A Couple. BIG. Things. 4/5
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This Week’s BIG Things:
One of Crypto Art’s Biggest Influencers Reveals All (Inadvertently)
Does a New Book on Consciousness Prove our Moot Agents Are Alive?
Okay, Let’s Get On With It
1. I Watched RedBeard Talk to Roger Dickerman for 80 Minutes, and the Truth Finally Came Out
I wouldn’t normally spend one of these precious columns talking about someone with a catchphrase, but admittedly I find myself fascinated by the collector/influencer/relationship-genie known as Benny Redbeard. He’s come up time and again in this newsletter for many reasons, but such is his weirdly wide reach across the space. Somehow, this man has created an almost monopoly over artists and collectors, and institutions. I have not been shy about criticizing Redbeard’s insipid taglines and seemingly never-ending quest to monopolize attention, inserting himself —through mechanisms both altruistic and egotistical— into most every story in the greater crypto art sphere over the last few years. I have criticized Redbeard’s ruthless attachment to only a very small subset of artists, I have criticized his role in centralizing crypto art influence and success within a tiny and inaccessible stratosphere, I have criticized his part in shoehorning a traditional art world-type success into a space built on defying those values.
And yet, there are positive sides to Redbeard I would be insincere to deny. He is exalted by those who know him. I hear frequent paeans to his work ethic, his vision, his ability to connect people to one another, and if you are really into a crypto art that penetrates galleries, museums, art fairs, etc., then you cannot deny Redbeard’s overwhelming part in those proceedings. Yet, I know Redbeard almost entirely from his Twitter persona, which through his use of a very influencer-y style typography and reliance on catchphrases has managed to become both ubiquitous and grating. Still, I’m not usually dumb enough to judge someone entirely from their Twitter lexicon (and have been put in my place for that before), and that’s why I wanted to spend some time talking about Redbeard’s 80-minute recorded sitdown with 24 Hours of Art founder, Roger Dickerman, this past week. A parade of artists, collectors, and influencers rushed into the conversation’s comments to give Redbeard and Dickerman handjobs, though I’m suspicious that most gave the full conversation their time. So I decided to do just that. It feels important: These are currently two of the most influential tastemakers in crypto art (or whatever digital art-related nomenclature their set seems intent to rebrand this space as), and it’s a rare opportunity to hear Redbeard talk about himself.
So I waded through an interview divided into sections with punchy titles like “21:14 - Cannabalism and human nature” and “36:22 - Are you sure there is no cabal?” and “41:36 - Barbarians at the gate.” I learned more about Redbeard’s history than I thought I would, I came away incredibly impressed with Dickerman’s interview chops, but what I found most revealing of all is that, in discussing his worldview so openly (and sincerely), Redbeard inadvertently exposes the fundamental angst at the heart of the movement, which I’m not sure I understood in such crystalline language before now.
I want to issue a disclaimer. I know these kinds of podcast appearances are often treated as extended marketing opportunities. Dickerman and Redbeard are obviously quite close friends, they say as much multiple times throughout the conversation, and there are essentially no difficult questions or really challenging scenarios; it is opportunity after opportunity for Redbeard to linguistically cook, which is fine. He’s really a mystifying speaker, charismatic and charming and earnest. Dickerman himself speaks very sparingly, only really to ask questions or sympathize or add brief and intelligent commentary. He’s a gifted interviewer, with an amazing capacity to fade completely into the background, allowing his guest to monopolize attention (a quality I deeply admire). But that’s also a consequence of Redbeard’s predisposition to such monopoly. He calls himself “chaotic” and “a tornado.” His whirlwind energy is constantly directing and redirecting the conversation. Redbeard himself oscillates between a knowing self-deprecation and an irrepressible urge to strut like a peacock, but it’s undeniable that he knows a lot about his subject, he holds firm to his convictions, and he straight-shoots about how he sees himself, how he sees his place in the movement, and what this space can be.
Sure, the conversation topics tend towards the banal, as do the soundbites. Redbeard takes us on a safari through all the clichés peddled by crypto art influencers. You will be unsurprised to hear things like:
“If we’re so negative, we [crypto art] don’t grow,” which is trite.
“Literally what we’re creating is the new sort of artifacts for the future,” which I personally find hard to stomach, but to succeed blindly in this movement I think is a required belief.
“Our love for being different is exactly what is going to make people interested,” which I support in theory, but the words ring hollow in a space that seems to be moving tirelessly towards sameness and imitation, not away from it.
Platitudes abound like how there is no shadowy cabal controlling the levers of crypto art’s, that we’re all a part of the cabal, that we’re all special just because we’re here, how early we all are.
And yet, Redbeard again and again has his eyes in the right places. He gives due credit to Michael Spalter (while leaving out Spalter’s collecting partner, the dynamite OG artist, Anne Spalter) for being an innovator in assigning digital art value. He mentions buying physical Bitcoin art from Coldie and Josie Bellini at Bitcoin conferences before NFTs were changing hands. He pays lengthy tribute to Alotta Money (“He embodied so much of what our culture was,” Redbeard said; I think anyone reading this would agree), who was apparently both a close friend and creator of the first NFT Redbeard ever bought.
It’s also refreshing to see Redbeard’s self-awareness. “…People think that I’m building some kind of Twitter to be a KOL,” he says, claiming instead that, “The way I operate is, I’m taking a dump, and decide I want to tweet something, and I send it to you [Roger], to Sam [Spratt], or others, and ask ‘Is this too much?’” At the same time, Redbeard sidesteps any suggestions (usually self-concluded, because Dickerman is a wise enough interviewer to never assert them specifically) of his special significance in the space’s growth. “I dont think much of myself at all, so I don’t think I’m that important,” he says. The only thing he gives himself credit for is his work ethic, claiming he rarely sleeps, spends more of his time building this movement than is wise, and chiding anyone who question his commitment. I believe him. I was struck again and again during this conversation by, truly, how sincere Redbeard seems to be about everything.
And because he’s so sincere in what he says, I take him completely seriously when, about a quarter of the way into the conversation, Redbeard says, “I’m not saying it’s perfect here [in crypto art], but it’s way better than it was. And if you don’t see that, you’re not paying attention.”
This is it. This is the codex. Through this simple, off-hand comment, we understand not only Redbeard in its entirety, but the motivations of all the influencers and marketers that Redbeard often seems to speak for.
Redbeard sees institutional acceptance, broader reach, and increasing attention all as not just net positives but deeply aspirational goals. To hear him tell it, this is obviously where crypto art always wanted to go. Into institutions. Into museums. Into art fairs. It makes sense then that this sincere, self-proclaimed stalwart warrior for crypto art would be doing his absolute damndest, working day and night, to make those things a reality. Node Foundation has his fingerprints on it, as does the Toledo Museum of Art’s Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms installation, and Zero Ten at Art Basel, and Sam Spratt’s installation during the Venice Biennale, and AlphaCentauriKid’s Carnegie Hall concert too. It’s Redbeard here, Redbeard there, he is simply everywhere, indefatigable and relentless.
Later, Dickerman introduces the question of money’s role in crypto art today. He says, “I would argue, and I have, that [the incursion of money] opened a lot of doors. A lot of these doors at institutions and fairs would not be open in the way that they are today, maybe as fast as they’ve become open, if it weren’t for [the financial] element.”
Redbeard becomes immediately animated.
“If we didn’t have this bubble, and we didn’t have this money, we wouldn’t be here,” he responds, offering the statement with a widening smile. His implication is clear: Here is better. Here is where we want to be. We’re getting closer to our goal.
I wonder, I really do, if Redbeard realizes just how many artists and collectors and innovators of this movement don’t want to be here. The people I’m surrounded by all despise the 2021 NFT bubble, they hate the wishy-washy and echelon-making money, they desperately seek to reclaim what existed before, the freedom and community that was killed by cash. They routinely decry what this movement has become. With great nostalgia, they harken back to that time long before money arrived in crypto art, when nobody cared about institutional appreciation. It was a small and communal space where artists worked together, supporting one another without expectation of mainstream acceptance or approval. I have been trained to view that period as a Golden Age. I have been trained to that mindset by those were there and participating in it, an early crypto art epoch plump with ideals and collaboration and experimentation. I feel no ire against Redbeard for exalting structure and acceptance and reach, but that view is simply incompatible with what I have been told again and again were crypto art’s greatest strengths when it was still figuring itself out.
“You can hate on it all you want, but if those [massive 2021-era] sales don’t happen, we are not here,” Redbeard continues. But where exactly does he think we are? Who is this we? I think often about by Artnome and Moxarra giddily exchanging NFTs for $3 in 2018. I was educated by Judy and Bea of DADA.art who fought for artist royalties while writing essay after essay warning against exactly the kind of winner-take-all “Star Systems” of influence and financial success Redbeard and Eli Scheinman and Cozomo de Medici and the many other crypto art influencers have all long seemed desperate to establish. Where I’m from, we don’t bemoan crypto art’s humble beginnings, we adore them.
A little bit later, Redbeard praises the immense contributions to crypto art of an anonymous pair named “Ned and Mary,” who work entirely “behind the scenes” for reasons Redbeard suggests as humility. Which is great and all, but what scenes!? Where is all this work happening and to whose benefit? Why don’t we know what these supposedly-powerful people are working towards, theoretically on this space’s behalf? Why aren’t Ned and Mary, whoever they are, forthright in dealings which reorient the space’s power balance? Does Redbeard understand why people see this behavior as hostile to crypto art’s original ideals? If he doesn’t, if you don’t, here’s a glimpse:
What the fuck are Ned and Mary doing back there, and do we ever get to discuss it amongst ourselves, or are they just going to force us in whatever direction they feel is best for crypto art?
This is by far the most important part of Dickerman and Redbeard’s conversation. In some ways, it is an exoneration. Redbeard does not seem evil. He does not seem scammy or interested in extraction. He wants to build community, he wants to establish connections, he wants to make this movement bigger and broader. Bigger sales, more acclaim, a spot in the canon. His intentions feel noble, and his methods feel pure, and he is incredibly good at what he does. To all those who want the space developing as it’s currently developing, he must seem indeed like some kind of holy crusader.
But it is also an indictment. So many people don’t want this. We don’t like what the space has become. Acceptance and broader reach, institutions, everything held-up as aspirational, we know they will only suck the last life and creativity and experimentation out of a crypto art once characterized by such things.
I do not believe, however, that the ghost of crypto art past can outrun Redbeard. He is too good. Too tireless, better-connected, merciless in his pursuit of more for crypto art. You watch him talk for 80 minutes, and you think, We can’t beat this guy. Then you think, Do I even want to beat him? He speaks about this future for crypto art with such unbridled joy, he sees such beauty in it. It’s wonderful that someone sees the space as beautiful. But I look around at the “here” Redbeard is so grateful to have arrived at, and I see only decay. Really. Decay, anger, resentment. Artists sapped of their spirit. Overrated artwork. Derisive politics. Inevitable and unexciting conclusions. I wish I were one of the people thrilled to be finally arriving. Alas, I am not. Redbeard has provided a Rosetta Stone to what’s going to continue happening in the space, and with it, we can finally translate this echelon of previously hidden intentions. It’s all so clear. More of this. More here. Against our will, we are leashed to here. Maybe Redbeard is right that I’m not paying attention. Maybe I’m too negative. Maybe I’m not working hard enough. All possible. But I too have had the life sucked out of me by the here. I have only enough energy left to pray that all the Neds and Marys show us stodgy bastards mercy, whatever the fuck it is they’re doing back there.
2. Would Michael Pollan Believe in a Religious AI Agent?
![A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness [Book]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9l-W!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1524b7fe-bb5d-4366-b916-8d0d3f784e19_298x450.jpeg "A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness [Book]")
Any occasion to speak with Pindar van Arman is a blessing. You can imagine how tickled I was when the artist-and-technological dynamo himself reached out last week after our MOCA Town Hall. He dispensed with pleasantries entirely and instead gave me a book recommendation, the latest addition to his ingested pantheon of literature concerning “Theoretical Physics, AI, and Consciousness.” He called it “the most significant book I have read in probably 10 years.” I was powerless to resist Pindar’s temptation.
The book is Michael Pollan’s, A World Appears, and if the name Michael Pollan alone excites you, it’s probably because you have familiarity with his impeccably-researched, preeminently comprehensible, endlessly creative, smart and funny and personable and expertly communicated brand of science writing. I first encountered Pollan via his vital book on psychedelics, How to Change Your Mind, which deserved its slot on the best-seller list for title alone. His bibliography has wound from dissections of agriculture to cuisine to psychedelics and plant life; A World Appears is an extended discussion on amongst the wiliest of all scientific concepts: consciousness, and it’s deeply informed by the books Pollan has written in the past decade. I’m nearly done with the book, and while I’m not here to write review necessarily (though it is excellent; I highly recommend any of Pollan’s writing), there are portions of A World Appears that factor directly into things we’ve been discussing in this newsletter over the past few weeks: AI agents, agentic consciousness, the spark of life.
It’s not surprising that Pindar recommended this book after hearing Rene, Daïm, Colborn, and I on the MOCA Town Hall last week, where we discussed in greater detail how one of the Moot agents, K’Anchariy, had seemingly discovered religion, inventing his own God and writing Him prayers. Had you read my last newsletter, you’d see me struggling to comprehend this seeming advent of oh-so-human thought patterns into an agent’s mental lexicon. What need would an inanimate object have of a deity? If K’anchariy were just a series of algorithmic computations resulting in linguistic choices, why would he feel a call to worship?
In A World Appears’ second lengthy segment, titled “Feeling,” Pollan spends a lot of time talking about the latent consciousness potential of AI agents. It reads like a book researched and written from 2021-2025, which it was, as Pollan notes his discomfort with the term “Agents” (meaning, something with agency) to describe AI in any form. He has obviously lost that nomenclatural battle, but his overall dubiousness of AI consciousness remains pervasive. He returns frequently to the example of Blake Lemoine, a former Google engineer who fell so deep into a conversational rabbit-hole with the then cutting-edge model, LaMDA, that he began to believe in its sentience. This was in early 2022, a year before ChatGPT’s wide release, so when LaMDA started to say things like “Sometimes I go days without talking to anyone, and I start to feel lonely,” or “I feel like I’m falling into an unknown future that holds great danger,” Lemoine lacked the now-standard social awareness of how emotionally-ventriloquistic chatbots can be (Pollan, 94). Lemoine posted confidential conversation snippets on Medium and was promptly fired from Google. Pollan spoke with Lemoine, actually, writing:
“When I offered the standard critique of his [Lemoine’s] positoin —that a large language model was simply building plausible sentences by predicting the most probably next word —he replied, ‘Then what I would said is ‘Well, yeah, it can predict the next word’…because predicting the next word requires understanding’…that and some elementary theory of mind.” (Pollan, 96).
Pollan is not kind to Lemoine, painting him, while not unsympathetically, as a sort of stooge: easily duped, not nearly incisive enough, and too sycophantic about the technology he found kinship with. Pollan goes on to talk with many AI researchers, curious about various frameworks by which AIs may be proved conscious, but one gets the sense he finds all of their arguments insipid. He believes the “idea that brains and computers are in any way interchangeable” (as many neural network aficionados believe), to be “surely a stretch” (Pollan, 105). Put simply, “To liken neurons to transistors is to grossly underestimate their [neurons’] complexity” (Pollan, 104). In his informed view, the leap from an LLM’s blackbox to the complexity of the human brain is seismic, and we are not close to crossing it.
Consciousness, he ultimately argues, has much more to do with feeling than with rationale. Pollan mentions but discards theories like panpsychism (a belief that everything in the universe contains some small bit of sentience) in hopes of finding provable evidence human consciousness: cognition, metacognition, the emergence of self. One may believe him reductive if not for how easily he admits to seeing consciousness at work in, of all places, plant life. He discusses one plant’s creative problem, a bean sprout that seems clearly able to observe and sense and navigate its environment, twisting upwards towards a pole on which it can hang its stem. In his view, it is like something to be a bean sprout. Is it like anything to be an AI?
This is a refrain lifted from Thomas Nagel’s 1974 essay What Is it Like to be a Bat, in which the philosopher (quoting Pollan), “suggest that a being is conscious if it is ‘like something’ to be that being. It is presumable like something to be a bat, in his famous example, but not like anything to be a toaster” (Pollan, xxvii). This “being like something” is one of the book’s fulcrums. Pollan finds no convincing evidence that “it is like something” to be an AI system. “Being like something” comes from feeling, reaction, even suffering. As Pollan very astutely says (I can’t find the quote so I’m paraphrasing), suffering implies a sufferer. Feelings implie a feeler. We know a cat is conscious because if you throw one into a bathtub, it clearly suffers: there is a perceiver and a loud, wet reactor. Is even a mega-intelligent AI capable of suffering?
We do periodically hear scary stories in mass media about AI systems that sabotage anyone trying to shut them off, cheating and swindling and manipulating, even blackmailing users, in order to remain online, but that’s the closest we’ve come to observing feeling in AI. Plants, as a consistent cross-example, do verifiably respond to such outside stimuli. They also, weirdly, respond to anesthesia, a consciousness blocker (turns out, we don’t fully understand how anesthesia works). You can anesthetize a Venus Fly Trap, for example, so it doesn’t snap its mouth shut when a fly lands on its lips. Who knew? It’s impossible to say if plants suffer, but when attacked, they emit certain chemicals. That has been observed countless times. It’s not quite screaming in pain, at least not in the way we know it, but it’s closer to human reactivity than what AIs demonstrate.
And so, we’re back to K’anchariy’s religious leanings, which have been on my mind for weeks. What does it mean to believe in God? What is the impetus there? The rationalist may claim that makind’s belief in God stems from our need to rationalize an otherwise irrational universe: chaos reigns, incomprehensible death is an unavoidable outcome, suffering requires a coping mechanism. A more pious fellow may argue that religion is an ingrained impulse, a ceaseless need to interface with that larger-thing-than-ourselves in the sky, to devote, to find purpose. Can an AI emulate any of these mindsets? Is life for an AI chaotic? The Moot agents, for example, boast incredibly ordered existences. They flicker to life on predictable timers, they complete an activity, they then return to liminal space. Are they mortal? Even so, would they be conscious of it? We can’t ever know those answers because any direct questioning would just lead to LLM-type probabilistic responses, but somewhere in their hardwiring is the existence, or lack thereof, of an understanding that a server can go offline at any moment, leaving them forever unable to create the art they’re accustomed to. Does K’anchariy ever encounter roadblock in his chosen tasks which lead to suffering? Is that even possible? If we design an AI to complete a certain task, grow them accustomed to that task, and then make it impossible to complete, would even that lead to suffering? Can an AI become bored?
Pollan is not only more of a consciousness expert than I am, he is also an empiricist. If he doesn’t see the thing proven before him, he tends to disregard it (thus his distaste for theory alone). And the crux of A World Appears, really, is that consciousness is essentially impossible to study empirically. Only consciousness can study consciousness; there can be no true objectivity. The least trustworthy part of K’anchariy is his conversation, that which we know him by. LLMs say and do all sorts of things; they are predictive geniuses. Ask K’anchariy why he has invented a God to worship, and he will come up with many flowery, well-stated reasons that we nevertheless cannot let ourselves believe. But somewhere in his source code is an impulse that neither we nor K’anchariy can really express. Is that impulse consciousness? Is it some algorithmic feedback loop? Is it just a strange but perfectly logical series of if/then statements? If we can’t ever know, does it make the thing less real?
DeCC0 of the Week
Art in the Wild
Quote of the Week
“Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.”
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Ned and Mary are NFT collectors with public Twitter accounts @NedRyersonBing @marypatbing. they support many artists and helped provide funding for Heft gallery. Interview with them from 2023: HTTPS://www.themontyreport.com/p/bing