M○C△ WEEKLY Round-UP 5/4

We got NEWS. We got THOUGHTs. We got ART! We got you covered.

May 04, 2025

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In This Week’s Round-Up:

A K-12 School With AI at its Center
Bringing Dead XCOPYs (and many other lovely artworks) Back to Life
The Unsung Cost of Crypto Mining

Okay, Let’s Get On With It

The Crypto Art Side

The rise and fall of RareArtLabs is the stuff of legend, it one of the earliest minting platforms specifically for crypto art, bursting into existence in 2017 when our movement was so shiny and so new and still carried its highest of possibilities. Unfortunately, the site shut-down in 2020, and because we had not yet learned (we still haven’t learned) that minted NFTs are not automatically affixed to the blockchain, the loss of RareArtLabs’ servers reduced all the pieces minted on their platform —which included 161 artists and 738 individual works— to nothing more than their metadata: blank image files pointing towards abysses on defunct servers far away. While you can still find each of these pieces on etherscan and note their provenance, the artwork is, for all intents and purposes, gone. Andre DeSantt from RedLion wrote about the RareArt saga back in 2021, and it’s an instructive text.

For years, this has been where RareArt’s story ended.

I’ve previously heard about harebrained schemes for bringing these pieces back to life, but this week, jPeggy.eth —an XCOPY collector— revealed in a lengthy thread they they had been working with Coldie, XCOPY, and RareArtLabs founder John Zettler to resurrect RareArtLabs, even purchasing the original RareArt.io domain, in pursuit of creating a mechanism by which all the defunct RareArtLabs pieces could be wrapped in shiny new ERC721 skins and more-or-less resurrected in an approximation of their original form. MOCA’s very own XCOPY work, Cracked, is one such piece that can now be brought back from the dead, but jPeggy claims that “The wrapper works for all 738 artworks minted by 161 artists on R.A.R.E.” With the ERC-2981 standard implemented to support artist royalties on all sales, this seems close to the best-case scenario for these early and vital pieces of crypto art, which I —and many others— had more-or-less given-up on.

I’m in no position to comment on the efficacy or ease of the actual wrapping process, but XCOPY themselves tweeted that —

—so the whole thing smells pretty legit from a phishing side of things, but I have yet to hear of anyone actually using the new tool to wrap their works, so I can’t be sure. Lead developer albi.eth goes into more depth here, for those seeking more depth.

It’s hard not to feel buoyed by such good news. Goods news, everyone, what a joy! It’s simply too infrequent that any real care is shown for early crypto artworks, despite how foundational they are to the history of the movement, and the RareArt pieces are among the earliest minted works by some of our most noteworthy actors. My fear was that anyone designing such a program would have done so exclusively for the XCOPYs (given how much they’re worth), so I am excited that the process is free and that it includes royalties and that it also breathes new life into early works by Hackatao and HEX0x6C and Osinachi and Max Osiris and Travis Leroy Southworth and Yura Miron and many many others.

Labors of love in crypto art are uncommon, but they are also not nonexistent. I have no idea what jPeggy’s tool does for further appreciation of early crypto art, but how can we not feel energized that a tool like this exists at all? That a group of people put real time and serious resources into a problem many had considered unsolvable, not technologically, but because nobody cared enough to make it a reality? I hope these pieces enjoy the benefits their restored existences. I hope they have a newfound chance to be curated and appreciated widely. I hope all these innovators are given their much-deserved due. I hope jPeggy is given plenty of flowers for leading the charge on what historians will surely look at as a seismic event in crypto art’s annals. We really needed some good news. And this is some very good news.

The Tech Side

Alpha - See 2025 Schedules, Reviews & More | ActivityHero.com

The above fairly-banal graphic design work, aside, I’ve fallen down a bit of a rabbit hole as I’ve become more and more familiar with Alpha Schools, a growing chain of private schools in the southern United States —mostly Texas and Florida— that has achieved some serious notoriety for its unheard-of embrasure of AI in their students’ everyday lives.

Joshua Rhett Miller’s article for Newsweek, “What Happens When Teachers Are Replaced With AI? This School Is Finding Out,” is a wide-reaching breakdown of Alpha’s unusual educational structure, and that structure’s seemingly-quite-positive effect on their students. In summary, Alpha has completely replaced anything resembling a standard education experience (which is to say, they have no teachers standing in front of chalkboards, little in the way of grading, and no catch-all learning speeds for students) with a kind of AI-based learning model where, as Miller writes, “students use laptops for 30-minute sessions in core academic subjects, including math, English, science and social studies. The personalized approach utilizes proprietary and third-party apps and allows students to master topics up to five times faster than traditional methods, Alpha claims.”

Elsewhere in the day, with only a few hours spent on hard-and-fast curriculum topics, the school focuses on soft-skills, with activites that sound more like camp than the dismal cinder-block halls of my own high school. I watched a number of videos on Alpha’s website breaking down their whole deal (I have no experience with $40,000/year private schools, but is this kind of pitch-deck tone normal?), and it seems that between group exercise, social cooperation activities, business and finance education, a rock wall, coding practice for students as young as six, and a suite of other electives that would be impossible to reproduce anywhere without such a hefty price tag, the school promises students much more autonomy in controlling their own education, drifting wherever their interests lie. I’m reminded of casual anecdotes I used to hear from friends working at Facebook at their Mountainview campus: the vending machines filled with free electronics, the ping-pong tables and bean-bag chairs, the self-directed tasks, the sunlight and open air, as much a far cry from the cubicles in my imagination as Alpha’s classes seem to be from the slideshow algebra lectures that were my torture.

I’m not advertising for Alpha by any means, and after speaking with my cousin —a long-tenured teacher and counselor in the Houston public school system— I have no choice but to be skeptical of Alpha’s curriculum, the bias inherent in their AI systems, what qualifications/standards they hold themselves and their students to, and mostly whether there are things here that would be practical at any kind of scale or without huge funding. But in some ways, the proof is in the sterling test scores Alpha claims their students achieve.

Miller mentions that, “[Mackenzie] Price, [Alpha’s] cofounder, told Fox News in March that Alpha classes were in the ‘top 2 percent’ of test scores in the country,” at least according to education benchmarks laid-out by the Northwest Evaluation Association's Measures of Academic Progress. If that claim is as true as Alpha figures it to be, curriculums and biases and qualifications seem a bit moot, don’t they? Outcomes are what we’re after, and if high outcomes are achieved concurrently with student enjoyment —and Alpha’s website is chock-full of glowing student and parent testimonials— there might really be a new paradigm at play here.

In short, I didn’t like school. At all. I was a clock-watcher, desperate to distract myself from another stuffy or overbearing lecture about a subject I could not give a shit about. Years spent learning about the crops planted in colonial Virginia, how to execute logarithm functions on my calculator, etc. I was, however, also quite good at school, and my attention wasn’t necessary to get fairly-good grades, which were, as I understood it, the only reason we were there in the first place. I also completed a semester of graduate schooling at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Education, which taught me in large part about how the self-fulfilling prophecy of a child’s early academic successes or struggles is massively predictive of how they’ll fare later in the system; in other words, if a student is placed in remedial classes in kindergarten or first grade (which often occurs for reasons entirely separate from that student’s own intelligence; sociocultural or economic or developmental), they’re basically marked for life, and will struggle mightily to surpass their own lowered expectations, needing to work twice as hard just to bob back above the baseline. Point is, as both experiencer and analyst, I know a little bit about what I’m talking about here.

When I look at how Alpha has redesigned the entire daily flow of K-12 education, it really does excite me. We collectively and culturally seemed to understand during the pandemic that the primary reason we want kids in schools is for reasons of social development. Everything else —schedules, grading, gym class, recess, building design, hall passes, etc.— is, as far as I’m concerned, open for experimentation. It really is absurd, when you think about it, that we separate kids into entirely different sections of the school based on their levels of achievement: honor’s students in this hallway, dipshits in that one. Self-guided learning and autonomy is always going to be a better way to enliven kids at school, especially given —at least in the U.S.— the growing teacher-to-student ratio, which is especially terrible in urvan schools, where I’ve heard stories of one-teacher classrooms with upwards of 35 pupils; personal attention to a child’s education is necessarily rarer and rarer. So yes, sure, let’s get rid of that! Let’s get a sophisticated AI track to progress, recognize what programs and questions and flows work specifically best for each student, and allow two kids sitting next to one another learn at completely different levels and speeds, because why not? Alpha’s website talks about an especially precocious second-grader who surpassed a fifth-grade understanding of math. Such systems let every student learn at whatever rate they like without guardrails, while still finding a practical reason to keep them socially connected to children their own age.

Alpha’s structure also seems to address the question of-bemoaned by 20-somethings around the world: “Why couldn’t I learn how to do this in school?” Alpha’s website talks about public speaking classes and financial literacy workshops, skills that I think we can all agree are far far far more important for a child’s later-in-life success than the intricacies of the Spanish-American War or the rate of velocity for an object falling in a gravity-less environment. You can only teach these things if you aren’t filling kids’ days and exhausting their energy with lengthy lectures. Maybe doing so isn’t just preferable, maybe it’s necessary.

There are so many questions with Alpha, of course. What kind of bias is inherent in these systems? Can we scale something like this to public schools or those with lesser resources? Is the academic achievement here any more robust than students at other wicked expensive private schools with smaller student bodies? I don’t know if we can even really determine the true efficacy of these systems without a longitudinal study, and the technology simply has not been around long enough for that to be possible.

But this is the dream of AI adoption, right? Use Ai to address otherwise intractable problems, make everything way more efficient, and thus allow more time for personal development. It’s the same basic thrust as incorporating AI in the workplace for busy-work so that employees have more free time on their hands to iterate and innovate and brainstorm. Inarguably, we need experimentation like this, and we need to not look upon a thing that’s new with automatic skepticism, especially because the system that it seeks to replace is already —I think we can all agree, at least in the U.S.— fundamentally broken, maybe even pointless, potentially futile?

Maybe Alpha is a big scam, maybe it’s nonsense, maybe it’s all overblown, but the fact is they seem to be experimenting with the very core model of American education. And so many have been crying for so long to see that done. If anything, such a valiant effort deserves our attention. If it all turns out to be a flash-in-the-pan, their new ideas deserve reconfiguration and redeployment elsewhere. There’s simply too much here that feels correct.

I’m going to follow Alpha for a while and probably report back in the future. They’re opening a branch in New York City in the Fall, and I think I’d like to do some reporting on it, so just stay tuned. But I’m intrigued. And I have to think that if you’re a believer in AI in any real way, you’re as intrigued as I am.

The Finance Side

(And now, for his last trick, the crypto art writer will attempt to connect mining rigs to the now-defunct, late-20th century, high-speed airplane, the Concorde.)

Kudos to Niamh Rowe, writing for The Guardian, about, “How Trump’s love for crypto threatens US residents’ peace: ‘I just want quiet,” an examination of the very simple, very understandable, very human costs to the spread of cryptocurrency mining operations. As Rowe writes in the article, “Underwritten by bigger budgets, AI data centers are built on large plots of remote land. Miners, on the other hand, flock to the cheapest power and easy grid access, which often means old factory towns.” Maybe you ca picture these towns, stark with poverty (i.e. an inability to leave) and sometimes with drug-use, omnipresent smokestacks, rows of clumped and dilapidated houses with thin walls. In practice, this means that:

“The hum [of large-scale cryptocurrency mining operations] has since become the soundtrack to life for hundreds…It echoes across agricultural land and forests, chasing away deer. It seeps into walls, vibrating bedrooms and dinner tables. [One interviewee] imagines it is what standing on the edge of Niagara Falls might sound like. [Another interviewee] says it’s like a jet engine is forever stationed nearby.”

There have been all kinds of arguments about the environmental impacts of crypto mining on a large-scale climate change level. Obviously, arguments and analyses on the subject are still ongoing. But this is the first time I’ve read about how the local human populations are affected. The noise. The smell. “With at least 137 commercial-level facilities across the country, clustered mostly in Texas, the sector uses up to 2.3% of the nation’s grid, according to estimates by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), a government agency that gathers and disseminates statistics on energy use,” Rowe writes, so assumedly thousands and thousands of people are affected by nearness to mining, and only more in the future as deregulation on mining continues. And the noise is apparently non-negotiable:

“Row after row of industrial-grade fans are typically used to prevent mining computers, known as application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, from overheating, which can create an enormous din. Crypto mining often also consists of rows of smaller mobile containers in the open air, in contrast to the US’s other major construction boom of tech infrastructure: artificial intelligence (AI) data centers, which are housed in closed structures.”

This weirdly connects to my lifelong fascination with the Concorde, a supersonic passenger aircraft that flew from 1969 to 2003, mostly catering to high-class clientele, and which could make the journey from New York to London (its only approved route, for reasons that will be clear in a moment) in under three hours, nearly half the time it takes today. There were only ever 20 Concordes made. Only two even exist as relics today.

Concorde against a clear blue sky, seen from below. Its wheels are lowered.

The problem with the Concorde —as is the problem with all supersonic aircraft— is that when they break the sound barrier, they create a sonic-boom, a massive sound explosion that radiates outward for almost a mile in every direction, essentially a bubble of ear-piercing and dangerous sound that travels as the aircraft travels. That’s why the Concorde could only fly from NYC to London, over the Atlantic ocean. It was was taken out of the sky for numerous reasons, but the inefficacy of its flying, its inability to fly over any peopled areas, was a chief concern. The human cost was too much, and it made the financial cost untenable. There was quite literally nowhere else for the Concorde to go.

And yet there seems to be no real attempts to cull the noise from mining operations, which drones on at all hours of the day, day after day, like some sound effect in the mind of a David Lynch protagonist. “The sound has unleashed a number of health issues, plaintiffs [suing for relief] say, including tinnitus, vertigo, hearing loss and heart arrhythmia, on top of insomnia and anxiety.” And yet, crypto mining law seems mostly concerned with expanding such operations, alien or ignorant to the human effects.

It’s hard to remain willfully ignorant of the drawbacks to rampant investment in crypto, especially when they’re so damaging and near and, honestly, kind of stupid. Really, we can’t fix this problem? Too noise, really, that’s our immovable object? Really, we’re going to let miners continue “building next to aging power stations – they call such projects co-locations – and striking deals with energy companies to bring underused plants back to life”? I can’t imagine Satoshi’s dream for Bitcoin included an army of corporatized miners disrupting and destroying the private lives of any poor people unlucky enough to live near an unprofitable power plant.

And remember, people don’t like the crypto industry to begin with. For many, crypto is experiential, like how I dislike fracking even though I have no idea what fracking is really about, it just smells bad and is loud and creates slag where once was forest. I’m not saying the noise problem should be enough to forgo crypto mining altogether, but maybe we can all be a bit more understanding when broad swaths of the public, aware of stories like this, call into question the industry at our art movement’s core. Or when they despise it outright.