When the levy breaks (Santa Cruz, 2023)

Thoughts about bomb cyclones, the tiniest McGirk, the artificial intelligence art revolt, and plans for building a literature object

The “bomb cyclone” is pounding our little burgh. The beach down the street has been swallowed by the sea, and legions of ants are marching up from their lagoon-side lairs to snag themselves in our maple syrup and add a formic acid sizzle to our microwaved snacks. (To concerned parents and relatives reading this: we’ll be fine, the house has survived 70 years of Santa Cruz weather and five generations of McGirks, and the lagoon isn’t fed by the San Lorenzo River, and if we do flood, the Volvo’s gassed up and ready to go.) It is a bit unsettling with a newborn baby so we’re erring on the cautious side when it comes to evacuation.

The Revolt Against Artificial Intelligence

Never mind the rain! Artists are flooding the Internet with crossed-out AI signs. The idea is to garble the databases that artificially intelligent art generators rely on to generate their “art.” I think it’s the first big anti-AI rebellion.

Artificially intelligent art or writing generators work by drawing statistical inferences between images or fragments of speech and are able to generate convincing guesses of what should happen next. The most recent models are uncanny: I generated the images above on Midjourney with a prompt asking for “a citadel made from blue and white porcelain.” Most models are open source, which means you can easily fork them and train them on your own database of material to generate more customized results, and this is what’s causing distress among the for-hire artist community. Custom AIs are generating pornography and big-eyed anime waifus and NFT art, and a lot of these models have become so tuned to a particular aesthetic that they’ll basically generate pastiche of a single artist’s work—without acknowledging them or paying them. So the “real” artists are deliberately poisoning databases and keywords to confound the machines.

Of course, the humans in charge can tweak the parameters to deprecate any unwanted images. (It’s an equation like any other hank of math and you can just subtract what you want from the final result) But I like the rebellion. We can expect to see more of this.

ChatGPT, the latest text generator, is amazing, it can generate working code and is excellent at synthesizing information. Luckily it can’t write about anything new yet, which means it can’t weave a clumsy rain metaphor around a disjointed series of substack updates. Speaking of, the puddles outside are swelling and connecting, like the liquid robot in Terminator 2.

The Literature Object — perhaps a literary use for NFTs

Most AI art models strike me more as a creator tool or a gimmick than a new medium, in that I think of them as closer to a toy than a new medium. The sense I got melting together pictures of angels and royal bedrooms and Audubon prints was that it depended too much on the version of the software you were using. You could see the fingerprints of the program too clearly on the work you made. At the time, OpenAI and its ilk restricted access to the newest models, so it was a bit of an arms race. The anointed few got early access and exhausted the latent space before the rest of us could get our hands on the tools, which suggests I wasn’t pushing the boundaries of what I could do with it. For me, it was more like throwing the I-Ching than designing an image. At the time I thought of it as something like street photography where you’re seizing a moment, but four years later, you can see what people who actually know what they’re doing are capable of making.

The best work uses generative work as a layer in a larger work. I love what Ira Greenberg has been doing combining his own paintings and sketches, for example, or Rafik Anadol’s work. Some of the prompt-based work I’ve seen is like DJing through latent space. I love the work Fabiola Larios and Moises Sanabria have done, for example. Which brings me to my next project, which has nothing to do with AI! Lonely ROCKS will probably go into hibernation for the next couple of months while we figure out some funding, so I’ve decided to work on a book-length interactive piece. I want to incorporate some NFT elements.

So far the only literary NFTs that have got any traction are short prose poems (Charles Simic would kill in the NFT world) but even these seem to rely on the visuals that accompany them more than the writing itself. Longform writing is such a mind meld that it doesn’t really lend itself to paying ten thousand dollars to read it. You put so much work into reading a text that it doesn’t feel as magical as looking at a painting or even a paragraph-long poem that you can swallow up in a single glance does. To me, poems and artworks feel like little gemstones that plopped out of another dimension. Novels don’t.

A long text is like a journey, and the narrator is someone sitting beside you muttering comments, and you wouldn’t want to give them a thousand bucks. But maybe you’d give them some walking around money? Or trade patches at the end of a long bus ride? I’m thinking of rendering what would have been a book about blockchains and cyberpunk expeditions as a series of vignettes you can navigate through, making choices, and having your unique journey generate a souvenir of some sort.

If this sounds interesting to you, leave me a comment, I’d love to collaborate with someone!

Announcing Amihan Teresa McGirk

Speaking of fruitful collaborations, an update: Amihan Teresa McGirk, 7lb 4oz, 21.5” in length has been born, she has a full head of hair and is already smashing through developmental milestones.

We promised not to use the word beautiful around her but that didn’t last her first day on earth.

The delivery wasn’t easy. A gripe about American hospitals: they use COVID-19 to slash services and won’t let you in Labor and Delivery unless you’re 6cm dilated (i.e. quite a bit) otherwise you’ll be turned away. Our hospital was 26 miles away from our home, over the dread CA-17, a winding stretch over the Santa Cruz Mountains into San Jose, which the locals claim to be America’s most deadly. We were admitted at 3 am, and as soon as Erin and the baby were hooked up to monitors and a drip of labor-inducing oxytocin I came down with terrible food poisoning. My symptoms could have been COVID. I passed a PCR test. The nurses deliberated and the hospital director herself kicked me out.

Amihan was born after 19 hours of active labor and 72 hours of contractions. Our lives changed—we barely sleep, and the needs of a tiny creature and her many, many accessories occupy all our time. She’s the fifth generation of McGirk to inhabit the house we’re staying in. The rain has paused, and suddenly the future seems in sharper focus than it once did.

The Future History of Credit + Art + Babies

Credit, Credit Intelligence and Credit Scoring

Benton C Bainbridge and I have closed the chapter on our first Season of Lonely ROCKS. Here’s what it looked like at Untitled Art Miami Beach:

You can check out the 110 self-portraits submitted here. Did you buy a membership NFT? They’ll be released from custody on January 15th. Which is the same day as our reverse auction. Details to come soon along with a video catalog, some postmortem thoughts posted here about how it all went, and about decentralized curation and NFTs and whether there’s any juice left to squeeze. I think there is. In the end, I couldn't make it to the actual show. My wife, Erin, is expecting, actually, as I write this she’s going into labor and having contractions. We’re counting down the interval between them, and when it’s time (3-5 min) we’ll pile into the Volvo and inch our way over the traffic-clogged CA-17 highway to the hospital.

Not quite the treatment we were expecting at the American Hospital in Istanbul with its chauffeured Mercedes rides and an OB/GYN who gave us her cellphone number. Erin is doing fine. She’s eager to get the squiggling baby girl out of her and into the world and doesn’t appreciate it when I “coach her” to “lay that egg.” Quite an end to a wild year: an international relocation, a deportation, a new job, a crypto startup, a crypto crash and a new baby!

(An alternate version of the self-portrait NFT I submitted to Untitled Art, visuals from Benton C Bainbridge)

The Future History of Credit

I figured you might enjoy a three-part series I wrote for Spectral charting the history of credit, credit intelligence, and credit scoring.

Spectral @SpectralFi

1/21 Do you wonder why #DeFi has yet to live up to its true potential? Building a global financial system from scratch takes time, so we took a long look at what it took to make the last one. Introducing the 3rd and final part of our educational series! 🧵👇

This subject matter might sound rather dry, and I certainly approached it that way, but credit turned out to be an alternate history of the world. There were cowboy spies, secret surveillance empires, embarrassed billionaires, and a gradual compromise between recognizing that people sometimes can’t pay their loans and spying on them to gather as much information as possible to figure who those people are. Interest rates haven’t changed all that much, though, the average Babylonian one was about the same as my Mastercard. Merry Christmas, etc!

• Credit as a Zero-Sum Game

• Credit Intelligence and the Rise of the Bureaus

• The Art and Science of Credit Scoring

Lonely ROCKs NFTs... incoming!

Announcing Lonely ROCKS membership drive; our NFT drop is LIVE!

Announcing Lonely ROCKS Membership Drive!

Lonely ROCKS is American Idol for global media art.

We democratize curation. Patrons nominate self-portraits for review by our international panel of renowned Curators.

Lonely ROCKS opens the black box of the fine art world and gives Members the power to curate digital masterworks.

We will open two exhibitions in late 2022.

Lonely ROCKS was selected for Untitled Art Fair’s ambitious new Nest sector on Miami Beach—here, we will unveil one dozen artworks chosen by our Curators. A second show will feature all works nominated by our Patrons.

Members fund the project and determine the scope of the exhibitions. Patrons may choose a virtual exhibition in the Metaverse or to show in a venue in Miami's Design District, or possibly both if the drive is wildly successful.

Patrons who buy ICY and METALLIC NFTs during our membership drive are eligible to nominate and vote on artworks. All participants can track the contest on our dynamic Leaderboard and debate their favorite artworks on our Discord server.

Join us! Become a Lonely ROCK

Introducing our ROCKstar Curators 

• Alaina Simone (New York City)  

• Ana Maria Caballero (Colombia/Miami)

• Cemil Şinasi Türün (Istanbul)

• Coldie (Auburn, CA)

• Fabiola Larios (Miami)

• Ihu Anyanwu (Abuja, Nigeria)

• Kerry Brougher (Washington, DC)

• Lance Weiler (NYC)

• Linda Loh (Melbourne)

• LoVid (Long Island, NY)

• Maria Gudjohnsen (Iceland)

• NFTartwolf (Mexico)

• Nicole Ruggiero (NYC)

And, our Founders:

• Benton C Bainbridge (Erie, PA) 

• James Brandon McGirk (London/Istanbul/Mexico City)

How We Democratize Curation 

Web3 allows people to assemble online and distribute access to common goods. To ensure equitable participation without compromising quality, we distilled the curation process to three essential “primitives”: novelty, quality, and play. First we incentivized a fat funnel. To reach generations of artists from around the world we made voting simple and open to adults of all ages. To guard against spam and double-voting, we require the purchase of NFTs for nomination: the ROCK voting token, airdropped to owners of ICY or METALLIC level NFTs. ICY NFT and METALLIC NFT holders form the Patron House, the “peoples” house of our bicameral government. However, a purely democratic system drowns out dissenting voices. This brings us to the second half of our governance structure: Curator House. Curators, who hold LONE NFTs, are handpicked by the Founders and given free rein to decide which Patron-nominated artworks are accepted into Untitled Art Fair.

We also incentivize community. Creativity cannot exist in a vacuum. Art emerges from dialogue with other work. Joining Lonely ROCKS means joining a community of fellow artists, Patrons, Supporters, and Web3 aficionados. To make the experience as fun as possible, we are building a place with opportunities for discovery, growth, and collaboration between members. 

Why We Chose Self-Portraits

Lonely ROCKS submissions are restricted to self-portraiture, although we define the term loosely.

We hope to receive poems, generative work, spoken word essays, abstract art, and photography along with more conventional depictions of the self. Self-portraits have a long history in art.

In Lonely ROCKS, self-portraits also poke fun at–and contribute to–profile picture (“PFP”) culture, in which expensive NFT collectibles are used as stand-ins for the self. We hold ourselves in opposition to this.

Lonely ROCKS embodies the mission which unites us: an evolving show of artists communing in self-aggrandizement. 

Why We Chose Chia and NFTCove.io as partners

Chia proposes a new vision for blockchain technologies and NFTs, using an environmentally-friendly form of consensus that avoids the energy waste of other blockchains. Chia Offers enable true peer-to-peer interaction, eliminating the middle man. On a corporate level, we were impressed with Chia VP Richard Tsao’s Vision for Chia NFTs, which places artists and provenance at the very heart of their NFT framework.

NFTCove.io presents artwork in a white box environment to showcase artwork in its proper context. NFTCove.io is friendly to crypto-newbies, enabling simple USD payment for buying NFTs as well as Chia (XCH). NFTCove.io empowers the Lonely ROCKS mission with a digital art marketplace that enables community and cooperation and discourages pump-and-dumps.    

Additional Benefits

• Each Lonely ROCKS NFT contains unique meteoric qualities that may yield some unexpected surprises 

• Stay on the lookout for exclusive mints from our curators and their selected artists

• Our outreach programs will offer additional opportunities for artists curious about Web3 artwork.

Announcing the launch of Lonely ROCKS!

Come join our fine art curation community...

Spend enough time in the tech sector and eventually, you’ll create a startup of your own. If you’ve been reading my last couple of posts you’ll have noticed me talking about an art project with media artist Benton C Bainbridge. After a year of intense discussions, a long week in New York City meeting with our Curator House, and connecting with the world’s first “proof of time and space” blockchain, Chia Networks who’ve graciously agreed to help us with the technical side of this venture, Benton and I are delighted to announce the kickoff of Lonely ROCKS, LLC.

The basic idea is that we’re a collective art project, a collection of self-portraits connected with a decentralized autonomous organization (a DAO) to two art world-class art spaces during Miami Art Week (Nov 29—Dec 4). The first will be an experimental booth at Untitled Art Fair and the second will be at a much larger space that will be revealed later. Access to the DAO is unfettered, meaning anyone who buys an NFT can nominate their work for consideration—or vote for someone else’s—and it will eventually end up in one of the two venues.

Our sale begins on August 1st, and there will be three levels of NFT allowing different levels of access to the DAO. Stay tuned and come join our Discord to find out more.

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!