Filling forms and designing Metaverse micro-republics

On bureaucracy, new and old, and work in progress

Tomorrow, my wife and I have an official appointment with the Turkish government for a short-term residency visa. With it, we can live here in Istanbul for a year, rent an apartment, open a domestic bank account, and otherwise remove ourselves from the peculiar half-life we’ve lived orbiting the earth as digital nomads.

The Turks have shifted most of their forms online, although unfortunately, the English versions of the forms we’ve been using have strange flaws and tend to foul up my browser and crash.

If I hadn’t found a note from an English project manager who’d run the gauntlet before me, I would have given up. Apparently, the government database can’t accept certain strings of English and the secret is to switch the page into Turkish when you run into a snag. It mostly worked. After a few days of trying I snagged us an appointment with the Migration Authority.

A few steps still required human interaction. It took us two visits to the tax office to get an ID number, the equivalent of a social security number here in Turkey.

The office had the feel of bureaucracy anywhere. There was a glorious view of the Bosphorous behind the workers, but otherwise, the atmosphere could have been transplanted from a DMV in California. Minus the grubby plastic sneeze guards. Weariness and styrofoam cups of tea and petty tyrannies and piles of paperwork and rubber stamps.

Tomorrow we go for our official interview; we’ve printed out the bank forms, puzzled over our blood types, generated Airbnb records, and taken special ‘biometric’ photos for the occasion.

There’s a site that vets whether they’re acceptable or not, per Google Translate, mine wouldn’t recognize my mouth until I boosted the contrast and whited out the background. It’s an odd picture, to be sure.

Meanwhile, we’ve enlisted a friend of ours to teach us Turkish, and have made some progress. It’s a tough slog, the language is second-only to Mandarin in difficulty for a native English speaker to learn. Estimated time for fluency: 2000 hours of practice, versus 580ish for Spanish. There are suffixes and minute shifts in tone that radically alter the meaning of a sentence. I can make it two sentences into a conversation with a waiter or a shopkeeper before the gig is up and it’s obvious I can’t say much more than thank you, good morning, I’ll take a Turkish coffee.

Stability should give me a little more time to write these posts and other, more ambitious things. I’ve finally come up with a solution for taking all of the essays I’ve written and feeding them into a grinder and spitting out a delicious hamburger of a narrative project.

For over a year I’ve been trying to think of a way to structure a story that would probe web3, my own journey through it, and let me talk about some of the geopolitical changes that rewiring our economic system will bring. The challenge wasn’t the subject matter, it’s interesting stuff and I’ve been steeping in it for a while. The problem for me was that other better books had already been written and there wasn’t any point in writing the same story twice. Plus Vitalik Buterin is unlikely to sit down for an interview with a 250-subscriber newsletter. Although I will try.

One of my subscribers, Cemil Şinasi Türün, an entrepreneur and professor at Boğaziçi University, came up with an elegant solution. He reminded me of my run-in with a strange character at a tailor shop.

I was being fitted for a bespoke shirt. A man in a nicely tailored shirt, wearing two-toned shades that obscured his face emerged from the back and offered to translate. He claimed to be an attorney but when I mentioned my connection to cryptocurrency, he demanded to input his data into my phone and verified that it was accurate, and then offered me advice on currency transfers into Iran. I declined his kind offer.

“He may have been a mad man or he may have been secret police,” said Cemil afterward, “there’s a lot of interest in crypto these days.”

Nothing came of my meeting until I returned to the United States. I had trouble crossing the border. Border Control gave me a special interview. They asked how much currency I was carrying and didn’t believe the heavily bearded face in my passport photo belonged to yours truly. I was a little shaken and held my in-laws up for about an hour as I struggled to prove my bonafides and they circled the traffic quagmire that surrounds LAX.

Had the deep state taken a personal interest in me? Or was I conjuring conflating coincidences? Tallying strange happenings to root out conspiracy might be one of the few uses of blockchain technologies that I’ve been able to find for narrative prose.

You can use a blockchain to capture a unique performance; and poetry, especially short-form poetry, seems to jive well with being tokenized, decorated, and turned into an NFT, but books and stories don’t. Or at least I don’t think they lend themselves to it. People are trying. But to me, an NFT ebook doesn’t seem intrinsically different than an Amazon Kindle Single.

You can fundraise for a book on the blockchain, and you can sell electronic copies of a book as NFT editions, but you can’t really do much else with them.

Creating an indelible record of a dangerous secret does seem relevant, on the other hand, and has the advantage of actually using the blockchain. Plus it’s fun to write about, and there are dozens of weird murderers and interconnected “deep state” funders backing projects. There are good guys, bad guys, utopian visions and dystopian fears. Plus there’s the deep psychological reason I write this Substack, my post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis, which comes with a version of paranoia that isn’t inaccurate, just touchy, called hyperawareness, and rather than distorting reality, I’m unusually perceptive to negative feelings. Or so they would have me believe. Hence the conversation with the TSA.

All this is to say it would be fun to wade into the murky conspiratorial side of crypto, and chat with all of the bedsit royalty and disgraced child stars behind it, and I’m planning to use that as the skeletal structure of a longer piece. 

On the less murky side of things, an art project I’m working on with Benton C Bainbridge has been making progress. We’re creating an artist-run decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called Lonely ROCKS. The original idea was to onboard artists into web3, while exhibiting well-curated shows.

We came up with two creative restrictions: the art would consist of self-portraits (in the expanded field) and would come to an end as soon the artist-curators we chose could no longer unanimously agree whether to include a new artist or artwork.

The last time I wrote about Lonely ROCKS, Benton and I had just chosen artists for the first DAO season.

We each picked 10 digital artists and used a quadratic voting system to whittle them down to five each. Since then, we’ve been meeting with our chosen artists and introducing them to the project. We’ve also been tweaking the structure of the organization as we meet with lawyers and talk to the artists, all of whom have their own experience with digital art projects, and generally try to avoid running afoul of the Securities and Exchange Commission, without restricting our collection to accredited investors, as most art DAOs have done in the past.

At the center of a DAO is a tokenized voting system. These are fascinating to study because minute differences in how they’re set up can have massive downstream effects on the community that blossoms around them. You have to safeguard against malfeasance, which makes creating the bylaws of the organization a combination of game theory and programming software; and make sure you aren’t unjustly enriching any one group over another, while making sure that no one can topple your government and raid your treasury.

We’ve landed on a bicameral structure. There are two tokens controlling two government bodies, like the Senate and the House of Representatives in the U.S. government. We have a group of Patrons, and anyone can become a Patron by buying our governance tokens. These allow you to nominate art for exhibition, and give you a special pass into events that we throw, first dibs at fundraising NFT mints, and proposing ideas to the Curators. 

Curators are unanimously approved by one another and receive a different governance token. To become a Curator, every token-holder who attends the meeting deciding their fate must agree to admit them. We imagine this being a kind of ritual. Curators, aside from approving one another, may also accept or reject artwork for inclusion in shows, nominate the treasury committee, and decide when, where and how to show work.

Curators receive a different token than Patrons, probably an NFT, and might also receive Patron tokens as an incentive for participating in votes.

The bicameral structure seems like the best way to avoid spam and hostile takeovers. There are dozens of sleazy NFT projects that would love to glom onto a community, and buy their way into nominating their collection of NFT drug bingo cards. But we didn’t want to exclude anyone from the project either. We wanted to keep the DAO at least somewhat open to the community, without turning it into a Reddit-like crowdsourced model, where the most popular, most SEO-friendly, meme content would “win.” Hence the need for curators and patrons.

We’re starting small, we don’t actually have the tooling for a DAO in place yet. We don’t need it yet, since we’re still dealing with small group dynamics and can vote over Zoom, but once we release our first Patron tokens, then we’ll have to set one up so they can nominate art for the next show. We’ll probably use a no-code template unless we can convince our backers to gin one up for us.

It’s been an exciting journey so far, we have an online venue picked out for our first season and plan to show our work either at Art Basel Miami or in one of the satellite fairs around it. There’s a long way to go. Of course, I do wonder at what point does governing a community shift gears from being fun to generating the cyberpunk equivalent of dreary halls and triplicate forms of a ‘going concern’ or a byzantine bureaucracy. In the meantime, before it does, if you’d like to learn more about Lonely ROCKS, come join our Discord!

A Samurai in [Crypto] Autumn

A dispatch from no-man's land

Given how sporadic these missives are, I’m flattered so many of you are willing to pay. Thank you for the support! Membership now includes the equivalent of a three-month supply of iodine pills and three inches of lead plates. Proven to regrow hair and melt belly fat. (Your results may vary).

*

All this late-era cold war nostalgia has come bubbling up for me: Kilo-class attack submarines have been sliding through the Dardanelles, close enough to touch. I used to pass an American airbase on my way to school in Spain every morning with billboard-sized Defense Condition status and its corresponding color bar. DEFCON is officially classified but was always at DEFCON THREE when I saw it (code name ROUNDHOUSE, 15 minutes to scramble jets). 

DEFCON was raised to two this week. As close as we came during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The only time we’ve come so close since the Cuban Missile Crisis. One step away from total thermonuclear war. Let’s hope it’s p.r.

Engulfing the world in nuclear hellfire seems hard to imagine. You have to hope those steely colonels manning the panels at NORAD and its Russian equivalent are still around, and they’ll doublecheck the order to fire at the last second and grab the operator’s hand a second before his quivering finger jabs in the red button...  But alas, they were probably propaganda, given the history of real Cold War nuclear shenanigans that have emerged, with atomic bombs sliding off the deck of aircraft carriers and our Dew Line (the early warning arctic radar system) false flagging the geese and the aurora borealis as incoming ballistic missiles. We’re lucky to have made it this long.

Closer to home, and by home I suppose I mean the “mass consensual hallucination” behind the screen where I spend fifteen hours a day as opposed to Odessa which is about as far as Los Angeles is from San Francisco, another conflict is playing out. 

Fifth-generation warfare is ramping up. We got a glimpse of it in Canada when the government started freezing protestors’ accounts and now the entire world – even Switzerland – is isolating Russia from the world economic system. They’re in talks to yank them from SWIFT (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, the world’s non-crypto international payment system, essentially an artery of global finance). Individual companies are climbing into the fray, banks are freezing Russian assets, Apple and Google halted their payment systems and Google Maps has been selectively shutting down traffic information from and yanking apps from their stores. Countries are forbidding visas, encouraging their citizens to join the Ukrainian irregulars and fight, and all of sudden my entire social network seems to have turned into a botnet: the Russians are bad, the Russians are incompetent, the Russians are losing, the Russian convoy approaching Kiev never ran routine maintenance on its tires and they’re all going flat… Twitter is actually flagging Russian news sources now as potentially suspect, the way they started flagging vaccine skeptics. 

This may all be perfectly justified, but it in practice means opening a much larger front–all of a sudden it’s not just the Russian Army at war, the entire Russian population is under attack by everyone outside of them. During the Cold War war seemed tragically under our leaders’ control, now everyone and everything is politicized and polarized and we’re all combatants. It’s hard to dial this stuff back. Just look at how much tension remains between American democrats and republicans since the 2020 election.

*

The crypto community is fighting hard to avoid being pulled into the war. For context, web3 has eclipsed some major milestones. The space is worth roughly $2T (a third of the value of the world’s gold supply) and the Ethereum network alone now contains something like $100B worth of value locked into its decentralized finance applications, and it’s growing quickly.

Traditional financial companies are starting to realize that they could be replaced by algorithms shuffling crypto.

El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as legal tender, and now Honduras – who someone once pointed out to me is a favorite destination for American wannabe social engineers because it’s the poorest functional country within easy reach of a Gulfstream jet – is also considering the switch. It’s a threat to US dollar hegemony and the U.S. and its allies are pushing back. 

On the government front, their first target (aside from deeply crooked initial coin offerings and blatant SEC violations) was Tether and a couple of other stablecoins, which are tokens meant to represent US dollars and other fiat currencies. They’re crucial for decentralized finance and speculation because they allow traders to easily convert from a fiat currency (such as a US dollar) to crypto and back again. They’re supposed to be backed 1:1 by dollars but in practice tend to have a certain percentage of slushier stuff like risky Chinese commercial bonds etc standing behind them. Meanwhile, the U.S. is considering whether to create a cryptocurrency of its own, a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), a digital dollar with all of the features of crypto but backed by the Fed.

NFTs have also come under fire. It was peculiar to see it happen, there were a few months when they were broadly accepted, and then there was an onslaught of media antagonism, mostly focused on the environmental costs of NFTs (which are pretty easily mitigated in the long term). Cool kids hate NFT now, which is sad considering it’s one of the few new ways to make money with very little capital. 

So naturally, crypto has also been pulled into the Ukraine-Russia conflict. There were suggestions that Russia might use crypto to maneuver around the international sanctions, the way North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela are said to routinely do, and the U.S. has sworn it will sanction any platform that trades with Russia. Many of these platforms are essentially just an algorithm connecting two disparate parties, and there’s no easy way to exclude Russian trades. 

In response, the crypto community began donating to Ukraine en mass, openly and aggressively aligning themselves with NATO and Ukraine.

*

While I was writing this a small group of Ukrainian nationals marched past our window (we’re about five blocks from the Russian Consulate).

The Ukrainian government created an official wallet for receiving crypto donations, which amounts to roughly $40mm as of March 3, 2022, and there’s a lot more are coming in.

What they did next was profoundly unsettling. They announced an airdrop to all of the addresses that had contributed to the wallet. We’ll find out soon what it is they are dropping, but will either be an NFT or an ERC-20 token of some sort or the chain equivalent. 

If it’s the latter then they’ve created a new vehicle for raising money, a new currency that they can sell on exchanges and use for funding military exercises, assuming they’ve kept a chunk for themselves. If it’s an NFT, then it could portend something a little more sinister. Imagine a badge permanently attached to your digital identity – a way of indelibly tattooing the Ukrainian government’s identity onto you forever. To me, this seems like a method of “standing up and being counted,” and pushing forward the flywheel of polarization. For many political issues in American politics, anymore there seems to be no middle ground, you’re either with us or the enemy. Even if it’s just a currency, it’s still disconcerting having a digital tag pointing to your political stance in a potential nuclear war.

*

The United States is ostensibly free but most of us choose to spend most of our lives in fairly oppressive totalitarian micro regimes, corporations, or government institutions that keep us contained with far fewer rights than we ostensibly have as citizens. For example, I assume my social media is being monitored and could be used to fire me or destroy my source of income. Depending on where we live, we also outsource much of the process of governance to housing associations or condo boards, or municipal governments which are far from purely democratic. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are both an evolution and a potential bulwark against the creeping economization of everything, which is what a cryptocurrency future enables, for better or worse. 

DAOs are a tool for organizing access to a public good. The utopian vision for DAOs is a world where you can carve out a political niche that is completely tailored to your existence. You might have subscription and voting rights in dozens of DAOs. If you don’t like one, you can “exit” or “hard fork,” copying and pasting an existing organization to create your own. 

Matt Levine opined in Bloomberg Opinion recently that “one great theme of the post-2008 financial world is that money is a social construct and a way to keep track of what you deserve in terms of goods and service.” This has always been true, but now “who has money and what they can do with it can be adjusted by central banks and national treasuries.”

The dark side of DAOs is that they bring this economization to an individual level, within the corporation, and there are now payment systems based on open peer review. Designed to spur conversations about compensation that ferret out hidden pockets of value, it’s a bit like crowdsourcing a management consultancy every month. Performance reviews are never fun, but imagine running the gauntlet every paycheck with all the delights of office politics getting dragged in too. And CBDCs are even scarier. They allow governments to turn off spending at will. They’re already doing so in Nigeria.

One of my favorite cyberpunk references, the last comprehensive U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (2035) predicted an increasingly acrimonious world that leads to three possible outcomes for nation-states – islands of isolation, spheres of influence similar to those during the cold war, or a gradual dissolution of the boundaries between public and private as NGOs and private corporations begin to scoop up duties that were traditionally left to the government. The latter seems to be coming to be in the Western world. The great powers like NATO are dissolving and leaving behind a strange gumbo of government in their wake.

*

For now, it seems as though the threat of global war is receding. The [NATO-aligned] Polish and Bulgarian governments declined to loan the Ukrainian government their MiG-29s, and the risk of a rapid escalation seems to be dwindling. As a ten-year-old schoolboy in the 1980s, I would have loved to see the F-16s streaking off to battle the MiGs, but now I really would rather not.

2021 - An Earth Odyssey

Our Beautiful Brutal Cyberpunk Now (in photos)

Looking forward to corresponding in the New Year! - James

Welcome to the Shingles Metaverse

Reconsidering international borders, British healthcare, the future of Web3, fate, and an anarchist look at deep history.

(photo by Erin McGirk)

I was grievously misinformed by a kindergarten chum. The chickenpox party I attended at a Hampstead garden apartment in 1986 was not intended to stave off a painful reappearance of varicella zoster in adulthood --  no, I’m an adult and caught fucking shingles, and was left with a scraggly divot of missing flesh on my forehead and puffed-up eyelid.

Apparently, they infected us to keep a potential outbreak of pox from interrupting the Fitzjohn’s Academy school year. Meanwhile, little sprinkles of Chernobyl fell on us in the schoolyard and the nasty pie they served us was squirming with mad cow disease prions and peas.

“Mister,” a young waitress in a Provo tandoori restaurant asked me, “please may I ask what happened to your face?”

Shingles sounds amusing on paper, it isn’t fatal, it largely afflicts boomer boss men and their balding gen x lackeys, etc. but I took it badly; I’m in my forties, and for the first time in my life I was feeling pretty good about my appearance, thanks to a young bride, a half-paid off Italian sports car and a couple of Turkish bespoke coats, I was maturing into a kind of Daniel-Day-Lewis-esque rakishness in my early middle age and then all of a sudden had a ghastly Gorbachev like gouge tunneling into me and couldn’t wear my contacts. 

For what it’s worth my wife was begging me to go to the doctor. Since I wasn’t in the UK and didn’t have access to the “National Elf” I refused to go until it got really bad. I kept insisting it was allergies and that all they’d do was give me a Benadryl in the ER. Anyway, she was right and I was wrong. If your face swells up, it’s worth spending $75 on a Teledoc (mine was aghast at how long I’d left it).

I felt as monstrous as I did at age thirteen with acne and aviator sunglasses and three ounces of dental apparatus wired between my teeth. After spending a couple of weeks in pain, I didn’t feel so cyberpunk, you know? I felt geriatric.

It took a couple of weeks of narrative digestion to weave this new mark into my system. I considered assuming an edgy anti-vax stance (who gets shingles at 41? Must have been the double dose of mRNA stew I was pricked with in Freedom, California), and considered adopting a snooty cosmetic fiction: oh, this? Just a little souvenir of miene Mensur (academic fencing) at the Studentenverbindungen at the American Embassy School in New Delhi. Neither were on-brand, as the kids say. 

The problem with creative nonfiction as a medium for thinking about the uneven distribution of the future in the present is that you need a little distance from the subject for contemplation and creation and if you’re living a cyberpunk life, sometimes you can’t help but notice the sand being sucked from between your toes and the wave towering behind you…which is all to say that I subscribe to dozens of sub(s)stack and promised myself I’d never succumb to the dreadful groveling apology post you must make when you miss a few miss issues: so shucks, I’m sorry everyone, between my frenetic travel, work, and hitting a rough patch with my health, I felt like crawling into myself and deleted a couple of social media accounts and kept my thoughts to myself for a few months.

As I steeped in my antiviral meds for a few weeks and was wracked with guilt for not writing this stack, and moved between Istanbul, New York City, Provo, Los Angeles, Vegas, Santa Cruz, and finally to Mexico City something odd happened. 

In Istanbul, I was so impressed by a friend’s Ethereum identity (ENS) that I decided to buy one myself: Ourcyberpunknow.Eth. It’s a bit like a web address, except it’s for the Ethereum blockchain and refers to a wallet. Look it up on Etherscan if you’re curious about what’s inside. Ethereum is a global network of nodes, by spending valuable “gas” you can pay for transactions on a vast peer-to-peer computer network. Bitcoin lets you transfer value between any two addresses in the world without interference, Ethereum lets you do the same but it’s Turing Complete, meaning you can run an infinite variety of software applications on top of it. 

All the promise and peril of cryptocurrency comes from this ability, other than destabilizing wobbly currencies and providing a stream of funds for rogue regimes. But worrying about all that is very 2017 (which was the Initial Coin Offering boom, the last paradigm in crypto; right now we’re somewhere in the DeFi/DAO/NFT wave).

Six months later, after a three-month pause in working on my Substack, I received what’s called an “airdrop,” a distribution of cryptocurrency tokens, just for owning the address. The tokens gave me a voting share in the organization behind the ENS, which a number of large crypto companies and investors had decided were crucial parts of the Ethereum infrastructure. There was a scramble to buy the tokens, particularly after Coinbase, the largest one, entered the fray. The price of a token spiked up. Suddenly a side project I’d created as a way to keep in touch with friends and accumulate notes for a book about the future present, became the most lucrative creative project I’d worked on. 

I sold half for Ethereum, and plan to use the proceeds to grubstake my half of a project I’m working on with a fellow artist: tentatively called AloneTogetherDAO, it will be a decentralized autonomous organization devoted to collecting NFT self-portraits created by its token holders. Each week we vote on new artwork and members to include. As soon as we disagree, the organization is dissolved and the collection ends. What happens next, we’re trying to decide. If you’re interested in the project, please feel free to leave a comment below.

***

This morning my wife and I went to Mexico City’s National Anthropological Museum. The ruins of the Aztec empire protrude through this city, and the museum is like a portal, an opening connecting the skyscrapers and volcanic stone cathedrals to the world below. 

The museum is a massive capital-m Modern concrete slab that was probably meant to look like a dig site—and may have been the inspiration for a newer one we visited in Turkey featuring the ruins of ancient Troy—there’s a vast inner courtyard and salas surrounding it arranged chronologically, charting all the lost and indigenous cultures who have claimed Mexico as their home.

Some of it really does look like alien spacecraft or radio-dialed control panels. Maybe because they didn’t have as much metal so the shapes of tools are unfamiliar?

There were faithful reproductions of temples to the Sun Gods, including the top of the pyramid and the braziers and slaughter stone where the sacrifices took place. Traveling Turkey’s ancient sites a few months ago, everything was familiar; I could connect it to old history assignments of drawing out Corinthian and Doric columns, but the Aztec and Mayan ruins were jarringly new to me, the only history I had to grasp onto looking at it were a few Cherokee myths and a National Geographic I remembered about discovering a well filled with burnished corpses and emeralds. Sheared of historical context I could only take in the aesthetic, which was bewildering and brutal. It was laid bare to me, I couldn’t help but imagine it as the remains of an aesthetic apparatus supporting centuries of human sacrifice with the consent of the governed. Made me wonder what the modern equivalent is today; the weird snarls on car bonnets, the grids, and guidelines shuffling us through cities, or the dark patterns nudging us online?

Which brings us to the Metaverse. I never liked Neal Stephenson’s (1992) Snow Crash (which coined “Metaverse” the way William Gibson coined “Cyberspace”). He described a virtual world based on our own, an uncanny double haunted by cyberpunk hotties and their corporate nemeses. Facebook has attached themselves to this concept, renaming their governing body “Meta”. They bought a promising virtual reality company called Oculus a few years ago, and have debuted a few sinister virtual office spaces. Legless entities float around conference tables.

To create a space that’s useful for more than pleasure-seeking and gambling, the Metaverse will have to incorporate what’s become known as web3. I’ll explain: There have been three incarnations of the internet. The first paradigm was realizing that a vast network could exchange information: email was the most exciting application, all of a sudden you could have spreadsheets materialize across thousands of miles. Inventories could be shared, supply lines improved, and multinational corporations evolved from lumbering dinosaurs into sleek predators. The next wave (web 2.0) brought eCommerce and social media. Data became a two-way exchange, analytics and consumer information created torrents of information and as processing speeds and storage capacity grew, it gave FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google) the ability to digest it and tweak their customers’ behavior. The most recent evolution involves the creation of an economic layer, not just cryptocurrency and decentralized finance, but changing the substance of the digital material we’re inhabiting online, giving us the ability to create unique digital property (NFTs) and transact without a third party peeping in and sieving off the cream.  

If you’ve been reading my work the last few months you’ll have heard me pondering non-fungible tokens (NFTs). These are essentially files containing a unique identifier that’s written permanently into a blockchain. The unique identifier allows someone to prove ownership of a digital file, which means you can sell limited editions of artwork or music or videos, and will eventually allow important records to be non-fungible, which means we’ll eventually be able to do things like automating title searches and anything else that requires a notary or stamp or a visit to a courthouse and will probably replace most white-collar jobs. I’m being glib here but that’s basically the plan.

So far Meta have failed to gain much traction in Web3. Facebook’s proposed currency Diem (previously Libra) provoked outrage, and they’ve been slower than their peers at algorithmically popping bubbles of cultural toxicity.

The Metaverse would give them a chance to rebuild their user communities with entirely new infrastructure, one created according to their exact specifications instead of slopped together chaotically like the first incarnation. Everything in the Metaverse would be provided by Meta, not just data, not just infrastructure, but reality itself, every instant of consciousness experienced by their readers would have Meta’s fingerprints on it. A chance for total horizontal and vertical integration, as a 19th Century industrialist might put it.

Zuckerberg himself is said to fancy himself as a kind of Roman emperor and quietly funds research into Roman history. Maybe that’s the dream for Meta, the creation of a dream world Pax Zuckerbergus, with roads and neo-villas, and baths and neon-lined Roman busts scrolling off into eternity. Of course, the other interpretation for the “Meta” maneuver is that it’s the last gasp of an increasingly irrelevant and desperate corporation, a cool rebrand to staunch the hemorrhage of users and distract from the way Instagram spikes teen suicides and governments are taking notice of its ability to propagate behavior.

***

Crypto is hurtling toward the tech world. Many of the future survivors, the little mammals seething and breeding around the legs of web 2 dinosaurs, are what’s known as decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). They’re best imagined for the moment as a collective project held together with a deliberate community and their own economic system, usually consisting of pooled cryptocurrency resources and some kind of token. Many of the brains behind them came out of the co-op world, not to mention weirder nooks and crannies like gamer guilds.

As I get older I worry less about creaking institutions like doing terrible harm to me online than I do the upstarts. Facebook is as fouled with bureaucracy as any government these days. Arrogant metaverse startups scrambling to turn billions of dollars worth of tokens into something tangible before the next market rebalancing frighten me far more. “Let’s rebalance the economy for 10mm people.” Click. Kaboom!

Venerable cyberpunk Bruce Sterling imagined a social network in his short story Maneki Neko, controlled by what we would recognize as a DAO today. Their incentive system consisted of favors: A spritz of bay rum triggers an allergy attack that triggers a chance meeting with the love of one’s life.  The spooky part was wondering about the grand plan behind all of the tiny little actions was… Who was really in control of it all? During the 1990s when Sterling wrote the story, an artificial general intelligence (i.e. human-like) seemed to be hiding behind the scenes of most science fiction. Today, an artificial general intelligence seems further away than it did in the 1990s, replaced with weird feedback loops between algorithms and big data and the humans producing all of that data. We’re absorbing these machines and vice versa. 

DAOs could be a bulwark against this and the total control of the Metaverse by data-hogging corporations. They’re relatively private, they’re adaptable and powerful. Recently a coalition of goofy crypto-rich collectors nearly raised enough to buy a copy of the U.S. Constitution. Other DAOs have bought the rights to the forbidden Wu-Tang Clan album bought by Martin Shrekli and boosted the price of countless wretched NFT artworks. Some are designed for a single purpose and then dissolve. Others like MakerDAO, a decentralized organization that produces stablecoins in exchange for staked assets, persist for years. A DAO’s tooling can be perfectly straightforward, but as these organizations of humans linger longer in time, holding them together becomes a much more delicate thing than just tokenized voting. There’s plenty going on behind the scenes. Culture comes into play. Deliberately created with incentives and by hiring charming people to engage and interact and wheedle other human beings into spending their time and effort in a community until it accumulates enough momentum to go on its own.

One of the paradoxical elements of the second wave of Internet evolution was how open the software side of it was. Google and countless other titans were created from open-source software, mass voluntary contributions from thousands of individual contributors. It was in those communities that many of the lessons behind today’s DAOs were learned.

Not all code is created equal. Tens of thousands of voluntary contributions had to be reviewed. Successful projects evolved ruthless administrations to root through, vet, accept and reject changes. Wikipedia is a good example. In the old days, almost anything could slip through and be published, but gradually a vigorous internal culture evolved, and legions of administrators and editors began protecting what the public could access.

Much of the violent online discourse that took so many of us by surprise in the last decade has its roots in these online conflicts. The imposition of culture onto communities that don’t want it. I can remember being suddenly “disenvowled” on BoingBoing in the late 1990s for criticizing one of the authors. Suddenly comments were policed, you couldn’t lash out or criticize without getting banned or publicly shamed. This tendency has accelerated. Tiny communities evolved complex governing structures. Gamergate, a class and gender clash between gaming journalists and an adolescent community of mostly male gamers and programmers may have been the beginning of a relentless focus on how much cultural norms within the programming world differed from the rest of polite society’s, and how hostile these communities, which were generating trillions of dollars, could be to outsiders.

Among the most important cultural victories of the 21st century may end up being the propagation of contributor codes of conduct and behavior codes within online communities and the replacement of traditionally liberal ideals like free speech.

On the surface, incentive structures within DAOs offer a cure for all of this, they’re fairer than voluntary contributions within an organization where the rules are ill-defined. You get paid for the work you do, and can precisely identify your status in a community. Shadowbans and in-group/out-group Machiavellianism should die out when exposed to the cleansing light of the immutable blockchain. Or will they? There’s a debate going on in the squishier corners of the cryptocurrency world about whether this economization of everything is truly good (there’s an excellent debate going on between CU Boulder’s Nathan Schneider — who I take many of the ideas about governance and DAOs in this essay from — and Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin about this).

One of the benefits of Facebook and Twitter according to Schneider is that they were forced to conceal their mercenary side and maintain a space where communities could naturally evolve. Marketplaces encourage ruthless self-interest and anywhere there’s a profit to be made in digital commons soon devolves into naked commercial slop. 

***

Aside from the shingles, one of the reasons I’ve been a little more reticent about writing has been an odd conflict with the U.S. government. So much for fearing the upstarts more than the aging colossus.

In Turkey, while I was being fitted for a bespoke suit, I ran across a strange man who helped translate what I wanted to the tailor. He also insisted on talking to me about his work as a lawyer, and his ability to facilitate trades of whatever cryptocurrency I wanted between Iran and the U.S. This is extremely illegal, so I did the best I could to fob him off, but he insisted on taking down my information and even called me to double-check that the number I gave him was accurate.

A good Turkish friend of mine noticed that his name was the equivalent of “John Smith” and probably fake, and suggested he may have been a secret policeman keeping an eye on me. I thought nothing of it until I left the country and was going through customs at LAX. They read my retinas at the border and the computer made an ominous noise and the agent came out from behind her desk and shunted me politely into a quiet little room and I was given a very polite but thorough interview about my family’s military service, my land travel between Moldova and Ukraine, and other oddly specific ventures. They let me go about an hour later. I asked why. They explained that the biometrics on my passport couldn’t recognize me and it was weird that I had suddenly decided to move to Turkey for three months (even though I’d traveled to Istanbul many times in the past). They just wanted to check that I was who I said I was and that I hadn’t been murdered and replaced by a doppelganger. Of course, that doesn’t explain why they were so curious about how much currency I was carrying. For the record, I was doing nothing illegal and never have.

It’s upsetting to know you’re on a creepy government list somewhere, though I suppose I understand why: Cryptocurrency is an existential threat to governments. You can already see it happening: Bitcoin purchases have helped erode Nigeria’s currency, they’ve allowed rogue regimes like Venezuela’s, North Korea, and Iran’s to maintain a connection to the rest of the global economy. More than anything else crypto raises the question of whether we really need government supervision in economies—most of us haven’t really benefited from the forty-odd years of post-Bretton Woods monetary policy, after all. For someone my age in the United States, the costs of housing and medical care and education are orders of magnitude more expensive than it was for our parents, and opportunities are dwindling.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that neo-anarchist David Graeber’s Debt: the First 5,000 years has become so popular in crypto circles. There’s nothing natural about economics, he says. Governments create markets, he says, they aren’t natural. Seigniorage is forced upon us.

I’ve only read an excerpt of his latest work. (Graeber died a few years ago but the first volume of a posthumous history of the world was just published) He pushes back against the idea that agriculture necessarily leads to organized government and religion. For thousands of years, farming was a seasonal activity, when the tides ebbed exposing fertile soil, tribes would sprinkle seeds and return later to sow them. Maybe if properly managed, this new economic layer of the internet could create a world without scarcity, an Edenic world like the one we left behind, where we can gather our harvest from staked currencies and survive and thrive and edge out the governments that currently dominate our lives or at least replace them with gentle toothless entities devoted to maintaining the roads.

Alas, it probably won’t come to pass. Something like shingles will erupt and gouge it all open and we won’t listen to our wives and have to call a doctor.

Play to Earn

Things whispered and shouted

The first month in a city where you don’t speak the language, unwittingly you become host to a battlefield for competing ideologies and narratives. Of course, we arrived with a few. Ahead of time, the American tech goliaths shot a barrage of information into us: Airbnb has a vision of Istanbul as a playground for affluent, mostly American thirty-somethings who marble frontispieces and learn to cook meze during the day and navigate the edgier, hipper Asian side of the city at night. Prowl the city with a National Geographic photographer (actually, I may sign up for that one).

We took a cocktail tour with the top-rated duo of travel guides. It was the last day of Istanbul’s COVID lockdown. The government gave free rein to tourists during the lockdowns and gave vaccines to government-certified travel agents before almost anyone else. 

We wound through the backstreets with our guide, through dying bars and empty music venues; and the guide was glum, business was bad, there were more cats out than people. We asked him for horror stories: too many tourists ask for hookers on the cocktail tour, he said, and the Russians start fights. They were subject to Airbnb’s narrative framing too: to maintain their status as one of Istanbul’s top-rated travel agencies that had all kinds of mandates to stick to, and a single bad review could tank them. He preferred the old city tour, where he could share historical facts about the fratricidal Ottoman empire. 

Today the old city is a tourist tangle; this is the Istanbul you’ve seen in postcards, the minarets and domes, and narrow streets and gullies; on the ground, it’s frenetic and crawling with touts and tour buses and mobbed with multitudes of humanity. Armored cars and temporary barricades provide direction and an air of menace. A glimpse of what it might have been like. 

During the Empire, the Ottomans held court in utter silence. There were treasures from all over the world. Gold and turquoise and antique tile from the very best eras (they collected antiques even then). A harem guarded by men with frills hanging down so they could never glance up at the balconies. A passage lined with criminals’ heads. But that none of that would have had the effect of stepping out of a city of millions into pure silence. 

The music playing in the bars and restaurants here has a byzantine flair, there’s a craze for soft torchlight versions of ’80s and ’90s alternative classics. Familiar lyrics tug at your attention but stew in strange syrup.

Cats have their own wordless story. They squirm in every corner and scurry across the streets and dart out of the way or refusing to budge or leap on tables suddenly. They add to the mad energy of the place, the careening cabs, the manic Vespas zipping against the flow of traffic, or the sudden deadfalls and gullies in the undulating hills and twisted streets. At night you hear the cats howling for attention and battling for territory. There are kitten litters too. I fell into a narrative trap, I began caring about a teenage mother cat and her five kittens in an inaccessible airshaft in our Airbnb, and then one drowned and another was trapped in the wall, and we tried to save them but the community around us didn’t understand what we were doing or have a philosophy of never getting involved with the cats and would come downstairs and physically block our way to the cats. They let us leave food. There are only two kittens left. I can’t bear to look out the window anymore. 

It didn’t help that when my first marriage ended, the final act was the removal and presumed destruction of the many cats camping out in the house we’d rented. The night it happened (I was far away in another state) I was awoken by a family of deer running through my garden, triggering the porch light. I came downstairs with my kukri knife ready to lop off an intruder’s head and saw them leaping the fence one after another. 

Istanbul isn’t as haunted as you’d think. Too busy, too filled with people and noise at all times; except in our apartment. We got a two-bedroom so I could work in peace (and we could host guests) and at night the extra space seems filled with menace.

The Lonely Planet presents a sober alternative to Airbnb’s offerings. Old alternatives like TimeOut seem to have been squelched. My mom used to write Insight Guides (among other things) and I grew up flipping through them, becoming obsessed with the little symbols indicating things like motor access or breakfasts available and star rankings, and the hierarchies they seemed to represent Lonely Planet speaks for a different era of travel, it’s a retort in some ways, conceived of in a time when it wasn’t as hip to travel, when the preferred attitude as an affluent America was to bit like National Lampoon’s European vacation, you’re supposed to come away thinking the world outside of the states is terrible; and return home appreciating your homeland--the Lonely Planet series is English, I think, (possibly Australian) a retort to the whining, misbehaving, America middle-class tourist brute, was designed for a better class of tourist, not necessarily a richer version, but a more sensitive, brainy type, who wanted to read a 5,000-word essay about Roman history before scurrying all over some ruin. 

We selected a starred review hotel on a long weekend in Bodrum, the beginning of the Turkish Riviera, and found ourselves in an overgrown vineyard in a saltwater pool surrounded by middle-aged Germans and Russians sipping daiquiris and watching a kindle of kittens scurry up the vines. The service was to western standards. Our premium sea view was blocked by a hedge and, after I gently complained, a gardener was dispatched to whack it back until we could see a harbor filled with yachts and the vivid azure blue of the Aegean. Fine hotels have lost their imperiousness, and with it a bit of their luster, and now they simper a bit, humbled by Airbnb and Tripadvisor and Yelp ratings. 

I know the feeling. Reviews made selling Kindle Singles on Amazon miserable. Giving something a numerical rating quilts it into a hierarchy. It’s hard to buy a $2 Kindle rated 3.5 over a 4.7/5, let alone spend thousand on a hotel with a poor ranking. Somebody once left a bad review during a marketing blitz, complaining that my memoir was a whine of caste privilege. Not necessarily wrong, but there was no indication they’d bought a copy. My rating dipped below the crucial psychological ⅘ stars mark. My sales drooped in real-time. But you can write another book. It must be so much worse when it’s a restaurant or bed and breakfast you’d staked your retirement on.

During the downpour that drowned the orange kitten, I watched a strange display. A young woman with a cheeky Amelie haircut in a bright yellow dress burst out of a cafe and ran into the rain clutching a folded paper boat. She dodged a cab and placed the boat in a gutter and chased down a rivulet as it slid toward the Bosphorous. She filmed the entire thing on her phone and made it about a block and a half before losing it. As she walked back up the hill, drenched, it was clear that she’d faked the enthusiasm and was becoming aware of how much of a silly spectacle she seemed.

The picture hosting social network Instagram (and its mini-video clip archrival Tiktok) is intensely corrosive to self-esteem. It hijacks focus from the moment into competitive status signaling and provides a constant feed of carefully photoshopped images interspersed with ads for plastic surgery and acne cures. Nowadays, every third person leaning over the battlement of a crusader fort is looking away from the view, into a screen and trying to squeeze the perfect combination of cleavage or chest hair and Aegean sparkle into the frame. It’s even affected the urban landscape, especially restaurants and hotels, they’ve become very conscious of how photogenic they are and you’ll find arty but otherwise pointless nooks everywhere. Arbitrary hammocks. Wading pools with pretty views but little do. I don’t mind this aspect of it as much, but it’s strange to see what was a hidden layer of narcissistic display leaching out and garbling the built environment. As a child, I used to feel comforted when I heard English being spoken in rural Spain or saw a German bakery at the top of a mountain in Himachal Pradesh. Maybe it isn’t so bad.

Eventually, the tentacles of American tech slide off a bit. After two months in Istanbul, I can understand a few sentences. I recognize words in ads. The grammar is fiendishly difficult. The language said to be closer to Korean than Arabic or anything I’ve ever tried to speak before.

As we’ve met and spent time with Turkish citizens we’ve become much more conscious of the politics at play. The Turkish government is unpopular in the city, and has done things like keep the subway out of the swank districts that rejected their leader. The Hagia Sophia has been turned into a mosque. There are frightening stories of cruel sentences for minor acts of civil disobedience. There are whispers of another rush of refugees from the Afghan collapse. People are tense. There are fistfights in the streets. 

In the old city, I briefly fell into the sway of an aggressive tout. We ran into him twice once on the way into the Blue Mosque. He lied about being a mosque official and offered clothing advice for foreigners. We got rid of him once but he sidled up beside us as we were leaving the complex. He apologized for lying and offered to show us a magnificent view of Istanbul. Naturally, this ended up being his parents’ shop, despite his constant assurances that he was off duty. When we got there we were suddenly surrounded and somewhat menaced by a fairly large group of people insisting that we go in. We did not. Touts are usually playful, and it rarely turns sinister, unless you’re looking for something illegal or get pulled into some seedy nightclub. I mention all this partly as evidence for a bit of rising tension and resentment (this was the day of the American exit in Afghanistan) but also because one of my silly fantasies in Santa Cruz, while I was looking for work, was wondering what it might be like to become a vacation town tout. Come with me, my friend….

I’ve been trying to think of ways to use non-fungible tokens for storytelling and I’m thinking about creating a series of postcards of microstories. (These are electronic files that have a blockchain-based token embedded in them so they are essentially unique.) The only things that really make sense are limited editions of generative artwork, but I’m convinced there’s some way to wind a story around in a way that isn’t completely arbitrary. Maybe it would be interesting as a creative nonfiction writer to have an online souvenir shop selling NFTs describe micro experiences. Maybe aforementioned the girl in yellow with the boat was on to something!

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on a freelance project for one of my Substack subscribers, Cemil Şinasi Türün. He asked Erin and I to help him write the whitepaper for a cryptocurrency project called Defterhane. A whitepaper in the cryptocurrency industry is basically a description of a technical project. I mentioned this a little bit in my last missive. In Turkey, businesses use cheques to provide short-term liquidity to one another. They post-date checks and then use them as letters of credit; you might issue a post-dated check to buy merchandise for your store and then the wholesaler could use your check to buy more… apparently, it’s a forty-year-old system that accounts for a billion dollars worth of, and has a much lower default rate than commercial loans normally do. This check-based system has persisted through several banking crises and has created a shadow banking system beyond the reach of the government. Decentralized finance in paper form. Check out their whitepaper, if you’re interested.

In the States, I’ve been asked to write about decentralized finance for my alumni magazine. I’m trying to find metaphors that can encapsulate the rapid evolution of a kind of new banking system. It’s a bit like the beginning of paperless offices and the introduction of computer networks into the office. It allows thousands of functions to be automated. What’s weird about Vadeli checks and DeFi, in general, is that it really does harken back to the very first forms of transaction, when transactions were made between people and without a centralized authority like a government or central bank issuing a currency or sieving off a fraction of it.

I heard about a really strange crypto concept the other day. Playing to earn is a grim vision of the future I heard explained at a conference. In the Philippines, great swaths of the population are now realizing that they can earn more money from breeding NFT animals than working. At a conference I attended, they were touting this as an evolution of universal basic income, Play to Earn will feed millions of people. The idea doesn’t sit well with me. Partly it’s my distaste for some of the people backing the project (like Mark Cuban) who don’t seem particularly trustworthy or gentle with the public but it living life plugged into a game and playing to live seems like a strange, diffracted way to exist. Maybe it’s inevitable. Maybe we already do: my work communicates using Discord, a channel designed for gamers and peppered with silly glyphs and emoji.