M○C△ WEEKLY Round-UP 6/29

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In This Week’s Round-Up:

• The Same Old NFTNYC, but in a Very Different World

• The First Momentous AI Legal Ruling is an LLM Supercharger. The Second Kills it Dead. The fuck do we do now?

• Hallelujah, You Can Use Crypto as Collateral for a Mortgage Now

Okay, Let’s Get On With It

The Crypto Art Side

Some pictures from the Creeps & Weirdos Wedding, hosted by DADA during NFTNYC 2022.

I don’t know any other way to write this section of today’s newsletter but as a personal account, so that’s what I’m going to do, and it will be mostly anecdotal, and maybe even divorced from reality, and I accept and welcome all squabbles due to my ignorance/inattention/nonparticipation/self-pity/etc. But, please, take it as a marker of trust that I’m doing it this way in the first place.

I, as some of you may know, found and involved myself into crypto art in October of 2021, months after the 69mm Beeple sale, after the PFP/NFT hype craze was already in full swing, long long after anything that could have been conceivably called a “Golden Age of Crypto Art” had ended. As such, I only ever heard stories of that great primordial era of our movement. To hear my colleagues talk about early crypto art, it was a place of great experimentation and risk-taking and randomness and community. There was something objectively familial about the crypto art world. There was a sense that those who put great effort into this movement, by way of collecting or connecting or creating, were rewarded for that effort, perhaps not financially, but with the respect and admiration of those around them.

But by the time I came to crypto art, most of that was going away, if it were not already gone, replaced by hyper-financialization, influencer politics, a calcification of both style and participation. The Golden Age had ended, and something new (better or worse, not for me to say) had begun.

Shortly after it concluded, I wrote an orgiastically positive retrospective on the first NFTNYC I attended, the week of June 21st, 2022. I remember so much about that week. Seeing Colborn speak on a panel at NeueHouse. Meeting Anne Spalter, at that point already one of my idols. I remember attending the Creeps & Weirdos hosted by DADA, and meeting face-to-face these people —Judy Mam, ROBNESS, Martin Lukas Ostachowski, Artnome, SamJ— who to that point existed for me as mythical figures. I remember stumbling around the streets of Manhattan with Okytomo and Frenetik Void and LuluCollages and Julian Brangold and the other members of CryptoArg. I stepped for those few beautiful days through a portal into crypto art’s so tight-knit past. More than that, I was invited into it. For my work, for my association with MOCA, for whatever reason, the curtain was pulled back to show me a bright and extended glimpse of THAT THING which even today is spoken about with such reverence: the beauty of crypto art.

And that carried through the following NFTNYC and the one thereafter. It was a time I always so looked forward to. Artists flooded into town, I took too many cabs up and downtown to see their work. Hugging my dear MOCA colleagues who live in faraway places. And seeing all this art, and talking with the creative souls who made it (the MakingIt24/7 exhibition from 2023 looms large in my mind), and drifting from place to place within a gallery of faces that not only were familiar, they were familial by default. Friends, friends of friends, admirers of friends, a grand extended network sustained on the transitive property of “I love this person, and this person loves you, so I love you too.” This kind of sentiment remained consistent throughout some pretty deep, dark, depressing, dreary bear markets. The core of crypto art lived on, and it craved knowing itself better.

For days, I’ve been trying to figure out what felt different this year. Maybe it was the lack of fanfare on Twitter. I didn’t even know NFTNYC was happening this week until Rizzle —in a Discord chat I am only nominally a member of— mentioned an event he was attending. Now, there are many possible explanations for my ignorance. That artists aren’t doing financially well enough to afford the expensive travel to New York, let alone lodging herein, and so there are fewer nodes communicating about it. That there are legitimate competitors to NFTNYC’s hitherto hegemony over crypto art, like the NFC Summit in Lisbon earlier this month, which drew artists from all over the world and rewarded them for their travel with exhibitions, activations, culture-centered programming, and also, you know, the grandeur of Lisbon. There’s the ever-diminishing size of crypto art. The closing of platforms like Makersplace, Async, and KnownOrigin have made large art-focused events necessarily rarer. The events this year are hosted by businesses and platforms I’ve never heard of: Abstract? Reown? Refraction? Am I losing my mind, or am I just wildly out of the loop?

Anyways, really what I’ve been wondering is this: Is the atmosphere different, or am I?

The thrust of this piece is that I haven’t been present for NFTNYC this week almost at all. I met for coffee with the lovely Judy Mam; I made and then cancelled plans with the lovely Andres del Vecchio. The yearly onslaught of works tacked momentarily onto Times Square billboards seems more nonsensical than ever before. The carnival of insipid slogans plastered on every tweet feel more frustrating than I remember. Maybe it’s that this space has completely calcified around its biggest names —Beeple, CryptoPunks, etc.— and I don’t know any of those folks because I lack influence and wasn’t present early-on-enough, so there’s less incentive than ever for me to venture out into packed rooms to fight for standing room with so many dealmakers and influence-peddlers.

And yet, so many others are here in town. And they drift from place to place in a manic daze of reconnections and jubilee, or so it seems by the way they post about it. The truth, I think, is that I have become more detached from this space than I ever have been, and this is what being detached looks like.

The less time I spend on crypto art Twitter, the healthier my mentality is, but the far less knowledgeable I am about happenings. The fewer groups I participate in, the further I fall from personal relationships. I am but a humble writer, though I too have been deeply affected by the misaligned incentives and shrinking size of crypto art. When the artist Patrick Amadon tweets that “Seeing NYC this week, uncomfortable truth is the digital art space has shrunk significantly,” it makes me feel a bit less like this is a solitary issue of mine, a product of letting friendships wither and un-exerted efforts, and seeing the cavalcade of similar feelings from artists I so love and admire, that makes me feel less alone.

And yet, it’s hard not to feel responsible. Maybe I’m not writing about the right things. Maybe I’m giving spotlight to the right artists. Maybe I’m not working as hard as I can to root myself closer to the core of this movement so that I too can become a fundamental part of it. I’ve been, admittedly, salty for years now that I’ve never been invited to speak on a panel at any of these conferences. Surely I, who have written more pure verbiage than anyone alive on the subject and culture and contents of crypto art, have something to contribute therein. And certainly, part of my own self-distancing from personal investment in crypto art is the lack of perceived reciprocation from the cultural institutions themselves (much of that responsibility is on me, I know, however I am an egotist, so I cannot accept fault too fully). And this makes me angry, and it sparks grievances in me that I have no solutions for.

I don’t own a Punk, so I don’t get invited to Punk brunches. And I don’t know Beeple, so I don’t get to attend the opening of Beeple’s new work. There are so few spots at these tables, and I have never been seen fit to have earned one, and that’s fine, but after all this time, it feels more sensible to stop sniffing around and just sit elsewhere.

I am not writing this to seek solutions. I see and speak to a sufficient number of crypto art peers who feel similarly to know I am not alone. But I am not writing this to absolve myself of blame either. I did not go to the event Rizzle clued me into. I did not bounce around Canal Street from gallery to gallery. I am dogged by a pervasive question of “Why?” To what ends should I —who tends, outside of this white page, to be a wallflower— extend myself out into crypto art’s physical body? My sense is that others are asking themselves the same thing, and with similar intensity, even if certain big names like to equate anybody’s self-reflection or clear-eyed perception or with whining. My own lack of a clear answer has likely led to this self-imposed distance. A protective shield of social effortlessness.

Certainly, I could bounce around from sweaty clubs to crowded galleries, and I could certainly run-in to old friends, make new ones, and feel reinvigorated, for a time at least, about crypto art. And I know there are good answers to the question of “Why?” For the relationships! To feel the love! To glimpse crypto art’s tootsie roll center, despite the layer-after-layer of of sugary, pointless candy-coating so frequently applied. I wish I felt these to be stronger incentives. I want to be swayed by them. I am not whining or complaining or being negativistic or critical.

But NFTNYC —as a stand-in for crypto art’s social schema itself— is enticing me with the same bells and whistles as always. I just don’t, I suppose, hear them in the same way, after all these years. And it helps nobody to deny that.

And yet, I’m excited to see how they sound next year.

The Tech Side

It’s the irony that’s the killer, but this is a difficulty with AI regulation we’re all going to become quite accustomed to: tasking legal institutions to deal with what are, in essence, philosophical conundrums. In the great ongoing debate of whether AI models may be freely-trained on copyrighted material, the tendency to find legal statues and loopholes to make sense of the issue is a fool’s errand to begin with, as we’ll see in a moment. The philosophical question comes down to this:

Is technological progress a goal worth pursuing at all costs; does human advancement supersede whatever pettier structures govern us today?

Two landmark AI-training-data-copyright-law cases were preliminarily decided in the United States this week, albeit with ambiguous —and perhaps even contradictory— outcomes; interpreting the law is artistry, and artistry comes down to perspective above all. Ask two carpenters to build you a chair with the same materials, they will build you two very different chairs. But our feelings on this issue should (in theory) supersede the law. The question —whether it is legally permissible for AI companies to train their models on copyrighted information— should be dealt with primarily on the basis of what we as a society, even more so as a species, believe the future should look like, and whether striding towards that future is more sacred than what we’ve currently enshrined.

But, okay, the facts. Last year, three authors brought a lawsuit against Anthropic AI (who operate the Claude LLM models), who they say “used the contents of millions of digitized copyrighted books to train the large language models behind their chatbot, Claude, including at least two works by each plaintiff. The company also bought some hard copy books and scanned them before ingesting them into its model,” as per Chloe Veltman, writing for NPR. Anthropic downloaded a massive, many-millions-strong database of copyrighted books —most taken illegally from pirating sights— to “amass a central library of 'all the books in the world' to retain ‘forever.’” This week, Senior U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled in favor of Anthropic’s ability to use copyrighted works in their training data, so long as those works are acquired legally in the first place. “‘The training use was a fair use,’ he wrote. ‘The use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative.’” The key point being that, because these works are being fundamentally transformed from their base state, that use is covered under Fair Use Doctrine.

So that happens in one court, and then almost simultaneously, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria, ruling on another case —brought, among others, by comedian Sarah Silverman against Meta— finds that while Meta in one specific instance may continue unabated in using copyrighted training data for their models, as Winston Cho writes for the Hollywood Reporter, this cannot possibly be considered a binding legal precedent. Judge Chhabria includes the following passage in his opinion:

“No matter how transformative LLM training may be, it’s hard to imagine that it can be fair use to use copyrighted books to develop a tool to make billions or trillions of dollars while enabling the creation of a potentially endless stream of competing works that could significantly harm the market for those books.”

It’s perhaps too legalistic for our discussion today, but the ruling in Meta’s favor was rooted less in present law and more in the decision by prosecuting attorneys to leave aside a “potentially winning argument” regarding the ability of LLMs to churn out technically-similar material to their training data:

“It’s easy to imagine that AI-generated books could successfully crowd out lesser-known works or works by up-and-coming authors…While AI-generated books probably wouldn’t have much of an effect on the market for the works of Agatha Christie, they could very well prevent the next Agatha Christie from getting noticed or selling enough books to keep writing.”

I’m no legal scholar, but I’d bet in an appellate court or in a secondary case —given that Chhabria’s ruling was intentionally kept nonbinding elsewhere, those potentially-winning arguments are made.

In both cases, however, much importance is given to legal technicalities, i.e. the extent to how “transformative” an AI’s output is from the material within it. It’s conceivable given these rulings that chatbot LLMs will be forced to limit what can be created within them, so as not to mimic the unlicensed information in their training data. Video-generation models that can’t legally generate videos. Music-generation models that can’t generate anything similar-sounding to its training data. The actual outcome doesn’t matter, it’s the specificities of the law that are most interesting to me, and how particularly every ruling must hew to the exact letter of laws written well before generative AI was a theoretical possibility, anything more than high-concept sci-fi.

The far more pertinent question is whether any of this legal gobbledygook should matter at all. The camp which believe AI to be the most revolutionary technology since the advent of the internet would surely argue that advancement can, in no way shape or form, be hampered by legal statutes; the outcomes and potential benefits are too great. This argument —especially from within crypto art and the surrounding countries— feels pretty easy to reason out. A technology with truly earthshaking ramifications on our species, and we’re going to let entertainment licensing law halt its progress? Plenty of lauded thinkers —Ray Kurzweil, Nikolai Fyodorov, Buckminster Fuller among them (names provided to me by ChatGPT)— have argued that technological advancement should be our prime motivator as a species, and while the ideas of many such technologists border on crackpot ideology, it’s an ideology nonetheless: that the technology of the future will so improve our lives that it’s worth making even substantial sacrifices in the present.

On the other hand, does this really seem like a great idea? Do we want to be giving more and more leeway to massive oligarchical tech companies so they can act with complete impunity? Do we want to sacrifice the hard work of individuals —and not just individuals, creatives, writers, artists, filmmakers— to the literal machine? AI uniquely evokes a future as full of fear as of fulfillment. For every prognostication about Universal Basic Income and a shorter work week and more time to pursue personal passions and medical advancements and poverty diminishment, there are plenty of others about overreaching surveillance and state control, Artificial General Intelligence run amok, war and destruction, environmental damage, etc. etc. I think an equally cogent argument can revolve around the speed with which AI is advancing, seemingly with no regard for its political or cultural surroundings, and how we should probably, yeah be using any resource at our disposal —the intricate language of the law included— to slow its ridiculous progress for just a fucking second so we can catch our breaths.

Whatever you believe, there’s a grand and almost absurd irony in something as banal as entertainment copyright law being the grand gatekeeper, the Scooby-Doo villain sans mask, between our legible present and whatever wild future AI portends.

The Finance Side

In what might be cryptocurrency’s single most notable leap into the mainstream yet, this week, “The head of the federal government agency that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac wants the mortgage giants to consider accepting a homebuyer’s cryptocurrency holdings in their criteria for buying mortgages from banks,” as Alex Veiga writes for the Associated Press.

In a world where individuals can barely use cryptocurrency to pay for anything (Tesla no longer accepts Bitcoin; though things like SolanaPay are attempting to make it much easier to transact in, at least, USDC), “William Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency” apparently wants cryptocurrency to be considered in the general criteria for receiving homebuyer loans. Wild. Whether only certain cryptocurrencies will be accepted in this regard (one has to think that USDC will be seen by mortgage lenders as more valuable than, say, $LEGFISH [sorry, LEGFISH whales]) is unclear, but what matters is that collateral put-up for mortgages may no longer need to be converted into fiat before being considered by lenders. A loss for fiat is almost always a win for crypto, so that’s one thing. And I think questions of added volatility in homebuying should be asked, because that’s certainly dangerous. But more pertinent than that is the question of, ultimately, who is this for?

While NBCNews reports that only some 17% of American adults own crypto, there is no clear picture regarding on the median monetary value of that crypto; Google AI says ~$650, but I can’t verify that figure, so take it with a grain of salt. While I continue to be concerned at the way important-sounding crypto policies prove beneficial for an exceedingly small part of the population, there’s no denying that this is another step towards crypto legitimacy as a more widely-accepted-and-held asset class. I just wonder if any of these policies are having a tangible effect on that acceptance.

The same NBCNews article notes that “new survey data from the U.S. Federal Reserve found that 7% of U.S. adults have used crypto in the past 12 months as of 2024, down from 12% in 2021,” and though those numbers haven’t been updated since Trump’s pro-crypto stance has started bearing fruit, I’m dubious as to whether measures like this FannieMay-mortgage decision —which doesn’t address crypto’s risks as much as it takes away the frustrating step of selling crypto for cash— will be a compelling addition to the pro-crypto narrative for skeptics and non-believers.

Still, we should consider this fairly exciting news. Being able to put crypto down as collateral for a mortgage is, of course, a risky enterprise, but for true crypto believers, it’s a best of two worlds: the stability of home equity combined with continued exposure to the crypto market, not having to choose between those things. More freedom of transaction for crypto users feels like a positive step towards more financial liberation for at least our little crypto gaggle. And we’ll certainly take whatever we can get.

DeCC0 of the Week

Art DeCC0 #5757, in collection of our very own Colborn Bell. DNA: AI, Pudgy Penguin, Mór Than, Shortcut. Background: Medieval. We love you Shortcut.

Art in the Wild

“Taming the Untamed” (2025), by Makam. Edition of 5 on Tezos.

Dev Corner

• Going back and forth with the Eliza plugin for VeniceAI, giving feedback to the maintainer, but its not working yet. There is almost no documentation. We'll get there.

• Digging a lot into Hyperfy, brainstorming strategies for a ROOMs curation interface.

• Ran the first large scale sdk-based file import from our own backend into The Library, which successfully finished processing yesterday (including 500 Fakewhale.xyz files) without a single error. More bug-testing and refinement on that coming soon.

Quote of the Week

“To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”

-Henry David Thoreau

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