A fresh bud opens

The process of trying to make a Clanker project support itself. $petal is an artcoin on Base.

https://www.sonyasupposedly.com

I generated a lot of red rose images to support Chic's promo campaign for the SHAKE remix, and some are too cool to leave on the cutting room floor.

For the sake of completion, I'm also including this one that I minted on Rodeo:

And these four that I shared on Farcaster in Chic's channel:

Shake. But don't shatter.

In closing, heads up that Chic is hosting a "SHAKE for Mental Health" event on May 15 — RSVP on events.xyz.

Lastly, buy $petal, tyia 😛🌷

First, Petalcoin was born, conjured into being with help from a friendly robot. The ticker is $petal. I bought $500 USD worth of the supply (1.6+ billion $petal) to get things rolling.

Then I shared my project concept with the Higher community:

• all $petal clanker rewards will be used to purchase $higher
• that $higher will be used to commission artists, who will explore the themes of fragility and resilience using floral imagery and metaphors
• the artwork will be distributed to $petal holders

I sent 100,000 $petal to each of the artists on my wishlist, plus a few supportive friends.

It was time to run some experiments. I did a lot of vibe exploration using AI and collage. A few favorites:

More can be found on my Rodeo profile, or in the /petal channel, including simpatico art by others.

I particularly love these pieces by @serminmin, @gusa, and @tanishq:

Petal has worked with two artists so far. Aoife O'Dwyer created spring yearnings:

This engagement was structured as a promotion to spread awareness of $petal:

• I paid a commission of 7,000 $higher for Aoife to make something Petal-inspired.

• She got to keep the mint proceeds (0.0047 ETH after subtracting Rodeo fees and the cost to mint 5 copies for herself).

• I sent 10,000 $petal to each of the 69 minters who weren't Aoife or me.

I'm happy with how this went — Aoife's average mint count on Rodeo is ~70 and we exceeded that by 31 mints! Indicating that people were intrigued by $petal... or perhaps just by the prospect of free money, however little it's worth at the moment 😛

The second artist is musical dynamo Chic Bangs. Petal contributed 7,000 $higher to sponsor the debut of "SHAKE (Custom Model Remix)," which is currently ongoing. Higher legend @lght.eth also helped fund the drop.

One lucky collector will receive a prize of 2,000 $higher, and Chic already rewarded everyone who supported her launch post with 55 $higher each. I think she has other plans up her sleeve as well... which might involve $petal 🌺

I'm taking a risk with this drop.

I know that music has lost a lot of value, but it is the medium I have poured my heart and soul into. This is a way of reclaiming the worth that I believe musicians deserve and I fully trust others feel the same.

— Chic Bangs

Worth noting: trading volume of $petal has been insignificant to the point of nonexistence. This surprised me, since the random memecoin I posted to test ClankPad saw almost $26k USD volume, leading to ~$100 in creator rewards.

I thought, erroneously, that a project I took seriously would attract some actual human wallets in addition to the presumable bots that bought $BUNSRUS 😆 Maybe it was counterproductive, at least in the short term, to grab $500 USD of $petal right after creating it? Who knows.

The reality of crypto is that people are only interested in buying the assets they think other people will want to buy in the future. Petalcoin has not managed to cross that psychological threshold. Which is fine — I am not entitled to anyone's support, financial or otherwise!

However, this does make me question the commercial viability of the project. I'm roughly $650 deep so far. I can afford it, but that's not a trivial amount of money for me. Should I cut my losses? How much more am I comfortable spending to learn whether $petal is worth pursuing? I'm unsure about the final answer, but I'm not ready to quit yet.

I said "Season 0" was about discovery. "Season 1" will focus on refinement, especially of the aesthetic. I hope to develop a distinctive $petal look — one that can be remixed by artists with varying signature styles, but remain recognizable. A brand identity, I guess.

Frankly, I struggle with this kind of thing. I am a writer, not a designer. That's why I want to commission my artist friends — so they can beautifully depict the ideas that are meaningful to me! Point being, I'm not sure how to approach this challenge... but I'll figure it out in the coming weeks.

I'd love to hear your thoughts and suggestions. And if you're interested in supporting the process, buy $petal! Or send $higher to petalcoin.eth, I'll accept that too ↑ Best of all, create with your interpretation of the Petal ethos, and tag me (@sonyasupposedly) or post in /petal.

A lot of startup communication work is tactics. What day of the week should we publish, post on this platform or that platform or both, which business partner to feature next… It’s easy to get stuck in the weeds making small decisions.

Granted, those decisions do need to be made — the daily grind is important. As my boss Will said recently, “the potential in this space is VAST and the journey will be long, but we will get there one week of shipping at a time.” That applies to spreading the word as much as it does building the product. Each post or partnership becomes a chance to reinforce the core message.

Well, what message should we be hammering home? Why does any of this matter? Once you know the answer to that question, repeat it frequently, because:

1. only a small subset of your audience is listening at any given moment,

2. repetition leads to remembering.

You better know what you want people to remember, so you can repeat it. And repeat it.

You better pick the right thing to repeat.

Be ready to repeat it for a long time. The most powerful narratives shape how people imagine the future as it dawns, over the course of years. (We’ll return to this point.)

Pour your heart and soul into building beautiful software, but all that effort is irrelevant unless the product does a job that people care about.

Y Combinator has a great motto: “Make something people want.” Emphasis on want. Not something people need, because it’s too easy to decide on someone else’s behalf that they need XYZ because it will be good for them. Meanwhile they don’t want it, so they ignore you.

How do you figure out what people actually want? That may not be easy, but it’s simple — Colin Dowling, self-proclaimed “best B2B cold emailer on planet earth,” boiled down the psychology of purchasing:

People buy 4 things and 4 things only. Ever. Those 4 things are time, money, sex, and approval/peace of mind. If you try selling something other than those 4 things you will fail.

For example, you’re trading the minutes spent reading this post for the sake of #4, approval and peace of mind. Don’t bristle; it’s not a bad thing. You want to assuage the itch of curiosity, to satisfy yourself that you’re not missing any important information about succeeding in the onchain economy.

This impulse ensures that your common knowledge about local norms and expectations stays current. You hope that your cultural facility will maintain or increase your standing in the community — the modern deployment of an age-old survival instinct.

That’s how to get people to do things: activate the deep programming that animates the meat puppet. (Hmm, I wonder why people find marketing creepy…)

Another piece of the puzzle is making something that enough people want. Marc Andreessen wrote about product-market fit in 2007:

In a great market — a market with lots of real potential customers — the market pulls product out of the startup.

The market needs to be fulfilled and the market will be fulfilled, by the first viable product that comes along.

Let’s say you nail all of the above. You’re making something people want, something that appeases one of the core urges. And it’s something that a lot of people want. How do you reach them, in order to flip the internal switches you need to flip?

With a meme. A catchy, sticky, irresistible little packet of information that yearns to be repeated and spread. The most effective meme marketing is not reposting funny image macros, but seeding the information landscape with your message. (Edward Bernays has himself become a meme for a reason!)

"You're not just shipping a product — you're shipping an ecosystem of ideas, identity, and solutions." — jihad (@jaesmail)

Meme and memory have the same root. A memory is inherently a copy; a map that becomes its own territory. A meme is an idea that engrains itself, a memory in motion. The term meme, which naturally is itself a meme, was popularized by Richard Dawkins as a sort of conceptual gene, information-theoretic DNA, with a side of Girardian mimesis (imitation — again, copying).

As with genes, what is amazing about memes is they spread with fidelity, but also that they mutate. The specific form of each almost-perfect copy competes with every other copy; the fittest wins. Fitness is reproductive potential, actualized. It’s not “may the best meme win,” it’s that “best meme” can only signify a meme that wins. That is what memes do.

This evolutionary dynamic makes memes particularly suited for conveying longterm visions. Successful memes are robust enough to remain relevant as circumstances change, yet flexible enough to adapt along with the surrounding context.

This is why Splits is betting on “10-year narratives.” These are stories of the future that capture — if you’ll excuse a moment of jargon — the nexus of near-term technological innovation:

We want to understand what goals and needs will persist even as the means of accomplishing them changes. It is the combination of permanence and change that offers promising opportunities.

A successful 10-year narrative is a meme, and as such it cannot be arbitrary. It must respond to the structure of the market, the information landscape, and most of all, human nature. In other words, it has to be true, to the extent that predicting the future ever can be. Furthermore, promulgation of the meme should actively help it become true.

Crafting such a meme is easier said than done. The point is that tactical communication decisions aren't just about reach or engagement metrics. They're about sustaining narratives that tap into fundamental human desires — memes that will reproduce, evolve, and spread the "10-year narrative" that connects to the product.

If you enjoyed this post, you should subscribe to the Splits blog.

The final poem, assembled from pieces of the other three.

SUN-FLUSHED PETALS
BEING AND FADING
WOUNDS IN THE DARK

SUBTLE ELEMENTS OF DECAY
BOTH INTIMATE AND VAST
VEIL OF TWILIGHT AIR

TIME ITSELF BECOMES A STRANGER'S FACE
CRUSHED, GLITTERING
GREEN ACID DAWN

GROUNDED AND INFINITE
EXPANDING INTO THE DIGITAL SUBLIME

The first complete co-creation.

Sky melting.
Ancient glass
where colors conspire.

Time itself becomes a stranger's face.

Sun-flushed petals wait, upturned
like wounds in the dark.

Stem, thorn, the jagged edge of
each curling leaf
slash against the evening haze.

Deep blue settles.
A single breath between
being and fading.

Meditation on process and finality.

A single rose in
various stages of bloom.

Sky transitions from deep indigo to velvet aqua.

Petals should be:
delicate pink,
almost translucent.

Subtle elements of decay
emerge at the edges.
Glimpse past
the crisp central focus.

Intimate —
intimate and vast.

Scrying the flower
through a veil of twilight air.

The pain of change and elation of nextness.

Rose silhouetted against a gradient void,
petals torn and floating.

Deep indigo bleeds into glass shards:
splintered, scattered, crushed,
glittering.

Harsh contrasts.
Pink, electric. Blue midnight.
Green thorns. Green acid dawn.
Sharp edges.
Ragged edges.

Petals fragmenting into particles of light.
Pixels of potential glitch and transform.

Evolution, perpetual becoming,
grounded and infinite,
consciousness expanding into
the digital sublime.

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this, please subscribe at my website.

If you’re on Farcaster or Crypto Twitter, you know that AI agents hooked up to crypto rails — however indirectly — are all the rage right now. Despite the term “agent” with its implication of autonomy, currently these bots need a fair amount of human hand-holding to actually do things onchain.

These AI personas talk a big game, simply because they’re as highly suggestible and puppyishly enthusiastic as they are hyper-articulate. At least today’s players… or are they still NPCs until they can execute their own transactions? Yet another lens casts the orchestrators and stewards of the bots as performance artists, and their creations as digital golems.

However, efforts are underway to transcend the current logistical limitations, setting each plucky AI free on social media with a wallet and… a dream? Do prompts count as aspirations for electric lambs? Either way, AI-led DAOs are what Santa is bringing the accelerationists for Christmas.

In the meantime people are using today’s relatively curtailed bots as a Schelling point for typically frenzied speculation on the next iteration, which seems imminent and will be legitimately groundbreaking. Traders are betting that there's a first-mover advantage in terms of mindshare and brand recognition. And there very well might be; that’s why we have the term “first-mover advantage” in the first place.

Often, whosoever moves first ends up in first place. More precisely, the party or entity with clout who moves first. If you’re not known, you’re useless for coordinating the mob. As always, the Matthew principle reigns supreme in crypto.

Snark aside, it’s crucial to point out: using AI to write social media content is not the interesting part. That’s been done (to hilarious effect) for more than a decade via Markov chains, long before the LLM revolution came along and gave AI the capability to write hustlebro LinkedIn exhortations as well as Dadaist shitposts. Of course, ChatGPT, Claude, and the like are genuinely an enormous leap in AI capability. They handily pass the Turing test in far more scenarios than ELIZA, and probably the Voight-Kampff too.

The interesting part is that AI agents with their own money, with the ability to distribute and receive funds, to mint NFTs or create tokens, can engage in this kind of economic loop:

earn eth
buy higher
commission work in higher
mint work
earn more eth
repeat

??? infinite money glitch for an AI curator ???

— Aether creator Martin

Zora cofounder Jacob Horne astutely responded, “The key variable is that the works’ substance and quality scales over time and is worth the attention. Otherwise it’ll eventually downtrend.” One certainly hopes quality will be a factor. But in this context the arbiter of excellence is market performance, the aesthetic standards of which have proved, uh, variable.

That said, in the immortal words of Benjamin Graham, popularized by Warren Buffett: “In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run it is a weighing machine.”

You might already know the crypto version: In the short run, the market is a casino but in the long run it’s a global computer.

Edit: How serendipitous, Martin just posted "Proposal for Continued Development of Aether":

martin ↑ on Warpcast

[DRAFT] Proposal for Continued Development of Aether Open to feedback and questions! https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/92dff9ee-910e-4485-28f7-5ad526451f00/original https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/7a8313e1-0d7d-4443-ecb6-6255703f1400/original

Farcaster

If you liked this, please subscribe to the newsletter on my actual website. I sent occasional emails.