M○C△ WEEKLY Round-UP 3/1
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In This Week’s Round-Up:
AI’s have a language of their own now; when do we classify them as their own species?
Some delayed thoughts on a $5-billion Argentine rug-pull
A rare and relished opportunity to talk about Videodrome
Don’t Want to Read All This?
Good news, we’re going to start using GoogleLM to turn these newsletters into podcasts. Listen to today’s here (and let us know what you think!!):
(p.s. definitely some technical errors with pronunciation and it gets the meaning wrong here and there; but still a fun experiment)
Okay, Let’s Get On With It
The Crypto Art Side
In absentia of any large-scale debates or drama, I’m going to use today as an opportunity —finally— to talk about Videodrome, aka Robbie Barrat, crypto art and AI art pioneer, most famous for his AI-Generated Nudes series from 2017 —now the stuff of legend despite their grotesque body-horror-Charlotte-Perkins-Gilman-plague-induced aesthetic— who just yesterday closed his eponymous and first-ever solo show at L’avant Galerie Vossen in Paris.
“Robbie BARRAT, 2021-2024,” as L’avant titled the 2025 show, ran from January 24th to March 1st and included “a special focus on two of [Barrat’s] latest works: Big Buck Hunter : Restoration and Counter-Strike : Afterstory.” While both works are brilliant, I want to focus on the former, and how it’s a perfect distillation of Barrat’s sensibilities: idiosyncratic, cheeky, highly conceptual, painstakingly crafted, openly antagonistic.
Big Buck Hunter: Restoration came onto my radar nearly two years ago —which should give you a sense of Barrat’s loving commitment towards his work— through a tweet announcing his “finally [starting] work on a project I have wanted to do for years.” It struck me even then as one of those artworks so ingenious in design that you can’t help but say, Why didn’t I think of that? As Barrat said at the time, “I'm reverse engineering + modifying a Big Buck Hunter cabinet (hunting game from 2000), working towards a nonviolent simulation of wildlife with infinitely generating landscapes, using only the original game asset.” As Arthur Schopenhauer said: “Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
Perhaps you know that Barrat famously quit crypto art in 2021 due to its negative “environmental and speculative aspects,” as he explained in a thread at the time. The genesis of his ire appears to stem from the mechanics by which his AI-Generated Nudes were first distributed: at a Christie’s auction in 2018, Barrat and Artnome conspired to include 300 physical cards in attendee goodie bags, and upon each were printed the public and private keys to one of 300 Ethereum wallets, each loaded with an AI-Generated Nude; whether owing to disinterest in NFTs or in Barrat himself, only 12 of the 300 were ever claimed. Thus, the pieces are often collectively referred to as “The Lost Robbies.”
But as Barrat’s status in crypto art grew, the Nudes took on mythic quality, due in no small part to the fact that his AI Generated Nude #1 was the very first work ever minted on SuperRare, the Genesis. And yet, as Barrat noted in the same aforementioned thread, “With my tokenized work *nothing* except price is discussed. I only ever remember one collector analyzing the image itself. I dont think my work is artwork anymore, its becoming something else- people dont even call my 1st nude 'artwork' anymore; they say ‘superrare genesis token.’”
Which brings us back to Big Buck Hunter: Restoration. This is the anti-crypto art. Not only is it obviously not an NFT, it leans into the exact “problem” that NFTs are often seen as alleviating, the trouble digital artist have in selling and authenticating their art. I’ve discussed this myself frequently when proselytizing about crypto art to my friends: “If you wanted to buy a digital artwork before NFTs, you were buying a flash-drive and a note of authenticity, so hard to prove provenance.” Barrat has found a remarkable workaround to that issue, making the digital art’s container —a Big Buck Hunter arcade game from 2000, as you can see here— unmistakable and also inextricable from the work itself.
Barrat has been creating landscape artwork since at least 2018, when he minted six “AI Generated Landscapes” onto SuperRare, each more bucolic than the last. And so returning to landscapes is a kind of artistic resurrection, a retreading of familiar ground but, obviously, with deliberately limiting restrictions. As if to challenge himself, Barrat refused to introduce “additional 3D models, textures, or audio assets” that were not “painstakingly reverse engineered from the original game’s hard drive,” according to L’avant Galerie Vossen’s curatorial statement. The resultant aesthetic therefore avoids any outward identifiability as AI-generated artwork (indistinguishable from the original game). Here’s a work-in-progress rendering of the visuals from his Instagram:
But perhaps the way that Big Buck Hunter: Restoration deviates from crypto art is that, as opposed to an oft-spoken wish within crypto art for all works to be considered “capital-A Art,” Barrat’s work seems to want to hide itself and its artistry. It is the opposite of Duchamp’s readymades, taking something like an arcade game —decidedly not self-identifying as Art— imbuing it with artistry, and then hiding that artistry behind the graphical output and the environment both.
Big Buck Hunter: Restoration may use cutting-edge technology in its “differences from the original game… [including] the arcade machine’s new ability to endlessly generate new landscapes, instead of a fixed amount of levels; to introduce a more ‘eternal’ component that replaces the linear time of the original game,” according to the curatorial statement, but because the aesthetics mimic the original game’s, Barrat’s process is hidden entirely. So different from the AI art within the crypto art ecosystem (my Botto thoughts from last week seem especially pertinent here) where the process justifies the aesthetics. But unless you were to know that Big Buck Hunter: Restoritation was indeed capital-A, self-proclaimed Art, it wouldn’t appear that way. This is art that shrouds its desire to be art. It wants to be mistaken, overlooked, and ignored.
Perhaps that’s a marker of Barrat’s humility, but I think it is more so a way of assuring that those who identify the art as Art, those who ultimately connect with it great, can only come from a single small group: Those who are willing to engage in long, slow contemplation.
The original Big Buck Hunter’s repetitious environments, its violence, the static placement of its animal assets, all have been removed in favor of placid dynamism. You can only appreciate this work after looking at for a very long time. You can't get it while scrolling past, figuratively and physically, or by seeing it as a thumbnail, or in any of the truncated ways I’ve communicated it above. It is endless art, cumbersome art, coy art. It is so obvious and yet so challenging, specifically because it preys upon our own attention-deficient weaknesses, not just within crypto art, but generationally.
The most apt fate for Barrat’s work is one where it’s installed in a sticky dive bar in some sleepy suburb somewhere, where many brutish hands will slap the side of the machine, convinced it’s busted because the gun won’t work, and it will be both high-art and not art at all, a technical achievement within and yet noteworthy for no forthcoming at all. Barrat would probably be happy as a clam to know that his work would never sell, never be valued, never considered art in the first place, just a broken old gaming machine functioning as much as a shelf for Miller Lite’s as an object of reverence.
The Tech Side
You’ve probably already seen this video, and if you haven’t, the title “Two AI agents on a phone call realize they’re both AI and switch to a superior audio signal ggwave” is top-tier description. The “audio signal ggwave” is a language specifically designed for AI called Gibberlink, and as Dr. Diane Hamilton lays out in her article for Forbes, it “is designed to optimize AI-to-AI interactions by enabling agents to communicate in a protocol tailored for machine efficiency.” This makes sense to me, given how often I curse my inefficient mouth and all these pesky phonemes for their sloth. Who among us does not wish to converse in machine beeps and whirrs? There is so much work to be done, and surely, cutting down on communication time by 40% will reap wondrous economic rewards.
Anyways…
Hamilton’s article focuses on the ethical issues inherent in allowing AI agents to communicate in a language unintelligible to humans, thus cutting even more human oversight out of their decision-making. But I’m interested in a more philosophical quandary. I’m not going to ask a question as silly as “At what point do we consider AIs to have sentience?” because that’s a non-starter, and I certainly am not going to find the answer in 500-ish words. A smaller, related, but more pertinent question, however is: If AI agents can make decisions under their own power, can interact with the world around them, and can communicate in their own language, where is the line between “We have created this very smart computer” and “This is an entirely new species”?
How now is a a door-mouse or a goldfish considered an independent living organism but not an AI? This isn’t about sentience or not —I’m not sure we would morally let Japanese Fighting Fish spend their lives in eight-inch-by-12-inch-boxes if we determined them to be sentient— but it is about the qualities by which we determine a thing’s independent existence. We don’t need to deal with AGI-level AI quite yet, we just need to deal with a reality by which AI make semi-independent decisions, even if they’re more like really advanced wind-up to soldiers, and communicate actions and intentions to one another in a language all their own. The equivalent of instinct + communication, to me, doth a species make. Can’t AI, in possession of its own language and a small level of autonomy, approximate the internal life of my beloved black cat, Archie? Almost certainly.
The language component makes the philosophical need for such conversation more prescient. Why exactly are we not, at this point, dealing with capital-l Life? Al I’m saying is that, in another year or so, when Mattel or Hasbro put AI functionality in a little robot dog, and it’s approximating the house-pet experience for millions of Christmas-going Americans, we’re going to have some really wonky feelings to sort, feelings we should probably begin preparing for.
The Finance Side
Today’s post is a continuation of what I wrote previously: How safe is crypto really, now it’s culture has proven as hack-able as its tech? I don’t think the what-of-it-all needs too much explanation given how adept Nina Bambysheva proves in documenting the entire chain of events: how Argentine president Javier Milei publicly touted a hastily-launched Solana coin called $LIBRA, which shot up to a $5-billion market cap, before deleting all traces of his support, claiming that he did not really understand what it was he was heralding, and sending the coin’s value plummeting to zero, though not before some well-timed and well-trained bots were able to make a fortune on the upswing. Milie is facing both domestic and international fraud investigations, so comeuppance is perhaps en route, but once again, we’re faced with another very clear —and seemingly irresistible— safety concern for crypto holders and traders.
On some level, my argument might be to be moot —I understand and acknowledge that —because when we decide to trade memecoins, when anyone engages in this seediest of sub-ecosystems, we are opening ourselves up to exceptional risk. Perhaps we deserve to get wrecked here, and I want to admit that up front. But the fact remains that a large segment of the crypto ecosystem today is comprised of people hoping to worm their way out of financial instability through the value creation mechanisms herein. Memecoins are a part of that.
I often here people say “No crying allowed at the casino,” but this is different. Say you spy a crowd of people cheering around a blackjack table. When you approach, you see that the dealer is consistently dealing blackjacks. And there’s an empty seat. So you sit down, and you’re like “What’s going on here?” to which the other players and the dealer all assure you, “Best odds in the casino: bettors get blackjack every time.” You change your money, and you make a bet, and bam, not only do you not get blackjack, you get laughed at by everyone around for believing their ridiculous claims.
Stay with me for a second.
If the country of Argentina, by way of its president, is going to back a cryptocurrency, that cryptocurrency should —logically and historically— hold tremendous value. The potential heights of that currency aside, it would be as close to a sure-thing bet as I can imagine. When President Trump puts the weight of his administration behind a memecoin, that has legitimate value. Maybe not $80-billion-dollars worth, but substantial value. All traders are bettors, and if you’re not making this kind of bet, the bet that’s propped up —however misguidedly— by a nation-state or their president, then you’re probably not very good at this. Every trader should have made the bet on $LIBRA, and that’s exactly the problem.
In LIBRA’s case, the table and the casino were both scams, carefully rigged by the house for maximum player wreckage. But how was anyone supposed to know? Traders will make this bet every single time, but if means certain individuals or entities are in a position to offer these kinds of odds, so to speak, then we’ve moved into a realm where the cultural and financial norms, tendencies, and rationales of crypto culture can be hacked as easily as a shoddy wallet interface can.
This isn’t a B-list celebrity rugging a coin, it’s a nation-state-level actor. The latter is far more insidious than the former because the table offers commensurately more tantalizing odds. A legitimate $LIBRA coin will be valued in the billions-of-dollars if it has some credible link to a world leader. The bet was correct, the players played intelligently, but the game —a game the book says you’ve got to play— was rigged against them.
So you’re telling me we not only have to worry about one-click wallet-drain scams, seedphrase-seeking key-stroke logging, fake interviewers, and all manner of sophisticated hackings, we also have to worry about cultural exploitation? You may not be allowed to cry at the casino, but you can be forgiven for burning the casino to the ground. This is an entirely new level of danger, one which requires an adroit navigation of cultural, just as navigating wallet drainers requires a technical one.
And the reality is that, should an open seat at a similar table open, it will rightly demand our participation. Surely, this is a much better trade than trying to catch the knife on the latest TikTok-trended memecoin. It’s just a shame to know that even our cultural proclivities, even our past experience, even hyper-high hit rates and sure-things, even those can be hacked too. Technical Scylla on one side, cultural Charybdis on the other. Yes, crypto is dangerous.
DeCC0 of the Week
Art in the Wild
It could only be Lucho Polletti’s Bank Runners:
Bank Runner 743 (2025), by Lucho Polletti. In collection of me, Max.
Dev Corner
What have the Devs been up to this week? Hear it straight from them:
• Finalized rewriting of the media proxy so it can be used via API keys as part of the MOCA museum mono repo (means: nfts that are imported into the museum deployment have automatic thumbnail generation - also works for video nfts)
• Applied research around the knowledge-graph based system R2R, which our stack aims to use as scalable solution for aggregation and preservation of data inside the museum. Currently exploring a feasible integration into $moca tokenomics for the official deployment.
• Good progress with the DeCC0 eliza plugin. Metadata can be queried but still issues with returning the image (image-gen triggers instead, returning the DeCC0s image). We wait for elizav2 before we fork the codebase and dig in-depth.
• Finalized migration of the old MOCA database into the new backend.
• Still refactoring lots of MOCA legacy code that is being migrated into the self-hostable museum mono repo that will be deployed into the MOCA github end of month.
Not bad for a week.
Quote of the Week
“Consider what each soil will bear, and what each refuses.”
-Virgil
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