Art is everywhere. This hasn't been more true in our modern era, where anyone, and ultimately any *thing* could create art. With powerful computers and the proliferation of machine learning, it's running head-first into art, and boy, is it fun. Somewhere, in all the latent space of potential art, lies patterns that will move us, and we can task our friendly mechanical friends with crypto-economics to go find them.

Blockchain technology has allowed us to re-imagine the arts. As a movement, it's been rife with seemingly disparate narratives: people adopting its cocktail of hashes & cryptography as a Rorschach test for their beliefs. It's simultaneously the most anarchist, most libertarian, most egalitarian, most socialist, most freeing, most authoritarian technology. I've always seen it as a tool empower creatives. In this post, I explore property rights experiments with new markets in the arts.

I was recently introduced to the narrative structure called Kishotenketsu. It's a narrative structure that doesn't rely on conflict/tension in the story. Rather, it thrives on creating tension/conflict in the reader.

I'm really happy to see Clovers finally go live! It's a blockchain application where you collect unique patterns of finished games of Othello (called Clovers). The most prized ones are those that exhibit symmetry. It's fun, quirky, nerdy, arty, but interestingly: a step forward in building economies around algorithms themselves.

In imagining & visualising economic systems, especially the firm, there's a lot of metaphors that have been used in the past. For example, firms as culture, or firms as machine. One that I particularly enjoy that I haven't seen mentioned in depth at all, is seeing the firm like biological cells.

In the creation of patronage as an asset class, one creates virtual collectibles whose beneficiary earns revenue at a specific rate from an always specified self-assessed price by the owner. An outstanding question is what rates to set.

What is the optimal size for a blockchain collectible (NFT) economy? How many unique items should be in a collection? How does one maximise the value of this economy? These are very interesting questions, because there's a trade-off between scarcity of a collectible economy & its inclusivity (allowing users to participate through ownership of a collectible). Currently, many projects in the space simply thumb-suck the size of their economies or employ unproven generation of new collectibles. The projects either generated too much or too little.

By combining the incentives of patronage, profit & collectibles, we can create a new tradable asset class that supports the funding of the commons. In addition to supporting artists and open source communities, this idea can be utilized to save our fragile planet from the ongoing effects of climate change.

The world sometimes feels chaotic & random. What if adding more randomness made it less so? Today, electoral systems can be costly, corrupted, underrepresented, and prone to manipulation by moneyed interests. Various proposals have been put forth that removes some of these issues by focusing on introducing randomness.