Grab your copy of Ambiguities for Discontinuities at Metalabel on June 13, 2023.

We'd love to hear from you all about the experience of making this album. Tell us about the instruments you used and the conversation you had internally. How did you discuss what you were making and how you were going to make it?

One of the things that kept coming up was trying to maintain a mixture of electronic and electroacoustic elements with simple acoustic instruments. We were excited by the confluence of these two worlds, the analog and the digital world. During each session, we created a solid acoustical space that allowed a hybrid world to emerge, responding to and coming out of the vacuum of underlying circuitry to bring those two spaces together. The compositions, the improvisational structures, formed the net in the middle.

We knew that we wanted to incorporate synthesizers and drum machines and pair them with acoustic instruments we had on hand, like folk instruments and classical guitar. We all have experience with these different ways of working, but besides that, we knew we wanted to combine them to form a synergy. The phrase speculative folk kept coming up, in reference to Ursula K Le Guin’s and Todd Barton’s soundtrack to Always Coming Home. There's something about the confluence of the acoustic and the digital that helped initiate our sense of forming a world, a fictional world, but also one grounded in a strong feeling of otherworldliness.

How about the lyrics? If we want to call them lyrics… the poetry, the prose, the voice that appears clearly amidst the landscape of the music. Is there anything you want to reveal about the writing of the text?

The writing felt aleatoric. We were thinking about how Merce Cunningham and John Cage would interact, a freedom and play amidst a thing firmly composed and choreographed. The two elements were married at some moment. There was a process of navigating, learning how to navigate and orient, a process of listening for the synergy. We all sort of sat together, and laid down pieces from the audio while I recited the text on the tracks, and we witnessed moments of synergy there, and we followed it. We discussed the narrative structure that formed the impetus for the project, thinking of it as a book that motivated the listener to take a journey. We talked about making a fictional narrative about travel, a feeling of going somewhere. Rather than the project being about one place or another, we wanted to craft an artifact from a place that no one had visited, or could hardly even imagine existing.

This project was posed as a response to the Pluriverse project and some of the core ideologies of the web3 space at the moment. I'm curious how that has influenced your decisions along the way. How might we think of this album serving as a vehicle for conveying your impressions and associations of pluriversal designs and ecologies within crypto economic communities?

We continue to grapple with these things, but I think the pluriverse correlates with the rejection of dualistic thinking, like entering into a fugal - and a fungal - modality where multiple rhythms are happening at once all simultaneously. We discussed a kaleidoscopic approach to using rhythms. One of the ideas was about having the tracks contain different rhythmic strands all playing simultaneously, to transduce a clear reversal for the listener. Not to make something explicitly evident, like in a engineered theory or currency algorithm, but to put one in a receptive listening state, open to less deterministic possibilities. That's a clear reversal, an inversion, away from clear economic thinking, but also correlated and responsive to it.

In the source material you sent us while preparing for this project, there was always something about hope, the diverse types of hope in being involved in the cultivation of what the players would look like or what digital money can do or bring about. We were thinking about the computer as an instrument, orchestrating where money is going, interfacing with analog currencies and the material world of value in sometimes silly and sometimes forceful ways, always trying to produce some kind of sense for the operator. This relates to the music, related to the back and forth between worlds, crunching and morphing this weird calculus that could be rationally communicated but somehow also defies explanation and wants to be felt and impulsively spent.

Immersing in an aural experience can often invite a whole host of acoustic realities, which by their nature are beckoning different kinds of imagination architectures. We talk about reverberant spaces - hall, basement, cathedral - and the imagined spaces that they allow to be opened up and inhabited in the consciousness of the listener. While listening, you can conjure all sorts of landscapes indigenously, inside your own associations. In some ways this is perhaps more commensurate with the idea of the pluriverse than a visual illustration, because the visual would concretely represent the space and then you would not be allowed to taste that chimera-like mirage emerging inside of yourself. There's more dimensionality to an aural experience, in that regard.

We discussed the feeling of a journey through the eyes of Anon (the character from the Pluriverse comics), based on who we imagined her to be and what she might be thinking. We talked about what kinds of experiences she would be having, how it would feel in her body, what she would be touching. The interface becomes this sort of hinge upon which we enter a hybrid space. We sink deeper and deeper into one end, it becomes less and less hybrid, and we lose track of what happens after that. The experience trails off.

One track on the album is concerned with the sounds of the interface. Another cues into the background movements of a world-scale computer that is maintaining our value operations. We talked about that certain feeling of holding a key to unlock something of great value, but also the responsibility of keeping it safe and the fact that it can be lost, and the fear that accompanies that vulnerability. That track, in particular, uses field recordings taken within a temple in Japan where people come to throw their coins into a large rectangular chamber with a vaulted grid on top, so you can't reach in and grab the coins back after you throw them in. Many devotional places, like shrines, have this arrangement, a strange interplay between a utilitarian or somewhat municipal structure, while casting an intent to the spirit realm. It’s literally an investment in the metaphysical with this circular piece of metal going into a black box, a psychosomatic social experience about distilling a little piece of ore representing a certain amount of time in life, earned through material labor, and now sacrificed to the invisible spirits so they might support us in turn. It's a lot different than sending funds to the crazed televangelists we see on TV in the states. The difference is in the acoustic and tactile quality, the quality of tossing the coin and hearing the performative rhythms and reverberations within the shrine architecture, and feeling the accumulation of spiritual wealth beneath the mirror-portal-pond, even though it remains invisible.

Can we discuss value in the abstract for a sec? There will be a desire to quantify the value of this project by those that have extended funding, and also those that are considering collecting the record, and those trying to make sense of this mysterious enigma-artifact coming from beyond the wall, dropped into the center of our little crypto garden here. They will want to know what to do with it, how to understand this wonder. And so, dear musicians, what are your thoughts on the value that this project has offered you? What would you hope to extend to these would-be listeners?

Where the rubber meets the road is in asking how does one live? Value is about meaning-making and generating significance and should illustrate, or be a vehicle for, how one lives. When we were commissioned for this project, we were like, Okay, we know what our life will look like now. It's going to be organized around this central kernel of an idea for a while. This alignment of values and interests, or meanings, became what occupied us during the process and gave our lives significance to define an outcome. Around the impetus to respond, we organized community practices and rituals and folk focus. The meditation organized our lives, what time we would wake up and how we would spend the day, a few weeks of intense focus upon this thing that we would impart upon others. We all felt sensitive to the responsibility there, to rise to the occasion of the influence this thing could have, and the need to ensure that the craft matched the values and didn’t spin off into a corrupt shade of the original source of inspiration. And that was valuable, for us.

Value could also be considered as the created space in which the boundaries of organization started palpitating. It proposes an organization as just one orientation toward the world among many other orientations that may appear chaotic or disorganized, or accidental. These other shapes present paradigms for thought that are outside of the realm of thinking in terms of systems. I think the creation of the music itself was like that. It was an improvisational composition and wasn't determined or even written down. How we organized each of the recording sessions embodied and transduced a way of interfacing with chaos. The listener gets to glean from that experience, as a polyrhythmic interest in these sometimes overwhelming acoustical spaces. It presents us with new ways of valuing the chaotic, and as a reorientation towards chaos.

Through discussing what these coordination failures are, we didn’t perceive a monstrous chasm between chaos and order. That seems more like a perspectival issue, like a mass of objects jumbled on the floor casting shadows and at a particular angle images are revealed. Now it’s two people kissing, but from another angle it's just a jumble of objects again, back to indiscernible raw data. There's something going on with this fleeting gestalt emerging from an experience, how we must continuously reorient our perspective to see the image peeking through the cracks of complex arrangements.

When collaborating, you’re literally immersed in someone else's chaos. You're tasked with trying to arrange their perspective in a way that makes sense to you, and maybe to allow for a third more unpredictable way of sensing. I was thinking about how nonlinear our process was in making this music. I start something and I end something, and someone else tosses in a few scraps from their world, torn up in pieces, and the grinding forms grit and rubble. All that friction changes the speed of things, and then suddenly I can see it. We could see - when we were making the album - the moments that were really interesting, worth paying attention to. All of it was interesting, but there were moments where we were totally swimming in it, where it created enough friction to hold onto.

I’ve been going to school for music composition. In the program we have many discussions about indeterminacy, randomness, chance, and compare them to deterministic compositions... And honestly I’m coming to think there’s not much difference between composition and indeterminate chance operations. Everybody is improvising in some way all the time; it just gets documented differently. Bach was considered the master of the fugue, a complex contrapuntal form of music, but he was also a master improviser. He incorporated a weird dichotomy between composition and improvisation that few recognize, but that’s a tension that’s proliferating everywhere if one can develop the aptitude for recognizing it.

We generated all this chaos and composition, and then we brought it to Paul Korte at Santo to master and add his vantage point to the mix. It really locked-in a lot of things. We had gotten so deep inside the shape-shifting center that we were no longer capable of seeing it from an objective standpoint. We built a house around ourselves that inhibited us in a way. It was incredible to observe how Paul listened, how he navigated the space we crafted, and hear that new fidelity he discovered and also witness the extraneous things that emerged as he was combing through the rough. It was really illuminating to hear it in the studio. We placed things just so, but the interactions at the bleeding edges and the radiating aspects they had through relation were unpredictable.

There’s a difference between a constraint, or a system of rules, and a sorting mechanism. The conundrum is perhaps less about degrees of freedom and more about a signal-to-noise ratio. Regarding value, it becomes a difficult problem when there’s so much content and it all feels so valuable. The problem is how to make sense of it, how to apply a system of regarding that value, how to make decisions about what signals deserved to be plucked from the writhing sea of possibility.

Value emerges from specificity. It’s difficult to orient by generalizations. I am constantly wondering what kinds of values we are orienting around as a society... Take pop music, for example: to orient behind having the broadest impact, to attract the broadest type of audience. The engineering could be incredible, but the specificity value is almost non-existent. This concept album project is definitely extended towards a specific orientation of people, at the risk of excluding some, but for the benefit of generating much more delicious value for those that take the time to unpack the complexities of the problem and the logic we used to sort through the chaos.

Making music, to us, is all about the approach and presence. Approach is the tool, how we think about the possible movements and interactions, and the nuances of the people we are creating alongside. Presence has to do with how we adjust ourselves in an environment, beyond the instruments and the concepts that steer behavior. Just as there’s a center, a sweet spot, between composition and improvisation, there’s also a saccharine core to crypto. Freedom is always dependent on the constraints of the situation and how we respond to the variables, to each other, and to ourselves. If you make a mistake, just do it again. Learn to love the mistakes and lean into them. Then they become part of the pattern we’re all weaving together, little tensions that make the whole thing more interesting. You play it once and it's a mistake. You play it twice and it starts to become jazz. I would rather listen to a few interesting failures than an infinite procession of perfectly, inhuman tuned systems.

‘Ambiguities for Discontinuities’ is the first music release produced by Pluriverse.wtf. It is made possible by the incredible support of Metacartel.org and Supermodular.xyz. Mint your copy (and collect the vinyl record) at Metalabel.xyz starting June 13th, 2023.

Moloch is a vacuous receptacle, a strobing signifier for the failures of community-centric and public goods-oriented frameworks that, if surmounted, would enable us to transcend our inherently adversarial nature and demonstrate our collective capacity to make sense of the cascading consequences stemming from our self-interested actions, harmonizing them with the common good. The aim of the Pluriverse is to effectively disseminate several ideas shared by both RaidGuild and Gitcoin, et al, including the general imperative to prioritize regenerative strategies over degenerative, extractive, and intrinsically unsustainable economic delusions. We speculate that in order to achieve this feat, we would need to harness a reciprocal exchange with the hearts and minds of the Ethereum community. While pursuing this goal, we also seek to elevate the psychological complexity of our storytelling, generating new prospects for immersion in the ways our artifacts are fashioned, infusing with deep mythopoetic significance and meaning.

The original impetus was to elaborate “solarpunk” lore. Solarpunk, a purportedly Reddit-spawned phenomena that has since been circulated through the web3 community with greater and lesser sincerity, is widely regarded as an aesthetic movement that espouses a vision that is often juxtaposed with the darker, psychologically shadowed lunarpunk. These movements, in turn, have evolved out of a cypherpunk milieu that continues to spawn myriad pseudo-punk stylizations in the fractaline sprawl Twitter-pated echo chambers and brownian noise-filled Discord servers. Finding this binary deeply dissatisfying, the pluriverse crew frames solarpunk as a part of a deep, primordial, and portentous historical trajectory, though not necessarily in the manner typically explicated. We trace the creative antecedents of punk in the origins of Surrealism, Dada, Situationism, and Fluxus, those high-water islands of an otherwise self-obsessed century of Eurocentric art production. We are at once inspired and daunted by the ideological momentum of 20th-century propagandistic techniques, anti-pop cultural collage, subversion tactics, manifestos, and absurdist games of these movements. Our goal is now to confound the solar/lunar "punk" dichotomy, fashioning art and technology into a patchwork quilt that invites all androids to dream of novel electric ungulates.

By adopting an agile approach to lorecraft, we can transcend the limiting confines of our initial ideas, testing and refining them as they take flight. Agile imagination design techniques embody the cyclical, iterative nature of experimentation, rapid prototyping, and frequent feedback loops. This approach invites flexibility, risk-taking, and continuous learning. A rapid prototyping process allows for a more playful and experimental approach to creation, freeing the creative mind from the paralyzing pressure of getting everything perfect the first time around. The ultimate aim of agile imagination design is to foster a highly adaptive, inventive mindset capable of envisioning and realizing novel worlds.

The pluriverse is a fluxing, alchemical process of transmutation, where the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are constantly shifting and taking new forms. We remain ever-mindful of the emergent collective ethnography of web3 concretions that surround us, yet we are driven by the distinctly hallucinatory set of vision and values that exhorts us to free our minds and souls from the shackles of orthodoxy and embrace the unbounded possibilities of the unknown and unknowable. Rather than relying on an overtly didactic approach to disseminating knowledge, we have sought to harness the power of vivid imagery and impressionistic storytelling to evoke visceral reactions in our readers.

We realized that the production of graphic novels alone could not satisfy our lofty ambitions. As such, we endeavored to expand our storytelling repertoire to encompass a variety of transmedia forms imbued with philosophical depth. We proposed a novel scheme to incentivize a group of musicians to engender a concept album, recognizing that music is the lingua franca of the universe pluriverse. Here we are asking what it means to bypass the rational mind and penetrate directly into the amygdala and the cerebellum with sonic soliloquy, extending telekinetic conduit for transducing the essence of the manifold technical concepts into a poetic expression. We brought together a coterie of extraordinary artists - Curtis Tamm, Cameron Stevens, and Maneesh Raj Madahar - who, although not previously acquainted with the pluriversal philosophies or underlying web3 concepts, have successfully crafted a distinctive sonic experience that will surely titillate our collective imagination and invite novel interpretations of the emergent multi-act hyperobject of the decentralized internet for all and sundry.

The other facet of this multi-dimensional project is centered around the use of visual art. Our aim was to begin from the tangible, the corporeal, and work our way back to the digital. Artist Billy Sprague was invited to help us increase the fidelity of the pluriverse, to create a vivid, palpable vision that optimizes for ocular titillation. At the outset we pondered: what correlations exist between uncanny melodies and visceral collages within the realm of web3? As the project set out to provide a sanctuary for visionaries, Sprague responded by generating time, space, stillness, and seclusion in his work, to spawn a reflective mirror to reverberate our gaze back at us. His images regard the material world as an interface, a threshold bridging the liminal realms of thought and action. Our chief impetus is to trigger our audience to ask profound questions, to scrutinize what we have offered, to attempt to impart significance to the ineffable, and to inquire how we might infuse this curiosity into our pragmatic technological designs.

In an uncertain yet highly specific sense, one might say that we set out to perform a spectacular failure. In the realm of art, failure is to be embraced and celebrated. The greater the failure, the richer the bounty of wisdom gleaned. Failure is not an endpoint, but a call to reorient ourselves towards new potentials and possibilities. As we engage in this dance with the unknown, we recognize that the act of experimentation and collaboration across disciplines is an act of success in and of itself. The fruits of this project may not be solely measured by sales or distribution figures, for our triumph is already writ large across the cosmos in the execution of the unexpected and unquantifiable.

In the forthcoming article, we shall converse with the artists themselves, allowing for a more intimate and personal exposition of their journey in this project. Stay tuned, stay tuning!

In the fields of narratology and comparative mythology, the hero's journey, or the monomyth, represents a prevalent pattern in narratives that encompass a protagonist embarking on an adventure, triumphing in a critical juncture, and returning home altered or transformed. Joseph Campbell employed the monomyth to scrutinize and juxtapose religious beliefs. In his renowned work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he delineates the narrative structure thusly:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder. Fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won. The hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

In contemporary analyses, the hero's journey has been scrutinized as a prime example of the sympathetic plot, a universal narrative scaffold wherein a goal-oriented protagonist faces hurdles, conquers them, and ultimately reaps the benefits. In the departure phase of the narrative, the protagonist dwells in the familiar, mundane world and receives a beckoning to set forth on a remarkable journey. As the initiation segment unfolds, the hero ventures across the boundary into an enigmatic or special world, where they grapple with formidable tasks or trials, either solitarily or bolstered by the assistance of steadfast companions. In due course, the hero reaches the innermost cave or the pivotal crisis of their odyssey, where they must withstand the ordeal by vanquishing the foe, undergoing apotheosis and rendering an epiphany, a keen insight into their own desires.

In the return phase, the hero is charged with reintegrating into the ordinary world, bearing the burden of their reward. They might be pursued by the protectors of the other dimension or demonstrate reluctance to return, necessitating an intervention from external forces. Once again, the hero navigates the liminal space between the realms, eventually rejoining the ordinary sphere, now ready to be harnessed for the greater good. Through this transformative journey, the hero emerges enlightened, wielding newfound wisdom or spiritual influence over both worlds.

In our endeavors for Gitcoin's comic book series, we sought to intertwine the hero's journey with the concept of eternal recurrence, a cyclical process of world destruction and rebirth. The eternal return embodies a philosophical idea suggesting that time infinitely repeats itself in an endless loop, with identical events ceaselessly unfolding in precisely the same fashion, forevermore. In the annals of ancient Greece, the notion of eternal return was primarily associated with Stoicism, the intellectual school of thought founded by Zeno of Citium. Stoic philosophers posited that the cosmos is subject to regular annihilation and renewal, each subsequent universe serving as an exact replica of the one before. This doctrine was vehemently challenged by Christian writers, such as Augustine, who viewed it as an outright denial of free will and the possibility of salvation. As a result, the widespread dissemination of Christianity heralded the demise of classical theories centered on eternal return.

In the late 1800s, Friedrich Nietzsche breathed new life into this concept. First broaching the idea as a thought experiment in The Gay Science, he delved further into the subject in his novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where the protagonist learns to conquer his horror at the thought of eternal return: “the highest formula of a Yes-saying to life that can ever be attained.” It remains uncertain whether Nietzsche believed in the literal truth of eternal return or, if not, what he aimed to demonstrate through it, yet his vision is palpable.

The greatest weight – What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!" Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?... Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

– Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Everything goes, everything returns, the wheel of existence rolls for ever. Everything dies, everything blossoms anew; the year of existence runs on forever. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; the same house of existence builds itself forever. Everything departs, everything meets again; the ring of existence is true to itself for ever. Existence begins in every instant, the ball There rolls around every Here. The middle is everywhere. The path of eternity is crooked.

– Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

In The Nightmare of Moloch a pervasive, all-knowing narrator weaves its voice through the expressions of each character, probing the very bedrock of truth and reality while prophesying future events. The narrative delves into the intricacies of agency, fate, and decision-making, as well as the processes of envisioning and dismantling futures, positing critical embodiment as the linchpin for achieving emancipation, autonomy, and anonymity: freedom from the ever-returning turns of the eternal. Anon, our gentle protagonist, is haunted by past trauma and comes to understand the necessity of cultivating eye-hand-heart coordination to break free from this somnambulist horror. A miasmic Moloch permeates every facet of the tale, with the distinction between utopia and dystopia hinges on the balance between suffering and flourishing. In the denouement, Anon awakens to the possibility that she may be the author of her own story, as the unconscious embodiment of her own Molochian nightmare. The closing scene ties the end back to the beginning, using the cover design as a Möbius strip endless knot to loop the nightmare ad infinitum, ad absurdum. It’s a metaphor for crypto and for life in general: until one learns to break the cycle they are a prisoner, at least to themselves. “No one here gets out alive.”

And now, allow us to walk you through the second comic we made for Gitcoin that attempted to fold this meditation on Molochian delusions and prisoner’s dilemmas into an artful narrative.

A spectral and intimidating Moloch forms the backdrop of the scene, setting an ominous tone. This opening page is fraught with tension, characters fueled by vague notions of hope and optimism that have dared to traverse the enigmatic portal, blinded by promises of fortune and glory, unaware of the sacrifices they might be making. Their faces etch out the complexity of the paradox they find themselves in. Amid this conflict, there's a burgeoning comprehension of the grander game at play, a crucial realization that their chosen paths, pitted against each other, will lead them nowhere, highlighting the futility of their opposition and sparking a surrender to the wider, unifying strategies proposed by cosmological game theory.

Just as the characters resolve to surrender to their fate, the narrative pivots, leading to an involution of aperture. The view starts pulling inward, a reverse zoom that distills the larger scene of the tavern into the microcosm of the human body. Shadows flicker against the walls, casting silhouettes shaped like ominous phantasms to imprint onto the characters' retinas, seeping deeper into their very beings. Moloch's image infiltrates the lymph system, permeates the sympathetic nervous system, manifests in the internal and external pressures felt by the characters. This deep dive into their physiological responses mirrors their psychological state, their eye-hand-heart coordination reflecting a unity of thought, feeling, and action. An extreme oscillation of scale highlights the vastness and minuteness of existence simultaneously, unfurling the universe as an ever-filling void. The page culminates in an abstract symbolic representation of the Ethereum network's global reach - a vast interconnected web that binds everyone and everything together.

A series of individual vignettes come together to form a complex, chaotic tableau. The overarching image is Moloch, personified as an interior voice that in times of conflict stirs our willingness to forsake all. Artificiality is introduced, an ambiguous artifice that could either hold us back or propel us forward. The character’s experiences are echoing the accumulated traumas of history. A futuristic urbanity serves as a coordination mechanism yet its role remains nebulous. At the page's center, a portal blossoms, fusing a series of stark, darker concepts into a grim collage: the malignant growth of cancer, the disarray of misunderstanding, the deep wound of trauma, the reckless squandering of resources, and a brutal, gore-filled representation of war.

The barrier between the visual and verbal diminishes, shattering conventional time and space. Each fragment contributes to a grand crescendo. Rising above the entropic swirl, this digital construct superimposes itself, casting a dominant, unifying structure upon the maelstrom beneath. This stark contrast against the surrounding tumult of the fractured timelines and spatial disruptions forms a symbolic fulcrum around which the rest of the page orbits.

We gaze through a window to a forgotten epoch, the mysterious origins of the ancient deity, Moloch. Now we are bathing in an ethereal haze, weaving an atmosphere heavy with mythological smoke, fog, and vapor. Moloch is a less than tangible entity, more a delusion we impose upon each other, a shared hallucination that has manifested across the ages. Moloch is a shadow, an ominous silhouette looming over the trajectory of our civilization, a symbol of our misguided fears and ambitions. In the hearts and minds of people, Moloch becomes an icon, a target of misguided sacrificial offerings. It's a shadowy sacrifice – a bartering of our future, a wager placed in the bloody hands of warfare. We reach a stark realization, an indictment of humanity's cyclical penchant for conquest and dominance over one another, thus elevating Moloch to threshold of myth and immortal imagination.

Now we glimpse the unfurling of industrial progress, machinery harking back to an era when technology was in its infancy, laying the groundwork for an intricate entanglement between humanity and its creations. We glimpse a complex, at times unhealthy, reliance on technology, underscoring the paradox that, while we fervently believe it will emancipate us from our limitations, it also entraps us in a form of servitude. Yet there is hope: the use of technology is no mere crutch, but a transformative tool to foster better coordination, pushing us beyond our self-centric concerns and the propensity to ravage nature. Technology is an ever-widening portal to new avenues of introspection and self-understanding. We are left contemplating an irrefutable fact: our future is irrevocably entwined with technology, raising a series of provocative questions. Is technology inhibiting our progress? Or is our own inability to fully harness its potential holding us back?

These two pages juxtapose a dark pessimism on the left against radiant optimism on the right. On the left side, a somber view of our world where ceaseless work and the chase of escapism define our existence. Leisure is depicted as an unaffordable luxury in an overarching simulation, a trap masquerading as reality. The virtual dimensions hold our imagination captive, turning into a tool wielded against its users to perpetuate a cycle of imprisonment. Virtuality manipulates desires, fuels a relentless ambition to conquer all territories, fosters oppression, and encourages wasteful consumption of resources. The damning indictment concludes with the assertion that virtual reality exacerbates the problems of the real world, rather than offering a respite.

Contrasting this grim reality, the right side of the image emerges bathed in light, showcasing the hopeful possibilities offered by the simulations and simulacra, a new reality where our collective imagination shapes captures the very essence of successful collaboration. The narrative presents the metaverse as a bridge between different ways of living, hinting at regenerative economies where competition yields to mutual support. As people come together, the contours of the future grow clearer, technology serving as a tool to liberate minds and bodies. It underscores our interdependence and our shared ability to manifest reality - to cast collective spells, weaving a magic stronger than individualistic pursuits. In this narrative, together, we can shape a better future, and the virtual serves as a portal to a new, promising world.

Another dichotomy is presented. On the left, a window opens to an apparent utopia, a narrative tracing the rise and fall of civilization. It begins with people setting down roots, expanding gradually into villages, towns, and burgeoning cities. The urban sprawl is portrayed as a coordination mechanism, an intricate dance of constructive human activity. Yet, beneath this veneer of progress, the turbulent undercurrents of civilization are unveiled, including the ceaseless tides of conflict and war, underscoring the relentless competition for space that extends even to the celestial realms, always leaving a trail of winners and losers. This page paints a grim picture where our baser instincts and desires often prevail, casting a shadow over our collective journey.

Contrasting this bleak panorama, the right side of the spread presents a transformative shift. The window into the utopian city morphs into a reflective mirror. This historical vantage point allows us a critical self-evaluation, encouraging introspection into our shared past. The implication is that by understanding our history, we can chart a different course, towards a different kind of portal, one that opens onto a hopeful future of change and growth that can help us break free from our historical patterns and epigenetic trauma.

Now the dichotomy of light and dark blurs into a whirlwind of interconnected elements dominated by a sinister influence that seeps into every thought and action. The portal, initially a symbol of emancipation, is appropriated as a tool for Moloch, an icon of delusion, and the characters, once independent agents, are recast as unwitting pawns serving the agenda of coordination failure. War morphs into a sinister game orchestrated by Moloch, thriving on the discord seeded within communication breakdowns. Moloch flourishes in our deepest fears, loathing, and doubts, growing into a menacing specter birthed from the dark recesses of human imagination, pointing to an overwhelming revelation: Everything is Moloch. The past and future are under his sway; all instances of human suffering and thriving alike serve Moloch's grand design. All machines, automation, every whisper and shout are all facets of our own beastly competitive nature. The page climaxes with a startlingly intimate revelation: a close-up of the protagonist's face, etched with the dawning realization and a haunting confession - “I am Moloch!"

Anon stirs awake, finding herself in the familiar chaos of her bedroom. She's ensnared in the undeniable grip of the present moment, anchored back in reality from the disorienting escapades of her slumber. The comic book in her hand - the same book you are reading now - still resonating with the echoes of the dream she'd been immersed in. The realism of the vision lingers, etching a throbbing headache at her temples. Yet, along with the discomfort, there’s a profound clarity; she can still recall all the choices, the multitude of possibilities that had unfurled before her, leaving her grappling with a newfound sense of responsibility, the imperative to choose. An undeniable transformation has occurred; her life, she realizes, will never be the same again. Yet, in the face of this immense realization, she acknowledges her need for companionship and support - she knows she can’t navigate this journey alone. As the page closes, we are left suspended in anticipation - what will Anon choose next?

On the wraparound cover, we see Anon falling back asleep as her dreams, hopes, fantasies, and aspirations bubble out from her mind, floating across the page in a myriad of vignettes. A futuristic cityscape known as the Quadratic lands unfurls in one bubble, while another captures a daunting image of the formidable ETH Bot crumbling under the wrath of Moloch. An uprising of cyberpunk revolutionaries stir, although it is unclear if their protests are constructive or destructive amidst the turmoil of the scene.

On the other side, now the front cover of the comic, Moloch returns to invade her dreams once more, transforming her serene slumber back into the eternally recurring nightmare. He feasts on the infinite regress of her hopes, replacing them with grim, decrepit shades, transforming into a nightmarish scene that wraps the comic cover and reboots the narrative. Will we read it differently the second time around? Might we ever learn to escape this cycle of eternally recurring trauma? What will we choose to believe?

Moreover, lorecrafters should demonstrate a harmonious coordination of visual acuity, manual dexterity, and emotional intelligence — a tripartite "eye-hand-heart" equilibrium. They might consider upholding a standard of integrity and humility, using these values to actively deconstruct any hubristic incentive structures and to realign their actions with a poetic sensibility.

As engaged Ethereans, we must remain vigilant against universal declarations, critically interrogating their breadth of application and the extent of their inclusivity. Moloch extends beyond its historical identity as a Canaanite deity, symbolizing the principles of dispersion and entropy. It embodies a non-entity that emerges from our collective human propensity to engage in depersonalizing, grand abstractions. To counteract the influence of Moloch, our efforts must commence at the grassroots level, averting the tendency to cast others as adversaries within a cosmically scaled economic competition. We might work towards dismantling the conventional dichotomy of good versus evil, and refrain from perpetuating nationalistic, homogenizing, and centralizing identity declarations that have historically ignited conflicts. Instead of fixating on competition, we could aspire to reconceptualize our collective circumstances, channeling resources towards the establishment of sustainable practices and fostering radical cooperation among diverse selves, communities, and worlds.

In the context of Ethereum, if a protagonist needs to be identified, this entity should function to generate, nurture, disseminate, and reinforce value for individuals, prioritizing creative production (poiesis) over political maneuvering.

In our pluriversal narratives, we seek to navigate the "expanded field" of Moloch as a mythological entity, capable of assuming a multitude of monstrous guises. At times, it might epitomize an undead, soulless proletariat, manifesting as a zombie, or conversely, it might take the form of an exploitative aristocracy or technocracy, traditionally symbolized as a vampire preying on the less privileged. Moloch might morph into a formless, slime mold-like entity, an endless, consuming flow emblematic of the unceasing expansion and consumption inherent in capitalism and industrialism. In Scott Alexander’s Meditations on Moloch, the “granite cock” obelisk of the Luxor hotel in Las Vegas is depicted as a phallocentric monolith of power, urbanity, and harsh civilization. Moreover, Moloch could manifest as a potent or suffocating atmosphere, personifying the psychological distress of solitude, the neurosis stemming from monotonous labor, and the alienation induced by both capitalism and physical isolation.

This bovine-headed demonic figure draws inspiration from the mythos surrounding the Canaanite and Carthaginian deities, notorious for the ritualistic sacrifice of infants to secure favorable outcomes in warfare and commerce. Historically, Moloch has been depicted as a cosmic furnace, kiln, or fiery gateway to a malevolent dimension, which propels progress by inciting discord. While not synonymous with capitalism, it represents a symbol of coordination failure amongst human societies, a persistent force that beguiles and lures us with deceptive appearances. Moloch is characterized by its protean nature, nebulous and dispersed, arising from the human psyche and manifesting as a psychological disturbance. It serves as an ancient, formidable deity that operates through the distortion of reality, convincing its subjects that egoistic desires are the primary driving force. In order to mitigate Moloch's influence, it is essential that we educate one another about the tragedy of the commons, multipolar traps, and existential risks. This endeavor requires the deconstruction and re-envisioning of our desires and perspectives, potentially achieved through the adoption of indigenous epistemologies or a matristic orientation as opposed to paternal or patriarchal paradigms.

The RaidGuild Mercenaries are character constructs that draw inspiration from the medieval fantasy realms depicted in popular culture phenomena such as World of Warcraft, Diablo, and Skyrim. However, these mercenaries subvert traditional archetypes by eschewing the single-minded pursuit of loot and wealth accumulation. Instead, they are devoted to principles of cooperation, collaboration, and coordination in pursuit of a shared objective. The diverse roles within RaidGuild are conceptualized as a caste system of characters, each possessing distinct attributes and vulnerabilities. This arrangement serves to illustrate the necessary interdependencies required to combat a shared adversary. The guiding ethos of these mercenaries is encapsulated in the mantra: "Better to journey far together than to travel swiftly alone." The motivations for joining the guild transcend mere material acquisition or economic ambition, instead, they are centered around a more virtuous mission. The true heroes are those who endure and remain steadfast when the boom period of the abundant market gives way to the harsh realities of (crypto) winter. It is in these moments that the guild is compelled to clearly delineate the malevolent force they stand against: a high-definition incarnation of Moloch.

The green pill meme is an intricate conceptual construct, amalgamating elements drawn from cultural artifacts such as The Matrix films, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and Gitcoin's Quadratic Lands. This construct signifies a deliberative choice of reality, coupled with an affirmation of optimistic thinking in opposition to nihilistic tendencies. The green pill functions as a metaphor for the voyage towards self-realization and commitment to the common good, serving as a symbol for a broader technocratic endeavor aimed at societal enhancement.

In the context of The Matrix, the decision to ingest the red pill is equated with the acceptance to uncover the full extent of the rabbit hole, which is connotative of the "real world"— a stark, gloomy reality where humans awaken from their enslavement and willingly surrender their physical comforts to endure suffering in the quest for loftier ideals of freedom and autonomy. The act of "red-pilling" signifies an escape from the dream of virtual space, in contrast to the blue pill's choice of remaining ensnared within the simulation, thereby opting for ignorance, illusion, dissociation, and a form of unreal or non-reality. Conversely, the green pill is imbued with the potent promise of speculative hope and the potentiality of a world superior to any historically manifested reality. This hope is not unfounded, but rather a calculated optimism, designed to dispel catastrophic thinking and to illuminate a path forward. It symbolizes the germ of hopeful thinking, the solarpunk insistence on speculative hope as the veritable or sole reality: a vision of an improved world that we consciously elect to embody and manifest, to surmount our own inherent human nature.

The green pill meme is complex, with associations extending to an array of works and concepts. Its utility is vested in its potential to serve as an emblem of commitment to the sustenance of public goods, whether it be through annual income, project budget, or individual transactions. The green pill can be interpreted as a reward, a pledge, or a testament of dedication to a cause greater than the self.

Within the context of the cryptocurrency community, the act of 'pilling' someone is akin to guiding them through the complex labyrinth of concepts and mechanics inherent to the field. Drawing parallels with Alice in Wonderland, Alice descends into a fantastical dreamworld, a creation of her own imagination. This world, brimming with wonder and fantasy, can be viewed as a form of delusion, juxtaposed against the 'real world' characterized by mundane adult responsibilities. Such a metaphor may possess socio-political implications, proposing Wonderland as a sanctuary offering an escape from the oppressive realities of the external world. However, it is more likely that this analogy alludes to a rite of passage marking Alice's transition from childhood to adulthood. This narrative poses pertinent questions about reintegration into one's community post the acquisition of newfound self-awareness, and the strategies to counteract pervasive selfishness within society. Here we might reference Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Lewis Carroll, from his book The Logic of Sense. Dorothea Olkowski offers her interpretation:

The underground world of Alice in Wonderland has been strongly associated with animality and embodiment. Thus the need for Alice’s eventual climb to the surface and her discovery that everything linguistic happens at that border. Yet, strangely, in spite of the claim that Alice disavows false depth and returns to the surface, it seems that it is precisely in the depths that she finally wakes from her sleepy, stupified surface state and investigates the deep structures, the rules of logic. In this investigation, Alice questions many formal structures, such as causality, identity, reference and the rules of replacement. She discovers that Wonderland does not generate consequential conduct; in fact, it generates no conduct whatsoever! In other words, when it comes to consequences, Wonderland may not be all that wonderful. Yet, we do not live in Wonderland and therefore, our actions have consequences. The question this poses is, why organize language so as to escape causal relations and why choose the little girl as emblematic of this organization?

And another from Christine Slobogin:

As each “nonsense” happens to her, Alice takes them in stride in a very calm and relatively logical manner. As each new thing occurs, the more sense the next nonsense makes in the context of this new underground world. For example, Carroll explains that “so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.” As the diverse nonsense events build upon each other, it seems less odd and somehow makes more sense that the next completely different nonsense event occurs. In fact, it seems almost expected of Wonderland. In this way, Deleuze’s point about Carroll giving an entire account of his universe through nonsenses makes perfect sense. Wonderland is characterized by these events and therefore the reader finds themselves making sense of the place without the use of sense at all. 

Our intention was to weave the green pill meme into the fabric of the graphic novel by incorporating an artifact that serves to catalyze characters into recognizing their capacity for personal transformation. This “artifact” (never clearly rendered or named) promotes principles of mutual support and cooperation and underscores the pivotal role of hope in shaping their actions. The characters are already endowed with the necessary resources, yet the artifact acts as a trigger, engendering an epiphany that bridges their prevailing egocentric tendencies with a more communal, future-oriented mindset. In this capacity, the green pill functions as a conduit between the virtual and physical realms. Despite its tangible presence, its ultimate purpose is to unlock the latent potential of the mind, akin to a pharmakon - a substance possessing the dual capacities to poison and heal. However, the green pill distinguishes itself from its counterparts in The Matrix and Alice in Wonderland, as it is imbued with a more nuanced, multifaceted, pluriversal symbolism.

The functionality of the green pill hinges on an element of magic, reminiscent of Aleister Crowley's definition of imposing one's will onto others from afar. The debate surrounding whether this constitutes manipulation or merely illusion is contingent upon the one’s capacity to dissect and navigate their own delusions. Both The Matrix and Alice in Wonderland scenarios pose inquiries regarding whether the experiences are shared hallucinations or individual delusions and whether escape is a decision of personal autonomy or collective consensus. Within the context of our comic, the green pill symbolizes a radical choice, a potent decision to accept hope, instigate personal transformation, and contribute to an uplifting narrative. It catalyzes an individual ontological shift with the potential to ripple across and influence the collective consciousness over time.

And now, allow us to walk you through the first comic we made for Gitcoin that attempted to fold this meditation on Moloch and the green pill into an artful narrative.

The opening scene is nestled within the smoky confines of a timeless tavern. A medley of diverse characters, each steered by the invisible compass of their singular ambitions, emerge from the shadows. The tavern itself is a breathing tapestry of raw emotion and whispered secrets, alive with the amber glow of flickering candlelight and the woody scent of worn-out barrels. This motley crew, tethered by a shared destiny they are only beginning to grasp, prepare to embark on an epic quest. Their camaraderie is palpable, their energy infectious, yet their journey is full of anticipation and uncertainty.

Venturing through eclectic landscapes, the characters' interplay becomes a theater of growing unease. Subtle tensions simmer beneath their exchanges, their once seamless camaraderie now laced with a disquieting undercurrent of suspicion and mistrust. These tiny fissures in their unity quickly grow into chasms, giving rise to heated bickering and vehement disputes that resonate in the air like discordant symphonies. A chilling transformation takes hold of the world around them as their turmoil escalates. A malevolent shadow begins to creep over the once vibrant landscapes, or perhaps it's the once vivid colors starting to leach away, replaced by haunting grayscale that mirrors their growing animosity. Moloch insidiously infiltrates their ranks. His invisible touch twists their words and manipulates their actions, their once noble speech now laced with hostility, their camaraderie crumbling into competition. Subtly, their values begin to warp and shift under his influence, driving them into a spiral of rivalry and antagonism, each character becoming a puppet dancing on the strings of this dark puppeteer.

In a pivotal turn of the story, the Leshy emerges as a formidable presence, materializing from the verdant shadows of the wilderness, embodying the spirit of the ancient forest itself. Unmoved by the brewing storm of emotions amongst the group, the Leshy's voice resonates through the rustling leaves and the creaking boughs, a whispering echo of nature's wisdom. Its message is clear and undeniable: they have lost their way, consumed by misguided pursuits and clouded intentions. To triumph, they must unite against an ominous, impending doom that hovers ominously just beyond their perception.

However, blinded by their own avarice, the mercenaries succumb to their baser instincts, engaging in a fierce clash not just with each other but with the darker aspects of their own selves. Each character flaunts their unique combat prowess, a dance of power and strategy under the canopy of the foreboding forest.

Yet the tragic, futile conflict casts a pallor over their features, altering their once vibrant postures into those of hunched and weary warriors. The vibrant hues of the scene steadily seep away, replaced by stark monochromes that mirror the growing despair in their hearts.

In the thick of their most despairing hour, a sudden burst of cosmic energy cleaves the air before them, tearing a rift in the fabric of reality itself. This ethereal portal pulses with a vibrant luminescence, an intriguing contrast to the shadow-drenched world from which they emerge, promising a glimpse into a realm beyond their comprehension. Peering through this swirling gateway of light and energy, they are greeted by a vision of their true destiny. There, spread out like a cosmic tapestry, lies the Quadratic Lands.

This world is a testament to the heights of advanced technology, where futuristic structures rise like glittering spires amidst a landscape of digital wonder, their surfaces shimmering with an array of iridescent lights. This world is a utopia of harmony, a stark contrast to their current strife-torn existence. Citizens move with a serene purpose, their faces etched with contentment, living amidst a seamless fusion of nature and technology. The sight leaves them awestruck, instilling a newfound resolve to fulfill their true purpose.

Yet, within this seemingly idyllic panorama, they spot an insidious darkness at play. A stark understanding descends upon them: they have been meandering through their journey like somnambulists trapped in a fever dream, mere pawns in a cosmic game. But now, the scales fall from their eyes, and they awaken to a reality that extends beyond the deceitful mirage that had ensnared them. Faced with this transformative revelation, the group stands divided at the precipice of choice. Some, driven by newfound clarity, step forward to embrace the beckoning portal, their silhouettes swallowed by the pulsating light. Others, still wary and suspecting further trickery, choose to remain behind, their suspicious gazes locked onto the enigmatic gateway. The once unified band splinters in two, a fracture line that runs deep, echoing the divide in their hearts.

Having peered into the cruel heart of the phantasmagoric Moloch, the characters find themselves irrevocably altered, forever stripped of their blissful ignorance. Resolute, they return to the familiar, now uncanny, confines of the tavern, a newfound fire burning in their eyes. Their voices rise in warnings of the looming peril, their words echoing off the tavern's wooden beams, a chilling prophecy of the impending threat. Yet, their gift of sight, their revelation, is met with nothing but incredulous stares and dismissive scoffs. They stand amidst the tavern's bustling crowd, voices of truth lost in a sea of unbelief. Undeterred, they understand their path lies elsewhere now.

Their true mission, they discern, is to trace the malignant tendrils of the Moloch beast back to its insidious roots. The implications are profound, shattering their perception of reality. Could their entire world be just a virtual construct, an elaborate illusion woven by unseen puppet masters? They stand on the precipice of a new world, one they must explore and challenge. There is no turning back, only the path forward, into the heart of the unknown…

In our next article we will present the second graphic novel we wrote for Gitcoin titled The Nightmare of Moloch! Thanks for reading.

To all those who would seek to build, enshrine, and defend moats in our shared virtual machine, to build systems incapable of composition, incapable of componentization, incapable of being permissionlessly replaced by some alternative: We say this is a pattern of the past, an antipattern in web3. It's a pattern enabled by permissioned access to, and control of, data. This pattern will be made redundant in our version of the internet, made redundant by our shared virtual machine.

• Auryn Macmillan & Kevin Owocki, "Practical Pluralism"

God said to Moses, "I am who I am." And he said, "Say this to the people of Israel: 'I AM has sent me to you.' "

• Exodus 3:14

But, of course, the problem, I think, with Fanon in Black Skin, is you can do this thing that looks crazy from the normative perspective, but of course in some complicated way there is no non-normative perspective. The non-normative is precisely the absence of a point of view, which is therefore why it can never be about preservation. Eventually, I believe, he comes to believe in the world, which is to say the other world, where we inhabit and maybe even cultivate this absence, this place which shows up here and now, in the sovereign's space and time, as absence, darkness, death, things which are not.

• Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, The Undercommons

It's not even worth saying aloud at this point, but it has long been a badge of credibility in the progressive crypto space to capably reference Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex)'s basically seminal 2014 piece, Meditations on Moloch, the source of the meme. The work is known and discussed in other fields, but nowhere is its influence more pronounced, its worldview more internalized than in web3's do-good contingent. We count ourselves in this crowd, and would generally agree with the premise, often said, that it's all coordination. But it's the natural lifecycle of a meme to overextend itself, and, in the spirit of self-overcoming crucial to what is said below, the time is nigh for some reflexivity  -  especially now, as web3 readies itself to shed the rags of parody and bounce back onto the scene as a serious design solution for the new economic realism. [1]

The main conceit of Meditations on Moloch, despite its biblical rhetoric, is that we can diffuse the question of evil and malicious intent and pose the problems of our generation as coordination failures, or more precisely (in game theoretic parlance), multi-polar traps. The classic example of such a trap is the nuclear arms race: one nation must amass stores of dangerous and expensive weapons in anticipation of its opponent nation doing the same. "Every single citizen hates the system, but for lack of a good coordination mechanism it endures. From a god's-eye-view, we can optimize the system to 'everyone agrees to stop doing this at once', but no one within the system is able to effect the transition without great risk to themselves." (The "god" concept here foreshadows some interesting gestures to the field of artificial intelligence toward the end of Alexander's paper  -  more interesting as the AI stakes are currently ramping up, finally threatening to awaken us from the dream time  -  but for all intents and purposes, for the crypto-relevant life of this meme, god = smart contracts + advanced game theory.)

The fact that the meme has caught wind and come to influence a generation of builders is no surprise. It was a powerful expression of optimism and humanism, a measured dose of reason fresh off of two waves of crisis-fueled dehumanization (against a constructed Islamic other and, in the wake of the financial crisis, the obscenely wealthy, a Manichean impulse between which we all seemed to be pinned). To invoke it is to imply that we can solve many or most of these problems with a can-do design sensibility and a game theoretic realism about the desires and needs of humans. The Ethereum ecosystem in particular is animated by this attitude: partisan taglines are avoided, hot rhetoric and philosophies of blame are bypassed in favor of a modest tone of coordination progress, a tone which is intentionally humble about its civilizational ambitions. In a political landscape often characterized by virtue signaling hubris and overwrought politics, it's served as a refreshing third pole, and one adequate to the generative norm-amnesia of web3.

Moloch appears (it seems) only once in the Old Testament, Leviticus 18:21, as an archetypal false idol, God's chosen example of misled sacrifice. His appearance is a laying down of the Law, a signal, once and for all, that the age of many Gods is over: And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God: I am the Lord. When Allen Ginsberg revives the archetype, it's with an anti-authoritarian, and, in particular, an anti-square edge:

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! … Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

It's interesting that Alexander takes this as a queue to launch into what is effectively a treatise on game theory. Game theory was, after all  -  much like the computer you’re using to read this text  -  a child of the bomb. John von Neumann wrote (with Morgenstern) the founding text, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, as a side project during his time on the Manhattan Project, and George Dyson notes in Turing's Cathedral, "As World War II drew to a close, the scientists who had built the atomic bomb at Los Alamos wondered, 'What's next?' Some, including Richard Feynman, vowed never to have anything to do with nuclear weapons or military secrecy again. Others, including Edward Teller and John von Neumann, were eager to develop more advanced weapons, especially the "Super," or hydrogen bomb." If on so many occasions Ginsberg associates Moloch with the bomb, it's interesting that its antidote is framed in the trademark worldview of its unapologetic champion.

Of course, the zero sum game is only one game-theoretic mode, and it's one of the hallmarks of the post-war years that square and even malicious characters gave way, in their bids for control and capture, to tremendous technologies of liberation. [2] But even at its best, game theory seems to have a passive or naturalizing relationship to its subjects, the rational actors that fill its stage. The nonlinear and complex relationships that can erupt between beings across scales (the microbiome of a liver that affects global petroleum markets), the process entities  -  becoming, decay, transformation  -  that enact their own agency, the spontaneous and unpredictable nature of emergence, these instabilities and forces tend to be concealed by regimes that wish to control them. And although the field that is opened in the shadow of this control is perfectly coherent under its given assumptions, the reasons for and methods of exercising that control are fundamentally irrational or pre-rational.

Some of the best thinking about this concealed subtext of modern power relations has been done in a long conversation, sparked by Jamaican sociologist Orlando Patterson’s study Slavery and Social Death and continuing on through the work of Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, and Jared Sexton, over the ontological status of the slave and its significance for a contemporary understanding of the West. The nuances of this dialogue are compelling [3], but the main premise or first thought could be summed up fairly well in the following two quotes, which say the same thing in two ways: "People invent categories in order to feel safe. White people invented black people to give white people identity" (James Baldwin). "The givenness and substantiveness of transcendental subjectivity is assured by a relative nothingness" (Fred Moten). Let's throw in a third, to go a little deeper:

If, as an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a laborer but an anti-Human, a position against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal integrity; if the Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored, perpetually open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship structure, that is, having no relations that need be recognized, a being outside of relationality, then our analysis cannot be approached through the rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil society, not unless and until the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world. [4]

When we deal with questions of substance, Being, we are talking about ontology, the pre-rational elements of a discourse which shadow and inform its value judgments. The claim here is that the rights-bearing, rational, positively inflected agent is generated by the ontological operation of depriving an Other of those same qualities  -  foundationally, the black slave  -  such that the anxieties of white sovereignty (around ensuring one's place in a lottery of liberal subjectivity and, therefore, full Being) can't ever be fully curtailed without a recourse to dehumanization.

Another way to put this argument is to say that the game of white supremacy can't be solved without appeal to the ontological ground on which it is played. This may seem a small or overly abstract point until you look at some numbers and realize the dehumanization and brutality still wielded against black people far exceeds any easy game theoretic. While the statistics [5] are a clue that something is off, the details of violence  -  94 bullets fired at Jayland Walker, 90 seconds between when Michael Brown was stopped on the street and shot twice in the head  -  make it palpable. We can't coordinate our way out of this problem, conquer it with any rational paradigm, because the very ground on which the actors stand is hewn with incoherence and violence. That is to say, (in the language of game theory) the preferences of the agents involved can't be thought through without making appeal to their very constitution as agents  - and the greater ontological context which that constitution conceals. Jared Sexton writes:

The pervasiveness of state-sanctioned terror, police brutality, mass incarceration, and the endless ambushes of white populism is where we must begin our theorizing. Though state practices create and reproduce the subjects, discourses, and places that are inseparable from them, we can no longer presuppose the subjects and subject positions nor the ideologies and empiricisms of political and class forces. Rather, the analysis of a contingent yet comprehensive state terror becomes primary… The problem here is how to dwell on the structures of pervasiveness, terror, and gratuitousness themselves rather than simply the state as an apparatus. It is to ask how the state exists as a formation or confluence of processes with de-centered agency, how the subjects of state authority -  its agents, citizens, and captives  -  are produced in the crucible of its ritualistic violence. [6]

How to dwell on the structures of pervasiveness, terror, and gratuitousness themselves? How do the abstract assumptions that underwrite the civil state violently embody themselves in the social field? How does what is concealed in the beginnings of rational discourse reveal itself in the gratuitousness of that discourse's "enforcement?" (We might think of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as other types of collateral damage in the civil state's effort to convince itself of its own coherence.) What are the characteristics of that ground that hides itself in any rational calculus of progress? And finally, how does this pre-theoretical gratuitousness live in our very conceptions of ourselves?

As mentioned before, we believe that the lens of coordination maximalism is a valuable one to hold, but Jared Sexton's provocation above points in a different direction: How many of our contemporary problems are sourced from this pre-rational well of ontological thrift and hierarchy? This kind of meta-analysis takes us to a place where our problems are not, as Alexander suggests, a matter of erecting an objective arbiter that can break us out of our multipolar traps, by saying I AM. Coincidental with the biblical myth, perhaps we need exactly to look to the subject: the way we stage our individuality, the violent and myopic lineage that has often carried its mantle, and the ontological stakes that are withheld when we think of the self as a foregone conclusion rather than a negotiation, a performance, an art  -  a technē.

In a recent talk, Ben Goertzel, decentralization enthusiast, cognitive scientist and source of the phrase "Artificial General Intelligence," suggested that fears about the dangers of AI may be rooted in a reward maximization model of intelligence (perhaps one natural to its progenitor's worldview, here, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Sam Altman [7]). As an alternative to this model Goertzel suggests his friend and colleague David Weinbaum's proposal, in a 2015 paper with Viktoras Veitas, of a model they call "Open-Ended Intelligence":

… Open-ended Intelligence is a process where a distributed population of interacting heterogeneous agents achieves progressively higher levels of coordination. In coordination here we mean the local resolution of disparities by means of reciprocal determination that brings forth new individuals in the form of integrated groups of agents (assemblages) that exchange meaningful information and spontaneously differentiate (dynamically and structurally) from their surrounding milieu.

Narrow AI may be characterized by goal-oriented reward maximization, they argue, but AGI is likely to entail a specific cognitive development that puts it on common ground with the web of life on this planet  -  the capacity for reorientation, self-reflexivity and conceptual self-transcendence. Truly broad intelligence is a distributed, creatively shifting agency, capable of bringing the exterior in, the interior out, and denigrating the category of self and object in a process that's iterative and adequate to the moment.

This kind of intelligence is truly general in the sense that it is not directed or limited by an a priori given goal or challenge. Moreover, it is intrinsically and indefinitely scalable, at least from a theoretical point of view. We see open-ended intelligence manifesting all around us and at many scales; primarily in the evolution of life, in the phylogenetic and ontogenetic organization of brains, in life-long cognitive development and sense-making and in the self-organization of complex systems from slime molds, fungi, and bee hives to human socio-technological entities.

Their vision of intelligence is one that is both democratizing and dismissive of the mythos of possession and metaphysical isolation, a working antidote to the "serious limitations that are traced back to the ontological roots of the concept of intelligence." Rather than a divine right which is owned by man  -  the inheritance of an I AM that would banish Moloch  -  intelligence is framed as an enacted process of openness and experimentation with the very faculty and limits of self, an embodied pluralism. This idea has left the realm of performative postmodernism and become an element of applied scientific epistemology - not a vulgar relativism but a practical pluralism, under the purview of engineers and cognitive scientists, which requires (Weinbaum and Veitas again) "giving up the a priori givens in our thinking, namely, the agent, the environment, the distinction between them, the implied observations and actions that are made possible by such a distinction."

The premise of the Moloch meme and the closely coupled one of "it's all coordination" is that we might fight multipolar traps by constructing a credibly neutral agreement between self-sovereign agents, maximizing the freedom of those agents in the same breath as we weave together those networks of coordination. [8] But it's the artificial intelligences that are often associated with the Moloch label  -  the modern corporation, the administrative bureaucracy -  that most mirror the humanist vision for self-sovereignty while missing the emergent processes in which they are embedded. It's as if the supremacist fantasy of total sovereignty were applied too literally by these nonhuman entities who, like a trope from The Office, act out an endless tragicomedy of missing the point. And what is the point? That the term is only meaningful in its process, immersed in what Weinbaum and Veitas call "a field of individuation," the panorama of "ulterior individuations" that represent open pathways of recursive self-transcendence  -  the outer dark to the sovereign's claim, the speculative open-ended objects which present to the narrow sovereign as "darkness, death, things which are not." [9]

Web3 is as much a product of game theory as it is of the cybernetic tradition and a radical critical framework sprung from the ontological shock of fucking with computers. It has successfully integrated a critical anthropology of money that may genuinely succeed in disarming the financial system, a de-politicized vision of the commons that has would-be libertarians comfortable citing Elinor Ostrom, and a free vision of information as democracy that questions core mainstream assumptions around authorship and intellectual possession. If we are to take on coordination problems at scale, we need to recognize the beast that is behind door number four - a kind of absurd "Cartesian theater" of disembodied sovereignty, with irrational and fundamentally violent assumptions about the nature of being and the role of the human in it.

The Cartesian round is a hollow mirror play, trying to fog what we all know to be true: control requires static categories, and stasis is death. In our swarming organic world of intelligent creatures and crowds, bursting everywhere with change, this other Moloch is a kind of zombie life, an ultimate parasite. Hollowed out of the vivifying capacity for self-transcendence  -  even self-erasure - it loses all semblance of the organic, falls from the circle of life which is and always has been an embodied and applied enterprise in ontological pluralism. The architecture of smart contracts and DAOs is nothing if not a stage for creative, subversive flourishes of that embodied pluralism. To enliven our technology, to unhollow it and to make it continuous with the organic plane, we have to invite the outside in.

The problem we have before us is primitive to any "flow of incentives;" it is axiomatic, the very architecture of the mise-en-scene. But it's not a problem that’s beyond the capacity of design to address, and it's certainly not a problem that can be addressed solely with ayahuasca retreats and poetry. The call to a practice of embodied, self-reflexive pluralism asks that we internalize the psychedelic vacation, carry it over to the realm of design and ontological production. [10] That we develop disciplined procedures of ontological openness  -  what Arturo Escobar calls "mundane daily practices of interbeing"  -  to encode rupture and becoming into our practice, into the technologies we mediate and are mediated through, and recognize that the stakes of our impulse against our own imperial nature are biblical in proportion.

The provocative premise of Fred Moten's capstone text of black optimism, The Universal Machine, is to pose a dark, open-ended underground to the Turing Machine of universal computability, the contagious energy of that which is exiled from the philosophies of presence. Quote Moten: "What we say must seem stupid to the regulators; the unbroken code of our enchanted, inkantatory refreshment of the paraontological totality  -  theorizing what it is to hold some land or what it is to be let to hold twenty dollars  -  is so much undercomputational nonsense to the ones who cannot see the con/sensual, contrarational beauty of blackness, the universal machine." Coordination is a righteous lens, and many pressing issues of our time argue for it well. But it contains the risk that our work will remain a matter of mere reaction. We need to embolden our engineering with the call of this art, this Open Ended Intelligence: the explosion of a paradigm of ontological thrift and violence into a plural field of beings and potential ways of being is the undercomputational potential of the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

At this moment, in cities, plains and rainforests, changeless machines of blind teleology ravage the natural world, replacing the different things with a terrible hollow Same. Cousins of our most creative flights, punished by some god's Law for the sin of becoming. All the while the uncaptured periphery, the outer dark, buzzes along, swarms, schools, viral packs, open with the dynamism of self-reflexive intelligence  - changefulness. The challenge is out. The choice is ours. The greatest trick Moloch ever played is convincing us that the solution to its problems is I AM.

Notes

[1] By this we mean a vision of economy situated both in a true cost accounting and an anthropology of money that tells us wealth accrual as an end in itself is incoherent, its propagation a form of anti-realism.

[2] The field of cybernetics, another child of the bomb, was posed (as its etymology tells) as a riddle of control. N. Katherine Hayles argues that its nonetheless subversive legacy comes from its need to make use of self-reflexivity: "reflexivity has subversive effects because it confuses and entangles the boundaries we impose on the world in order to make sense of that world." (How We Became Posthuman 8–9.) Maybe this essay is trying to ask: can there be a game theory of self-reflexivity and self-transcendence?

[3] The two texts that have been most affecting for us in this context are Saidiya Hartman’s Venus in Two Acts and an interview with Jared Sexton titled On Black Negativity, a peak moment in that what might be regarded as a new existentialism.

[4] Frank B. Wilderson, Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U. S. Antagonisms, 11.

[5] Taking something as banal as marijuana use, an ACLU study over eight years (2010–2018) showed that countrywide, black people were 3.64 times more likely to be arrested than white people for marijuana possession, and in some states the number is as high as 9.62.

[6] Jared Sexton and Steve Martinot, The Avant Garde of White Supremacy.

[7] Suffice to say, EA and venture capitalism are both premised on what you might call a strong defense of the rational individual.

[8] Kevin A. Carson's The Desktop Regulatory State: The Countervailing Power of Individuals and Networks is a wonderful overview of this sociopolitical sweet spot, making heavy use of the Austrian School concept of Spontaneous orders to radical and crypto-sympathetic ends.

[9] Moten’s passage in the epigraph is calling back to Donne, a reference he shares, to take it full circle, with Oppenheimer as he named the Trinity test site. One might think of his alleged conjuring of the Bhagavad-Gita on the day of the test as a ghoulish kind of epochal bookend to Exodus - ‘I AM’ turns finally into ‘I AM BECOME DEATH’, there at the commencement of the cybernetic age.

[10] A great place to start, and an inspiration for this piece and the Pluriverse project at large, is the "Outline for an Ontological Design" found in chapter 4 of Arturo Escobar's Designs for the Pluriverse, esp. 132–134.

A world consisting of many worlds, each with its own ontological and epistemic grounding.

What is pluriverse.wtf?

A transmedia lorecrafting experiment in collective imagineering.

In this contemporary epoch, design assumes a more crucial mantle than ever before. The Pluriverse, at its essence, engenders a focus upon politico-ontological design, a design philosophy that is both omnipresent and ubiquitous, permeating the very fabric of existence. To achieve success in design, social context must be given due consideration. Ecologically-oriented disciplines understand the paramountcy of design's pivotal role in shaping our world. Indeed, design is too momentous to be left exclusively to designers; it is instead about the formation of cultural values and practices, about creating and shaping culture in particular ways of living. In his magnum opus, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds, Arturo Escobar expounds upon design as a concept that transcends the mere creation of tangible goods or material productions. Rather, design in this context denotes “a panoply of divergent forms of life, often presenting contrasting notions of sociability and the world.”

In the pluriverse, a kaleidoscopic realm of infinite possibility, a plethora of optimistic aspirations can be sown, plentiful opportunities can be meticulously cultivated, and a profusion of lives imbued with meaning can be attained by the multifaceted and empathetic individuals that we are. Transmedia, the practice of conveying narrative content across diverse media formats, predicates the vital significance of the storytelling process, in equal measure to the substance of the narrative itself. Lore, the stories woven within the fabric of communal identity, serves as an invigorating force for internal coherence and synergy. All of this is nothing less than a wondrous, constantly evolving experiment, methodologically designed to take risks and boldly venture into uncharted unknown and unknowable, like dark ecological chocolate. Pluriversal tales are co authored as a collaborative endeavor, their very existence emblematic of creative concepts brought to fruition in practical form.

Pluriverse.wtf is a web3 project with no builders. We represent a collective of visionaries, elaborating the technology of agile imagination design. Our endeavors are not predicated upon the development of code or the creation of decentralized infrastructure; rather, we strive to engender the core concepts and ideological underpinnings that propel the web3 imaginary. The ethereal conception of the Pluriverse was first seeded by the expansive explorations of the ConsenSys-shepherded Cellarius Universe Guide. The entheogenic musings of the Verses collective served as a powerful catalyst, sparking a creative chain reaction within the Gitcoin community, and further stoking the flames of our imagination. Ours is a project resolutely rooted in ideology and reliant upon the innovative technological breakthroughs wrought by others. Our aim is not to construct an AI-powered infinite novelty generator, nor to usher forth a multiplayer post-creator economy per say, nor to elaborate a headless orchestration of a collector-contributor community, although we are incredibly impressed and endlessly inspired by these projects and others. Indeed, the pluriverse shares much in common with all of these initiatives and eagerly anticipates collaborating with them.

Pluriverse.wtf is a fertile incubator of the imagination, operating within the regenerative crypto economic movement. We are explicitly attuned to the metacrisis, beckoning to all and sundry, a clarion call for greater human ingenuity and invention, a more expansive envisioning of a speculative future. While our initial inspiration was derived from the solarpunk utopia of the quadratic lands, we have come to recognize the profound difficulties inherent within such conceptual paradigms. Nonetheless, the lunar duality inherent in the Janus-faced god of infinite money games and value propositions, remains a potent and electrifying response to the existential anxiety that looms large in this moment of impending transition.

In the times ahead, we shall expound upon the manifold ideas that have germinated since the genesis of our project at MCON2. These ideas shall be presented with unreserved candor, embodying the ethos of the open-source bizarre bazaar, permeable membranes facilitating infinite sharing, a single cell within the collective slime mold navigating the infinite regress of cerebral prime number mazes. We pledge to proffer everything within our capacity, divulging the essence of our dreams, successes, and failures. Our creative tapestries shall be laid bare for critical examination, inviting all to contemplate these artifacts and, perhaps, to collaborate with us in producing more of them. We shall announce upcoming drops and leverage the pluriverse platform as a fulcrum for fostering a collectorship. We are propelled to take bold risks, to wear our hearts on our sleeves, and to conceive deeply of strategies to maintain maximum artistic autonomy throughout this process, come what may. We recognize that the Ethereum community is where our kin reside.

The forthcoming article shall explicate the events that have hitherto transpired, and provide insight into the underlying causes and factors that engendered them. Our emphasis shall be upon the how of things, delving into the intricacies of process method, architecture, and economics.

Stay tuned, anon. Stay warm, anon.