet a managed end. By 2031 its remnants will share their final resting place in the South Pacific Ocean’s so-called “spacecraft cemetery.” The countries involved in its launch have not yet planned any international infrastructure to replace it.

After its descent, the Chinese Tiangong will be the only remaining space station in orbit.

Standards Also Unmake a World

Unlike space stations, perhaps spaceports don’t need to manifest beyond their fictions. Plain old ports exist because they fulfill a need. Marking the passage of a resource moving, from land to sea, sea to land, or embarking into the air, ports facilitate movement across terrains, sovereignties, and engineered environments.

But spaceports do more than that. As fictions, they facilitate movement that more explicitly bridges worlds. Worlds that could have wholly unknown ecologies.

While the term “worldbuilding” enjoys cyclical revivals in the popular imagination, a different definition of worlds could be offered here (a definition intended to be neither definitive nor canonical, but instead to be a temporary guide). We regularly think of worlds operating with specific external boundaries, which contain relative internal coherency despite the occasional leak.(1) The Victorian fascination with terrariums demonstrates this well. But what if the opposite were true, and unstable boundaries are precisely what constitutes worldness? Its contradictions exceed it. A world is so much a world that its boundaries cannot entirely be certain, with constant leaks into other worlds or further recesses into its own. With unstable boundaries, its relationships can be symbiotic, predatory, or, as more often happens, a mix of both. Ultimately in this understanding, a world confounds expectations of agency for those meeting it.

Do you think today we could build infrastructure that bridges worlds? There’s a joke that the most fantastical thing in the Star Trek universe is not the worlds they encounter, but the fact that intergalactic video calling actually works.

Standardization is one strategy for cross-world interoperability. Historically, standardization often comes from sovereignties wanting to consolidate. An early example: the first Chinese emperor sought to standardize measurements in the second century B.C.E. Other needs for standardization came from crises, like during the early twentieth century when a fire broke out in Maryland, United States, and firefighters arriving from other states could not connect their fire hoses to the fire hydrants. Many large-scale efforts at manufacturing standardization across sovereignties, though initiated before World War II, came to pass after its wake.

In the insightful essay “Standards Make the World,” David Lang writes about an approach to standardization that he calls “disruptive standards-making,” illustrated by influential groups rallying around engineering that just works. He cites the development of the internet as a chief example. TCP/IP, the computer networking protocol that facilitates the internet today, came from applied, practical development of the technology. The publicly lesser known Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) is a theoretical framework for computer networking largely developed by the International Standards Organization (ISO) at the same time as TCP/IP but with the stated intention to create a standard. TCP/IP, however, ultimately won out because it just worked. Lang writes, “Disruptive standards-making falls somewhere on the spectrum between de facto and voluntary-consensus—elements of both strategies mixed with heavy doses of entrepreneurial hubris. It’s an attitude of ‘we’re doing this—are you coming?’”(2) Though disruptive standards-making doesn’t begin with consortia, Lang concludes, standards usually survive in the longer term through consortia management.

Typically at a confluence of influence, capital, and institutional might, plus a little lucky timing, the documented history of standardization naturally favors the large-scale. However, one might wonder about standards that escape explicit formalization: cases in which there is just enough interoperability. One could argue that regions with differentiated linguistic dialectics might be examples of this. Just enough may be understood, and differentiation can multiply.

Still, none of these approaches explain how the Star Trek video calling conundrum could be solved (as long as we momentarily suspend our belief in Star Trek’s solution: the existence of a universal translator and “subspace” communications.(3)) This type of standardization implies coordination across entities that can already communicate with each other or which have at least some form of sufficient discoverability between them. Interpretability becomes central.

To explore the intergalactic video calling conundrum, we could understand protocols in contrast to standardization, though of course many would not make this separation in practice. For our purposes, we could define protocols as systems that prioritize interoperability over formal standardization, with spaceports acting as their central metaphor. Spaceports take the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) line further, to establish “rough consensus and running worlds.”

So while strictly speaking there might be no need to build intergalactically just yet, spaceports evoke a vital attitude toward infrastructure, as the sense that our technologies exceed our understanding as humans increases. Spaceports are a metaphor for our technological present. They represent infrastructure that adapts to plurality, or in other words, adapts to the proliferation of technological uncertainties: other worlds. To imagine what that means, first you can close your eyes.

Spaceport Aesthetics

Now imagine what a protocol looks like. Any protocol, just as an idea. What are its contours? Does it have a direction? A feeling?

A group of us tried this experiment, which resulted in the humble sketches below. Across all of the sketches, our visualizations of a protocol had a few commonalities. One of the most striking sketches resembled a crystal: the idea of the inorganic growing within a set of rules but without precisely predictable offshoots. Most of our sketches included infrastructures with a solid core, a means for free floating agents to interact around the solid core, and a directional arrow in time, as though simple operating instructions allowed these infrastructures to continue indefinitely. In short, we concluded, our collective subconscious had decided that protocols look like spaceports.

The thing about spaceports, however, is that they’re janky. They’re not going to maintain perfect operation over time. One must imagine every cable connector ever designed in the past, plus the thousand more cable connectors that will inevitably be designed in the future despite our best attempts at standardization, all lined up irregularly on a wall. That, rather than the sterile operating room of HAL 2000, is the aesthetic of spaceports.

Spaceports defy the dominant aesthetic narratives of technology. Given to us by 2001: A Space Odyssey and other media, these lingering science fiction imaginaries suggest that a technologically advanced future implies minimalism. Other popular science fiction imaginaries like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? suggest that technological collapse and earthly decay go together. Spaceports sit somewhere dynamically in-between.

Heterogeneous Devices and Cross-World Media

The research and development company Xerox PARC is best known for creating our modern personal computing paradigm. Additionally, beginning in the 1970s, Xerox PARC supported initiatives by social scientists to produce ethnographic studies of emerging technologies that would influence how we understand them today.

A classic paper from this initiative, “Reconstructing Technologies as Social Practice” authored by Lucy Suchman, Jeanette Blomberg, Juliane E. Orr (Work Practice & Technology Associates), and Randall Trigg that American Behavioral Scientist published in 1999, summarizes some of their work on human-machine communication over previous decades.(4)

This research group conducted case studies of technologies, including a new, “feature-rich” photocopier that consistently received complaints from those trying to use it. In this case study from 1981, Suchman explored why these difficulties arose despite users having a detailed instruction manual for the photocopier. From observing its use in several different contexts, Suchman concluded that no matter how “self-evident” designers tried to make a new device through things like instruction manuals establishing interaction patterns, users could not escape some level of contingency as they interpreted its functions. She reframed the task of designers from creating a device that acts nearly like a human, in the sense that it should be able to fully explain itself, to creating a device that requires writing, reading, and interpreting with the ambiguity that entails, because interactions with devices lack the “subtle, emergent, and highly contingent courses of collaborative sensemaking that characterize interactions among humans.”(5)

It’s also interesting here that Suchman implies designers considered instruction manuals part of a “self-evident” device. Today we might be more inclined to think of instruction manuals as separate from a device. Even consulting them might be considered a sign of failure of a device’s explanatory power. This could be for multiple reasons, one being that we have much more established interaction patterns to rely on when interpreting devices. As devices become more agentic through artificial intelligence, however, this point should be revisited. What happens to interpreting devices when the instruction manual speaks back?

In subsequent work by Blomberg from 1987 to 1988, she expected to find a correlation between the number of service calls a photocopier required and how users perceived its reliability. She was surprised to find none. Instead, she inferred, it depended on not the number of service calls, but their helpfulness in problem resolution.

In 1991, a larger scale ethnographic study by Orr was initiated in response to “corporate concern” over how to train service technicians. Orr concluded that rather than “the rote repair of identical machines,” repair work “was better characterized as a continuous improvisation with a triangular relationship of technician, customer, and machine.”(7) Maintenance, Orr argued, is inherently idiosyncratic, and narratives, it seemed, proved the best compensation for this idiosyncrasy. As this research group writes in the paper, “Storytelling is the principal medium available for technicians to share their knowledge and stay informed of subtle developments in machine behavior.” Responding to “subtle developments in machine behavior” requires technical skill as well as narrative skill.(8) The Star Trek video calling conundrum may only be tractable through open improvisation. With artificial intelligence, agentic devices might be interestingly understood as teaching machines to improvise (machine improvisation).

At the time of this research group, nowhere embodied the dynamic, idiosyncratic nature of maintenance better than airport operations rooms. For two years in the late 1980s, the researchers visited one such place. Summarizing their experience, they immediately mention how the airport operations room challenged the dominant science fiction imaginary:

Where on the deck of the Starship Enterprise [in Star Trek] it appears that all the artifacts were created at a single moment, the operations room presented us with a kind of archaeological layering of artifacts acquired, in bits and pieces, over time. Rather than being homogeneously and seamlessly integrated, these artifacts comprised a heterogeneous collection of information and communication technologies, including telephones, radios, video monitors, networked workstations, whiteboards, clocks, and a wide array of documents. The integration of these artifacts, correspondingly, seemed more a matter of string and baling wire than of design.(9)

They also observed the social organization of the staff, a small, close group, who oriented their team toward events distant in space and time. This led the researchers to redescribe an information system, not as a clearly delineated organizational form, but instead as an “unfolding” of “partial, heterogeneous devices.”(10)

While understanding technology as a situated social practice has become familiar, this ethnographic work from the 1970s onward set precedents for how we think now. Some people might even read the emphasis on “storytelling” as part of a contentious cultural fault line in technology discourse today. However, whether overly familiar or even contentious, our aesthetic understanding of technology perhaps never took the conclusions of these researchers to heart.

Maintaining complex technology proves inherently idiosyncratic. Standardization at scale has chaotic externalities. Rather than assuming anything other than minimalism is a design flaw, what if we were to integrate these idiosyncratic, adhoc tendencies as a sign of just enough interoperability in our technology, made of “archaeologically layered” “partial, heterogeneous devices”? What if we were to take these tendencies seriously as necessary marks of spaceport aesthetics, of plural, cross-world interoperability, and of worldness itself?

Infrastructure as Organization

If even standardization can’t escape some form of idiosyncratic, adhoc storytelling, how can we think of the innovation complex technology writ large offers?

In traditional economics, organizations supposedly form because they maintain knowledge shared among their participants, processes, and tools, which should improve efficiency. In many scenarios, an employee troubleshooting a technical error in a process created by the organization would be more efficient than outsourcing the troubleshooting to a service technician. That is, unless the troubleshooting requires specialized knowledge the organization does not maintain, in which case, the organization outsourcing the troubleshooting would lower its “transaction costs.” Referred to as Coase’s theory of the firm, this idea suggests that an organization with stable boundaries forms when it sufficiently lowers the transaction costs of accomplishing an endeavor.

Spaceports hypothetically elude this theorem, which is questionable in its own right. As we’ve conceived of them, spaceports are infrastructure designed without stable boundaries. They are meant to accommodate the fellow traveler and the unknown visitor alike. Yet this doesn’t mean they don’t imply some interpretable organizational form.

From our protocol visualization experiment, the activity of docking came up. Before landing a fellow traveler might think, would the spaceport have digestible food? What would the cultures there be like, and if their spaceship became damaged, would the spaceport have the tools to repair it? Would the spaceport have the right connector cables? Some unknown visitors would not have any questions like these. Spaceports are organized adaptations to these uncertainties.

What I’m getting at, then, is that spaceports demonstrate the concept of infrastructure as organization. For spaceports to exist, they would need to be built for just enough interoperability. Their infrastructure would have to substitute for the shared, maintained knowledge of an organization, making it worthwhile to land. The needs that couldn’t be anticipated technically would have to be met with practices of improvisation.

Current software experiments in cross-world media like the Autonomous Worlds Network can be seen through the lens of infrastructure as organization. Building “autonomous worlds,” which can be understood as media, game, and cryptographic environments, they make their software protocols public, intending their operating rules to maintain consistency plus discoverability akin to digital, Newtonian physics.(11)

The game This Cursed Machine is one example from the Autonomous Worlds Network. In a 2023 talk, game developers ARB and Agnes Cameron presented their work in the context of developing “composable game loops.”(12) They suggested questioning the assumption that, in the context of public blockchains, a game is meaningfully composable simply because its game states, rule sets, and objects are on-chain and therefore readily available data. Instead, they set out to create composable game loops, that is, small, simple mechanisms that facilitate technical as well as narrative composability. In the case of their game, as they explicitly point to in their talk title “Bugs In, Sludge Out” (you’ll get it if you play the game), participants can think of the technical and narrative output of one game loop as an input for another game loop, which participants can then build themselves. From these integrated, composable game loops autonomous worldness can grow.

Autonomous Worlds Network is a nascent, playful example that, in some cases, intentionally embraces spaceport aesthetics from the start, whereas other established examples, including photocopiers, instruction manuals, and operations rooms, have incorporated it over time. We will likely see many changes to these examples, both new and old, as agentic devices develop further.

Understood this way, complex technology innovates through infrastructure as organization, providing just enough interoperability on which improvisation can build. Such approaches will be vital as our technology tends toward the agentic unknown.(13)

A metaphor for our technological present

Spaceports do not represent a will toward homogeneous, globalized standardization, but neither do they represent a will toward borderization. They exist in the protocolized, permissionless mess in between. They attempt to articulate a vernacular without walls: welcome to fellow traveler and unknown visitor alike.

Ultimately, repairing a spaceport involves storytelling as well as technical skill. While no one knows how to repair a spaceport, after this thought experiment, one could imagine a manual fragment captured from the training data set of an old agent 2.78 AUs away. It might read:

• Just enough interoperability

• Computer says maybe

• Aesthetic pluralism

• Iterate on one mechanism at a time

• Liability should not exceed agency

• Vernaculars without walls

• Agnostic infrastructure, opinionated implementation

• Theater of all possibilities, not performances

The rest of the manual fragment would be illegible and unknown, lost somewhere in the inorganic yet decomposing spaceport cemeteries of the future. We do know for certain that if spaceports exist, they will definitely need repair.

NOTES

1. ludens, “The Case for Autonomous Worlds.”

2. Lang, “Standards Make the World.”

3. Ursula K. Le Guin’s faster-than-light communication device the Ansible might be the subject for another essay.

4. Suchman et al., “Reconstructing Technologies as Social Practice.”

5. Ibid, 395.

6. Ibid, 396.

7. “Unidentified Floating Object.”

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid, 397.

10. Ibid, 399.

11. ludens, “The Case for Autonomous Worlds.”

12. “Bugs In, Sludge Out: Production Circuits As Composable Game Loop ✧ Agnes Cameron & Arb ✧ Assembly.” November 15, 2023.

13. Someone may deem it pertinent to write The Cloud of Unknowing, but instead of how to relate to God in the fourteenth century, it describes how to relate to technology in the twenty-first century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“Bugs In, Sludge Out: Production Circuits As Composable Game Loop ✧ Agnes Cameron & Arb ✧ Assembly.” November 15, 2023.

Lang, David. “Standards Make the World.” Summer of Protocols. Accessed August 26, 2024.

ludens. “The Case for Autonomous Worlds.” Autonomous Worlds Network, August 9, 2023.

Suchman, Lucy, Jeanette Blomberg, Julian E. Orr, and Randall Trigg. “Reconstructing Technologies as Social Practice.” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 3 (November 1999): 392–408.

The Public Domain Review. “Unidentified Floating Object: Edo Images of Utsuro-Bune.” https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/utsuro-bune/.

Cover image: Ismail al-Jazarī, Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, 1206.

There is enormous interest in building new movements today. But you don’t have to start anew if you want to change the world. Communities lie on a spectrum in terms of their origins: either they have been created to achieve a goal, or they appear to have been created almost by default; no purpose, they just exist. Who can harness the latent power of those default communities? What power do they have?

Digital Contexts

When we examined historical sources at school, my history teacher encouraged us to respect even the tiniest details. “Everything in this source was put there for a reason.”

The internet, of course, is just the same. Have you ever thought how, on the internet, nothing exists by default? Everything online was created by some person, for a reason.

Our real world is quite the opposite. Yes, the groups which make headlines are designed to effect change on the world — Google beats its earnings targets; a local charity raises money — but these Designed Communities are built on unintentional foundations.

These foundations are the product of two things: social value systems and the natural world. They arise without any purpose or design, with origins embedded so deep in the past that in the present day they appear almost as the default state of affairs.

Nobody chose them: geography that defined borders and ‘home’; birthright that influences class and ethnicity; genetics and the food chain; personality and natural ability.

It is these foundational characteristics which truly shape our lives and beliefs. They do so not just because they are part of our identity, but because they are the parts which feel hardest to give up.

This is well documented, most famously by Stuart Brand.

A community is a clearly-defined group of people whose interests are co-invested with each other. They can be built upon any of the layers that Brand uses in his diagram, whether it’s a community built around some fashion trend like Crocs or one built around a set of cultural values or beliefs like a religion.

Fashion and commerce move “fast”, he writes in The Clock of the Long Now (1999). These are the layers of those headline-grabbing Designed Communities, like Crocs, purposefully designed to pursue a specific goal.

“The fast parts get all the attention,” Brand writes. These are the parts that are easy to give up. Millennials change job every 3 years. Trends every few weeks.

The fast parts are home to a long line of changemakers who seek to influence society on a timeframe that spans only the few decades of their working lives. The art of designing a community to make a dent in the world, from startups to protests, is now highly refined.

Designed Communities have shaped our world because they are specifically designed to do so. They have institutionalised methods to accumulate assets, coordinate people, and allocate capital.

Default Communities, by contrast, have no such institutions. People forget that communities can even be formed around these ‘default’ characteristics which date to before living memory. Culture and nature are “slow”, Brand writes. They are “the work of whole peoples” in the former case and “inexorable” in the latter.

“The fast parts get all the attention. The slow parts have all the power.”

This is best seen as a feature, rather than a bug. Communities built upon these characteristics have something that Designed Communities lack: ties between their members that date to before living memory. “The slow parts have all the power.” Nation states usually beat companies.

Default Communities

Nestled in the northern English village of Trawden, the Trawden Arms made over half a million in profit last year. It helps that 120 locals run the pub for free. The pub is one of four community-owned establishments which have made the village an iconic example of what a default community can achieve.

Once a driver of the industrial revolution, Trawden’s future looked bleak by 2014. Thatcherite reforms saw the mills close down one by one, followed by the butcher’s, a baker’s, grocer’s, a post office. Come 2014 and just one of the five churches was operating, whilst the library opened just four hours a week. Buckets caught raindrops from the roof. The community centre was slated to close.

It would have done, had locals not bought the building for £1 instead. Ten years on, their cooperative manages the centre, and now the library and a shop. Seeing what the community can do, two of every three local households contributed an average of £500 each to buy the Trawden Arms in 2021 (a quarter of the region’s monthly post-tax salary).

Default—Design Spectrum

Default and Designed Communities form ends of a spectrum. Whilst members of Designed Communities are fundamentally united by self-interest, members of Default Communities are fused together by a passionate part of their identities which they share in common.

These communities lack the dynamic structure that makes Designed Communities so successful, but community leaders who can build that dynamism will find themselves leading a community that is far better placed to change the world.

Astute digital adventurers will ask ‘where are the latent communities of the internet?’ In an artificial world, every detail was created by some person, for some reason. But there are two types of characteristics we can look at, which arise essentially unplanned: unintended consequences (the ‘nature’ of the internet) and personal values (which shape its culture).

Unintended Communities

The intentional decisions which built the internet nonetheless caused unintended consequences, and it is here where our first default communities lie. Trawden’s revitalisation came as the byproduct of Britain’s most radical reforms for a generation. Default communities of the internet will likewise be grow from the most defining characteristics of our internet nature.

Specifically, there are default communities lying in wait in response to decisions made by dominant internet companies (like Amazon and Meta) and in response to the rise of new internet primitives (like search engines and AI).

Decisions made by internet companies

MENTAL HEALTH: Ignored for years by social media platforms, it is undeniable that tragic declines in mental health are driven by news feeds. Jonathan Haidt cites 476 studies to this effect in The Anxious Generation alone (whether you agree is beyond my scope here).

What this produces is a group motivated to tackle a common suffering, culminating in legislation like the UK’s Online Safety Act. In Britain, the 2017 a teenager’s suicide prompted government interest in a country already aware of social media’s manipulative potential (following the Cambridge Analytica scandal and 2016’s Brexit referendum).

Amidst the furore of British politics, which saw three elections and four Prime Ministers since that Brexit vote, the Online Safety Act was an irresistible force motivated by its own extensive volition. Buttressed by a highly motivated constituent group, both media and political voices alike then saw reason to champion the cause.

The process is well known to policy entrepreneurs. Step 1: identify an intrinsically-motivated community, or one in a crisis. Step 2: nurture its passion, shepherding it towards a specific goal. To go further, shepherd it towards a broader economy and cultural system.

Key for any default community is its source of dynamism, which makes the difference between a community like Trawden and a community which succumbs to the dynamism of others. For the mental health community, its dynamism came at first from people closely related to it: movement activists, parents of children who suffered, or social media whistleblowers. But note how other groups, from business, politics, and media, which largely picked a side later on, were critical dynamic allies in the battle against some of the most powerful companies that human society has ever produced.

INTERNET CENSORSHIP: The alliance between a community’s members and others prioritising their own interests is no more apparent than in the case of internet censorship. A movement fostered on then-Twitter, the community motivated by free speech is a blend of libertarians led by their own minds and others led by people who adopted the cause for their own gain. And the movement has had some success: anti-censorship social media platforms have reached millions of users and billions of dollars in valuations.

In large part, the growth and community of Farcaster is the product of a strong desire to develop decentralised social networks, free from the rules of today’s dominant network owners. With many thousands of daily users, Farcaster’s popularity is an example of what can happen when people are united by a common and passionate belief.

But anti-censorship has not typically been a winning cause, usually falling second-fiddle to competing interests. Whilst Elon Musk claimed he bought Twitter to make it the internet’s town square, the platform has become sharply more compliant towards government-requested censorship since his takeover.

Even the success of anti-censorship movements have mostly come from leaders who chose the cause to support other personal priorities. Donald Trump held notably mixed views on the First Amendment before becoming a free speech defender when being so was electorally advantageous. As a default community, anti-censorship was co-opted into the agendas of others, whether this benefitted the movement or not. It’s more than ironic that adverts on Truth Social are called sponsored truths.

Lessons can be learnt from both cases, but internet censorship was a particularly hard battle to win. On one hand, censorship does not rank highly on the priorities list for those who care about it. Meanwhile, those who care about it were too few in number: they went up against organisations which united billions of people. With 20 million users at Parler’s peak, even the biggest ‘free speech network’ pales in comparison.

These two limitations, the priorities of a group and its size, relatively, are key in identifying which default communities are likeliest to succeed. Relative priorities refer to how much a group’s members value the cause, compared to other priorities they have, like career progression and sharing funny TikToks. Relative size refers to how influential a group is, compared to the group from which it seeks to extract concessions (such as more stringent or more loose moderation).

Privacy campaigners also suffer from this double-limitation. Many people care about privacy to a rather low degree, and when you remove these people there are only a few who truly prioritise it. Privacy movements had victories in Europe, but these came from lawyers and policymakers, not a real community. And the opponents they faced were the same social media networks, if not even larger organisations.

Other communities are hamstrung by just one of these two limitations, with members who either are too weak in number and influence or who don’t sufficiently prioritise the cause. Groups of people who suffer from significant online accessibility issues or from internet scams are typically just too small to achieve their ambitions, despite the personal severity of their cause.

Changes in how the internet works

It is also possible for a default community to struggle even with many members, if those members don’t prioritise the cause. These are the default communities which tend to form in response to evolving internet primitives: fundamental changes in the nature of the internet.

ETERNAL SEPTEMBER: The first such change came when the online world evolved from a secluded network to the cultural zeitgeist. Writing in a time so distant that people could use their full government name online, Dave Fisher lamented on a Usenet forum that “September 1993 will go down in net.history as the September that never ended.”

He was talking about AOL’s decision to let millions of its customers access the internet for the first time ever. Internet users in the USA, numbering just 2% in 1993, more than quadrupled, ballooning to 9% by 1995.

The flood of new users overwhelmed the existing Usenet forums. And whilst disgusted oldtimers made t-shirts and text posts in protest, little else happened to protect the internet they loved. When push came to shove, Usenet was just a pastime. The internet which came next was different to Usenet, but it wasn’t bad enough to be worth seriously opposing.

INTERNET SEARCH: Almost two decades on it happened again, when the internet crossed 2 billion users in 2011. That January, TechCrunch explained Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google. Of course, SEO fought battles for your eyeballs since the Usenet days, but whilst Google had originally swung the balance back towards users, SEO bait and content farms were back on top by 2011.

Two major changes soon came to the Google algorithm, called Panda and Penguin, but the appeal of monetising a customer base which has grown to many more billions means there remains a common feeling that SEO ruined the internet and Google pulled the trigger.

But who really cares?

A whole host of startups have sought to do internet search without SEO bait.

In 2011 TechCrunch sung the praises of blekko, a search engine which used human curation to find better results, and many search engines have risen up and fallen away since.

Others have also tried human curation (Sproose, Mahalo).

Thematic engines grouped results on a visual map (Kartoo, Quintura, Grokker).

Semantic tools promised to respond to your underlying intention, rather than keywords (Kosmix, hakia, Yebol).

Others tried to compete on the back-end: a bigger data set (Cuil), an open source algorithm (Wikia Search), or aggregated results from other engines.

Now is the era of the AI search: Neeva, You, Perplexity. But the lesson from two decades of failure to displace Google is that the default community which says they want an internet untouched by SEO bait… will happily accept SEO for the benefit of convenience. Google in the 2010s was different to Google in the 2000s, but it wasn’t bad enough to be worth seriously opposing.

That notwithstanding, AI is a main character all on its own. Changes in how internet content gets made strikes deeper than how it gets searched. And unlike Usenet posters or Google searchers, creators from art to entertainment have a lot to lose from computers which let anyone do their job in an instant. What comes next could be bad enough to be worth seriously opposing.

And the dynamism that default communities so often lack is present and well, in singer Holly Herndon and her partner-in-every-sense Mat Dryhurst. For years at the forefront of AI applications in music, Herndon advocates for the AI creative revolution just as passionately as she advocates for a specific path of its development: one that accommodates creators rather than running roughshod over their rights.

To identify what the pair have done well, we should remember what makes designed communities so effective: institutionalised methods to accumulate assets, coordinate people, and allocate capital. With their organisation Spawning, Herndon and Dryhurst are building these structures atop a much stronger foundation: a default community highly motivated to shape the future of computed creativity.

Spawning is most successful today as a coordination device. Their tools are the first in the world which give artists an idea about whether AI models have been unethically trained on their work, and they make it easy for artists to declare an opt-out from future model training, as well as tools to block AI scrapers.

The aim is to create an animal welfare food label for AI art models. So far, artists have protected 80 million images with the service. Whether AI companies recognise any opt-out is up to them, but Spawning’s aim is to persuade the world that stolen training data is as unethical as factory farmed meat.

Respected visual models like StabilityAI’s Stable Diffusion V3 already adhere to the opt-out, as do Hugging Face’s AI development tools, making it “effortless to honour creator wishes”. The cold start problem is out of the way.

More recently, Spawning have launched Source.Plus, a 40 million-strong dataset of opt-in and public domain imagery. Building a visual AI model that respects artists is now a choice that engineers make with a few lines of code.

The fact that Spawning’s tools represent millions of images, and are thus relevant, is testament to a massive public coordination success that likely could not have happened without the deep ties that artists have to the cause.

Having raised $3m and built a team of 6, Spawning is attempting to accumulate and allocate capital as effectively as it has coordinated people. It is easy to write a thesis explaining why it will fail, why Big Tech-backed AI juggernauts will win, and why everyone will go along with them. But the strong foundations of Spawning’s ambition make it an underrated bet that aims to change the world.

Personal Values

For Spawning and Trawden, values play second fiddle to the specific issues they work to tackle. But internet adventurers can also build Default Communities around the values themselves.

This practice is well-known as the subtlest form of advertising. Brands don’t spend millions at the Superbowl to just get 100 million eyes on their product. They advertise at the Superbowl to connect their brand with a set of values. It’s not just the fact that loads of people watch Superbowl ads. It’s the fact that everybody knows that loads of people watch Superbowl ads, and thus everybody knows the values that each brand is trying to connect with.

The attempt quickly becomes self-fulfilling as people who want to reflect that value self-select into buying the associated product. Whether it’s soft drinks or cars, the work of a brand marketer is to corner a cultural niche and then, rather than moving onto the next one (which would dilute the brand), to occupy that niche for decades.

The brand marketer opportunity is exponentially larger on the internet, where cultural connections spread further and faster than anywhere else. Much like the Superbowl squeezes smaller forms of marketing that can’t generate such broad cultural connections, advertising at internet gathering points will squeeze the Superbowl.

Yet whilst there are billions of people online, such internet gathering points do not really exist. Hence why Meta is investing so much in the metaverse, which is where these cultural connections will form online. And hence the excitement of Meta, Reddit, Roblox, and the like for digital assets, which are the medium for these cultural connections: over 1.5 million people adopted NFL-themed digital avatars during last year’s Superbowl, for example.

Digital assets are uniquely powerful cultural symbols for two reasons. Their owners have meaningful property rights and their provenance can be trusted. They can thus be transferred to anyone at negligible cost, and their authenticity and value can be trusted across the entire internet, not just within the walled garden of a given social network. Testifying to this, numerous organisations are working to tokenise values, culture, and authenticity, like KPMG and their partner Awsm for brand equity and Blackbird for restaurants.

However, the most common values which digital assets have been used to symbolise have so far been wealth and exclusivity. When you set an NFT as your Twitter profile picture, this is all you can achieve. By contrast: wearing your Vans at the skatepark (or on Roblox) is an authentic use of the brand, because it is a product of and a complement to your original behaviour. Compelling brands and communities cannot simply be promoted with cash: how they show up in the world matters.

Internet gathering points and digital assets allow people to authentically express their identity and values online. Gathering points are the where and digital assets are the how. As these complements come together (sooner rather than later), new values-based communities will be consecrated and grow online; digital assets will be how their members signal the values they hold dear.

Few communities have done this better than crypto projects Base and $Higher. A community built around being action-oriented, your own person, and supportive of others, Base quickly became one of the largest L2 chains on Ethereum. The clear exposition of Base’s values attracted the developers who sought to build products for the type of people those values appealed to, creating a cycle of growth which allowed Base to make a huge impact on its crypto niche, with plans to spread across the rest of the internet too.

Base

@base

Your vision breathes life into this ecosystem.
It's the oxygen that sustains our dreams.
Explore and create the onchain future.

Just build it.

zora.co/collect/base:0…

697

1:27 PM • May 13, 2024

Though a coin rather than an L2, the Higher story is much the same. “It's for all those aiming to do more, to think bigger, to leave their mark on the world,” declares the website. The community-turned-movement sponsors a group of Higher Athletes who align with the brand’s optimism and ambition. Like Vans in skate culture, wearing Higher gear is a product of and a complement to your original behaviour.

The Base-Higher playbook is this. Harness the power of digital assets to develop cultural connections with a set of values, and then bring dynamism to the Default Community which emerges (rather than ‘forms’) around them. This empowers community members to promote those values, where the price of membership is that this is done in a way to complement the interests of the dynamic actor (for Base: building on the Base chain; for Higher, using Higher memetic symbols).

The playbook is simpler for the Default Communities formed as unintended consequences. When a dynamic actor like Spawning forms a direct connection with the Default Community’s unifying force (like concern about AI art), the actions which that community takes are already naturally aligned to the dynamic actor’s interests.

But the approach of recognising these deeper sources of connection, which people already share, is common to both playbooks. Today, there is enormous interest in building new communities, but it is not the case that if you want to change the world, you have to start anew. Build where passion already exists, and is latent, waiting to be awakened.

Further reading:

• The Pace Layers of Civilization, notes on Stewart Brand’s book by Caterina Fake.

• Stuart Brand interviewed by Palladium Mag in 2022.

• Ads Don’t Work That Way, by Kevin Simler.

• Aim Higher on the streets of Paris, photo via @kugusha.

• Moral Ecosystems, by Toby Shorin.

Footnote – in the middle of the Default-Design Spectrum

In the middle of the Default—Design spectrum lie communities which combine elements of both sides. Typically, members of these middle communities form ties around shared passions but with no shared purpose. But because coincidental communities tend to form around specific ideas, they can adopt a shared purpose when motivated by leaders linked to those ideas.

Their membership is a disinterested impulse, to borrow de Tocqueville’s term. In using this term, de Tocqueville does not mean that the participants are not interested in the community of which they are a member. My interpretation is that he means they participate in the community from their personal passion (ie, an impulse), and do so without thinking about the broader interests of that passion or community (eg, how they might support it politically or elsewhere in the public arena).

A modern example is politically-active K-pop fans, with community bonds forged by a love of music that have been deployed to achieve very different goals. Coincidental K-pop communities are why journalists have found themselves exploring questions like How K-pop fans became a political force to be reckoned with. That headline came in 2020, when fans of BTS registered tickets at a Donald Trump rally en masse, only to not show up and leave swathes of empty seats.

On the internet, we are part of swarms: networks of people, bots, and content, coordinated through algorithmic feedback loops. Swarms are harbingers of misinformation, heralds of mutual aid, and representatives of the public will. But this is not our grandparents’ crowd. Swarms are networked tempests of humans and information. Most importantly, they can act collectively without explicit protocols; they are minimally protocolized entities. In this research, I document a variety of swarms, such as the mutual-aid response to the devastation of Hurricane María, to uncover their unique methods of cooperation. To understand swarms, we also need to understand their peers within the broader category of online formations. This category includes group entities like memetic tribes and online communities that have explicit protocols which separate them from their swarm peers and makes them more explicitly manageable.

This inevitably leads us to the question: How do we steer swarms?

Algorithmic Coordination

The sky turned lilac at the break of dawn on September 22, 2017. It was an omen of Juracán, the wind spirit, summoned by the indigenous deity Guabancex. Hurricane María, the worst storm since 1899, was about to make landfall in Puerto Rico. It was mythic: the storm crossing on to land one minute after sunrise. Thousands would die in the aftermath. Millions of Puerto Ricans living in the U.S. and around the world waited in anticipation, without a way to connect to or help their family and friends.

A Berlin-based Puerto Rican working in climate venture-building, Jorge Vega Matos fidgeted on his phone through the morning, watching his Facebook feed nervously. He dreaded the challenges his elderly parents and family might face in the coming days and weeks. Unknown to Jorge, an old acquaintance and Puerto Rican social activist in New York named Pablo Benson did the same.

There was a deafening silence online. Everyone was alone but watching together As the silence continued due to an islandwide blackout, Jorge noticed that the Puerto Rican diaspora had begun to share drop-off points on Facebook for aid supplies. Rumors of stronger-than-expected damage crawled from phone to phone, urging those with an internet connection to broadcast their fears and take action. Facebook’s ever-watching algorithm understood the opportunity for engagement and amplified their voices. A collective direction emerged as anxiety transformed into support: Let’s not delay, let’s get supplies to those in need.

There was no banner or organizing institution, just posts about where to go and visual memes with lists of useful supplies. Jorge’s feed became a cacophony of activity. The digital diaspora had mobilized into a swarm: a network of people, content, and bots kept aligned by the algorithms of Facebook’s feed. It was a symbiotic alliance between social media and the Puerto Rican community: both needed to aggregate attention.

By the end of the day in Berlin, while Hurricane María was still ravaging the island, Jorge had created a public spreadsheet to aggregate supply drop-off points circulating on Facebook. He shared the link with various mutual aid groups, in hopes of accelerating donations. In New York, Pablo saw the spreadsheet and immediately forwarded it to others in his network. It turned out that the recipe for their swarmlike collaboration had been simple: provide a platform of connection to those with a common desire. The message found its way across the Atlantic: We’re creating a team and we want to use your spreadsheet.

It was not the presence of certain protocols but their absence that gave the swarm its advantage. While government agencies and aid organizations sought approvals, individuals were able to act freely and broadcast their intentions via posts. Social media had enabled collaboration at scale through algorithms and instant messaging rather than being slowed down by explicit protocols, central planning, or strategic oversight.

Swarm Sighting

The story of Hurricane María highlights the structures and affordances of online swarms. But swarms are all around us. Other instances are regularly referenced in pop culture and daily news: celebrity cancellation raids, misinformation campaigns, fandom hypes, activist rallies, and memestock frenzies.

We can see another swarm’s footprint in the paths to ruin of four banks in 2023. The episode began that year when the Silicon Valley Bank published a surprise announcement on Wednesday, March 8. In it, the bank mentioned that it was taking action to address some liquidity challenges. A frenzy of panicked founders and CEOs (sparked in part by newsletter writer Byrne Hobert’s analysis of the situation) messaged each other frantically as funds (such as Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund) advised them to withdraw their money. A torrent of provocative content flooded digital spaces. The swarm had been summoned.

Screenshots of texts and emails were forwarded from one person to another. Posts on social media and in group chats created a pattern. In turn, the algorithms identified it as highly engaging content and accelerated its reach. The impending collapse manifested itself: within a day, over $42 billion had been withdrawn. The bank was unable to react in time. By March 10, just two days later, the bank was placed under the receivership of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Later, it became evident that the banking collapse was incited by other issues, but the swarm had accelerated its fate, striking like lightning fueled by desperate attention. Three more banks were claimed throughout the summer. Eventually, attention moved elsewhere and the swarm dissipated. The hurricane response and the bank run are examples of online swarms: networks of people, content, and bots. They allow participants to act individually, with collective impact. Through a shared orientation that emerges in algorithmic feedback loops, swarms coordinate without internally directed protocols.

Animals, Crowds, and Guerrillas

Swarms mirror similar patterns we see in animals, crowds, and guerrillas. Animal aggregations such as fish shoals evade danger by finding dark waters. Army ants build bridges over tricky terrain.

Online swarms also create collective solutions, but navigate networked online worlds instead of purely physical ones. The hurricane response built bridges of information enabling a supply chain of aid. The bank runs evaded financial ruin by collectively removing themselves from the unsafe institutions. Yet unlike animal aggregations, online swarms include a diversity of agents—people, content, bots, and algorithms—each with their own objectives or programming.

It is not sufficient to characterize swarms as a basic mixed crowd. In a crowd, participants gather organically and then act as a collective. We can picture a crowd of people gathering at a sunny spot in the park.

Each person makes an individual decision to join and move from one part of the park to another. From afar, it would seem as though the crowd was working together. In reality, the sun was serving as a shepherd.

For an online swarm, the sun is the algorithm. But swarms operate with key differences. They include spectral objects like bots and content. They are digital-first, while crowds are often physical gatherings: location and mobilization are decoupled in a swarm. Additionally, swarms are deeply networked and everyone can broadcast information or send instant messages to each other. In contrast, crowd participants only communicate with their nearest physical neighbors.

At the intersection of algorithmic navigation and networked crowds, swarms take on guerrilla-like traits. They use their ecosystem as infrastructure for communication and coordination. They also form celllike teams. These teams are autonomous and self-contained, each with its preferred protocols, but globally oriented via an emergent promise.

Read the full essay at:

Tips and earnings from this post will be split among those that submitted essays for this bounty and Folklore, enabling us to fund future research.

Documenting $DEGEN

Memecoins have been part of crypto since its inception; the concept behind monetizing IP, attention, and online proliferation is as entrenched in onchain culture as the very internet desire for your creation to go stratospheric with millions of people remixing, reusing, and re-interpreting your idea.

Up until recently, memecoins weren’t fully able to be tapped into because of the very constraints that make them so powerful. A meme can’t be harnessed by any given person by design, that is, until the perfect storm unfolded that made this possible, without compromising on the virality and powerful erraticness of memes.

If you've used Farcaster, crypto’s premiere social platform, at any point in the past couple of months, you've probably noticed the conversation around the $degen token; you may even be fortunate enough to have received a “420 $degen” tip for a good or engaging cast.

With over 60k holders, a $350M realized market cap, and controlling a huge portion of the conversation and activities on Farcaster, the $degen project has pushed the boundaries of what a memecoin can achieve in just a handful of months.

When searching for an official definition of the $degen token, you might find the following:

“Degen started as a reward token for participants in the Farcaster Degen channel. What began as a meme coin now boasts a substantial following of developers, crypto content creators, and enthusiasts who have bought into the coin. During its initial launch, 15% of the total supply was airdropped to active members of the Farcaster's Degen channel, and there are plans to airdrop 70% of the token's total supply eventually.”

This is how most exchanges define $DEGEN. It does the job of covering the essentials of what this token set out to achieve at first, but over the past month, the de-facto Farcaster and BASE memecoin has grown beyond the bounds of just a “for fun” project, and into what we could only call a Meme Economy.

In this piece, we’ll share the origins, mechanics, and noteworthy contributions that have led to this token exploding in popularity and taking over your Farcaster feed.

What is $DEGEN?

As the tweet above outlines, $DEGEN (or just “degen'') started as a memecoin that sought to channel Farcaster users’ speculative energies, focusing on rewarding good and engaged creators.

Jacek, its creator, could not have imagined what was to come afterward. But the token’s design did suggest a bias toward getting the token into the right people’s hands and some pretty long-term thinking.

Let’s break down the two official DEGEN contracts:

The Token

The Degen token, officially named '$DEGEN,’ operates under a unique set of rules to manage its supply and ensure the security of its transactions.

Initially minted with a supply of approximately 36.97 billion tokens, it introduces a careful approach to inflation through a minting cap of 1% of the total supply, enforceable only after a mandatory waiting period of 365 days between minting events.

Governance features embedded within the token's design include mechanisms for token burning, transaction pausing capabilities for security purposes, and a democratic voting system for token holders.

$DEGEN Token Contract Breakdown

Token Overview:

• Official Name: Degen

• Symbol: DEGEN

• Initial Supply: 36,965,935,954 DEGEN tokens

  • Defined by: TOKEN_INITIAL_SUPPLY = 36,965,935,954

Supply Management:

• Minting Cap: 1% of the total supply

  • Defined by: MINT_CAP = 1

• Minimum Time Between Mints: 365 days

  • Defined by: MINIMUM_TIME_BETWEEN_MINTS = 1 days * 365

• Minting Start Time Constraint: Minting is allowed after a predefined timestamp set at contract deployment.

  • Defined by: mintingAllowedAfter variable, set in the constructor

• Inflation Control Mechanism: Minting restrictions (cap and timing) to manage supply expansion responsibly.

Security Features:

• Transaction Pausing: Allows the contract owner to halt all token transfers in emergencies.

  • Implemented via: ERC20Pausable extension from OpenZeppelin

• Ownership: Contract actions such as minting and pausing are restricted to the contract owner.

  • Implemented via: Ownable from OpenZeppelin

Governance Features:

• Token Burning: Holders can reduce the total supply by burning their tokens.

  • Implemented via: ERC20Burnable extension from OpenZeppelin

• Voting System: Tokens come with voting rights for governance decisions.

  • Implemented via: ERC20Votes extension from OpenZeppelin

Customizations and Deviations from OpenZeppelin:

The token seems to be a slightly modified version of the OpenZeppelin template, so there’s not that much that separates $degen from your run-of-the-mill ERC-20. This was pretty surprising at first, but it goes to show just how much you can achieve with the existing tech as long as you get people to adopt your creation.

• Minting Logic: The standard ERC20 contract from OpenZeppelin does not include minting capabilities. The custom mint function in the $DEGEN token contract enforces unique rules:

  • Minting only after a specific timestamp (mintingAllowedAfter).

  • Enforcing a minimum time between mints.

  • Limiting the mint amount to a cap of 1% of the total supply.

• Error Handling: Custom error messages (e.g., MintingDateNotReached, MintToZeroAddressBlocked, and DegenMintCapExceeded) provide clearer feedback on failed operations than generic reverts.

• Governance Integration: Integrating ERC20Votes for a token that can also be paused and has a controlled minting system is a tailored approach to embedding governance capabilities directly into the token's functionality.

Deployment Precautions:

The constructor requires a mintingAllowedAfter_ parameter, ensuring minting cannot start immediately after deployment, a deviation designed to add a layer of planning and foresight to the token's economic model.

The Airdrop

The Degen Airdrop contract is designed to securely and efficiently distribute $DEGEN tokens to a predefined set of recipients within a specific timeframe.

Using a Merkle Tree for claim verification allows the contract to handle many claims without storing each recipient on the BASE chain, significantly reducing gas costs and enhancing security.

Including a fixed claim window and robust administrative controls ensure that the airdrop process is fair and transparent.

Merkle Tree Verification

• MERKLE_ROOT: An immutable state variable that stores the root of the Merkle Tree. This is used to verify claims without storing the entire list on-chain, ensuring security and efficiency.

• Claim Process: Recipients prove their entitlement to an airdrop amount by providing a Merkle proof, verified against the MERKLE_ROOT.

Claim Window

• END_TIME: An immutable state variable defining the deadline by which all claims must be made. After this time, no claims can be processed, enhancing the security and finality of the airdrop.

Claim Tracking

• claimedBitMap: A mapping used to track which addresses have claimed their airdrop to prevent double claims. This structure efficiently records the claim status of potentially thousands of recipients.

Events

• Claimed: An event that logs the successful claim of an airdrop, including the recipient's index, account, and the amount claimed. This ensures transparency and traceability of claims.

Custom Errors

• Custom errors like AlreadyClaimed, InvalidProof, and ClaimWindowFinished improve error handling by providing more specific feedback than generic error messages.

Constructor

• Initializes the contract by setting the token address, Merkle root, and claim window end time. It employs checks to ensure the end time is in the future, establishing a valid claim period from the outset.

Claim Function

• This function allows eligible recipients to claim their allocated tokens by providing their index in the Merkle tree, account address, the amount entitled, and Merkle proof. The function checks the claim window, verifies the proof against the MERKLE_ROOT, and marks the claim as processed to prevent double claiming.

Withdraw Function

• This function enables the contract owner to withdraw any unclaimed tokens after closing the claim window. It ensures that the tokens are not locked indefinitely in the contract.

Differences with OpenZeppelin and Uniswap Boilerplates

• The contract does not inherit from the Uniswap IMerkleDistributor interface, allowing for a more tailored implementation specific to its use case.

• The Degen airdrop contract Incorporates OpenZeppelin's Ownable for administrative actions and SafeERC20 for safer token interactions, enhancing security and usability.

The above breakdown is just part of my normal due diligence when interacting with unchecked tokens, and while we’re happy to report there’s nothing out of the ordinary, we do admit it might be a little overkill for a token we already know is safe and widely used. For a more succinct breakdown of what degen is and what makes it special, you can check out this post by @bitfloorsghost.

$DEGEN Community

Degen has taken a life of its own; what started as just an incentive for the /degen Farcaster channel has since become the unofficial currency for most corners in the FC ecosystem; we’ll outline some standout examples of this later in this article, in the meantime, these are the official $DEGEN communication channels for anyone looking to get started on the degen ecosystem:

• The Original /degen Farcaster channel: You’ll find most $DEGEN activity here. Anything from airdrop farmers to exciting frames experiments. This channel is hosted by 0xen, kenny, wake, purp, pedrowww, and Jacek himself. It was originally a channel for memecoin traders, repurposed once $degen exploded in popularity.

• /Degentlemen: $DEGEN’s official community channel led by 0xen, it was created before the /degen takeover. Most of the degen memes we’ll explore in the symbols section of this article happen here.

• The official $DEGEN websites are degen.tips , the degen bridge, and Degen explorer for their L3.

• /degenangels: Want to fund your project by pitching degenerates? This channel allows you to crowdraise using people’s tipping allocation.

• /houseofdegen: A lesser-known onboarding channel hosted by wake.

• The DEGEN newsletter is a semi-daily recap of everything worth noting in the $degen ecosystem. It was invaluable in sourcing the key dates and events for the $degen timeline, which I’ll share below.

• The $DEGEN telegram channel isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s volunteer-led by the community; you’ll usually find people asking about their wallet being disqualified from the leaderboard and the occasional bullpost.

$DEGEN Timeline

$DEGEN’s history is frantic and full of outstanding achievements; we could dedicate an entire piece to every notable event and launch within the $degen space so far. Instead of doing that, I’ll be limiting this timeline mostly to official milestones and crucial actions taken by Jacek and the community that we believe helped make $degen what it currently is.

Keep in mind it’s been less than three months since they launched:

Late November 2023 — Jacek’s first post on /degen, which was originally a channel for memecoin traders.

December 15, 2023 — First announcement hinting at what would become $degen.

December 21, 2023 — First official $DEGEN announcement.

January 6 — The Official Degen X account posts for the first time and announces the launch to the public.

Jan-07-2024 03:25:35 PM +UTC — $DEGEN total supply of 36,965,935,954 is minted ($669,719,226 at today’s price vs the $226,415,430 current circulating supply).

January 8 — The $DEGEN Airdrop 1 is available for /degen OGs to claim, with a 93% claim. Jacek goes live on Unlonely.

January 10 — Degen Telegram Launches.

January 11 — Aburra live spaces to discuss $degen.

January 12 — $DEGEN crosses $1M MCAP.

January 13 — The $degen logo bounty is live.

January 19 — Warpcast officially integrates the “Degentleman” hat as a feed reaction button.

January 22 — Bountycaster starts accepting $degen payments.

January 24 — Basepaint #169 (nice) has Degen as its topic.

January 25 — Degen has an official logo.

January 27—The Airdrop 2 tipping mechanic is officially launched, with Farcaster integrations for the familiar in-feed tipping experience.

February 3 — Degen Frames bounty is live, just in time for FC’s own user explosion.

February 6 — The first $degen IRL party is held in Madrid.

February 9 — Boost.xyz integrates $degen rewards.

February 12 — The $DEGEN leaderboard is live; it adds a competitive element and an easily frameable interface for all users.

February 13 — The Degen API is launched for frame and app builders to fetch data from.

February 14 — Jacek launches the Valentine’s Day $DEGEN incentives. Anyone using the hat emoji on their Farcaster handle receives a 1M $ DEGEN allowance boost, which reportedly led to 1.3B tokens being distributed to 6,552 wallets.

February 15 — Rainbow Wallet launched a 2x multiplier on $degen swaps.

February 20 — Degen raises 490.5 ETH in an angel round.

February 26 — Airdrop 2 tipping snapshot taken and frames bounty winners announced.

February 28 — After many collabs, the official Perl and Degen partnership is established; this later led to Perl becoming Degen’s first grantee. Tip allowances are gated to users holding a minimum of 10,000 $DEGEN.

February 29 — Degen Airdrop 2 is live, people immediately figure out how to claim early, to Jacek’s amusement.

March 1 — Aerodrome finance liquidity incentives.

March 14 — Degen partners with Drakula.app to enable tipping on short-form video.

March 17 — Drakula.app becomes the second-ever $degen grantee with a 10M allocation.

March 20 — $DEGEN meme contest is live with a 200k $degen pool. The team removes spammy accounts to make the tipping leaderboard fairer.

March 25 — Farcaster client Supercast enables native $degen tipping.

March 26 — Degen partners with Airstack to fuel their upcoming “L3” initiative.

March 27 — Zora launches multi-ERC20 payments which allow you to mint NFTs with $degen. Two degen-centric farcaster clients are in the works (Degencast.xyz and Memecaster).

March 28 — The Degen chain officially launches using Syndicate infrastructure and built on Arbitrum Orbit: “The public Layer 3 rollup chain for Degen. Built on Arbitrum Orbit, Base for settlement, and AnyTrust DA”

Some Onchain Insights into Degen

Finding patterns in $DEGEN’s onchain breadcrumb trail has proved tricky. Since its original launch intent of rewarding engagement on Farcaster’s /degen channel, the token has evolved beyond any predictable frame of reference.

It’s become a signal of good content across the entire farcaster ecosystem; it’s the memecoin of choice for anyone betting on BASE and FC’s long-term success; it’s being used to bet in gamified frames on warpcast’s feed, and it’s even the currency of choice of a handful of platforms, with plenty more to come.

Still, some noteworthy insights surface when looking at the macro trends and the specific use cases some people have given it.

• $degen and its variations are the most used terms in the entire Farcaster ecosystem, with 361,380 unique “$degen” instances and 29,310 for “degen” appearing on a cast in the past two weeks as of 03/28/24.

• /degen is one of Farcaster’s oldest channels at 205 days old, and it’s Farcaster’s most engaged, competing closely with /base. As of 03/28/24, it sports 35919 casts, 319.8k engagements, and 2,395 transactions (via frames) in the past week alone!

Source and supplementary guide

• To put those numbers into proportion, just on the 25th of March, the /degen channel saw 7,364 casts from 3,836 unique users and a total of 80,449 $degen tips.

https://dune.com/rchen8/degen

• The 25th of March, 2024, was $degen’s most transacted day to date with 36,494 cumulative transactions.

• Thanks to their Valentine’s Day activation, $degen’s top-mentioned day was the 14th of February, with 103,433 mentions, followed closely by the 25th of March, with 102,165.

• You could say that January 27th was the day $degen took on a life of its own, with the launch of the tipping leaderboard for Airdrop 2, it started to increase in engagement and popularity exponentially.

• $DEGEN’s current realized capitalization stands at $340,623,172. You can check the individual P&L for every $degen holder here.

• According to the Degen Newsletter, the Degen L3 saw over $1M+ worth of assets bridged to the Degen chain, 16K+ unique wallets, and 1.9M+ transactions on launch day.

As before, we could dedicate an entire piece to $degen’s onchain trail, including how specific activations and launches impacted the price, number of transactions, and social mentions. The above will suffice for now; let me know if you want to see more!

@matt90 on Dune is possibly the most consistent $degen dashboard creator for the data degenerates out there. Notable mentions include the $DEGEN Tipping Dashboard, DEGEN Overview, and DEGEN Evangelists

You can find the official $DEGEN Dune account, led by Jacek himself, here. This piece breaks down some interesting onchain data to build the case for “a nickel per $degen.”

The Tipping Mechanic

What’s about to follow is an in-depth breakdown of $degen’s tipping mechanic from a technical level. For an easy-to-understand guide on how to tip using $degen, we highly recommend this guide by @pichi

One of Degen’s most distinctive features is its tipping economy. They established a clear incentive for rewarding consistency and participation from the outset. And while it may sound basic initially, there’s much more to $degen tipping than meets the eye. The $degen tipping allocation is based on the following Dune SQL query:

https://dune.com/queries/3408503

This Dune SQL query is structured to analyze user engagement and reward allocation within Farcaster. It meticulously constructs a series of insights regarding user activity, reactions to casts, and calculates a "tip allowance" based on various engagement metrics. Here’s a breakdown of its components and the insights it establishes:

1. Date Series Construction: This function generates a series of dates from a fixed start date (2021-09-23) to the current date, ensuring every day is covered for analysis. This series is used to observe user activity and engagement over time.

2. User Profiles Aggregation: Compiles user profiles, selecting the one with the most verified addresses per user (if multiple profiles exist) as the primary profile for further analysis.

3. Display Names Collection: This collection retrieves users' most recent display names, which could change over time, ensuring the latest identity is used in reporting.

4. Initial User Engagement Filtering: This filtering method identifies users who have made at least 3 original casts (posts) that are not replies or deleted, marking their initial engagement date. It limits the user base to those who have demonstrated a baseline level of activity.

5. Daily User Engagement: Cross-references the date series with users' initial engagement, allowing for an analysis of daily active users based on their first activity date.

6. Reaction and Cast Counts: Counts daily reactions to user posts and the number of original posts by users, setting the groundwork for engagement and contribution metrics.

7. Cumulative and Median Reaction Metrics: Calculates cumulative cast and reaction counts and derives median reaction metrics over different periods and thresholds, providing insights into user engagement trends.

8. Final Engagement Insights:

   This section of the query adjusts the median reaction count based on the volume of user contributions. This is achieved through conditional logic that selects different percentiles of reactions as the "median reaction" metric, depending on the user's total number of casts (posts). Here's how the criteria break down:

   • For users with 1,000 or more casts, the 60th percentile of reaction counts in the past 7 days is used as the median reaction metric.

   • For users with 500 to 999 casts, the 50th percentile (the true median) is used.

   • For users with 100 to 499 casts, the 40th percentile is used.

   • For users with 50 to 99 casts, the 30th percentile is used.

   • For all others (below 50 casts), the 20th percentile is used.

   This approach recognizes that more active users might have different engagement patterns, and it adjusts the engagement metrics accordingly to provide a fair and nuanced view of user engagement.

9. Tip Allowance Calculation:

   The "tip allowance" calculation uses a sophisticated formula that uses logarithmic and exponential functions to translate engagement metrics into a reward value. The two main factors that affect allocation size are:

   • Median reactions: Based on the user's activity level, adjusted median reaction counts proxy engagement quality and impact.

   • User's activity duration: The time difference between the user's first post and the current event day, plus a constant (to ensure the logarithm is never calculated for a value less than 1), provides a measure of longevity and sustained contribution.

   The formula calculates the tip allowance as follows:

   1. ⠀Logarithmic Scale for Activity Duration: The base-10 logarithm of the user's activity duration (in days) plus 10, rounded to the nearest whole number, represents a "retroactive boost.” This factor rewards sustained engagement over time.

   $$$ Retroactive Boost=⌊log10(Activity Duration+10)⌋ $$$

   2.⠀Exponential Scale for Engagement: The exponential function, using a base slightly above 3, scales the median reaction metric, emphasizing higher engagement levels.

   $$$ Scaled Engagement=exp(log3.3(Median Reactions×1000)) $$$

   3.⠀Combined Metric for Tip Allowance: The product of the previous “retroactive boost" and the “scaled engagement metric”, rounded to the nearest whole number, determines the final tip allowance.

   $$$ Tip Allowance=⌊Retroactive Boost×Scaled Engagement⌋ $$$

   Special adjustments for identified users or policy changes would act as conditional modifications to this formula, applied after the calculation based on specific criteria (e.g., user IDs, dates).

   This calculation method ensures that rewards are more sensitive to higher levels of engagement and sustained activity, incentivizing both quality contributions and long-term participation.

10. Special Adjustments: The query implements specific overrides and adjustments for identified users and situations:

    • User-Specific Overrides: Certain users are identified by their fid (user ID), and their tip allowance is set to a minimum value if the calculated allowance falls below this threshold. This can be seen as a way to ensure that key contributors or specific roles within the community are adequately rewarded, regardless of the automatic calculation.

    • Cutoff Date Adjustment: For allowances calculated after a specific cutoff date (2024-02-28), the query applies a reduction factor (70% of the calculated allowance), rounding the result. This adjustment reflects policy changes or recalibration of the reward mechanism over time; it is in response to inflation and the ongoing drops that would put $degen’s economy off balance if left as-is.

Insights and Outputs

While this may sound like a mouthful, it’s actually a quite straightforward and fair way of calculating who has actually been consistently adding value to the farcaster tipping ecosystem.

In a nutshell, the all the above does is:

• Ranks users by engagement, adjusted allowances, and other metrics, providing a daily snapshot of top contributors and their rewards.

• Filters out disqualified users, ensuring only eligible participants are considered.

• Aggregates data to include user profile information, display names, and engagement metrics.

Incentives, Partnerships and Grants

As you saw on the timeline section of this piece. $Degen owes a lot of its success to people’s enthusiasm to build on top of it. Platforms, frames and average degen connoisseurs have poured their time and energy into making this ecosystem more than just a simple memecoin.

So far, Jacek and the team have only officially partnered with four projects so far, with probably a lot more to come down the line:

• Perl: The socialfi prediction game that pits creators and their community in a race for engagement officially adopted $degen payments on February 28. Before that, they had previously voiced their support for the /degen community, participating in an activation and $degen’s angel round.

• Drakula is a short-form video platform for degens who are passionate about $degen. A couple of days after its launch, Drakula opted for $degen as its official creator compensation rails and even launched a $degen creator fund.

  As an extra onchain data goodie for this section, you can use this Dune dashboard to see Drakula’s real-time engagement, growth, and $degen payouts.

• Degen Jeeves (aka. @degentip): A community-built bot for onchain $degen tipping, NFT minting, and much more on the horizon.

• Aerodrome Finance: $degen’s first third-party LP incentives provider and a huge partner in their official liquidity mining interface.

• Airstack: Not much is clear as of yet on what the Airstack partnership will entail for $degen. This onchain data provider will be at the helm in running the $degen L3 API.

Building with $DEGEN

As with any ERC-20 token, building with $degen can be pretty basic; what’s made this memecoin special is mostly the landslide of excited builders looking to use $degen as their main currency, onchain vehicle, and incentive mechanic. @0xluo.eth has spoken about what makes $degen unique from a builder’s perspective in what he calls an “Onchain Social Summer”, a combination of composability, memetics and aligned incentives for participants of all kinds.

Besides the official endorsements and partnerships above, here are some tools and examples of what building with the farcaster token by default can look like:

• To begin with, the $DEGEN team has made it a point to open up doors for builders on several avenues. The official degen API launched less than a month after the token mint, and subsequent partnerships have only strengthened the convenience of fetching data and building with $degen. Most recently, the launch of the Degen L3 has sparked a third wave of builders experimenting with semi-official “degen smart contracts”.

• Aside from the official launches, third-party and community developers have pooled a lot of resources to make degen experiences seamless, entertaining, and engaging for the community.

• There’s even a dedicated Farcaster channel that ranks the top tools being built on $degen. If your contribution is outstanding enough, you'll receive some tips.

Some of the top builders we’d recommend reaching out to if you want to learn more about how you can launch your own $DEGEN tool include: Matthew Fox, Ng, Limone, and Jtgi

Farcaster and BASE

BASE and Farcaster walked so $degen could run, or maybe it’s the other way around. These three projects have developed a symbiotic relationship of sorts, where Degen’s success leads to a direct increase in FC DAU, which lead to more attention to the BASE ecosystem, which leads to more people finding out about $degen.

It’s hard to say which one is more beneficial or impactful to the other. Still, there are some sources studying this phenomenon and trying to replicate it in other ecosystem flywheels.

As of today, $DEGEN is considered Farcaster’s unofficial token, and BASE’s prime memecoin (even though there were some others before). The memetic power of being a degen in a new ecosystem with a platform designed to amplify the voices of those closest to you has created the perfect storm for one of the most interesting experiments in what the right incentive can create for protocols and ecosystems.

Of course, it hasn’t been all good. Farcaster has adopted the $degen tipping culture with open arms, but this has led to a gigantic increase in spam, scammers trying to pass off malicious tokens, copycat rug pulls, and every other extractive behavior that comes with the success of an onchain experiment. Thankfully, the $degen community is keenly aware of this, and they’re doing their best at combing the onslaught of spam.

$DEGEN Memes and Symbols

As Josh Cornelius’ widely quoted classic says:

“Imagine what happens once we have consumer products that package their economic and social superpowers into broadly accessible experiences”.

With $degen, we’re approaching what this vision hinted at.

In my opinion, the main thing Jacek and the team did right to ensure $degen’s success was leaning very strongly on the memes, icons, and symbols that have become the lifeblood of the community. Creating a strong symbol system can be tricky, and by focusing on laying the foundations from day 1, $degen managed to out-meme any of the pre-existing farcaster and BASE tokens.

• The main factor differentiating $degen from any other memecoin before it has been its intimate link to Farcaster frames. While most other memecoins suffered from gigantic friction when it came to building experiences to onboard holders, convert eligible claimants, and incentivize activity and engagement, $degen had it all pre-build and digested thanks to the novel implementation of frames, something they noticed immediately and leaned on strongly.

• Another crowning achievement for the $degen community has been their Top Hat symbol that spread like wildfire and flourished in the farcaster ecosystem; keep in mind, one of $degen’s first incentivized actions was coming up with a logo and iconography, placing their bets on brand recognition early one has paid off in that the degentleman top hat is almost as recognizable as noggles to the insider crypto audience.

• The official/unofficial DegenDAO, the Haberdashery, acts as grants council, culture leads, and some of the strongest voices in the community. Perpetuating the top hat symbol with such a powerful vehicle is only the cherry on top.

• If there’s something every memecoin should have, it’s memes. And thankfully, $degen suffers no shortage of funny templates, recognizable characters and shared spaces for proliferation.

• Several NFT collections feed DEGEN culture; notable mentions include ODEGEN, DegenLadies, Degenghouls, Degen Stamp, Degen Owl, $degen Glyph Opepen, and Onchain Gaias.

• Making games is usually one of the easiest ways to familiarize outside audiences to a meme. Thankfully, $degen has been known to have the odd cameo here and there, as well as their own dedicated games and use them as the reward token.

• The degen community has started to dip their toes on music composition as well, the social feed is slowly becoming multimedia, and they’re coming for your playlists as well.

• There’s even some community-approved $degen merch out there! @lluis has launched a $degen e-commerce storefront if you’re looking to sport a purple hoodie to go with your tophat.

All of the above are just a few of the sources we could find while doing my research. There are countless other examples of how $degen is championing the media proliferation front more so than the technical one (which is in itself high praise). The community has started to call $degen “More than a Memecoin” for good reason; none of its peers have been able to break through the speculation bubble quite like this.

Sure, $degen is still 99% speculation, but in this case, that same speculation has actually been channeled into a positive impact. Funding Gaza relief efforts, supporting newcomers in the FC space and new platforms launching; some founders have even called their $degen tips their “marketing budget”. The power in degen isn’t only found in their market cap; it’s also in leaning on the meme, the degenerate gambler, and using it to accelerate and catalyze an entire space in a way no other token has made possible.

And in the end, it’s all about the giving, isn’t it?

Calling all context designers, remix artists, divergent dreamers, seekers and hyperconnectors!

Recognizing that the utility of ghostcontext.xyz is currently limited by what we have chosen to collectively bring and mint onchain, we understand that its value might be held on reserve for your future selves.

With that in mind, we hope engaging with the conceptual underpinnings of ghost context can still prove to be a rewarding exercise for your imagination, both literally and figuratively.

Prizes Include:

• 1st Place - .13 ETH (~$290 USD) + Folklore Season Pass (valued at .05 ETH) + physical + digital copy of The Curious Human's Field Guide to the Future by RADAR (valued at $30)

• 2nd Place - Folklore Season Pass + physical + digital copy of The Curious Human's Field Guide to the Future by RADAR (valued at $30)

• 3rd Place - Folklore Season Pass + The Curious Human's Field Guide to the Future (digital copy ONLY)

Check out the details here:

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With this post, Folklore is seeding (and ceding) its graphic identity to its community. This identity consists of no approved assets, no brand guidelines, no official typefaces nor colours. In their place, Folklore offers the source material of these canonical objects: seeds, prompts, references, and an open-ended narrative concept through which to imagine Folklore’s activity: the curious swarm navigates the labyrinth. What follows are some reflections on the technology and culture that inform this approach.

nft://7777777/0x4593f6cf8cec557d1484296645e7378d24c8866c/?showBuying=true&showMeta=true

1973 sued 2023 and lost

Earlier this year, American fashion designer Thom Browne successfully defended his eponymous house against a trademark infringement lawsuit brought by the German sportswear brand Adidas. Adidas alleged that Browne’s use of four parallel stripes as a motif on clothing was confusing and misleading customers, who might mistake (miscount?) them for Adidas’s iconic three-stripe branding.

Twentieth century brands tended toward such visually reductive and deterministic formations. As case in point, take the transition from the intricate pictorialism of Apple Computer’s original 1976 logo to the simplistic mark that it adopted in 1977, and which still remains essentially unchanged. The reasons for this visual refrain are neatly concealed behind the spurious notion of a cultural zeitgeist which minimal, puritanical, graphic design purported to capture. In reality, before computerisation, large-scale reprographics were prohibitively difficult and expensive to do. Whole arcane industries supported the reproduction and distribution of printed signs. Even at the onset of globalisation, the technical and logistical complexity of instituting a consistent, international brand positively demanded that its graphic assets themselves be simplistic. Modern, globalised corporate iconicity was technical constraint masquerading as cultural expression.

Reportedly, Browne’s counsel began their closing argument in the New York courtroom with the claim that “Adidas does not own stripes.” It’s a claim that might sound entirely reasonable to twenty-first century ears, but to Adidas — a megacorporation ensconced in the codes of twentieth century branding and iconicity — it undermines the entire purpose of corporate identity, and its staking function in the market.

Off with its head

Other Internet’s 2019 essay ‘Headless Brands‘ theorised an emergent phenomenon in contemporary branding, with its supposition that “the rise of networked media has challenged the coherence of centrally-managed brand identities.” The essay describes how online space — portrayed as a vast, chattering arena for second-order observation — has undermined centralised brands’ appeal to authority, leaving them vulnerable to misappropriation and the spread of negativity, in the form of publicly displayed reviews, comments and memes. Naturally, the essay takes the identities of decentralised organisations, such as the blockchain-enabled protocols Bitcoin and Ethereum, as its counter-examples of headlessness. These organisations are branded to some minimal degree of coherence, in that they have proper names, founding statements, and more-or-less defined logos. But, whereas the twentieth century brand relied on legal policing to maintain its purity of narrative signal, the anarchic, anti-corporate connotations of decentralised blockchain-based organisations are, self-evidently, better amplified by submitting to the memetic desires of their communities, however factionalised they might be.

The headless brand loosely accords with the tradition of philosopher Umberto Eco’s ‘open work’. In his book of that name, Eco draws on avant garde artistic and literary tendencies in the mid-twentieth century to figure cultural artefacts as open propositions that are actively completed by their intermediaries (performers, publishers) and their audiences:

Here the work is ‘open’ in the same sense that a debate is ‘open’. A resolution is seen as desirable and is actually anticipated, but it must come from the collective enterprise of the audience.

Community as media

However pertinent Eco’s perspective on the avant garde might now appear, the open work was really a premonition: a foreshadowing of cultural energies that only the internet would fully manifest. Nowhere have these dynamics of open, participatory cultural production been better exhibited than in online gaming.

Trackmania is a multi-platform racing game which gives players the tools to design and publish their own tracks for other players to compete on, in a time-trial format. Track records, rather than head-to-head race victories, are the currency of Trackmania. The game has a highly active online community, who have, over the course of its two-decade, many-iteration history, produced a number of iconic tracks with fiercely-contested records. Perhaps the most notable of these, at least in recent memory, is Wiinty’s ‘128³ Deep Fear’, uploaded in July 2015. In their ‘author comments’, accompanying the track at its page on the Trackmania Exchange website, Wiinty wrote that Deep Fear — a sprawling, labyrinthine sequence of track elements suspended in mid-air — had taken them 500 hours to design and construct. The track demanded such precision driving, at such unrelenting speed, that Wiinty considered it impossible to complete in a single run, without occasional checkpoint ‘respawns’ following crashes.

In 2021, Mudda defied this expectation and became the first player to complete ‘128³ Deep Fear’ without respawning. They wrote, in the description of a YouTube video documenting the run, that it had taken 800 hours of grinding over two years to achieve this flawless performance. More than any official presentational asset belonging to the game, Mudda’s YouTube video is the defining representation of Trackmania: at once canonising their own performance and the incredible spectacle of Wiinty’s course. And, more than the game’s original designers and developers, these two members of its community are its most notorious protagonists.

’Lore of the labyrinth

Corporate marketers use the term transcreation to describe the practice of localising brand messages: adapting content to appeal to cultural preferences in different parts of the world. Transcreation necessarily involves more than a simple translation of the linguistic and pictorial content of an original message. For a global campaign to achieve consistent cultural affect in Tokyo and Berlin might require entirely distinct assets and positioning.

Folklore proposes that a contemporary, networked brand be designed not for its human demographics, but for its machine intermediaries. In lieu of finalised assets — iconography, typography, photography — Folklore provides seeds and prompts: inputs for further, generative, creation and mediation. These seeds can be thought of as descendants of artist Harun Farocki’s concept of the ‘operational image’. With this term, Farocki theorised a genre of images not meant for human attention. Images produced by one machine for another to process in the course of a computational operation; be it identification, navigation, or something inscrutable. Operational images are neither outputs nor inputs; they are throughputs.

The throughputs of Folklore’s visuality, textuality, and editorial direction are contained in the following image seeds and text prompts, each of which differently envisions the mythical symbol of the labyrinth.

nft://7777777/0x1b0e2fbee89f8d183fd6bf9169b7463bb7a2c548/?showBuying=true&showMeta=true

The labyrinth never existed as a real place. It was a symbol of pure cope: an impression of unfathomable visual complexity created by the first rural Greeks to behold the vast Cretan city.

The labyrinth was a cybernetic training ground. An abstract and arbitrary space that early computer scientists programmed their robots to escape from.

The labyrinth was a containment device. An endless and inescapable maze designed to imprison the Minotaur, the prototypical offspring of the human and the technological.

The labyrinth was a meditation. Unlike a maze, it contained no deceptions, no alternative paths, and no dead-ends. It represented an individual’s reflexive journey to discover their inner self; and their return, back out to the external world.

The labyrinth represented preparedness and reason. An analogy for the swarm’s collective, algorithmic, problem-solving method, also known as ‘Ariadne’s thread’.

Palimpsests

These seeds are in your hands now. They are incomplete, unresolved, and unconvincing. Open. They might need to be nurtured to survive. Or to be corrupted, mutated, and overwritten. Mint them freely on Zora and remix them in Source. Community incentives will be announced shortly — join the Folklore Telegram for more details.

But if you want to get a head start … here are the competition details.

Mint the Open Edition Seeds Here

Rue talks into their screen in a room in Toronto. They keep a green hardback journal with them in case any good ideas want to make themselves known in the shape of daydreams. Ruby is a designer, cyberethnographer and artist. He is the founder of 13101401 Inc. and Adjunct Professor of Design and Media Theory at New York University.

We encourage you to support Folklore by minting and sharing this article. Want to join the Folklore community? Purchase your membership here.

History of a Digital United Kingdom

Domains under heaven, after a long period of division, tend to unite; after a long period of union, tend to divide. This has been so since antiquity.

— Romance of the Three Kingdoms

The “Balkanization” of the internet is the process by which, currently, the united kingdom of the internet ruled by mega-tech platforms is figuratively splitting off into smaller digital regions. The age of the mega-platform is coming to an end in favor of less visible and more resilient digital spaces. The internet as we know it is bursting at the seams. This piece explores the process of fragmentation which the web is undergoing and its impact on language and community.

In a sense, this is a return to form: the internet was incubated in 1969, out of the United States Advanced Research Projects Agency, as a fault-tolerant and resilient communication network between the research centers of universities. Two internet Protocol (IP) addresses could share data over a telecommunication circuit, without the need for a third node.

The internet remained largely decentralized until the 1990s. To convene, early digital communities used different types of digital spaces: chats, email lists, multiplayer environments such as Multi-User Dungeons, bulletin board systems (BBS) like WELL, amongst others. These were all separate islands, accessible through their own addresses, unique pages or a terminal program in the case of BBSs. Until the internet as we know it today and the advent of mass page indexes and search engines such as Yahoo and Google, many of these communities remained relatively concealed, mostly growing in popularity through word-of-mouth, email forwards, mentions in blogs and through members at conferences. Most users generally accessed the “online” through commercial services such as CompuServe, Prodigy and AOL. Notably, these private networks provided their users access to news articles, programs, chat rooms, email services and files which were exclusively accessible to the subscribers of these online services. In other words, the private computer networks users accessed differed based on which service providers they paid for, they had their own version of the “online”.

This model was upended by the Internet Service Provider (ISP) model, which is universal today, where we all connect to the same “online”, the same kingdom. The scale of this new online space represented an opportunity for companies to build and provide infrastructure for communities to migrate. Though some MUDs and single-access digital spaces still remain, most new digital communities are built on this open web. Unfortunately, this shared space has been a site fraught with conflict. The last decade saw culture wars rage on social media platforms between politically antipodal factions. Who would have thought putting radical feminists next to edgelord teenage gamers on the same platform was a bad idea?

The tens were marked by a series of cultural rifts engendered by the collisions that occurred in said shared digital spaces. Ruthless battles were fought on keyboards, from GamerGate to Black Lives Matter, the internet became the war-field for the high-stakes socio-cultural issues of our times. We also witnessed the rise of alt-right figures like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson, who harnessed the algorithms to trojan horse their controversial messages to the top of the zeitgeist. Around that time, users retreated into soft-walled digital enclaves called “echo chambers”, as ban-hammers were wielded mercilessly to create more peaceful feeds. The creation of the echo chamber was a semi-conscious process and a product of conflict fatigue: through incremental muting and bans, in conjunction with reinforcement from the algorithms, users slowly built digital spaces where the only content they saw either validated their pre-existing ideologies or energized their acrimony towards the opposing group. In spite of the echo chambers, users with public accounts who posted (“posters”) were still exposed to attacks from dissenting groups. A tweet meant for a niche group through retweets could find its way to a much larger audience with an adverse opinion. The risk for the poster, depending on the controversial nature of the post, ranged from “brigading”, a coordinated large-scale group attack against the poster in the comments, to “doxxing”, the revelation of the poster’s identity and personal information, all the way to “cancelation”, the equivalent of being brought to a digital scaffold for public punishment, usually leading to loss of employment and major reputational hit.

In that sense, the echo chamber was a safe space for the lurker but not the poster. In the current climate, the poster needed a private enclave to share their thoughts, one sheltered from the mob’s gaze and where they are protected from the dangers of publicly posting. Thus, we transitioned from the echo chamber to private groups, whether it be Discord servers, Telegram groups, iMessage group-chats, etc.

Yancey Strickler, thinker and founder of Kickstarter, and Bognia Konior, assistant professor of Interactive Media Arts at NYU Shanghai, recently have adapted the term “Digital Forest” to describe the current situation on the internet. The appellation, from the popular sci-fi series “The Three-Body Problem” by Liu Cixin, describes the silence that reigns in the forest at night. Strickler writes, “Imagine a dark forest at night. It’s deathly quiet. Nothing moves. Nothing stirs. This could lead one to assume that the forest is devoid of life. But of course, it’s not. The dark forest is full of life. It’s quiet because night is when the predators come out. To survive, the animals stay silent.” He adapts this description of the internet as the “Dark Forest Theory of the Internet” to describe the retreat from feed-bound echo chambers to private chat groups, sheltered away from the brigades, trolls and bots that abound in open digital spaces. These private groups represent a new era of digital communication, predicated on privacy, exclusivity and access, but, more importantly, their insular nature creates a new set of issues.

Within these communities, new languages develop. The groupchat engenders a new coded word only comprehensible to those within it. An exterior image is appropriated, subverted, deep-fried and repurposed. New symbols take on new meanings. Entire semiologies are built and abandoned. But the walls of our digital cities are porous, many participate in multiple communities, and the platforms that act as our town squares become sites of communication and exchanges where these new languages collide with one another. We no longer share a common language.

In the Bible’s book of Genesis, monolingual humans aspired to build a "city and tower with its top in the heavens". God punished humans by creating a multitude of languages to sow chaos: "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language there so that they will not understand one another's speech." Today, this parable is known as the Tower of Babel.

Babelification

Language, as a social instrument, is more than its content. It’s also a signifier defining the speaker. Therefore language, whether expressed as slang, dialects, patois, or accents, is a marker of cultural identity. The language you use signals to other people: am I like you? Do we come from the same place? Do we share perspectives? In which ways can we connect in our shared humanity? Communities develop shorthand ways of referring to big ideas over time — by using this shorthand, an individual can signal to other people that they are part of the in-group. A generation ago, adoption of in-group language required people to be, well, part of the in-group. Physical presence and community involvement on-location where these communities congregated was the prerequisite for engaging in niche language.

Yet, increasingly, our choice methods for communication are largely devoid of in-person context. Our online tools on screens enable completely unprecedented methods for connection. When my mom immigrated to Canada in the early 1990s, she'd go months without speaking to her family because of the prohibitively high cost of long-distance phone calls. Today, online messaging tools make this a complete non-issue. The restrictions placed upon context — distance and cost — have been removed. In the time since, we've removed many more context-based restrictions. Today, any individual or actor has access to platforms which can broadcast their message to millions of people overnight.

This unboundedness offers us incredible freedom to communicate with anybody, but it also represents a fundamental shift in how we communicate, which ultimately determines our reality. TikTok's For You page — perhaps the site of the current cultural zeitgeist — is a curated feed made for specifically you by the algorithm based on what it thinks you will engage with. It’s a great departure from a TV channel, a radio station — the centralized broadcast network of yore. After the Fall of the Facebook Wall, we had the "Feed" which kept a semblance of a shared experience but the For You page is a step removed from the "Feed". It further entrenches the user in an individual algorithmic reality, a reality which is thoroughly divorced from the experience of the Other.

Between the insular private groups, like subreddits, private Discords, and individualized feeds, we no longer have a shared reality, online. We've returned, in a sense, to the age of commercial services, where we connect to our own private internets. When we return to the public squares, it is not uncommon to think: what the hell is anyone saying? Imagine explaining what an "Aesop Soap Guy" or a "Sandy Liang Girlie" are to someone who isn't involved in that discourse. These buzzy terms, of course, will soon shift meanings, grow vague and confusing, then ultimately be discarded as the language trend cycle moves forward. The pace at which we’re creating new words, then recontextualizing their meanings in hyperbolic, meme, and joke formats, is moving faster than ever before, in our age of relentless online discourse.

Babelification is the process by which, after splintering, insular digital groups develop unique languages which makes reintegration in shared digital spaces difficult, if not impossible. When someone believes their insular language in online echo chambers is commonplace reality, clashes ensue when that same individual is placed in a context where other people aren’t privy to their language because they are fundamentally misunderstanding one another. Often, there is little by way of shared values, goals, and culture to glue these communities together. Therefore, the only glue is how tapped in someone is to the discussion. The basis of new algorithmic languages is the discourse, the hot takes, the thinkpieces, and the cancellations. As our screen times rise and online is the way of contacting people, our online language becomes our reality.

Incel communities use the archetype of "Virgin vs. Chad" to invoke the constructed dichotomy of an idea of two types of guys: the Virgin is a pathetic loser unable to attract the attention of women he so desperately wants, whereas Chad is everything the Virgin is not: confident, buff, good-looking, charismatic and the object of attention from women. Do these people actually exist IRL? The Virgin and the Chad are archetypical stock characters in the world of Incels. The Incel Virgin has connotations not associated with the dictionary definition of a virgin. So, when someone online is saying that word, what are they referring to? The answer is based heavily in context- and in-group–specific indicators. When a poster in this community says, "a Chad cut me, a Virgin, off today", they are applying their own framework of the world onto other people who may or may not have anything to do with Incels.

When Charles Darwin studied the finches of the Galápagos islands, he noticed the birds were noticeably different from island to island. Some birds had small beaks, others had stout ones; some had oblong skulls and others had round skulls; they were all adapted to different behaviors. Life on islands evolves separately from the continent. To an outside observer, the animals are unique and crazier (imagine: the flora and fauna of Tasmania, Australia, Madagascar to a European), and this specialized evolution leads to speciation. Could something similar be happening with the way we use language online?

As we are fed more content, we are pushed deeper into algorithmic niches. In return, we are encouraged to engage with more extreme and polarizing identifiers because it is more labelable, more indexable by the machine — the creation of the “Island". On this island, the slang, in-jokes, and archetypes which emerge as a community develops in isolation from the rest of the "Continent" creates language “Speciation”. When the half-life of a meme is now several days — periods of cultural relevancy have radically shortened over time — how many layers of cultural anthropology does it take to understand a single meme?

What happens when two disparate communities clash? What happens when arguments happen online, and people are saying things that the other completely doesn't understand? What happens when the two parties arguing don't even know how deeply they are misunderstanding the words being used? Can we ever rebuild the tower?

The Medium is the Massage

Humans are mammalian animals hard-wired to understand the language of Body — touch, expression, subtext, glance and counterglance. Even silent pauses can be pregnant. A gentle brush on the arm means something vastly different than an urgent squeeze. And we don't need any words to know that! Action and reaction can wordlessly steer interactions into uncharted waters. If you start making a funny face at something I’m saying, I might feel the need to change what I’m saying or how I'm saying it. It's the context of conversations which makes for gratifying back-and-forth dialogue.

The opposite of hyperbolic, contextless, online communication in this Mass Age is skin-to-skin touch, that which can transmit intention without even saying a single word — Massage. Perhaps the way through Babelification is to circumvent words altogether.

The famous misprint from Marshall McLuhan’s 1967 book, “The medium is the Massage”, may actually be revelatory. Online linguistic collisions and their downstream cultural effects can be remediated by physical touch.

Not only do we thrive under touch, we physically need it. Cultures where physical affection toward infants was high had low levels of adult aggression, but cultures where affectionate touch was low had high adult aggression. For us, a people experiencing online polarization so deep we're calling this phenomenon a culture war — we need to touch each other more than ever, and we need to let ourselves be touched. The act is radical — we are making ourselves vulnerable to other people. Yet this is where the true strength in humanity comes through: our ability to share with others, and to be generous with each other. We're not faceless anons behind a screen, we're human beings with bodies and the ability to understand them.

Touch brings us closer. Emotions can be communicated wordlessly through hugs, caresses, holding and being held. The language of touch can inspire deep connection between people and express more than words could ever say, would ever need to say — this is the space where eros comes alive, where we desire for others. To be reminded of our want is to be reminded of our bodies and the affection we crave. That is, the affection, desire, and camaraderie which emerges from being in proximity with someone, not the image of desire or the consumption of desire as a product. We are stronger when we are physically together.

Whereas our current interfaces push us towards an atomized and isolated anger, touch is relational, direct and immediate. We are best understood when we are close. New social interfaces should seek to stave off Babelification by building digital pathways to which lead to Massage. Have you ever met someone off a social media platform? Time-to-touch is the new metric we should aim for in an increasingly chaotic online town square: how long does it take for people who meet online to meet face-to-face, and touch each other?

If physical Massage is not feasible for everyone at all times, consider how you can make your interaction with someone through a screen MORE personable. A FaceTime is more personable than a phone call, than a text, than an Instagram DM, than a fire emoji story react. The only way to finally build that tower whose top reaches the heavens is by holding hands.

We encourage you to support Folklore by minting and sharing this article. Want to join the Folklore community? Purchase your membership here.

If walls could talk

I have a vivid memory of a particular moment in 2019: it was a sunny spring day, and I had just picked up the keys to my new apartment in West Village, NYC. I ran up the stairs and stepped in. I remember feeling excited by the emptiness, about the memories that I’d create here. And then, as many people must do, I thought about the past.

While finalizing the lease, I had learned that the building was built in 1920. It was one year short of a century old. As I stood there, the potential of the empty rooms moved me with a sweet melancholy – I wondered about the people who had lived here in those years. What were they like? What beautiful and complex lives did they lead? I suddenly had a deep longing to have some way of accessing those stories.

Was there a public record that saved people’s histories based on where they lived? I entertained the inquiry and found a post that showed how to access the record of pictures for any New York building from 1940. I loved it, gladly looking at the five buildings I had lived in in the city and seeing how they had changed. But this look into the past just increased my desire to know what was happening to the humans there and then. What were their names, their routines, their favorite places in the neighborhood? I was yearning for the stories.

This kind of archive is a simple idea but hard to implement. It wouldn’t make sense for a centralized institution to track it, and besides, who would want to chat with the local archivist? It could be an open-source, public project, but how would you prove that someone lived where they said they did?

Back then, I had a nagging feeling that blockchain could offer a solution. It was already useful for onchain archiving of digital histories and cultures, but the practicality of using it for memories fixed in space didn’t quite make sense. How could we ensure that only others who were in the exact location at that moment could see what was written?

Some years later, here now, I think we may have a solution. It brings the physical world onchain in a real and strange way. And sometimes strange is good.

Location-bound digital diary

Here’s the idea. We put a simple blockchain-enabled NFC chip on the wall in the inner hallway of our living spaces. They don’t record or do anything until you want to add a journal entry for whoever comes after you. When you’re feeling inspired, maybe on the day you’re moving out, you tap it with your phone and share your thoughts with future dwellers. Wish them well. Tell them about your cat. Share your stories about being locked down in this small apartment for so many months in 2020.

The messages are encrypted and uploaded to the blockchain, and they can only be unencrypted by someone who stands in that room and scans that same chip. Decades from now, someone whose parents are not even alive today might read your recollections. Make them good! We can’t rescue the stories from the past, but we can leave a meaningful memory for the future.

If apartments are too personal, we can start on the street. Put NFC-chipped stickers around the city for this purpose. What conversation would you want to have with every person who will one day be in the exact same location as you? What puzzles or riddles would you gift them? Each chip is a digital time capsule bound in space, an airdrop waiting in escrow.

There is a bigger idea here: these tiny chips can fit everywhere, so every physical object becomes a possible archive. As people pass on their objects, they can leave messages for posterity. You can read stories bound to the family heirloom passed down from your great-great-great-grandmother. Or hear about the countless nights of laughter spent on the sofa you bought on eBay. Or relive the tales from the front porch of the first house in your network city.

And then just imagine, every object we interact with suddenly brings a rich history. How much more interesting would that be compared to mass-produced things? I don’t want the cheap factory thing, I want the one with the anecdotes! Things capture memories that were once vivid reality for someone. They have always had tales to tell; the humans that nurture them are humble messengers and scribes.

Earlier this year, I visited New York and needed to swing by the village, so I reached out to the people who moved into that apartment after me. We had kept in touch, and they were glad to invite me over for coffee. The place was arranged differently, but the memories and emotions came flooding back. Over our chat, we reminisced about our experiences in that space, two different timelines converging in the same location.

Such encounters remind me of the profound connection we share with places and things. And we can now imbue objects with story, highlighting their significance in our lives. Share that they really mattered to someone, for a time.

Thank you to Austin and Yancey from Metalabel for inspiring me to write again. Thank you Alice Sholto-Douglas, Rafa, Jon Hillis, Cameron, and Yun for thoughts and feedback.

Epilogue

Entry: #00001

Date: October 10, 2023

Author: T

Hey, I don’t know who you are, but I hope that you are smiling as you read this. I just set this thing up in my apartment. Pretty weird, huh? Or maybe not to you.

I don’t know how many years, decades, or even centuries from now you’re alive, but I hope things aren’t too crazy then. I imagine they probably are. But oh well, at least you have a nice apartment!

A lot has happened for me here. I’ve made this place home with my partner N. We usually hang out on the rugs in the living room, around our circular table, laughing and discussing the world. We talk about how we don’t want to leave this place, but I imagine eventually we will. If you’re reading this, I guess we did.

Maybe as I get more used to this, I’ll share more stuff.

Ciao for now.

Entry: #00002

Date: July 20, 2025

Author: T

Hey, me again. We’re moving out next week, so I wanted to leave a note. It’s so wild to read my notes from two years ago. I can’t believe how time flies. It feels like it was yesterday, but also like it was a different lifetime.

We’re thinking about starting a family, and N’s job is moving us away from the city, but we’re definitely sad to leave this place. So many lovely memories. I hope you enjoy it.

Take care, all the best <3

Entry: #00003

Date: March 8, 2030

Author: R

Hey! R here. This apartment was my little sunlit haven. Nothing beat the warm morning rays streaming through those windows.

I stumbled upon the previous notes early on. They were like mini time capsules. I love the feeling of being part of this shared history, it added an unexpected layer of depth to my time here. I wish there were more from further back in the past.

Btw I love the coffee at Pinky’s. They’ve been around forever so I imagine they’ll continue. The neighborhood has definitely changed in the past five years, but everywhere does, I guess.

It's been real. Hope you create as many fond memories here as I did. Cheers!

Entry: #00004

Date: August 9, 2037

Author: S

Hey people from the future. This apartment is a dream. To be honest, my time recently hasn’t been so easy. I won’t get into it. But I found my peace here, and I’m grateful for that.

I agree with the person above that I wish there were more of these entries. They were lovely to read. I’ll try to write a few more before I leave

Wishing you joy, laughter, and countless cherished moments in this home.

The first season, started on August 20th 2022, has been so much more than we could have envisioned. Season 2 will probably be just as fun. What comes next is up to all of us. As always though, our path is slow, gentle, stern.

nft://10/0x2451761FeD91d394AD6BA01215f8b46aBe70fC96/?showBuying=true&showMeta=true

Our History

Folklore launched in August 2022 with a simple mission: to create a curated space to learn and discuss the virtual world, its architecture, and its culture. If we were lucky, we’d be able to make some progress to develop a DAMN (Decentralised Autonomous Media Network). It turns out we’ve been quite lucky.

Folklore gathered 200 members and amassed ~9k USD in its treasury. About half of the treasury has been deployed to support local charities, build community software, and commission the first long-form essay (available here). We also created a basic website, published two essays from our own community members, and have gathered over 400 readers on Telegram and Mirror (Hello fellow lurkers!).

Folklore’s WIP Website: https://folklore.institute/

Our treasury now sits at about ~5.4k USD, and we're ready for Season 2. Our ambitions will now look towards building a basic community brand, doing some meetups, doubling down on commissions, and building community software (ARK)

Membership Design

Similar to last season, we will have a capped membership.

There will be 150 passes, each priced at 0.05 ETH.

Curators will have the option to claim a gifted membership, although donations are encouraged. Those who purchased the mid-season pass do not need to purchase a new season pass. Any member who received an engagement badge can claim a discounted price of 0.02 ETH (Just send me a DM @rafathebuilder).

Some scholarships for low-income members / partnership passes will also be sent out at my discretion (not part of the 150).

Memberships for Season 2 will be available for the next 30 days, at which point the Season 1 pass will be deprecated.

IMPORTANT: A new purchase is not necessary for mid-season pass holders, you are grandfathered into Season 2.

Attrition by Design

Many reading communities, such as Substack, work based on automatic subscriptions. Folklore will adapt a high-friction approach instead. If you don’t follow along, you will be left behind. We are travelling in a dark forest… beware of the culling.

The second benefit of this approach is that we reward and support those who actively participate in Folklore’s mission. When we think about Folklore as decade-long project, we aim to have 150 involved members. Not 150 passive subscribers (that membership will launch later).

A (Possible) Path

Season 1 closed once we completed two things: (1) our first commission and (2) our basic community software. This season, like the first, will likely last a year or less.

However, Folklore will not have start or end dates. Removing the pressure of timelines has been beneficial and we will continue the tradition. By sacrificing certainty, we prioritize flow. This is our way; seasons at Folklore will be based on community maturity, not the Gregorian calendar.

During the next season we will attempt to increase the number of content commissions. For example, instead of one commission, we can strive for 3 or 4. In addition, treasury funds will be allocated to hardening and decentralising the core Folklore software. Over time, we will want a fully decentralized community framework: interface agnostic, censorship resistant, persistent. For example, we will look to create a way such that our curated content is not susceptible to link rot.

Community Curation

We want to thank the Forefront team for their support with OnPulse. Moving forward, we will be using Folklore’s ARK framework, which uses gasless Ethereum signatures and an RSS feed. For those curious, you can visit submit.folklore.institute.

A quick note that only those selected as curators will be able to submit content. The curators today include Jihad, Keely, Aron, Pedro, and myself. The role of curator is voluntary, with a maximum of 5 people at any given time. Curators will be encouraged to rotate regularly and participate as a peer-to-peer membership program.

Join Folklore Today

Thank you again to the 200 supporters from the last year. The treasury has allowed us to invest in high-quality content, experiment together, and find new paths of virtual connection. With some Grind, Belief, and a dash of Luck, we might just be able to create a fully autonomous entity adventuring through networked digital realms.

nft://10/0x2451761FeD91d394AD6BA01215f8b46aBe70fC96/?showBuying=true&showMeta=true

Welcome to Folklore’s first external commission. We are proud to have commissioned work from Wassim, a brilliant mind exploring online cultures. To support Folklore’s mission of creating a sustainable community of writers, please mint this article. The earnings will be split equally between the author and Folklore, which will commission more high quality content related to the digital humanities.

Author’s Note: This text is a heavily abridged version of a longer text in preparation on this topic, and as such is broad in scope but light on exposition. Causa latet, vis est notissima.

Technology, Capital, Spirituality: An Unholy Trinity?

“From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable. He moves in mysterious ways: men say.”

Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 1989, p. 95.

The phenomenon of  ‘disenchantment of the world’ invoked by Max Weber by way of Friedrich Schiller's ‘Entzauberung’, emerged as a result of the gradual exfiltration of magic, sorcery, gods, and demons from the arena of divinity by the Abrahamic religions, in their place invoking human prophets, apostles, disciples, and other forms of modernist cultural rationalisations.

“All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts”

Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, 1922, p. 36.

Since time immemorial, the calendar and clock have been used as organs for the mediation of ecumenical, imperial, capital, and now technological forms of ‘chronic’ domination. In Weber’s later The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the equivocation is made between time and money. Today, it’s more apparent than ever that modern capitalism has replaced God with quantised time.

Contemporary luxury beliefs such as those under the ‘TESCREAL’ banner–transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism–amongst others associated with the ‘quantified self’, and ‘longevity’ movements, intimate that the disenchanting of earnest spirituality into synthetic replicas reified through capital and technology continues unabated in the present moment.

A Chance To Cult Is A Chance To Cure

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

John 3:16

Cults–of personality, of belief, of community–are nothing new. Indeed, the Romans and Greeks thought of affiliations to untraditional deities within their respective constellations as cults. Similarly, so-called ‘conspiracy theories’, i.e. legends of clandestine skullduggery associated with organisations such as the Knights Templar, Freemasonry, and the Bavarian Illuminati have persisted for centuries. There is an epistemic issue at the heart of any discussion around these topics, which is where the distinction–if such a delineation is even possible–at which point a new religious movement transcends its status as a conspiratorial plot into that of a social cult, a cult into that of a bona fide religion, or the reverse via schisms and factional divergences.

“The Church and The Network, Zeal and Time, Death and Money. All sides of the same Coin.”

0x Salon, The Black Hole of Money, 2022.

It seems important to ask, why are all these new technology-mediated new religious movements emerging now?  Looking at the world around us, post-COVID, post-Brexit, post-Trump, in the midst of rampant price inflation, it would appear that a new wave of Weltentzauberung (world disenchantment) is upon us. We live in an age of weak ties between kin, clan, and townsfolk, with trust in institutions–from churches and universities, to governments–seemingly at all-time lows. Concomitantly, the atomisation of the heteronormative ‘nuclear’ family continues apace. With increasing numbers of people living alone and working remotely, civic hubs such as pubs, cafes, and post-offices slide out of commercial viability. As real estate prices soar globally, community spaces such as town squares and parks are increasingly turned over to private developers for luxury apartments, gated communities, and other enforcers of social hierarchy operating through the demarcation of territory.

Founders. CEOs. Type A personalities. Leaders. Captains of industry. Professors. Inventors. Investors. Patreon-Podcast-Substack-growth-hackers (‘Roganauts’). We all know them, and love or hate them, they will never go away. The incentives–economic, social, and otherwise–provided by capital; in all its hard and soft, explicit and implicit forms, are so powerful that, like moths to a light (positive phototaxis), or flies to a heap of dung, they will keep coming. But where do these unnatural-seeming people-cum-archetype-facsimiles spawn from?

“Like liberalism, or democracy, or capitalism, protocol is a successful technology precisely because its participants are evangelists, not servants.”

A.R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, 2004, p. 245.

It may be helpful to orient this anthropological exploration though a concept which arguably started it all: code-as-law. Originally spoken of in the 1990s separately by Bill Mitchell and Larry Lessig, code-as-law appears to have fairly benign conceptual origins in the early days of the world wide web. Code-as-law supposes that there could be a type of self-regulation where private actors–institutions, companies, individuals etc.–could embed their values and customs into the technological substrates and artifacts that they create and use. The trouble is, with blockchains that never forget a thing we now have long-lasting mnemotechnics, and therefore code-being-law means not just some text files in a Git repository, but rather a technoeconomic substrate which can execute and enact the predetermined logics of a piece of code both within and without (via proxies) the network itself. Neohistoricisation. In so doing, code-as-law becomes something we are subjected to unwillingly, unwittingly, and unconsensually, from the moment of execution/deployment until the end of time/the network. These may or may not be the same event, depending on your preferred network eschatology.

“Rather than savage anomaly, blockchain is better understood as normalisation and naturalisation, the regime of nature-as-technics presented as a work of trustless salvation. Blockchain technics is what mediates here between formalised Idea (that of ‘ordinality’) and everyday life (‘late capitalism’): it is Platonic Idea incarnated as Capitalist Theocracy.”

Justin Clemens, In The State of Nature, Nothing Will Be Lost, 2020, p. 171.

Imaginary Countries: Control-AltRight-Citadelete

Perhaps this New Age of Disenchantment, together with the aforementioned nascent mnemotechnic capabilities, can go some way to explain the fervour and zeal of today’s technocapitalist empire-builders. The desire for new forms of distributed community, from benign online gaming cliques, unidimensional fandoms, speculator-tribes, and ‘intentional communities’, to Bitcoin citadels, network states, special economic zones, and charter cities, might be interpreted initially as exit fantasies for the disempowered and dispossessed. Can this secessionary turn be thought of as a colonialism of the map, now that is no longer a faithful reproduction of the territory?

It seems somewhat self-evident why these neo-egressive movements might grasp for a form of network animism, dressing themselves up with the accoutrements of religions and other belief systems, to garner a veneer of legitimacy. Such ceremonialisms may also serve to distract from these nascent movements’ fragility and ephemerality, and of course to beatify, and beautify–typically in traditional senses of the word–the people at the centre of the associated social formations: foregrounding their prophet motives, whilst obscuring their profit motives.

This is ostensibly a zealotry-without-faith, where unapologetic ultra-capitalists use the pretence of spirituality as a convenient ruse to manipulate and radicalise the dispossessed, the outsiders, the forgotten, in whatever way they deem to be necessary and expedient, by manipulating their fantasies and curiosities. Indeed, this is anything but new: the idea of the outside, or more specifically a ‘frontier imaginary’ has existed since humans kept oral and written records e.g. Exodus, Adam and Eve’s fall from grace, and Muhammad’s expulsion from Mecca. The idea of the radical outsider as prophet appears to be hardcoded in our post-Abrahamic cultural blueprints.

“The discovery of the New World induced an impatience with the Old. In vastly extending the range of the Renaissance imagination, it made Europe appear ever more despoiled, damned, and doomed, and prompted millenarian dreams of taking flight from this waning world in quest of new beginnings. In the New World, eschatalogical expectations of renewed perfection came into earthly focus. After Columbus, paradise became more than just a vision; it became a place.”

David F. Noble, The Religion of Technology, 1997, p. 38.

Indeed, David F. Noble’s landmark 1997 book The Religion of Technology rests upon a thesis that can be interpreted as such: that mankind’s contemporary techno-solutionism, the Promethean will to channel divine fire–power, wisdom, knowledge–derives from the Christian move to interpret Jesus as a human representative of God, sent to Earth to facilitate the recapture of the God-likeness of Man’s image after the fall from Eden. Might we extrapolate Noble’s hypothesis into the 21st century, insofar as the networked eschatologies and frontier spirit of the various tangled (ww)webs we have woven since then, being similarly driven by this unwitting–or depending on one’s opinion, misguided, even–desire to explore uncharted territory, terra nullius*, the W(i|or)ld Wi(l)d(e) We(st|*b) ?

In the present moment, fantasies of exit exist which entail a retreat from the public, from wider society which casts the (naïve? optimistic? cynical?) techno-solutionist as outsider, as pariah, in order to provide the necessary ‘push’ to seek alternatives. Precisely what escape routes and options are available, depend on how well capitalised the outsider is, in every sense of those italicised words. This idea carries more than an echo of colonialism; it is in reality another form of it. Abstracted now into cyberspatial territory, a simulacramap, cartographics without an underlying territory, or ‘colonialism of the map’ as discussed earlier. In some ways, this notion is reminiscent of the Second Realm as espoused by ‘crypto-anarchist philosophers’ Smuggler and XYZ. Their argument proceeds as follows: the asymmetry of power that the state enjoys in the material world (‘first realm’) over its subjects is such that its hegemony cannot be overcome using symmetric tactics to create persistent real-world resistances, and therefore efforts should be focused upon actions reminiscent of Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZs), and persistent digital environs which state apparatuses can be excluded from on a permanent basis.

As the universality of the nation-state model is increasingly called into question, and new technological scaffolds for the amassment and distribution of cultural, social, and economic capital rise, novel and audacious forms of empire-building are emerging, chiefly from political philosophies traditionally associated with the right. What was just a few years ago a purely hypothetical fantasy seeded in the minds of the faithful Bitcoiners by a speculative (now-edited) post on reddit by a ‘time-traveller’, the notion of Bitcoin Citadels has taken root in the collective imaginations of the more ardent, fervent, faithful, and otherwise-disaffected members of the Bitcoin community. ‘Citadeletion’ is one of the key pillars of the emerging Bitcoin eschatology, alongside so-called hyperbitcoinisation: the economic singularity moment of Bitcoin as it outcompetes (to destruction) every other ‘monetary’ / ‘value’ system, including commodity-money systems such as gold and silver, as well as fiat-money systems such as the US Dollar and the Euro.

These imaginaries carry more than an echo of the patchwork philosophy of Mencius Moldbug, an alias of Urbit creator Curtis Yarvin. Moldbug’s ‘neocameral’ governance concept is in reality little more than a feudal, quasi-monarchic system with ‘philosopher-developers’ at the apex of the power structure, just as Aristotle put a philosopher-king at the head of his most preferred governance system. What is more concerning is that most of the people willing this apocalypse on haven’t deeply engaged with Yarvin’s work, and indeed most seem to not even be aware of him. In the words of 0x Salon Fellow Habib William Kherbek, technofeudalism is indeed rising once again. In a perhaps unsurprising short circuit of neocolonial logics, Yarvin wrote in 2020 on ‘Bitzion: how Bitcoin becomes a state’.

Byzantine Business School

@BusinessSch001

Out Now:

"Exorcise your Daemons with BitInquisiton" (BSPress, 2019)

If currency is a Keynesian beauty contest, purity is a Maximalist virtue signal parade. Shed your unclean past, sign a BitConfession & retake your place in the congregation!

Initial Truth Offering ends soon.

10

4:32 AM • Jan 27, 2019

“Finesse and Finitude. In the ashes of the present We shall build a New World The Blinding Light of CoinCleansing, educating, enriching Scarcity as Purity Capital as Mana Property as Virtue A Discretionary Utopia Enter DOME.”

Cryptographic Poetics Researchers’ Union, Versus In Numinis, 0x Salon, 2022.

So, why is all this happening in the here and now?

Well, this is perhaps an appropriate juncture to reacquaint ourselves with the technical architecture which undergirds Bitcoin, and has since given rise to a panoply–or should that be panopticon?–of descendants, rivals, or pretenders (according to your individual worldview), namely blockchain technology. Blockchains can be thought of as jurisdictionless freeports, and as such lend themselves extremely well to the application of so-called special economic zones, which as Wikipedia summarises are “located within…national borders…a special economic zone (SEZ) is an area in which the business and trade laws are different from the rest of the country.”

These distributed economic architectures afforded by blockchain technology can be used to implement so-called network states:

“A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition.”

Balaji Srinivasan, The Network State, 2022,  p. 9.

Connected to network states and SEZs are charter cities, apparently the successor organisational concept to city-states. Charter cities would enjoy an increased–or even total–level of autonomy compared to the partial autonomy afforded by SEZs. Quasi-city-states such as Qatar, Singapore, and Hong Kong might be thought of as exemplifying Paul Romer’s proposed model:

“A charter city is a type of city in which a guarantor from a developed country would create a city within a developing host country. The guarantor would administer the region, with the power to create their own laws, judiciary, and immigration policy outside of the control of the host country.”

Charter city (economic development), Wikipedia

Critics of the charter city model argue that the initiators of such projects–typically white, male, western captains of industry and finance–are engaging in neocolonial statecraft by taking advantage of weak nations, promising jobs and other trappings of economic development such as GDP uplift whilst in reality creating new conditions for the exploitation of natural resources, local labour pools and facilitating regulatory arbitrage and/or tax avoidance on grand scales.

Might charter cities be the new banana republics?

Knightwork States? Crusader Orders as the Original Network States

Can we look into the past and see in days gone by, a hint of what might be at hand in our present moment? With technology organisations such as Anduril and Palantir, and private international mercenary armies like Blackwater and Wagner Group seemingly in the ascendancy, some prior premonitions might be helpful as we cast our gaze forwards.

Following the disintegration of the Roman Empire, over the Middle Ages European and Byzantine territories were lost to invading Turkic and Arab peoples from the South and East. Plans were hatched in Northern Europe, in the name of the Roman Catholic Church, to fight wars in the name of Christendom against unbelievers instead of rivalrous local fiefdoms and regional powers squabbling amongst themselves. The Muslim occupation of the ‘holy land’–compounded arguably by the decline in power and legitimacy of the leaders of the rump states formed as the Roman empire collapsed –led Pope Urban II to give ‘divine sanction’ to Christian military efforts to retake Jerusalem in the late 11th century. Middle Eastern perspectives typically foreground an added pretext of looting the intellectual and material wealth of the region. The s(u|e)ccessive waves of conflicts which resulted came to be known as the Crusades, which resulted in the capture of Jerusalem and other Levantine lands.

Etymologically, the ‘Crusader’ term appears to have derived from the latin expression crucesignatus (one signed by the cross) in the 12th century. A number of chivalric ‘Crusader orders’, which were constituted of a network of local associations, sprouted up to answer these calls to alms, arms, and psalms, which themselves had fascinating concrescences of technology, capital, networking, divinity, and sovereignty. Following initial victories, four Crusader states came to exist: the County of Edessa; the Principality of Antioch; the Kingdom of Jerusalem; and the County of Tripoli, collectively known as ‘Outremer’. Crusader armies occupied various configurations of these lands for around a century, and spent another century attempting to wrest them back.

“Corporate Sovereignty was also exercised by religious corporations like the Knights Templar, the Knights of St. John, and the Teutonic Knights. These hybrid institutions have no modern counterparts. They combined religious, social, judicial, and financial activities with sovereignty over localities. While they exercised territorial jurisdiction, they were almost the opposite of today's governments in that nationality played no role in the mobilization of their support or their scheme of governance. The members and officers of these religious orders were drawn from all parts of Christian Europe, or "Christendom," as it was known.”

William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age, 1997.

Perhaps the Crusades can be seen as a reaction by the papacy and other organs of power within the Catholic Church to a disenchantment within Christendom, prior to the New World excitement that accompanied the first European voyages to the Americas. Then, just as now, imaginaries of conquest, domination, usurpation, and extraction accompanied them. The Vatican gave divine licence in papal bulls, encouragement in the form of indulgences, and resources to Crusader orders to perform various functions including: theological training (education) at home and in the ‘holy land’; providing medical treatment pilgrims venturing to and within the Levant (healthcare); protection of travellers (security); logistical, distribution, and transportation support (communication); taxes and levies, as well as financial instruments such as letters of credit (economic); and direct offensive capabilities (military). Though these sound like the basic provisions of any city- or nation-state, these orders of faith were distributed all over (mostly) North and West Europe, with chapters (or nodes) of various sizes on mainland and offshore territories.

It is this article’s contention, that these Crusader orders, most notably The Knights Templar, The Knights Hospitaller–more commonly known as ‘the Knights of Rhodes’ in the 14th-16th centuries and ‘the Knights of Malta’ in the 16th-18th centuries–were the first network states, notwithstanding the limited communication and economic tools at their disposal. Unlike the aristocratic and mercantile city-states which preceded them such as Venice, Pisa, and Genoa, and unlike mainland powers with ancestral connections to the lands they dwelled upon, without a strong territorial claim–ethnic, historic, religious–to the outposts they attempted to occupy, these orders flourished or expired depending on their management of resources, conquests, and alliances. Crusader orders were given the lease or ownership of numerous territories by or at the behest of the Church. In recent history, perhaps the closest analog–a mirror, perhaps-is the Salafist Daesh movement, more commonly known in the west as Islamic State, ISIL, or ISIS. The notion of Islamic Jihad, previously espoused by many groups including the insurgent-cum-resurgent Afghan Taliban, is unsurprisingly not that far from the sentiments which motivated the Crusades. Today, the descendant organisation that has the most similar structure and purpose to the Mediaeval Crusader orders is the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, which considers itself a continuation of the Knights Hospitaller tradition. The order maintains diplomatic relations with over a hundred countries, and retains extraterritorial rights in a Maltese military complex, in addition to two palatial buildings in Rome.

Like so many successful institutions throughout history, the prominent Crusader orders grew rich feasting upon their spoils of war, tithing passing traders and their territories' subjects, and merchant ventures, becoming more inward-looking and self-serving in the process. Capital was misallocated, Papal orders and priorities overlooked in the service of looting, corruption, piracy (corsairing), and most strikingly, capture of the seat of the Orthodox Christian Byzantine Empire in Constantinople to create the short-lived Latin Empire alongside the Venetians. The papacy withdrew support from the Knights Templar and confiscated their assets as they were abolished in the early fourteenth century, at the initiative of a French King unable to pay his debts to the order. Many of the territories were redistributed to other orders including Hospitallers, and Teutonic knights from Utrecht, Brandenburg, and elsewhere. Much land was also ‘reclaimed’ by local crowns. In other words, the knightwork state became a corrupt and self-serving empire, and was overthrown.

A cautionary tale on unintended consequences, and second-order effects of zero-sum games:

“The Greeks were convinced that even the Turks, had they taken the city, would not have been as cruel as the Latin Christians. The defeat of Byzantium, already in a state of decline, accelerated political degeneration so that the Byzantines eventually became easy prey to the Turks. The Fourth Crusade and the crusading movement generally thus resulted, ultimately, in the victory of Islam, a result which was of course the exact opposite of its original intention.”

Speros Vryonis, Byzantium and Europe, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967,  p. 152.

Returning to the present day, it is tempting to draw parallels between the present nation-state occupier of the ‘holy lands’ and their zealous antecedents. Amin Maalouf, in his crucial Crusades Through Arab Eyes, comments on the resonance between Middle Ages and twentieth-century events. Adina Glickstein describes Israel as a network state and has written about the role of startup culture and speculative capital in the nonconsensual remaking of Palestinian territories. Indeed, Srinivasan also gestures towards this in The Network State:

“God/State/Network: this is something like the Jewish diaspora after Israel. Our One Commandment model also draws on this, as a startup society can be based on a traditional religion or on a moral imperative that’s on par with many religious practices, like veganism.”

Balaji Srinivasan, The Network State, 2022, p. 58.

Crusader orders’ insignia are used as dog-whistles for white supremacy by fascist groups in the US, as an ostensible continuation of the logics which gave rise to the Ku Klux Klan in the last century. Heinrich Himmler modelled the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) upon the structure and iconography of Crusader orders.  Despite its near-complete deterritorialisation by popular mobilisations in Syria and Iraq, Daesh continues to operate in the backwaters of the ‘holy lands’. Wagner Group is still running amok in Ukraine at time of writing. Praxis, Zuzalu, Liberland, Urbit, Prospera, The Seasteading Institute, Bitcoin City El Salvador.

What horrors will be committed by future ‘knightwork states’ in the name of what their prophets–and profits–deem to be right, good, and true?

Can the laws of nations stop today’s arbitrageurs from becoming tomorrow’s arbitra(i)tors?

Thanks to Christopher Dake-Outhet, Martina Cavalot, and rafathebuilder for helpful comments during the preparation of this article.

Endless gratitude goes to the wonderful 0x Salon community for whom this topic was developed in the first place, and in particular to the attendees of Salon#38 ‘Prophet Motives’, held May’23 in Berlin, for an incredibly ‘enlightening’ discussion.

Postscript: ‘Prophet Motives’ Project Note

The aim of this text–and other works currently being undertaken under the aegis of the Prophet Motives banner–is to render explicit the spiritual, libidinal, and mytho-poetic underpinnings of human relationships to the technological artefacts they create, to critique and explore nascent but incipient machinic faith communities, powered by economic incentives, eschatalogical imperatives, and teleological drives.

For as long as there has been financial capital, risk and speculation have orbited, manipulated, and harnessed it. As narrative feedback machines, simultaneously reading and rewriting realities, markets exist as a distributed conversation amongst speculators driven by profit motives and an appetite for divination and prophecy. Despite the ostensible ‘neutrality’ afforded by novel technology architectures, recognisable human characteristics and archetypes continue to appear in positions of explicit power and implicit influence.

Work on this theme is undertaken in an effort to explore the role of zealotry in narrative synthesis, incentivisation mechanisms, and the ethics of technology in ostensibly egalitarian communities. While architecturally distributed–or even "decentralised"–domains may initially appear to offer new organisational possibilities, in reality the familiar schema of humans appointing themselves as arbiters of taste, morality, and correctness is typically borne out, thus reinforcing,  or indeed exacerbating, existing power imbalances.

Prophet Motives seeks to foreground the deeply human impulses guiding our relationship with technology and critically examine the speculative frenzy of capitalist markets, with cryptocurrency as its most gratuitous and grotesque manifestation to date. Through a transdisciplinary and transmedia approach, the Prophet Motives project currently being undertaken by the 0x Salon collective aims to offer novel insights and perspectives on the ecumenical, emotional, and ethical dimensions of our technological interactions. This is being approached through the creation of speculative and critical liturgies, scriptures, ceremonies, and reliquaries populated by sacred objects in an attempt to bridge the material and psychic realms.

References & Further Reading

• Visit https://www.are.na/0x-salon/prophet-motives for a repository of related materials.

• Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, George Schwab (trans.), University of Chicago Press, 2005.

• Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures, Rodney Livingstone (trans.), Hackett Publishing Company, 2004.

• Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Talcott Parsons (trans.), Dover Publications, 1930.

• Wassim Z. Alsindi, Max Hampshire, and Paul Seidler, Twenty-Two Years of Transcendental Time Machines, MVU Press, 2023.

• Rob Henderson, Luxury Beliefs Are Status Symbols, Substack, 2022.

• On TESCREAL: Timnit Gebru, Eugenics and the Promise of Utopia through AGI, SatML, 2023.

• On Trinity Moravian Church’s debt forgiveness ceremony: AJ Willingham, A church is canceling people’s medical debt for pennies on the dollar. It wants others to join in, CNN, 2023.

• For a comprehensive treatment on the epistemology of conspiracy theories, see: Erica Lagalisse, The Occult Features of Anarchism, PM Press, 2019.

• For a detailed treatment on New Religious Movements, see: James R. Lewis (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements, Oxford University Press, 2008.

• Justin Clemens, In The State of Nature, Nothing Will Be Lost, Australian Humanities Rev., 2020.

• William J. Mitchell, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn, MIT Press, 1996.

• Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Basic Books, 1999.

• On network eschatologies: Wassim Z. Alsindi, Necroprimitivism Rising, Agorism XXI, 2023.

• 0x Salon, The Black Hole of Money, Theatre Premiere, 2022.

• Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, MIT Press, 2006.

• David F. Noble, The Religion of Technology, Penguin Putnam, 1997.

• Smuggler and XYZ, Second Realm: Book on Strategy, Liberty Under Attack Publications, 2019.

• On the Bitcoin time-traveller: TheNextWeb (reportage); 0x Salon (satire).

• Hyperbitcoinization Explained, Bitcoin Magazine.

• Mencius Moldbug, Patchwork: A Political System For The 21st Century, 2008.

• Habib William Kherbek, Techno-Feudalism and The Tragedy of The Commons, Berlin Art Prize, 2018.

• Cryptographic Poetics Researchers’ Union, Versus In Numinis, 0x Salon, 2022.

• Balaji Srinivasan, The Network State, 2022.

• For a non-Western perspective on the Crusades, see: Amin Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, Saqi Essentials, 1989.

• For a discussion of the financial activities of crusader orders such as the Knights Templar, see: Wikipedia’s History of the Knights Templar and references therein.

• William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age, Touchstone Books, 1997.

• Speros Vryonis Jr., Byzantium and Europe, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967.

• Adina Glickstein, User Error: Angel Investors on Holy Land, Spike Art Magazine, 2023.

• On the similarities between crusader orders and the Third Reich, see for example: Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Editorial Note: Editorial note: a decision was taken to capitalise all instances of the term ‘Crusade’ and ‘Crusader’, firstly for stylistic consistency, and secondly to pay heed to the fact that capital was arguably one of the prime motivations for the initial declaration of hostilities, and less arguably the primary motivation for the persistence of the Crusader orders as institutions and ultimately what we might think of today as the first knightwork states.

This is a journey to summon a portal to Us, our collective wisdom.

Folklore is nearing 300 pieces of curated content. The knowledge accumulated by the community is becoming increasingly valuable for research, not just curiosity and leisure. How can we make this information accessible? How can we begin to derive insights from the connections between the content?

Let us create our first Mind.

Community Minds

Folklore is not the first, or only community asking these questions of knowledge and memory preservation. Humanity is constantly asking how we can best record our wisdom for future generations. In this way, our descendants can build beyond what we have achieved.

Local artisans in Puerto Rico, for example, preserve knowledge through the dissemination of their handcrafted works and apprenticeship programs. Popular online communities create massive and complex wikis covering every detail of their fandom curiosities, whether it be Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, or World of Warcraft. Esoteric niche hobbyists document their questions and theories in private forums.

And yet, this documentation can be fragile. Artisanal techniques are poorly documented and forgotten at the end of the lineage. Oral history is remixed and sometimes abruptly taboo. Wiki’s go stale as maintainers fail to provide new context. Forums turn to ghost towns and become disconnected from offline conversational context. For the most part, our repositories of wisdom are either easily lost, static, and or transformed by the winds of time (i.e. linkrot and contextual collapse).

Could there be a new technology wave that increases the fidelity of our memories, beyond static files? This is what we are exploring at Folklore. Ours is an ambition to create a collective and dynamic mind, on top of an ongoing communal library. A Mind that becomes a portal to Us, and an active partner in our expression of curiosity.

Ark v0.1, or Archie (short for Archive)

Ark is short for Archive and stands for Authentic Record of Knowledge. It is the first instantiation of the Folklore Mind. Some members may choose to call Ark by other names such as Archie, Archibald, or Arca. To begin, Ark will serve initially as on-demand memory for our readings. Then, Ark will grow into the memory of our interactions and conversations. Finally, we will work to make Ark a Daemon (autonomous agent) that works alongside us and proactively (and consensually) preserves Folklore’s collective wisdom, not just memory. Our challenge though is solving for contextual memory, completeness, and importantly, forgiveness. The former is likely less difficult than the latter.

Starting this week, Ark will be a chatbot available to paid members. The chatbot will be knowledgeable in all the articles we’ve read to date, as well as additional content provided by the community. We will run a proof-of-concept, costs permitting, throughout the first half of Season 2, allocating a portion of membership fees to fund the technology (~$200 per month). The experiment will likely end in December 2023, depending on runway. At that point, we will make a decision to expand Ark’s functionality.

Unlike other chatbots which pull information directly, Ark will be using semantic search. This is a search technique that interprets the intent and contextual meaning behind each question and uses this information to pull the right information from our curated knowledge base. The knowledge base itself will be converted into numerical representations, called vectors. The vectors will capture the semantic meaning and relationships within the text.

Just ‘/ask’ Ark

Ark is available to all paid members in our Folklore Forum Telegram group. To test it, simply follow the instructions here. I’ve added some screenshots as well so you can get a sense of what the responses will be like.

Getting started:

• For paid members only (You can get a membership at folklore.institute)

• Join the paid members forum (guild.xyz/folklore)

• Type /ask followed by the question of your choice

If you are a member, try one of these questions:

• What is Folklore?

• What is an online community?

• What is an autonomous world?

• How does accountability work online?

• What is a vibe?

• Why is time different on the internet?

Adjust your question with modifiers such as:

• Keep the answer short

• Make the answer in form of poetry

• Include a quote

Current Action List

• /ask {question} -> Answers question based on Ark’s verified source database.

• /start -> Deletes the conversation history in a chat. By default, Ark will remember the last three questions, so a user can ask up to two follow-up questions from the initial one.

• /info -> Print out the Telegram chat ID in the developer console. This will enable us to approve the channel for bot usage.

What comes next?

Later on, Ark will have expanded functionality. For example, Ark will be able to create memes and mood images. Ark will also be able to search for related content based on a new source.

• If you are interested in using Ark, feel free to join our community at folklore.institute

• If you are interested in deploying an Ark to your community, get in touch!

• If you are interested in learning about our roadmap and how Folklore is building a new model for online communities, send us a message.

→ Contact us via Twitter at @folklore0x or at rafael@rafael.fyi

Meandering among the digital humanities

Back in August 2022, when Folklore initially launched, I described the curation as “a unique intersection of content combining community, internet lorecraft, and human relationships in the digital realm”.

It turns out that Folklore’s curation can best be described as an exploration of The Digital Humanities.

Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanities, as well as the analysis of their application.

Wikipedia

From GPT, the voice of Kafka:

In the shadowy realm where old manuscripts slumber, the digital humanities emerged as a metamorphosed being, fusing ancient wisdom with computational precision. This peculiar entity reached out to literature, history, and the arts, weaving an intricate web to unveil their secrets through a machine's gaze.

The labyrinth of data, once obscured, was traversed by this hybrid, exposing patterns and connections long hidden. An existential unease enveloped onlookers, contemplating the implications of such a transformation. The metamorphosis revealed the complexity of human thought and the inexorable advance of technology.

*ChatGPT4, Kafka on the Digital Humanities

Our sources of curation

At Folklore, curation is simple:

1. Browse Twitter

2. Browse Discord

3. Save articles in a backlog

4. Select daily content from the backlog

Content is chosen based on writing quality, diversity of source, and personal taste. In general, the content at Folklore leans towards technologies influencing interpersonal human connection today: crypto, artificial intelligence, social media, and other algorithmic technologies.

Overall, the content is sourced from communities, editorial publications, and secondary references.

Each community included here has their own crowdsourced curation. If you like Folklore, you will likely enjoy the people, conversations, and curation within each of these communities:

Trust - Utopian conspiracy

Our Discord serves as a living archive and experimental forum where members sense make, propose collaborations, and share work-in-progress. The forum is structured around our main research channels: 𓀬collective-bodies ∞intelligences 𓏖planetary 𓏃new-economies 𓏞play-and-mechanics 𓆲politics 𓁺aesthetics ▝▞

https://trust.support

Digital culture and entertainment insights daily | Dirt

Dirt is a daily(ish) newsletter about the cutting edge of digital pop culture. Every week we send out multiple insightful short essays on topics like streaming, TikTok, video games, and web3, from a rotating group of critics.

https://dirt.fyi

The Yak Collective

The Yak Collective is an online space for collaborative tinkering.

https://www.yakcollective.org

0xSalon

welcome to the 0xSalon ::: event series, residency programme, epistemic skunkworks

https://0xsalon.pubpub.org

In addition, there are a series of online publications which have excellent and compelling content. Here are a few that are constantly nurturing influential content:

About - Real Life

Real Life was a magazine about living with technology. The emphasis was more on living. To find out more about us, click here. To find out more about our contributors, click here. Real Life was made possible by funding from Snap, Inc., and we operated with editorial independence and without ads.

https://reallifemag.com

NOEMA | Noema Magazine

Noema is a magazine exploring the transformations sweeping our world. We publish essays, reporting, interviews, videos and art on the overlapping realms of philosophy, governance, geopolitics, economics, technology and culture. In doing so, our unique approach is to get out of the usual lanes and cross disciplines, professions, social silos, political tribes and cultural boundaries.

https://www.noemamag.com

Other Internet

Applied Research

https://otherinter.net

Palladium Magazine

Palladium is a San Francisco-based non-partisan publication that explores the future of governance and society through international journalism, long-form analysis, and social philosophy.

https://www.palladiummag.com

https://zine.boysclub.vip/

ZORA ZINE

Galaxy brain speculations and vibin out.

https://zine.zora.co

FWB - Editorial

FWB - Editorial

https://v1.fwb.help

Finally, there are a few newsletters that constantly publish excellent thought pieces and link out to interesting sources (check the links and footnotes):

Product Lost by @hipcityreg | Reggie James | Substack

This is not a collection of links and news recaps. This is a critical exploration of what is happening in our technological environments, how it shapes us, and how we actively shape it back. Click to read Product Lost by @hipcityreg, by Reggie James, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

https://hipcityreg.substack.com

default.blog | Katherine Dee | Substack

An emotional scrapbook of the Internet. Click to read default.blog, by Katherine Dee, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.

https://default.blog

Squishy Computer | Gordon Brander | Substack

Learning to build living software. Click to read Squishy Computer, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

https://newsletter.squishy.computer

Numb at the Lodge | Sam Kriss | Substack

These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here. Click to read Numb at the Lodge, by Sam Kriss, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.

https://samkriss.substack.com

Stratechery by Ben Thompson

On the business, strategy, and impact of technology.

https://stratechery.com

Jay Springett | Writer, Podcaster, Strategist - thejaymo

Jay Springett is a writer, podcaster, and strategist. An early voice in Solarpunk and expert on world running, he explores technology and internet culture.

https://thejaymo.net

Three quarks | David Phelps | Substack

Deep dives into crypto and web3: what does the past of tech, culture, and economics tell us about their future? Click to read Three quarks, by David Phelps, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

https://davidphelps.substack.com

Kneeling Bus | Drew Austin | Substack

Notes from the collision of meatspace and the internet. Click to read Kneeling Bus, by Drew Austin, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

https://kneelingbus.substack.com

Very Internet Person

A channel for Very Internet Persons to discuss net culture, intermedia, and having fun online

Farcaster

Thank you again for reading and enjoying Folklore. If you have recommendations for newsletters, please let us know. We value diversity of writing and perspective and are constantly looking for fresh takes on our social realities (IRL and URL).

Not a member yet? Join here:

https://zora.co/collections/0x30fbfb1416803b3e46d82811ce7aea0a21af12ce/

Ecosystems, as part of organizations

Our digital ecosystem no longer lingers in the background; instead, it has forced its way to the forefront. It is a moving entity requiring new paths for organizational development.  As a result we can ask: what new patterns of organizational design are becoming visible?

Historically, organizational designers like Galbraith and Chandler have proposed a series of different models of how organizations deliver Products.  Chandler’s seminal work in 1962 outlined how “structure follows strategy”(1).  Then, Galbraith built on this thesis by defining the four modern components of organizations: capabilities, service types, geographies, and customer segments(2).  Each component, concatenating on the previous, expanded the variety of organizations possible in an increasingly globalized world.

“International expansion leads to organizations of three dimensions: functions, business units, and countries. Customer-focused strategies lead to four-dimensional organizations currently found in global firms such as IBM, Nike, and Procter & Gamble.”

Galbraith, The Evolution of Enterprise Organization Designs

Now we’re seeing hints at the next evolution; organizations are experiencing another step-change in complexity; new companies, especially in the technology sector, are integrating components of the blockchain stack and extending their functions into a thriving and volatile digital Ecosystem where their organization lives.

This digital ecosystem has two primary components that an organization can integrate into their strategy.  First, as many have discussed over recent years, is the Protocol(3).  This serves as an extension of the logic system on which an organization is built.  Protocols, like L1 blockchains, introduce legitimacy through public, verifiable and codified rulesets.

Second, there is a component that’s been relegated to a product feature and overlooked as a design focus: Community.  This is the interdependent human relationships of the organization.

The trifecta of Product, Protocol, and Community forms the cornerstone of every organizational map today, as it navigates survival and growth.  A complete strategy needs to address all three. Viewed together, the components address internal priorities and a participatory approach to the organization’s ecosystem.  However, tradeoffs exist.  Each founder must choose a Sequence of development which will influence their valuation, fundraising and growth strategy.

A (not-so-secret) third thing: Community

“If you stand together and profess a thing before your community, it holds you accountable”

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

As blockchain technology continues to evolve, organizations are becoming increasingly aware of the differences between product offerings and protocols.  Recent writing, such as Jesse Walden's "Product vs. Protocol," have explored the various implications of the blockchain stack, including the value accrual patterns that come with it (e.g. “Fat Protocols”); now organizations are developing competitive strategies accordingly.

As Jesse mentions, a clear example is Uniswap, who made the software application open and free to use, “commoditizing the complement” to their advantage.

However, while recent work has focused on the differences and opportunities of protocols and products, organizational strategy has either neglected, or been unable to integrate a key component of our open-source trade network: Community.

Similar to a product or a protocol, a community can become the primary anchor of an organization.  Yet a community is not “The Customer” or “The Market”.  Both these terms are product centered vernacular, where the participants are defined in the context of a product opportunity.

• A market is where goods are sold

• A customer is who goods are sold to

• A community is who participates in the organization’s survival and success

We can find many ‘DAOs’ at the forefront of community-centered organizational development.  Friends with Benefits (a.k.a. FWB) is an ideal example here, where the products they are developing are FOR the community’s development, while most software organizations “build a community” to increase their product growth.

It is important to note that the layer of "Community" goes beyond potential sources of revenue; it includes the matrix of friends, advocates, fans, their support network, creator partnerships, and other operational support.  Community is not simply a list of ideal users, the supply chain, or the industry; community is the network of agents(4) within which a particular organization operates.

In other words, Community is the relationships between those who are touched by the product and protocol.

When we invest in Community, we are trading relationship optionality for depth. The benefits may not be trivial. While depth unlocks access, trust, and long-term mutual support, it also increases the cost of pivoting networks.  This cost can be detrimental to new product organizations without product-market fit. On the other hand, those who ignore Community beware; we are soulbound to the platforms which we use for distribution.

Choosing an anchor

“The idea of interdependence is that we can meet each other’s needs in a variety of ways, that we can truly lean on others and they can lean on us. It means we have to decentralize the idea of where solutions and decisions happen, where ideas come from”

Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy

Organizational leaders must develop a comprehensive strategy that considers all three elements: the product itself, its underlying protocol, and the community it serves. The way these pieces are sequenced, developed, and integrated with each other will lead to different opportunities and risks.

At the inception of any venture, and then again at each growth milestone, the leadership team should ask:

• Where is the highest need for the ecosystem? (Why?)

• What is our anchor? Where do we center our decision making?

• Do we build internally? Or do we borrow?

Following this choice, investors need to create specific, and likely novel, valuation models based on the organization's sequence of development. An organization that emphasizes community will have a different growth model than one that prioritizes a specific protocol. For instance, the former may launch multiple solutions to boost the GDP of its community, while the latter may focus on serving as many communities as possible, driven by volume.

Emerging sequences

Digital-first organizations are already experimenting with various ‘Sequences’ of development.

The three most common include:

• Tooling: These, like most SaaS organizations, are founded on a product roadmap. Once product-market-fit is established, organizations then may deploy a set of protocol contracts, extending the functionality of the ecosystem.

• Protocols: Like many DeFi innovations, these begin by building an open protocol. Afterwards, they invest in nurturing third-party applications that leverage the protocol.

• DAOs: These are started by jump-starting a community. They gathered a mass of advocates through crowdfund and then decided what application to build.

Where next?

In the future, it would not be surprising if organizations design their functions around the communities they are a part of, or the foundational protocols they participate in. After all, geographic boundaries are evolving from physical borders to network edges and protocol compatibility.

Only time will tell if these new approaches which diverge from the established "product-first" SaaS model will succeed. Their viability, long-term prospects, and ability to generate substantial returns for those who provide starting capital is still uncertain. That being said, there is no doubt that the emergence of blockchain technology and its intersection with vibrant online communities has opened up new possibilities, inviting us to reimagine the very process of organizational genesis and growth.

Thank you to Steph, Gilbert, Jad, David, Spencer, Bethany, Jon Hillis, the Folklore Makers, Mirror, and so many others that have helped me clarify my thinking. This framework was first shared in Berlin (2022).

1. “Chandler defined strategy as ‘the determination of the long-term goals and objectives of an enterprise and the adoption of courses of action and the allocation of resources necessary for carrying out those goals’” Read more here

2. See The Evolution of Enterprise Organization Designs

3. See The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols for more details: “A protocol is a stratum of codified behavior that allows for the construction or emergence of complex coordinated behaviors at adjacent loci.”

4. Agents include all forms of human-ish coordination nodes in the network. For example: people, businesses, other entities, and human-managed autonomous bots as well.

5. Richard Barlett has an excellent framework for community-building called Microsolidarity. You can read more about it here: https://www.microsolidarity.cc/

Questions or comments? Reach out on twitter @rafathebuilder

Over the next 2 months, we will be encouraging all readers of our Telegram Public Drip to subscribe with a free token (below!). If you don’t have a crypto wallet, feel free to let me know (@rafathebuilder) and I can help onboard you.

As we continue to grow, this registration process will help us extend our membership beyond those that are paying for additional privileges such as the discussion forum, curation, and commissioning essays.

After the 2 months, onboarding will require the token and the Mirror newsletter will become the fully free and public interface.

→ Curious about the current masterplan? Continue reading below.

Membership Structure

It’s been exciting designing the membership model at Folklore. What I’ve settled on is a three tier system:

1. Free, no token (newsletter curation) (Subscribe to this Mirror!)

2. Free, with token, unlimited supply (public TG drip) (Collect Token Above)

3. Paid, with token, limited supply (private forum, events, content voting, and other contributor activities) (Pay for membership here)

Token holders will also be able to collect Badges for participating. Those that collect badges will receive a discount in renewing their membership. I hope that contributors will have an optional free membership based on their commitment to building Folklore’s Decentralised Autonomous Media Network.

Our Master Plan

At Folklore, long-form writing and funding is our focus. Essays, such as Finn’s recent one, will be collectible as Writing NFTs.

https://folklore.mirror.xyz/rGug0n494-NOppi16F-5BBpsu8uCvj36u0viJvMu908

However, these commissions will only be available to writers who have been curated by Folklore Curators (myself at the moment), to ensure high quality participation in our publishing.

Funds from writing NFT sales and memberships will be gathered in our treasury and distributed to the writers themselves (using on-chain splits).

Splits | Financial infrastructure for onchain teams

Contracts, apps, and developer tools for managing onchain treasuries, revenue, and expenses.

https://splits.org

Folklore will create a blueprint for self-funding media entities.

Our flywheel:

• Sell recurring memberships

• Curate long-form content and approve quality writers

• Commission new long-form content and sell them as Writing NFTs

• Distribute content to the author’s audience

• Sell recurring memberships

This flywheel will help us fund Folklore’s decentralised on-chain infrastructure and automated (AI-supported) collective curation.

In other words, Folklore is slowly becoming a 21st century digital magazine — or better known as “Decentralised Autonomous Media Network”.

Want to be part of the Folklore journey? Get our mid season membership today:

https://zora.co/collections/0x30fbfb1416803b3e46d82811ce7aea0a21af12ce

A big thanks to @more_reese, @FLobsien, @JoshNuttall and @cryptohun3y for the great feedback and encouragement.

If you are a member and curious about onboarding, you can follow the steps in this thread:

Welcome! This is our first Folklore community contribution, written by Finn Lobsien. Funds from the NFT will be split between Finn and the Folklore treasury.

Carved into marble by the city’s best sculptors, sacred relics once adorned the temple of Athena. Once, they supported Athenian worship of the goddess of battle. Today, the marble figures can testify to Roman marauding, Ottoman conquering and British tourism.

The Parthenon marbles’ involuntary journey from Athens’ Acropolis to the British Museum exemplifies our treatment of ancient religions: Once sacred objects, they now wow history buffs and bore their tired spouses.

The British acquisition of the Parthenon’s marbles is controversial. But Greece doesn’t want them back for the few thousand people who believe in Ancient Greek gods, but to preserve their cultural heritage. History had revealed Ancient Greek gods as weak: When the Turks desecrated the Acropolis by storing ammunition there, not one soldier was reported as being struck by lightning.

As empires collapse, religions decay and deteriorate into mere mythology. People once died, killed and conquered for belief systems now demoted to niche interests for a Sunday afternoon documentary binge. The same way modern European cities sandwich gothic churches between minimalist office towers, ancient religion reverberates in contemporary culture, even if we don’t sacrifice goats to Zeus anymore.

I believe religions exist in one of 3 categories: First is your conviction: the truth everyone should embrace to make the world a better place. Another is what others subscribe to: We might consider those religions—they’re of consequence in the world, but not our personal preference. And then there’s mythology: Belief systems practically no one subscribes to anymore.

This is not a hierarchy. All modes of thinking are useful. Mythology might never inspire the enthusiasm conviction does, but conviction doesn’t benefit from sober analysis like mythology:

From a distance of 2000+ years, we can view ancient religious rituals as useful (communal dancing and singing) or harmful (human sacrifices). From there, we can proliferate the useful and discard the harmful.

We rarely extend sober analysis to our convictions. The crypto/web3 industry gets both extolled (wagmi) and ridiculed (crypto bro) for its fervor. That’s because crypto is far more than blockchains, ZK-rollups and other technology: Crypto is a faith.

This essay reveals and examines the different elements that make crypto a religion. If you’re in web3, you might ‘react by defining your religion by telling me it’s not merely a faith. Or you might learn how to help shape a healthy culture that strengthens community. That’s the believer’s reaction to their convictions being revealed as other people’s mythology.

“Any belief you took in package (ex. Democrat, catholic, American) is suspect and should be re-evaluated from base principles.”

-Naval Ravikant

This essay aims to elucidate the beliefs, practices and values our industry operates under that make crypto a religion (your religion?). From the viewpoint of mythology, we can discover what we should keep and what’s harming this space.

You might use this knowledge to improve your marketing messages, evolve your own beliefs or simply augment your viewpoint.

II

During the NFT mania, people loved to hate NFTs (and anything blockchain) because of high energy consumption. Whenever I mentioned I work with NFTs, some people looked at me like I chop down the rainforest in my leisure time.

I doubt DALL-E 2 is powered by Sam Altman sweating in OpenAI’s basement on a bicycle generator. And yet, AI’s gorging of compute power seems to get far less criticism. Sure, AI has its haters. But they mostly hate the prospect of unemployment, ChatGPT’s middle manager palaver and societal risks. Crypto’s haters don’t seem to hate its consequences, but crypto itself. That’s because crypto is a belief system some in society believe in, while others don’t—which always leads to conflict.

Crypto is mimetically different from other tech frontiers like AI, robotics or biotech.

There’s a “Crypto Guy” subspecies of the „Tech Guy”. Black hoodies, beards and unnecessary math references abound in both, but Crypto Guy has claimed his own mimetic turf. „Crypto bro” is part of popular discourse and you can imagine things he might say.

This has two components:

1. Crypto comes from an ideological lineage. Its inventors cared about encryption, decentralization and privacy—which themselves require caring about the power of individuals to determine their own fate.

2. Crypto only works in multiplayer mode. On a deserted island with nothing but a computer, DALL-E 2 would provide entertainment. A blockchain without other wallets and smart contracts to interact with would be useless.

That second point matters: Crypto is a faith-based technology. Because it only works when others also use it, its usage requires not only technological, but also social construction: For crypto to be successful, we need a narrative that requires its success. The more people buy into the narrative, the more successful crypto will be.

The necessity of narrative is true for all multiplayer technologies and cultural innovations. It’s true for Instagram, which would die tomorrow if we all stopped using it. It’s true for trade unions, which would be pointless with only one member.

Unless there’s a strong narrative, the effort fails. And narrative innovations always stir the pot. The more a budding narrative differs from a mainstream one, the more intense the reaction.

I believe the strongest form of narrative is religion: A religion is a complex web of morals, stories, practices and much more (as we’ll see).

Compare religion to a highly effective story: When we saw the turtle with the straw in its nose, it horrified us—and contributed to many countries switching to (usually disintegrating and wood pulp-flavored) paper straws.

But it doesn’t penetrate into the spiritual or metaphysical and is thus not religious. A religion combines those (and more elements) to supercharge their influence and create a self-perpetuating movement.

As we’ll see, crypto is something like a religion. Now that we’ve established that crypto requires a narrative, let’s deconstruct crypto’s religion and see the components that make its believers so fervent.

III

Morality

Few technologies have built-in ethics, notions of what’s right and wrong. Crypto bubbled up from an underground mailing list of privacy enthusiasts. To crypto fans, there are right and wrong uses of blockchains.

Compare that to AI: People debate AI ethics, but there’s no overarching morality beyond a vague „let’s hope this doesn’t ruin civilization“.

While it lacks a moral framework as concrete as the Ten Commandments, crypto emerged with a moral framework:

• Decentralization is good, banks are bad.

• Individual power is good, government power is bad.

• Controlling your privacy is good, wholesale data collection is bad.

Morality is fundamental to religious belief. With morality defined, other components blossom: You can define your ideal world and use that vision to inspire believers.

An Ideal World

Many Christians believe they must build the kingdom of God—a world where He reigns supreme and humans live according to the Bible.

Once you have morality, you can derive what the world should be like. This is persuasive because it outlines the future believers are striving for. It’s also more concrete and visual than an abstract set of ethics.

The vision of an ideal world exists outside of religions, too. Think of Basecamp’s „It doesn’t have to be crazy at work“, which outlines how work could be more peaceful. Or think about communism’s vision of the workers paradise, free of capitalist tyrants.

Crypto has its own scripture about what the world ought to be like: Balaji Srinivasan’s The Network State describes digital-native countries that manifest the freedom to live how you want, a lack of unwanted authorities and ideological alignment (basically the promise of every utopian world vision ever). 

The Network State envisions the world crypto aims to bring about. This vision helps people rally behind something and creates a goal for believers to strive for.

Compare that to AI—there are many ways AI might change the world. But the AI community isn’t united in one ideal scenario it aims to bring about.

But the idea of an ideal world brought about by crypto requires something else:

Prophecies

Most religions feature prophecies, often delivered by oracles. These are predictions within the context of the religion. It’s curious that crypto folks use exactly those two words to describe things they’re building.

Crypto is rife with predictions—both from priests like Michael Saylor stating “They will get the knowledge and you will get the money” and from ordinary folks making price predictions.

Predictions serve as a confirmation of the validity of the belief system and the oracle itself. If an oracle is correct, we believe it more and thus trust the belief system it operates in more. This is why prophecies are often vague: To increase the likelihood of them being correct.

Perhaps the promise of “decentralization” itself is a sort of prophecy—a vague notion that things will be better, but without falsifiable predictions when or how it’ll happen.

Hunger for Expansion

One of the best tests for the strength of a brand is how well it translates to other industries.

To take an example from Seth Godin: It’s easy to imagine the kind of hotel Nike would open, but hard to imagine the kind of shoe Hilton would produce.

There’s an analog for technologies: You can take almost every industry and imagine how it might change with ubiquitous crypto. That’s not true for other technologies—how would banking change with ubiquitous biotech?

Perhaps it’s this versatility combined with the promise of interoperability that gives crypto the hunger to usurp ever more areas of commerce, culture and work. Whether it’s this reason or simply faith, crypto seems to be a belief system capable of permeating every area of the economy.

That’s a stark contrast to hobbies known for proselytizing, like CrossFit. CrossFitters are fervent, but they’re not trying to take over adjacent activities. There’s no CrossFit way to meditate, cycle or practice yoga.

That being said, crypto’s religious facets go beyond the metaphysical:

Initiation Rituals

Belief systems usually have some type of initiation. These rituals are often deliberately pointless, expensive or weird.

An example is head shaving, which some cults apply to new initiates. These rituals usually build a stronger commitment to the belief system.

Current members must know you’re joining the community because of true conviction. What better way to invent something so utterly pointless that there could be no other reason to do it than to show your devotion?

If you take a militant atheist stance, you might explain this game-theoretically as costly signaling (which I wrote about here). And costly signaling has a corollary: the sunk-cost fallacy. The more money, time or emotions you’ve already committed, the less likely you are to abandon it.

Initiation rituals act like a ratchet and make it way less likely that someone leaves.

Crypto, too, has weird rituals:

• Seed phrases: Keeping 12 random words secure is a weird activity—one that might trigger your brain to believe more.

• Buying your first Bitcoin makes you a member of a community that can use alternative payment rails and be independent of institutions (theoretically)

• Even getting rugged (buying into a project that subsequently gets abandoned) is seen as a rite of passage.

Specialized language

Any subculture builds its own specialized language. This isn’t specific to religions, but is always a part of them. Wagmi, gm and fren are signals to show you belong to the community and create coherency.

New Identities

All major religions have (or used to have) a tradition for name change upon entering. Popes and monks often change their names as a result of being „reborn“.

A new identity is persuasive: You can get rid of your past, the belief system promises, and reinvent yourself. Crypto also gives people new identities with its otherwise odd insistence on pseudonymity and anonymity. ENS names and profile pictures are some of the best-selling NFT categories. They’re also the core ingredients to an identity: A name and an appearance.

Whether this is good or bad, it contributes to making crypto more religious.

Saint Worship

It’s hard to worship abstract ideals. Humans need things they can see and interact with. That’s why every religion creates saints.

Crypto also seems to worship saints: Satoshi Nakamoto (whose second coming some seem to be waiting for) and Vitalik Buterin seem to embody the principles of crypto for many.

Origin Story

The vanishing of Satoshi Nakamoto and the untouched $18 billion fortune make many speculate about his (their?) identity and gives it a mysterious aura.

All religions need an origin story. The virgin birth of Christ and his eventual crucifixion is Christianity’s. Buddhism has the Buddha finding enlightenment under a tree.

The Satoshi story matters because it somehow shows crypto as „pure“. The fact that Satoshi keeps holding somehow proves to believers that it’s about more than speculation.

What would happen if all of those coins were dumped into a Coinbase account tomorrow? Besides the market pressure decreasing the price, I also suspect many would stop believing in crypto’s ideals.

Fragmentation & Civil Wars

Subcultures, movements and religions rarely remain united. Things as essential as political parties and as benign as musical genres splinter when one part of the group is dissatisfied.

Shiite and Sunni muslims are an example of an eternal rivalry, but there are less bloody examples. Music scenes often have a straight-edge subgroup rebelling against rampant drug use. Hustlegrind self-help saw the uprising of the self-care-yoga rebels. And bitcoin saw Ethereum.

In every social group, the dynamic is the same, with a subgroup declaring:

„We’re the real (group members) because (group) was always about (principle) and (object of discussion) never mattered that much.“

The clash can produce anything from peaceful separation to heated arguments and even armed conflicts.

While this splintering is normal, it shows something important: People don’t leave because of their dissatisfaction. No, they care enough about one aspect of the subculture to improve it.

The fact that crypto is constantly splintering further shows us that there is some persistent belief—some ideal people see in it that they believe they can pursue better.

Christianity had a famous rift between protestants and catholics. Today, we have presbyterians, lutherans, evangelics, Roman Catholics, Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox and many more.

Religious Fanatics and Extremism

Whenever enough people care about a belief system, someone will care too much. Religious fanatics sound delusional to outsiders, but energize their followers and spread fringe beliefs.

The most prominent crypto extremist group are bitcoin maximalists. The best example of a crypto extremist is Michael Saylor. He conjures up far-reaching theories on livestreams and tweets with takes as mystical as:

„#Bitcoin is a swarm of cyber hornets serving the goddess of wisdom, feeding on the fire of truth, exponentially growing ever smarter, faster, and stronger behind a wall of encrypted energy.“

Or as dogmatic as:

„#Bitcoin is hope“

(I unfortunately cannot present further evidence as I find his rants hard to tolerate)

On one podcast I listened to, Saylor spoke about building a wristwatch that earned the holder $100k per year. Whether you believe his sermons or shake your head at them, he takes an extreme position.

Extremism isn’t exclusive to religions. But whenever something can produce extremism, it signals that it’s about more than the technology itself.

Holidays

Yearly reminders of (sub)cultural events are common artifacts of religions. In the West, Christianity’s holidays are so deeply embedded in culture that they’re state-mandated.

Crypto, too, is starting to produce holidays. Perhaps the most pertinent is bitcoin pizza day, when an early bitcoin believer bought a pizza for 8000 BTC.

This is no national holiday, but it’s an indicator that a culture is forming around crypto which believers consider worth passing down to future generations.

Sacred Texts & Stories

Most religions, professions and subcultures have a canon of essential stories. These range from scripture to folklore and from books to aphorisms.

In a way, this is quality assurance. It guarantees a base layer of knowledge all members have. This strengthens coherency and simplifies collaboration.

Religious texts like the Bible are the obvious example, but there are more. Entrepreneurship has Good to Great, copywriting The Boron Letters. If you’re a manager, you’ve read The Goal while Zig Ziglar rings a bell for many salespeople.

Crypto, too, has texts of which most believers have read at least a few:

• Bitcoin whitepaper

• The fable of the dragon tyrant

• The Byzantine generals problem

• The Sovereign Individual

• Ethereum Whitepaper

• The Network State

• Hyperstructures

• Fat Protocols

A16z has even compiled a list called Crypto Canon. The word canon has religious origins: In the 15th century, it was defined as „The Scriptures, the books of the Bible accepted by the Christian church,“

The fact that crypto has a canon is evidence that crypto is a belief system. If it was just a technology, we wouldn’t need a philosophical base layer. After all, there’s no required reading for most pieces of machinery or infrastructure.

Hierarchies of Believers

Most religions feature a scale of devoutness—stratification based on how well you follow the belief system’s tenets. The Christian who doesn’t have sex before marriage, never curses and volunteers feel more Christian than those who go to church once a week to meet their friends.

Crypto also features a scale of belief based on following rules that involve ever more inconvenience.

• Buying and holding your crypto on an exchange like Coinbase or Binance is seen as naive and risky—like you’re breaking an important rule.

• Holding your crypto in a non-custodial wallet like MetaMask is „more crypto“, but comes with challenges. Managing your seed phrase and managing every transaction is riskier and harder.

• A hardware wallet exemplifies „being crypto“. It’s what people always think they should do. But it also adds complexity—in addition to your seed phrase, you now have to safeguard a physical object and approve each transaction with it.

You could also create a hierarchy vector based on privacy that extends from public KYC exchanges to non-KYC exchanges to crypto mixers and eventually reaches running your own node.

Those are a few components that make crypto more a religion than a technology. But these properties aren’t unique to crypto. We mentioned CrossFit before, and there are many other hobbies and industries that have at least a few of these attributes.

IV

Is everything a cult?

There’s no mathematical equation to determine whether something is a religion, a hobby, a philosophy or an industry. Sociological concepts like these elude clear boundaries, especially for an amateur like me.

But I think there’s something like a sliding scale from the purely utilitarian (turning screws at a factory to receive a paycheck) to the purely faith-based (eschewing worldly belongings and pleasures to move to a monastery).

I’d argue that cult-ey hobbies (CrossFit, Dungeons and Dragons, Beliebers, Potterheads, etc.) don’t quite qualify. Potterheads have scripture while CrossFit has practices and Beliebers worship saints—but there’s something missing.

At least as a dilettante in religious research, I feel all of these lack the sweeping vision of crypto that places it closer to a religion. You can imagine what a crypto-powered central bank, a music industry or trade union looks like. Not so for music fans.

In his landmark essay Life After Lifestyle, Toby Shorin describes how lifestyle brands seem to be concluding their lifecycle and projects a new frontier in commerce: Faith.

He writes:

So to me, the problem is not with the buying, nor even with the culture-grifting of brands, but with some kind of insufficiency on the part of the companies themselves. If the meanings they have on offer are starved versions of cultural membership, then perhaps, I started to feel, the brands aren’t going far enough.

This rings true. We all witnessed the mobile revolution and the social media revolution. We voted with our dollars, eyeballs and mental health to make them happen. But nobody feels like they’re part of something (let alone something good) with those?

Perhaps crypto is the first thing on a new commercial frontier, a shapeless amalgam. It’s more than a technology, but less than a cult. It’s more than a collective, but less than a corporation.

When this shapeless entity takes form, it will manifest in thoughts and actions in the real world. This might be a wonderful boon or a catastrophe, but it will most likely be both. We’d be well-advised to listen to Shorin:

The realization that producing culture is about producing types of personhood is the central issue of this new cultural economy. Systems of belief are sticky, compelling. Culture can be generational. This is both the opportunity and the risk.

In the most cynical version of this new world, culture designers are inculcating types of guy who are profitable. The customer lifetime value of a believer is potentially far greater than a user. Founders could easily design a culture with bells and whistles, upsell opportunities, and a permanent model of extraction. (…)

In the best version of this world, culture designers are inculcating people who are caring, giving, and selfless, or who take action to improve the world and the lives of those around them in some ways. Encouraging practices that are lifegiving and loving and meaningful on their own merit.

By now, I hope I’ve convinced you that crypto is a faith. Neither you nor I will change that. But we can influence whether it’s an extractive faith that wreaks havoc—or a nourishing contribution to culture.

V

Conspicuously absent from our treatment of religion here has been God. Belief in deities is perhaps the most obvious qualifier for religions. Crypto, of course, doesn’t believe in a „man in the sky“—and neither do other subcultures closer to religion on our continuum.

Crypto doesn’t have a „man in the sky“. Proclamations of imminent, omnipresent and omnipotent AI are tech’s idea of God—one entity that rules and explains everything.

But those aren’t prevalent in crypto. Perhaps the blockchain itself is a God ersatz—the entity all of crypto serves, the single source of truth that stores all information worth storing and has all the answers. And, as in Christianity’s kingdom of God—the blockchain rules with more power than any individual developer.

As I write that point, I don’t quite believe it. It seems too far-fetched, too outlandish, too… weird? But maybe I’m just not a true believer.

Thanks to Rafa, Lia Godoy, Livster, buz and Kelly Kim for feedback and editing and to Ian By Design for contributing artwork.

That’s a wrap for this first community essay. Collect it below to support both Folklore and Finn. For all (aspiring) member links about Folklore, check out our Linktree.

“What’s culturally relevant is valuable to own”

Finn, Folklore Member

Welcome back! It’s been a long few months and we continue to read and discuss together about online culture, communities, and how they are influencing our lives.

Community Updates

As of today, we’ve curated 200 pieces of content. The running list is available here in a google spreadsheet

If you are a Season 1 Member:

• Collect a Genesis member badge

• Curate with us at OnPulse

A reminder that our linktree has all our community links.

Upcoming Events

• Join us at ETHDenver for Breakfast on March 5th

  • You can get a token to join the event here (free for members)

• This week we will publish our first essay by our own community member Finn. Funds from the Writing NFTs will be split between Finn and the Folklore Community Treasury

Other News

• I’m working on a new project called “LOCAL” helping bridge physical makers to the emerging on-chain economy. Learn more here.

Overall, a note of gratitude to everyone helping build the Folklore space. If you feel lost or confused, read first about decentralised media networks and then about Folklore’s participation process.

Not a member? Join us.

We’ve spent 6 months exploring our current technology. We invite you to purchase a mid-season membership if you’d like to join our journey. The price includes the rest of Season 1, likely until the summer, and Season 2.

https://zora.co/collections/0x30fbfb1416803b3e46d82811ce7aea0a21af12ce

A piece of our collective mind

Our community has curated over 200 pieces of content over the past 6 months. And in the Forum, we’ve had the opportunity to learn together. Here are a few choice quotes from our dialogue.

If a quote is yours, message @rafathebuilder on Telegram to claim a special badge.

labyrinths never go anywhere. the labyrinth is always exactly where it is and how it is, and there's only one entry and it's also the exit. no matter where you go in a labyrinth, you always end the journey exactly where the journey started.

Cathedrals are more dynamic. there are various rooms, interconnected hallways, and multiple entries and exits. there are options, which is very much... like... the interior of a labyrinth... right? a lot of decisions.

Entering a room in a cathedral though? only one entry/exit. so that's a labyrinth. whatever story is told in that room has to return to how it began…

Tactics are what works in the meta, but might not work tomorrow—i.e. tips on running Facebook Ads or how to launch a PFP NFT collection. And the meta creates imitation because it works quickly.

Principles are timeless, i.e. focusing your startup on a hyper-specific use case before scaling it. Use of principles can create a meta and let you reap big rewards from that innovation…

One way to maintain a common purpose and group cohesion in larger groups is by defining a strong sense of shared identity with a clear and reiterated purpose, or even a collective mythology…

Beauty in a digital is more about the bones than the skin, more about structure and less about facades, more about content than styles…

Everything online has some stamp of human on it. In a similar way cities are full of right angles (a human invention), there are a lot of proverbial right angles online. In nature, a true right angle doesn’t exist…

perhaps the 'compulsion for production' means that we enjoy solving puzzles that we can see (forward motion) and activation of visual senses… in the coming years as we experiment with how to create greater depth of experiences complemented by digital tech, we might be able to recapture the art of leisure not just as an activity but as a mindset….

Software is only half of the game. The other half is trained cybrarians, knowledge gardeners, and knowledge ecologists…

The battle for “cozy internet” has just begun…

Community management is a kind of infinite scroll where, whether you want or mean it or not, you come to be a node - and it’s hard to boundary that feeling & the privilege / complexity of that position into what we call a job…

The hyper financialization mindset of web3 makes for the hyper productization of community as most peoples moats in web3…

In Focus: Online Communities

Our Vanishing "Third Places" - PlannersWeb

Informal neighborhood gathering places were, for many years, an integral part of our cities and towns. Since World War II, they've been vanishing. An exploration of why "third places" are so important to the health of our communities.

https://plannersweb.com

https://truecenterpublishing.com/psycyber/disinhibit.html

The difference between Communities, Groups, and Networks

The difference between Communities, Groups, and Networks Taxonomy of social forms, part 1. Our traditional communities are evaporating. The advance of communication and transportation technologies ...

https://medium.com

Vertical communities

The internet has changed what "community" means.

https://www.noahpinion.blog

Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution | Meaningness

How muggles and sociopaths invade and undermine creative subcultures; and how to stop them.

https://meaningness.com

https://web.archive.org/web/20101012105003/http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/

Internet communities: Otters vs. Possums

Most of my friends have been on the internet, and I've spent many years as part of various internet communities, many of which I have moderated as either part of the mod team or the sole creator. (this also applies to irl communities, but the pattern is more obvious with online ones) There's a pattern that...

https://knowingless.com

Credible exit

To avoid lock in, you need the ability for the user to credibly exit.

https://newsletter.squishy.computer

https://every.to/napkin-math/content-moderation-double-bind-theory

We will feast on excellent content, explore new theories, and nurture opportunities to craft, decorate and garden.

We continue on our journey to learn about digital cultures and how the internet is shaping our world. A few updates:

• By next week, we’ll likely hit 100 curated articles (currently at 96!)

• A shout out to the 77 Folks participating in the Forum conversation. This is >50% of token holders.

• We’ve launched a new community curation process, details below.

• We will be launching a new free-tier membership NFT soon.

• We have a new linktree gathering all our community links. In our next update, we will share an update on how to contribute.

Overall, a note of gratitude to everyone helping build the Folklore space. If you feel lost or confused, read first about decentralised media networks and then about Folklore’s participation process.

Welcome to OnPulse, our community curation tool

Last week, Forefront invited us to participate in an experiment. Moving forward, everyone with a Folklore token will be able to participate in communal curation of articles that will surface in our "DRIP".

How to get started:

1. Download the chrome extension here

2. Sign-in with the wallet where you have the Folklore Member Token

3. Visit any website, and you can "bookmark" to our community curated library - make sure to be on the website when you click the extension.

4. Visit our curated library here (https://www.onpulse.xyz/folklore) (You'll need to sign-in with the same wallet)

The curated library also allows you to upvote and add comments to articles that you read, so you can have gentle, long-term conversations about the articles we curate together.

This experiment will continue through the first 2 seasons at Folklore.

In Focus: Identities and Interactions

https://www.metalabel.xyz/magazine/features/how-culture-is-made

https://humanparts.medium.com/how-to-internet-6c379e75c8e0#.7x48lygqf

Dirt | Substack

Daily newsletter about entertainment. Click to read Dirt, a Substack publication.

https://dirt.substack.com

The Private Life of Generation Z

Generation Z, those born after 1997, are the canaries in the coal mine of privacy.

https://www.vml.com

https://www.pastemagazine.com/comedy/tik-tok-comedy/

Brené with Esther Perel on Partnerships, Patterns, and Paradoxical Relationships

Listen to this episode from Unlocking Us with Brené Brown on Spotify. I'm talking to Esther Perel, psychotherapist, New York Times bestselling author, and podcaster, about relationships in the pandemic and beyond. She blew my mind around some patterns that Steve and I have discovered over the past months in lockdown.

https://spotify.com

All earnings from collection of this post will be split 50-50 between the non-profit I support (Obras del País) and Folklore’s community treasury. Treasury funds will be fully utilized to commission new essays related to our new digital realms.

We will feast on excellent content, explore new theories, and nurture opportunities to craft, decorate and garden.

Our journey preparations are complete, and the adventure through these strange digital realms has begun. Onward:

• As of last week, we’ve shared 59 long-form articles in the Folklore Drip and welcomed 150 members to the community. We are sold-out.

• As of today, Folklore is a community of members with shared interests; it was “an extended dinner conversation” on Telegram discussing online culture and how media is evolving.

• As of tomorrow, we will move one step towards becoming a decentralized autonomous media network. It is time to begin work towards our second milestone: commissioned writing. (👀 New post coming soon 👀)

Beforehand, some community updates. If you feel lost or confused, read first about decentralised media networks and then about Folklore’s participation process.

Community Member Reminders

Once again, I hope you are enjoying the ride. Some quick reminders:

• IMPORTANT: If you have a membership token, make sure to join our guild by (1) navigating to this link and (2) joining the right telegram groups.

• OPTIONAL: If you want to become a contributor, join the planning google doc by (1) navigating to this link and (2) reviewing the token-gated google document.

• NOT A MEMBER? If you didn’t get the chance to participate in this season, you can:

  • Buy a token on the secondary market (HINT: find someone on Twitter with the token by looking at the collectors of the membership token here).

  • Wait until after we finish commissioning the new work. We’ll open membership based on voting participation (capped at 150 active members). Priority will be determined by amount of Folklore Writing NFTs collected on Mirror (like this one).

If you have any issues, reach out on Twitter (@rafathebuilder).

In Focus: Digital Products

Social Objects: Notes on Knitting in America

I recently bought a classic, cherry-finish River City hourglass. It was the first time I deliberately bought something to serve as a social object, which I'll define as any tangible entity that can catalyze a characteristic social chemistry. In this case, the hourglass helped me tweak the ambiance of a writers meetup I run in the Washington, DC area.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com

Corteiz Goods

The rebirth of subculture

https://andjelicaaa.substack.com

Developing My Personal Product Language

"Issue": 021

https://hipcityreg.substack.com

https://towardsdatascience.com/machine-thinking-conveyance-and-the-future-of-design-be2af8c7533c

https://blog.gnosis.pm/inventories-not-identities-7da9a4ec5a3e

Life After Lifestyle

After everything has become a lifestyle brand, the frontier of cultural creation is now faith itself.

https://subpixel.space

Never-Ending Niches

The Internet changed how media competes to focus and quality, but quality is defined by your niche.

https://stratechery.com

The Strongest Crypto Gaming Thesis

Why we're building @darkforest_eth

https://gubsheep.substack.com

https://holly.mirror.xyz/54ds2IiOnvthjGFkokFCoaI4EabytH9xjAYy1irHy94

In Focus: Community Contributions

https://www.atlasofplaces.com/essays/on-the-phenomenon-of-bullshit-jobs/

Chase Chapman

@chaserchapman

New podcast episode w/ @cryptohun3y

+ Decentralized media
+ Propaganda
+ Free will

ALSO how DAOs should be creating + leveraging media

othersidepod.xyz/episode/51

54

8:45 AM • Sep 18, 2022

All earnings from collection of this post will be split 50-50 between the non-profit I support (Obras del País) and Folklore’s community treasury. Treasury funds will be fully utilized to commission new essays related to our new digital realms.