Like many, I also go through life like a mollusc picking up new ideological shells to see if they fit against the mental attacks of life and the modern era: the existential dread of death, heat death of the universe, and other seemingly inevitable problems like climate change. There’s many maps that help us navigate these territories. Two such maps (that are related) that I wanted to explore from the get-go in Hope Runners of Gridlock was Optimistic Nihilism & Metamodernism. It’s a feeling of acceptance, and the pursuit of meaningful action in the face of seeming meaningless. The addition of sci-fi or fantasy can help elucidate these mental maps by creating novel fictional constraints or extremes that does not exist as apparently in the complex, messy life of the real world.

Cities tell stories. They are the emergent outcome of all the people that lived in it: a map etched by millions of individual lives, making their mark in passing. It not only provides historical insight into a society, but it also provides for novel exploration of how an individual might be affected by their surroundings. A love story would be told differently in Hong Kong, Mexico City, Cape Town, and Los Angeles. To me, a great city in a story can be like a character: a backstory, motivation, and an arc in and of itself.

Without a doubt, writing an interesting city was at the top of my desires in writing this novel, and it all started with one small seed.

Recently, there's been quite an interesting exploration of social/community/creator tokens. $JAMM, $RAC, $ALEX, $JOON, etc, all tokens either resolving around people, a brand, or a specific community.

Teams like Zora, Foundation, Rally, Roll, StakeOnMe, etc, are helping tackling the problem of empowering creators through these new novel economic systems. Recently, Zora helped the musician, RAC, launch his own community token. Particularly interesting, was how RAC launched the token by retroactively rewarding fans and contributors. To continue longevity, I propose the concept of seasons in community tokens.

I wrote a novel. It's about finding hope in a cyberpunk city with radical markets. If you enjoy a story whose characters deal with issues of belonging, hope, truth, and choice that take place in a near-future city with novel economic systems of power, then you will enjoy this novel.

Will AI replace human creators? Will the next great story be written by an AI? Will we care as much? Considering that AI, like GPT-3, is informed by existing data, is its creations considered, ‘original’?

Does intent, matter?

Virtual reality is a prime space to experiment with property rights because space is infinite. What is finite, however, is distance to experience. If land can be infinite, then locating close to meaningful virtual experiences is what becomes valuable. This provides ample opportunity to experiment with new property rights, all perhaps, even in the same virtual space.

A few weeks ago, I had a chat with the Cryptovoxels community on ideas on how to increase or decrease land in this decentralized virtual space. I want to share two such ideas: a COST (Harberger Tax) zone, and a Bonding Curve zone. Both rely on land being minted and destroyed as desired. Both generate value back into the community.

On 21 March 2019, I released the first NFT collectible that was always-on-sale using “Harberger Tax”. In order to keep the collectible, you pay a tax based on a price that you have to specify. This price must always be set. It is called: “This Artwork Is Always On Sale”. As artist, I’ve received ~18.4 ETH since then as patronage. It turned over 3 times, before being held by the same patron since then. It is valued at 240 ETH (currently). In it, I asked a few question as it relates to this being conceptual art experiment. I try to answer them and share the release of v2 artwork.

These are my speaking notes from talk at the WIP meetup that formed part of the Virtual Rare Arts Festival that kicked off in Cryptovoxels. Looking at blockchains and how we could tell infinite stories with it.

Along with several billion other souls, I've been in quarantine, confined to my capsule. I can't venture outside, but over the past weeks, I've seen our Earth come into view, a sight, I'd never expected to see. With my mask as my helmet, I've become a pandemic astronaut.

The boundary of the firm remains a perennial and interesting question: where should firms begin, and where should they end? When should a firm be split apart, and when should it absorb another firm?

The Celestial Roche Limit is the distance at which a celestial object would be ripped apart by its own tidal forces as it approaches a larger object. This article derives an Economic Roche Limit to determine and explore a new boundary of the firm.

James P. Carse describe finite and infinite games as:

"A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, and infinite game for the purpose of continuing play."

In the same vein: finite stories are written for the purpose of it beginning & ending. Infinite stories is written for the purpose of continuing the story.

Recently, the topic of personal tokens started gaining traction again in the blockchain community. This is particularly driven by new tooling and platforms (such as Uniswap), enabling easy trading of personal tokens. This is a far cry from 2014, when I first proposed ideas around personal tokens. Back then, the only way to experiment with this was to launch your own blockchain. Glad times have changed.

New examples of personal tokens take various forms. I'll explain some of them, and then propose a new variant for liquid, social reputation tokens.

Markets themselves is an approximation of many individual self-interests, and thus it is a reflection of society. If we can utilize markets as a medium in art and not shy away from it, perhaps we might learn more about ourselves.

The first draft chapter of my upcoming novel: Hope Runners of Gridlock.

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.