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 for a year, rent an apartment, open a domestic bank account, and otherwise remove ourselves from the peculiar half-life you live orbiting the earth as a digital nomad. They’ve shifted most of the forms online, although the English versions of their forms have strange flaws, and if I hadn’t found a note from an English project manager who’d run the gauntlet too, suggesting that when you run into a snag you switch over to Turkish, I never would have submitted them.
A few steps still require people. It took two visits to the tax office to get a number, the equivalent of a social security number. The office had the feel of a bureaucracy anywhere, there was a glorious view of the Bosphorus behind the workers, but the atmosphere could have been transplanted from a DMV in California. Tomorrow we’re going for an official interview; we’ve printed bank forms, Airbnb records, and taken special ‘biometric’ photos. 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, second only to Mandarin in difficulty for an English speaker to learn from scratch. Estimated time: 2000 hours of practice before fluency, versus 500ish 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 before the gig is up and it’s obvious I can’t really speak it.
Stability should give me a little more time to write these posts. I’ve also 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. The big problem for me was that other better, more informed books had already been written and there wasn’t any point in writing the same story twice.
One of my subscribers, Cemil Turun, a professor at Boğaziçi University, came up with an elegant solution. He reminded me of my run-in with a strange character at my tailor. He claimed to be an attorney and was helping me translate, but when I mentioned my connection to cryptocurrency, he got really excited, and demanded to input his data into my phone, checked that it was accurate, and then offered me advice on currency transfers into Iran. I declined this kind offer. “He may have been secret police,” said Cemil, “there’s a lot of interest in crypto these days.”
Conspiracy has also been one of the few narrative uses of the blockchain that I’ve been able to find. You can use a blockchain for capturing a unique performance of a spoken word piece and fix it in space and time; and poetry, especially short-form poetry, seems to jive well with being tokenized and turned into an NFT, but books and stories can’t. Or at least I don’t think they lend themselves to it. People are trying.
You can fundraise, of course, and you can sell electronic copies of a book as NFTs, but you can’t really do much else with them. At one point I wanted to create bread crumb trails of tokens within interactive books and I fumbled around with the idea before realizing I’d reinvented the text-based game. Remember Sierra? Space Quest, Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards… apparently there’s an entire community of independent game companies still cranking these things out. Creating an indelible record of a secret does seem relevant, and has the advantage of actually using the blockchain. Plus it’s fun to write about, there are dozens of weird murderers, and interconnected funders. And then there’s the deep psychological reason I write this Substack, my post-traumatic stress disorder, which comes with a version of paranoia that isn’t entirely inaccurate: they call it hyperawareness, and rather than distorting reality, it just means I’m unusually perceptive at picking up on negative feelings.
All this is to say it would be fun to wade into the murky conspiratorial side of crypto and all of the bedsit royalty and disgraced child stars behind it.
On the less murky side of things, an art project I’m working on with Benton C. Bainbridge, who is a subscriber and media performance artist has been making progress. We’re creating an artist-run decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called Lonely ROCKS. The idea was to onboard artists into web3, while maintaining a well-curated collection of artwork. We came up with two restrictions: the art would consist of self-portraits (in the expanded field) and would come to an end as soon the artist-curators 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 our first round of artists. We’d each picked 10 digital artists and whittled 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 as we meet with lawyers and generally try to avoid running afoul of the Securities and Exchange Commission, without restricting our collection to accredited investors, like most art DAOs have done.
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 in the beginning can have massive effects on the community that blossoms around them. You also have to safeguard against malfeasance. Which makes creating the bylaws of the organization a combination of game theory and drawing up an online homeowners association.
We’ve landed on a bicameral structure. There are two tokens and two government bodies, like the Senate and the House of Representatives. We have a group of Patrons, and anyone can become a Patron by buying our governance tokens. These allow you to nominate artwork 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 your fate, must vote for you. Curators, aside from approving one another, may also accept or reject artwork for inclusion in shows, they nominate the treasury committee, who controls the tokens and the multi-signature wallet containing the DAO’s funds, and decide where and how to show work. Curators receive a different token, probably an NFT.
The bicameral structure seems like the best way to avoid spam. There are dozens of sleazy NFT projects that would love to glom onto a community, and could probably buy their way to nominating their collection of NFT drug bingo cards or whatever it is they’re shilling. But we didn’t want to exclude people either. So wanted to keep the DAO at least somewhat open to the community, without turning into a Reddit-like crowdsourced model, where the most popular, SEO-friendly, meme content would “win.” Hence the need for curators.
We’re starting small, in that we don’t actually have the tooling for a DAO in place yet. We don’t need one yet, since we’re still dealing with small group dynamics, 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. It’s been really exciting, 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 shows around it.
It’s fun watching all come together! Of course, I do wonder at what point does governing a project shift gears from fun to the dreary halls and triplicate forms of a ‘going concern’ or a byzantine bureaucracy… Stay tuned, and if you’d like to learn more about Lonely ROCKS, come join our Discord!