M○C△ WEEKLY Round-UP 3/16
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In This Week’s Round-Up:
Sam Spratt reveals one of the most beautiful gestures in crypto art history
How a Mr. Beast Content Memo and AI-for-Work ubiquity could make meetings into content (in the worst possible way)
The globalization of crypto is an unavoidable asteroid
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The Crypto Art Side
I have not been closely following Sam Spratt’s gargantuan artistic undertaking Masquerade, and though I have become aware that the performance/multipart-auction/creative-explosion at last reached its culmination, I am not the right person to examine its intricacies, critique it positively or negatively, or give anything more than passing thoughts. But as part of Masquerade, all 613 participants received a hand-painted artwork in the shape of a Mask, in keeping with the theme of Spratt’s eponymous 1/1 piece. I feel tempted to argue —despite having only glanced over the collection itself— that Spratt makes huge strides towards the oft-overlooked potential of the PFP medium: the artist can both provide a tailored digital identity for the collector and simultaneously create an unbreakable bond between the two.
I do not know if every one of these masks was made with specific regard to the individual who received them, but the above mask, #409, titled Yahrzeit Rose, certainly was, which is what captured my attention. It is an unmistakable gesture of love from artist to collector, and reaches perhaps highest possible echelon that art can ascend to: that of the unspeakably meaningful.
Yahrzeit, a Yiddish word, refers to the anniversary of a loved one’s death in the Jewish community, which we mark by burning a long-wicked candle (intended to last 24 hours) and reciting of the Mourner’s Kaddish, as our ancestors have been doing for thousands of years. Rose, meanwhile, is both the departed sister of Zack Yanger, artist and Senior Vice-President of SuperRare, and the core of Yanger’s monumental outpouring of art throughout these last years. In January of 2019, and probably many times since, Yanger wrote beautifully about Rose, and how her memory is the continual inspiration for he and his art. To a less conscious observer, this all may come as a surprise. To those paying attention, however, Rose’s influence, her initials, and the iconography she inspired are peppered all throughout Yanger’s life, his art, his words, and his actions.
Sam Spratt’s Yahrzeit Rose is a tribute to Zack and Rose so moving that even a casual observer like me can sense how special it is. The rose engraved right there in the mask’s forehead mirrors the roses which are the eternal centerpieces in Yanger’s art, and which imbue his works with such palpable grief, such powerful love, such emotion, at once overflowing and forever stymied. There is in Spratt’s piece so much care, and compassion, and intent, this work a connection seemingly made without expectation between its creator and its recipient. In Yanger’s own words, “This gift means the absolute world to me and it will be cherished in my family long after my days. Thank you for seeing me.”
May one day our own art be lucky enough to have such impact.
I have always buoyed my own attempts at art-making by internalizing the following mantra: to affect even a single soul with one’s work is the highest achievement the artist can aim for. How many of us can claim that our work is truly cherished? How many of us contain enough ability and insight and sensitivity and attention, and most importantly, dedication to bring that to life?
Spratt, for all the criticism I’ve given him, is often cited by his collectors and those in his circle as a uniquely beautiful soul. How can one look at Yahrzeit Rose and not concur? I find myself, though distant from all affected parties, so deeply moved by this piece, its unexpected delivery, and all the unimaginable reasons why Spratt put so much of himself into its creation. Great art like this can and will fundamentally alter the world around it.
I really wanted to bring this piece, and its principals, to your attention today. This is a lifeboat, and it reminds me of why we create and what the point of this all is, past the market, past the collection, past the ecosystem. There are always only two people who matter within any work of art: who created it, and who looks upon it. The too-often unvisited place where those two souls may meet, wherever that is, that’s where all art through all time is ultimately aiming for, and where only the very best of it can come to rest.
We are lucky —lucky— to look upon it here for ourselves.
The Tech Side
The other day I was listening to the Plain English podcast —one of my favorites— hosted by the Atlantic writer, Derek Thompson, which rattles around a whole breadth of topics, but here, in How Gen-Z Sees the World, Thompson spoke with Kyla Scanlon, a content creator and researcher, about, mostly, the financial and social viewpoints that characterize Gen-Z. At some point in their conversation, Scanlon highlighted a growing lack of creativity in the most lucrative spheres of content creation, bringing special attention to an internal memo composed by Youtube-wunderkind, Mr. Beast, about best practices for success on Youtube. I quote here from Scanlon’s article, “The Mr. Beast Memo is a Guide to the Gen Z Workforce”:
As Mr. Beast writes himself in the memo, “Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.”
There’s something fascinating about content changing itself based on the metrics of the platform at hand. Almost like site-specific artwork but without the creativity or love, focused entirely on retention metrics, watchability, clicks, etc. The eyeballs on his videos are no longer a reflection of Mr. Beast’s content, the content is a reflection of the eyeballs.
Which brings us back, as always, to AI. I’ve been thinking a lot about AI in the workplace, especially after conversations with family members and friends confirming that many workplaces have carved-out a niche for Microsoft CoPilot and ChatGPT, used therein to summarize meetings and write emails and accomplish all that type of busy work. John Herrman’s article, “What Happens When AI Joins Every Meeting?” for New York Magazine discusses a world where these capabilities are ubiquitous, and one particular passage drew my attention:
“During a recent meeting with Read.ai, an AI assistant tool that can record and analyze meetings across different platforms by joining as a guest, the company shared with me a live analytics dashboard for the meeting we were in at that moment. One panel contained a real-time transcription of what we were saying; another informed me that I had been late, while the other two attendees had been on time; as I spoke, I watched my “Engagement” metric rise, my words-per-minute spike, and a “Sentiment” metric dip, then rise, then dip again. At the conclusion of the meeting, I could revisit not just its contents but an assessment of my performance in multiple dimensions: How much did I get to talk relative to others? Did I use too many filler words?”
One can see a world quickly developing where these metrics are applied at-will and with glee by C-suite executives on-down the corporate ladder, until there develops a vernacular for meetings as specific and divorced from reality as email vernacular often is. Doesn’t that seem almost like an eventuality? Younger employees aware of such metrics will want to make a good impression on their higher-ups, while middle-managers vying with others for promotion will want to optimize any metrics they can. When the activity which pleases an AI’s understanding of “engagement” and “sentiment” is used as a rubric for performance and upward-mobility, following suit will become more than the status-quo, it will become mandatory.
So how does this relate to Mr. Beast’s Youtube-minded production?
We are talking about abusing metrics to the point that the thing loses the essence of itself. Mr. Beast specifically creates Youtube videos, which have become sacrifices at the program’s algorithmic altar. That is his entire goal: to maximize for Youtube. The content, the moral, the end-goal, the meaning, even the variety, it’s all in service to pleasing the Youtube God, and that will —if it hasn’t already— have a chilling effect on the entire ecosystem: Mr. Beast’s videos will continue to outperform, they will suck views away from anything that doesn’t mimic its style, so more and more content in the ecosystem will mimic that style, the whole ecosystem stiffening until it eventually constricts itself.
I fear we will soon apply this same principle to meetings, and given that’s how a huge swath of the populace spends a huge swath of their professional time, we’ll ultimately see the further atrophy of work culture, it’s form so alien to its original intent that it becomes even more a parody of itself than it currently so.
Language and speaking style will hew closer and closer to algorithmic glory, doing away with individual personality in the process: Just look at how those numbers drop when you act like yourself! This will seep out from presentations into all communication; why wouldn’t the AI assistant be grading you on everything from one-on-one calls to participation in team meetings, your attention span during all-hands meetings with your eyeballs tracked by a camera. Every activity and every spoken word and every breath will be literally quantified and compiled into an overarching report on one’s ability to lead, to talk, to listen. The God in our corporate machine will be the vast, ineffable algorithm at the heart of a given company’s AI software.
As always, not knowing how these models are trained or what ideologies they are in service of is dangerous. Whatever they are biased towards at this early stage in their development, that is what work culture will soon mimic. And what’s the point? Are meetings really about communicating important pieces of information around a team, or are they tests of one’s obedience and articulation? How much actual productivity will be pushed aside in favor of entry-level associates practicing diction in front of a mirror?
There are places where AI is positive and places where it is negative. AI is extremely good at turning things into numerals, and while the negative consequences of this have been immortalized in, say, Black Mirror episodes about social ratings, AI being deployed willy-nilly to track the success of one’s work persona, that’s not too far off. When our interactions themselves —instead of just silly Youtube videos— are reduced down to their metrics, the stiffening-cum-constriction of culture leaks out into our physical, day-to-day reality. Work where nobody can actually get anything done. Relationships where genuine communication is impossible. A point deducted for unshined shoes, another deducted for an unseemly zit. Who knows what an AI might find positive or negative, especially at these early stages? Who knows how much of an algorithm is unknown to its purveyors and purchasers? A Youtube environment killed by Mr. Beast is uninspiring at worst, but a reality strangled by the same principle is just outright stupidity…the kind that brings down Rome.
The Finance Side
The crux of this section has for some weeks been about crypto’s rapid ascent to global acceptance, and the consequences —intended and otherwise— which appear to be emerging from its therefore centralization. A lot of people may say I’m late to the party for saying this (wouldn’t it be nice if a lot of people said anything about me), but I think it’s finally hit me that, yes, Bitcoin will soon span the globe, become the financial axis of investment firms and world governments, and that’s a wave that won’t soon be stopping.
But as always, I wonder what that is going to do to us, all the way down here.
Earlier this week, Brian Armstrong, Coinbase CEO, announced that “Across federal, state, and local, Coinbase now works with 145 government entities in the U.S. and 29 government entities outside the U.S,” which may or may not include the fact that, according to Coinbase’s official account, they are approved to launch in India! Access and adoption are obviously quite different, but the fact that another billion-plus people in the global south will at least have the opportunity to dabble in a new financial market through a proven mechanism, wow! That’s intensely interesting. Keep in mind that 10% of Indian citizens, however, hold 77% of the wealth, so this may not be the army’s march of further Bitcoin scarcity that it may on its face seem.
But this certainly is: According to Reuters, the Bolivian state-owned energy company, “YPFB will use cryptocurrency to pay for energy imports amid a painful shortage of dollars and fuel in the landlocked South American nation.” Yet another nationstate institutionalizing interest in cryptocurrency, that is indeed a boon for further scarcity, and if proven in this test-case, may very well provoke a rush of imitators in other countries where cash is scarce or are amidst an economic crisis.
Again, we have to remember that while nation-state entry into crypto is a net-positive for prices and overall scarcity, there are limited paths by which increased price action trickles down into what I’d call the “cultural core” of crypto (cryptulture?), which to me encapsulates not only crypto art, but the blockchain-based open-source development ecosystem, meme communities, and basically anything blockchain-built that sits downstream of centralized crypto exchanges.
The biggest immediate beneficiaries of such price action will liekly prove to be crypto-rich individuals and blockchain foundations, both of which will hopefully pass that money along to devs and high-potential projects. I think of the Erik Voorhees-started VeniceAI, or the way the Solana Foundation (I know) makes concerted investments in on-chain startups. Vitalik Buterin —and the Ethereum Foundation by proxy— has seemed to soften his historically harsh view of NFTs recently, so maybe there’s something to read into there.
I think, however, we need to often reflect on what the wave of approved Bitcoin ETFs did to downstream crypto: bupkis. Large entities may buy and sell cryptocurrencies, but they will largely do so in already high-valuation and accepted coins —probably nothing beyond Bitcoin for the foreseeable future— and can then manipulate the price for their own reasons. Such is the benefit of owning everything. Until nation-states or big banks begin to blockchain-ify their workflows and processes, there will be little incentive for their money to flow our way by any more multifarious vectors than we have currently. When the crypto-rich and crypto-indoctrinated do very well, culture below them flourishes. But that’s no different than it’s ever been. So while we should certainly cheer on crypto’s overall victories —like proudly watching our son win a swim competition against kids a few years his senior— we should be aware that our lives may not fundamentally change, or even improve at all, because of them.
DeCC0 of the Week
Art in the Wild
Dev Corner
Update day!
• started to feed our R2R test instance (aka MOCA Library) with more documents and testing that system
• prototyped a r2r-mcp which acts as middleware between the MOCA Library and the eliza agent
• we made good progress with the frontend code (collections, artwork detail)
• started to integrate the legacy $moca staking pools into the new stack
Quote of the Week
“The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.”
-Martin Buber
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