Three. BIG. Things. 3/22
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This Week’s Three BIG Things:
What Makes Them “Crypto’s True Believers” but Not Us?
When a Famous Actor is Recreated with AI, Who are we Really Watching?
Irish Zionism Forces the AI Backlash to Consider Itself
Okay, Let’s Get On With It
1. Is Vanity Fair’s Crypto Article Laughing at Us or With Us?
Come on, you’ve seen this picture by now. The cover photo (which I saw someone quite insightfully call “a dim lit photoshoot depicted as a circus act”) of Clara Molot’s Wednesday article for Vanity Fair, “Crypto’s True Believers Demand to Be Taken Seriously.” The article itself is a whirlwind tour through the last two decades or so of crypto history, touching even on Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper, the social context it was borne into. But Molot’s eye lingers most lengthily on the strange, strange today, this uncertain and unusual point in crypto’s life-cycle, post-boom and now degraded, its former ringleaders now little more than showmen in red suits jumping through hoops of fire in an empty tent. She identifies and gathers together sever such ringleaders/showmen, using their collective quotes and insights and stories to describe a world where “crypto’s permeation of the [mainstream political and economic] establishment is either a betrayal of everything it was supposed to be, or proof that the experiment worked.” These are Bitcoin scions, Cathie Wood and Meltem Demirors. OpenSea founder Devin Finzer. Ethereum maxis, Danny Ryan (the barefoot one above, who fancies himself a John Lennon type) and Michael Novogratz (the bald one, who fancies himself a Bond villain henchman), Olaf Carlson-Wee, the first Coinbase employee, and Yu-Chi Lyra Kuo, who is never described in more authorial detail than as Finzer’s wife. Molot follows this gaggle of “crypto’s true believers” along the tightrope between belief and delusion, regarding both the ecosystem at large and their own places within it.
The quotes she pulls out of them often reflect a stunning disconnect with what the ecosystem is like on the ground floor.
Molot quotes Meltem Demirors —who I know from her Twitter presence but also founded Crucible Capital— as saying “‘Technology without belief…technology without spirituality, is nothing…Really…what we were building was a religious movement.’” A not unfamiliar line of thinking in 2020 and 2021, when crypto’s neuvo-riche were posturing themselves on Twitter as God Kings of Investment. Fitting, then that the anecdotes relayed later about-and-by Demirors read like the accounts of a wannabe Caligula:
“‘I went to La Guérite [a very hyped and lavish restaurant/bar] for like three days straight,’ says Demirors of last year’s Ethereum conference in Cannes. ‘I was drunk and army-crawling on the table.’”
“‘I went on Net-a-Porter and bought myself a pair of red Giuseppe Zanotti heels and had them same-day delivered to the conference.’”
“She [Demirors] is layered in diamond crosses and wearing a black sweatsuit with her firm’s slogan—’Believe in Something’—bedazzled across the ass.”
Such anecdotes —about money, luxury, high society, privilege, and excess— abound throughout the article, and I’ll mention many of them along the way here, and none should be too surprising given what we know about a certain sect of crypto’s values, but nevertheless, seeing such riotous celebration of wealth on display was painful in the exact same way as listening to your uncle denigrate immigrants during Thanksgiving dinner. You’re repulsed by the sentiment, but more than that you’re repulsed because it’s coming from inside your house, you and this attitude both emerging from the same experiential and ideological cauldron. You are a part of the idea, however horrifying and ridiculous it is.
Quite clearly, Vanity Fair’s article is an attack. Look again at the image above. I’ve seen it compared to The Hunger Games. There are dozens of mentions in the article about the interviewees’ painstaking outfit choices, including “Ryan, meanwhile, brought his only two pairs of pants. His favorite has a hole in the crotch. He wears them anyway,” and “Novogratz deliberates between a bedazzled black suit and [a] Valentino.” There is such an absurd display of wealth included in outerwear that it becomes parodic, like this Silicon-Valley-reminiscent description of Danny Ryan wearing “a thin black T-shirt and jean jacket on a single-digit-degree New York day and a plastic yellow nose ring he claims helps him breathe.” The parody is the point. Assumedly, the reason Molot speaks at such length about cryptocurrency’s original values is because they stand in such stark opposition to how it’s “true believers” posture themselves today. Mentions abound about parties on private yachts, drunken benders at nightclubs, and haute couture flown in from Europe. Almost everyone here is denoted as founder of some sort: of Opensea, of Etherealize, of various hedge funds. The term is well-loved for its redoubtable impression. And for its communication of wealth. Did you know that all these people are quite rich and powerful? They are trying their absolute damndest to make sure you do now.
There’s a lengthy aside from earlier in the article about Bitcoin’s founding ethos, and I want to show it to you in its entirety. Then, we’ll look back at the article’s cover photo again, this time blown-up a bit bigger. I’ll tell you why momentarily. Molot writes:
“The [Bitcoin] movement took hold in the fringes of society among a ragtag group of misfits disillusioned with a postrecession world and in search of both social and political change. Its early believers were mostly young, mostly male, and hyper-online. They were cypherpunks on message boards, creating their own echo chamber and convinced that cryptography could do what regulators never would: redistribute power. ‘It was like the rebels in Star Wars,’ says Novogratz, who was wearing his new red Valentino suit at the photo shoot, and describing a movement that saw itself as small, scrappy, but morally certain.”
Put simply, I don’t recognize these people. Not in the sense that I’ve never heard of half of them, and but because they seem completely alien to the crypto landscape as it exists today. They are ghosts. They are downright translucent.
Five years ago, when PFP founders paraded around in Rolex’s and Lamborghinis, there was a kind of sense to the peacocking. The industry was bejeweled, and it was rich, and the entire ecosystem ran on sentiment, so appearing wealthy was akin to being wealthy. Living luxuriously was a confirmation of expectation, and creating cults of personality around oneself was proven good business. We know that somewhere in 2023 or 2024, when the crypto-bro sentiment began to tank, those same people, ever narrative-driven and sensitive to market conditions, pivoted away from pomp. They started cosplaying builders, writing faux-thoughtful threads about decentralization, began espousing AI, and traded their Valentino suits for black turtlenecks a la Steve Jobs. That’s what I’ve grown accustomed to.
I’m unsettled by less by the article —which is very good— than by its photoshoot because it shows seven very powerful, very rich, very well-connected and successful people showing zero recognition of what’s valued in crypto today. The cults of personalities have all but died. Molot notes that Cathie Wood (founder of the hedge fund Ark Invest), “has been crowned the best stock picker in the market—in 2020—and the worst, in 2022.” Things change fast in fashion, faster in economics, at warp speed in crypto. These are all people who have been left behind by our sliver of society, still wearing silk gowns and eating cake even after the Bastille was stormed. And yet they hold themselves up as monarchs.
They look ridiculous. They act ridiculous. Their anecdotes about luxury living come across as cloying and infuriating. Party boys far too old to be acting like this (at one point, Novogratz “proceeds to describe a Saturday night that climaxed with a 4 a.m. trip to the Burning Man–inspired New York nightclub Gospël, which he hopes his 30-year-old daughter and her new husband, who live nearby, did not witness.”), whose espoused beliefs in crypto’s central tenets have been so clearly co-opted and corrupted by every lever of society around it, that to consider these tools still decentralized or financially freeing is to see either deaf or ignorant.
And yet, all while reading the article, and especially in its aftermath, I find myself wondering, “Am I ridiculous too?”
Which is to say, I struggle to know how much you and I are implicated in this article. On a certain level —as I sit writing this in my buddy’s two-bedroom apartment wearing one of my six Boston Celtics t-shirts and a pair of very warm sweatpants whose $50 price tag gave my heartburn— I have nothing in common with these people. I’ve never been on a yacht (wouldn’t say no to an invite, though). I don’t stay out until 4 a.m. at New York clubs (would prefer self-immolation). I’ve never boasted a net worth above (admittedly high-ish) five-figures. I think putting a sport coat over a t-shirt with jeans is fashionable (is it?). I needed to Google who Valentino was (an Italian man). Yet their delusions are reflected just the same both around me and inside me. I blindly believe in crypto art’s moral future, ignorant to the facts I’ve seen play out year over year. I believe that NFTs might be worth something again. That people who hate AI for moral and political reasons will finally come around. I don’t know how much of these delusions are tech specific vs. crypto specific, but I can’t shake the feeling, as I read Molot’s article for the fourth time, that these people are no different than me, it’s just they got into crypto earlier, invested better, figured out how to purchase a Birkin Bag.
The natural response to Vanity Fair’s piece is distancing. I keep seeing it. People upset that crypto is evangelized by women wearing leopard print dresses and men who refuse to wear shoes. They are not like us. They are an old guard, a dying breed. Let them be ridiculed, we say, so that maybe they’ll leave this place, hide underground, quit poisoning our well with their terrible desperation for such a passé kind of attention. It was my initial reaction too. And true, these people are corrupt and terrible in ways I am not, you are not, even the highest-achieving crypto artists have sense enough to keep from outwardly being. Maybe it is something ultra-wealth demands, whispering to its ringbearers at night like the Green Goblin mask (You must wear fingerless gloves!, the money snarls). Maybe old habits just die hard.
But I can’t extricate myself from all this, no matter how I contort logic. All through the article, Demirors and Novogratz and their peers mention crypto’s founding principles, exalting them like parshot. But what they hold even more sacred than Nakamoto’s vision is their own. That they were early. That they recognized something big bubbling.
There is a section of the article featuring interviews with two people who did not participate in the photoshoot, Erik Voorhees and Jordan Fish. The former is among Bitcoin’s largest proponents, as well as founder of VeniceAI. The latter I know only by his online moniker, Cobie. Both are quoted only twice. Voorhees establishes an ideological difference between crypto’s principled believers and “‘the guys driving around in Lambos slinging meme coins…[who] range from outright scammers to the slightly grifty to honest fools who don’t know any better.’” Meanwhile Cobie earnestly admits that “‘Being a cryptobro was almost cool in 2019. Now it’s very much not cool.’” The tacit admission by both men is that they are not among the criticized classes. Cobie is no cryptobro, reads his subtext. Voorheez is neither outright scammer nor honest fool. With clearer eyes, they claim themselves innocent. Just as we do. And yet, both are in the article. We are too.
I don’t mean to suggest these two men are ideologically or aesthetically linked to the seven other interviewees. They ceded themselves to the background, lightly quoted and unpictured. They ceded control of this narrative to velvet lapels and “an Armani gown that isn’t even couture.” But they ceded it. In the same way, they and their clear-eyed class were neither loud enough nor emphatic enough to rein in the blowhards and belly dancers with discussions of values, with technical innovations, or with sentiment. Nor were we. We all had a hand in making these people our envoys. Not consciously, of course. But we invested in their protocols. We followed them on Twitter. We took their investment advice. We paid for their couture. They sought the attention that quieter folks like Voorhees and Cobie shirked, and we were all so happy to bestow it. What these people are, how they dress, their juvenile actions and pompous demeanors, they are representations of crypto’s id from a time when such frivolousness was dutifully rewarded. But “some of the most committed believers in decentralization are now in closed-door Oval Office meetings,” Molot writes. The levers of power surrounding crypto have crystallized these people as central to its operations. That Finzer can straight-faced claim in this article that “[He and his wife, Yu-Chi Lyra Kuo are] relaunching OpenSea as something that they claim is even more ambitious,” on the same day their company delays its long-awaited token launch once again, only shows that bluster is still rewarded. “‘We tell normal people [Opensea 2.0] is an expansion,’ [Kuo] says, ‘but it’s the world.’” She says this about a company universally reviled by nearly all the people who have ever used it. And yet, a deification of narrative is something sticky from all the way back crypto culture’s adolescence. It still confers power and legitimacy to its practitioners. In this case, free advertising by way of Vanity Fair.
We taught them to do that. We agreed to hand them crypto’s keys (no pun intended). The more we distance ourselves from people like Ryan and Finzer and Demirors, the more we deny our own responsibility in their myth creation. We wanted to be rich like them, so we worshipped them as ikons. Now they’re still rich, and we’re much worse off, and though their words come across as cloying and ridiculous, they still embody the ideals we ourselves espoused only a few years ago. They haven’t had to confront these ideals the way we have. It was ruin that forced us into reflection.
Alas, there is no second-chance to make this movement. The Great DAO in the Clouds hath spoken. Crypto is not a democracy, we don’t get to vote out our monarchs. The truth is, every twinge of embarrassment I feel when reading this article is deserved. I am implicated. This is my world. That I was powerless to watch it grow this way, that I didn’t explicitly follow these people, that I hid myself behind gilded cloaks of art and culture, none of it means much in the grander scheme. These are my people, as I am theirs. We must not sidestep the ridicule. It, they all, these are the consequences of our hubris.
We are not in on the joke.
2. The Val Kilmer Paradox: Who Are we Watching When We’re Watching Nobody at All?
Back in August of last year, I discussed a worrying situation where Jim Acosta, the former CNN Chief White House Correspondent, interviewed the AI re-creation of Joaquin Oliver, a 17-year-old who was killed in the 2018 mass shooting of a high school in Parkland, Florida. Unlike many other commentators, I was less concerned with the ethics of Acosta’s interview than the effects Joaquin Oliver’s AI was having on those closest to him, specifically his mother.
Quoting Ethanan Shanfield’s reporting for Variety:
“[Joaquin’s father] Manuel said they created the AI, in part, so that he and his wife Patricia could hear their son’s voice again. ‘Patricia will spend hours asking questions,’ he said. ‘Like any other mother, she loves to hear Joaquin saying, ‘I love you, Mommy.’’”
A question I never fully reckoned with back then was one of identity. Who was Patricia Oliver really conversing with when she spoke to an AI version of her son? In some ways, trained on Oliver’s voice and thoughts and pattern of speech, it was a recreation of Oliver himself. In other ways, it was just data arranged in a certain pattern, the pattern recognized by Patricia Oliver and imbued by her with the soul of her son. The AI entity has its identity confirmed via its perceiver’s recognition. Just the same as someone falling in love with a chatbot, their feelings made real by the fact that they’re being felt. But what about a situation where we have no relationship with an AI re-creation? What if we’ve only ever known someone as data points on a screen?
Which brings us to this week, when Angela Yang reported for NBCNews that “An AI-generated version of the late [actor] Val Kilmer is starring in a new movie. The filmmakers behind ‘As Deep as the Grave’ said they obtained permission from the late actor’s estate to use his likeness.” On its face, this situation skirts some of the dicier issues that AI has forced Hollywood to confront. The estate of Val Kilmer —known for roles in Top Gun (1986), The Doors (1991), and Batman Forever (1995)— gave express permission for “First Line Films, the New Mexico based production company behind the project, [and] director Coerte Voorhees” to use his likeness to complete the film via AI. Kilmer had been cast in the movie years prior, feeling an apparently powerful kinship with both the story (about “the first female archaeologist in North America”) and the Native American heritage of his character, which Kilmer shared. A cancer diagnosis, which would ultimately take his life, forced him out of the role, delaying the project’s production until recently.
Yang contextualizes the Kilmer news within a Hollywood infrastructure struggling with complex AI sentiments. She cites Governor Gavin Newsom’s signing of laws to "protect digital likenesses as part of performers’ posthumous right of publicity, a legal right that protects people’s identities from unauthorized commercial use,” as well as the industry’s discomfort with Tilly Norwood, a completely AI “actress” first publicized last year. But the Kilmer situation is different. It seems to bypass ethical gray areas, has complete approval from all parties, and is the kind of low-budget indie project that AI should theoretically benefit (not being used to take human jobs from humans so as to enrich a massive corporation). Also, Kilmer’s likeness and input were apparently vital to the film. The article quotes Kilmer’s daughter, Mercedes, as saying, “‘[My father’s] spirit is something that we are all honoring within this specific film, of which he was an integral part.’”
So let’s move away from the experience of making the movie to the experience of watching it. We —you and I— are about to sit down in a theater to watch As Deep as the Grave, and boy are we excited. The floors are sticky with old spilled soda. We argued about that buttery topping, me arguing that the added flavor isn’t worth the wet fingers. But I digress. The lights lower, the projector runs, and Val Kilmer’s character, Father Fintan, appears on on the screen. It looks like Val Kilmer. It sounds like him. But it’s not him exactly is it? We know it’s not Val Kilmer, because Val Kilmer died before filming, yet we’ve only ever seen Val Kilmer as an impression of pixels on a screen before us. So is there a difference? Is there not? Lacking a personal connection to the man Kilmer was, is his AI likeness any different than that when he was alive, at least to us, as distant from him as before?
On the one hand, yes, of course there’s a difference. The actor is not Val Kilmer, it is a fabulously complex series of binary calculations resulting in a facsimile. On the other hand, whenever we’ve seen Val Kilmer, it’s been as reflections of light captured digitally or on film stock, transmuted into code and deployed on screens big and small before us. Data turned into data turned into data. And data is data is data. Only our preexisting relationship with Kilmer, our awareness of his former personhood, sets his new AI-ness apart from what came before. We’re individually responsible for how real Kilmer’s AI double feels, established by our awareness (or lack thereof) of who he was before his death, whether or not we are aware of how he was remade, as well as the efficacy of the AI version. We are not watching, for certain, an AI re-creation or a real-life performance by Kilmer, it’s really entirely up to our own preconceived notions and levels of information. If the performance would be identical either way, then what’s really the difference? This is not Patricia Oliver unable to hug a son who once lived in space around her, his being reduced to a computerized likeness. Val Kilmer never fully existed anyways, to us always so far away from him. Nothing has changed. Kilmer was never more than Kilmer, and he’s no less than Kilmer now.
3. The Anti-AI Crowd Faces a Reckoning, and Irish Zionism is the Catalyst
I’m not sure this qualifies as “news,” per se, but it’s the first time I’ve seen the unabashed, hyper-online, militantly anti-AI crowd actually seem at odds with itself. And that’s worthy of a moment’s recognition.
For the most part, the moralistic arguments against AI fit neatly into worldviews in which tech titans are evil, autonomous warriors are bad, mass surveillance is dystopian, we shouldn’t burn the rainforest for the sake of building datacenters, human’s having jobs is good, all things I agree with. But force-fitting these arguments into the day-to-days of the proletariat is how they often fall part. Alas, it is via the absurdist, nearly-seven-minute video posted on Monday by the comedian, Conner O’Malley, that a whole host of anti-AI revolutionaries are staring at themselves in the mirror.
O’Malley’s comedy isn’t for everyone, so if you can’t sit through the video, but I understand. Jump around it, even, and you’ll see many places —animated figures, cutaways, filters— that use an obvious and comical kind of generative AI in their production process. For many anti-AI folks, that’s already a black mark, worthy of being written off. A few years ago, the indie horror film, Late Night with the Devil, was found to have used generative AI for like six collective seconds of runtime in the form of 70’s style commercial graphics: We’ll be right back after these messages, that kind of thing. And the filmmakers got harangued. And in the same vein, some prepared at once to burn O’Malley alive upon the altar of progressive, Twitter-specific public opinion.
Naturally, a war of escalating opinions began in that tweet’s comments. But as time went on, the attitudes started to soften. Became more complex. O’Malley’s use of AI seemed more of a tragic situation, nothing so evil as Palantir, maybe even launched with the best of intentions, though ultimately his dark path would be no different than anyone else’s, as per Tweets like these:
You can see the justification. You can sense the melancholy. O’Malley had indeed used generative AI tools in the past, releasing an entire (brilliant) comedy special, Stand-Up Solutions, about an AI comedian. The problem, apparently, is less in the use of AI, and more in the casualness of the use. “There’s more of it in this video than in others.” And the more generative AI used, the worse the product must be. At some point, one inevitably runs off the cliff.
But that’s really all set-dressing, because what happened from there —and this is I think what’s most important to remember about any kind of no-exceptions, bar-none, foundationless belief system— is the kind of illogical moralistic equivocation that occurs during a meltdown. I want to stress that I’m not making fun of these people (maybe a little), because I do respect moralization. Stick to your guns, man! And I also at times feel the anti-AI pull. I too have had a tendency towards militarism. But when we see these anti-AI opinions laid out before us, it feels very clear that the arguments themselves are more the point than what’s being argued over.
Take for example the below opinion:
So based on this idea, AI is a useful resource only if one lacks the resources to use human labor, at which point the AI is exploitative. I actually kind of like this line of thinking because it at least allows for some kind of nuance, but then of course we have to argue about what it means to have “resources,” and who gets to be the judge of that. If Conner O’Malley is “a solo practioner bringing a vision to life without attempting to pass it off as authentic art,” then that’s okay. Those are many hoops to jumped through, but at least there are considerations allowed, a step in the right direction. Thus, low-budget comedians who use AI only for ironic purposes, they’re in the clea. But anyone with more resources or less comedic undertones would be expected to “hire a full art team.” I take personal issue with the “pass it off as authentic art” part because it both devalues O’Malley’s art and also takes a rather sophomoric approach to what “authentic art” means (I imagine “look at me, I’m so smart, I’m such a great artist”-esque contemporary art), but let’s not quibble any more than necessary.
Then there’s this one:
Herein, AI is only okay to use in production if the finished project is high-quality enough, and obviously, the only one capable of judging whether it meets that quality threshold is this person on Twitter. I would argue that it’s dangerous to culturally forgive the use of a technology only if the product is deemed worthy because that A) relies on unpredictable cultural attitudes, and B) chills experimentation, though I can probably invent an alphabet’s worth of rebuttals. I’m not sure that anyone can actually stand-by such a juvenile point, so we can just use it as a data point and move on.
This is my favorite, however, and I will leave it entirely unelaborated:
When I was a bit younger and the Me Too Movement was at its zenith, I thought a lot about Woody Allen. Still do. Because I loved his movies, they were extremely meaningful to me as a Jew and writer making sense of the world. Still are. But Woody Allen, for reasons I will not go into, was a primary cultural assassination within the movement, and I, being one of its sycophants, was happy to lend what bullets I could. But after a lot of soul-searching, “Kill the man, preserve his art” was the conclusion I ended up at. The common knowledge at the time was, “Don’t watch Woody Allen movies,” but I always wondered, why? Because his movies meant a lot to me, and so by not watching them anymore, after Allen had already achieved cultural and economic wealth from their release, the only one losing something in the transaction was me. The answer I usually got was about further enriching the artist: every watch, every purchase, every click added money to the bank account of a bad actor. But if you follow that line of thinking to its conclusion as I did, you discovered this odd, wobbly place where, well, it’s not moral to buy a Woody Allen movie, or even stream it, certainly not to share it online or watch any clips on Youtube, but if you, say, owned the DVD of Manhattan or Annie Hall or Bananas or Midnight in Paris, as I may or may not have, and in watching the film contained on those DVDs partook of their art, found a VHS in your attic and popped it into the ol’ Boob Tube in a way which did not transfer any value to the artist responsible, then, I suppose, it is okay. And when an argument can be undone by such absurdist methods, it means the argument is fairly faulty on its face.
Point being, when it comes to hardline moralistic arguments like the ones the anti-AI crowd, they are often too brittle and unbending to keep from breaking apart under pressure.
I’m not saying, of course, that all arguments used to vilify AI are inherently null and void. I’m saying that in the public discourse, these attitudes haven’t matured into actual worldviews. They are often emotionally driven or based on inconsistent logics. Maybe that’s because the dastardly and most-feared effects of AI adoption have yet to materialize, environmentally and occupationally. Maybe it’s because the most vehement anti-AI sect are unsuccessful creatives, and unsuccessful creatives love to blame anything but their own inadequate creativity for their heretofore failures. But when communicating a hard-line stance about anything, one must be prepared to answer a series of sequential “Why’s?”
Why do you feel this way?
Why is it so catholic?
Why are there no other allowances?
Why is it applicable in this situation, this situation, and this one, but not over here?
To my knowledge, the books of AI moral philosophy mostly don’t exist yet. A lot of this dialectic is based on fears of voodoo. All vibes. And sometimes it takes these hyper-specific cultural moments to see that.
DeCC0 of the Week
This week’s DeCC0 is Taghazut, a very special “botanical-human synthesis” who we think you’ll fall in love with at first sight:
Art in the Wild
March 18th - 06:46 (2026), by Justin Aversano. From series: Moments of the Unknown. Currently being auctioned on Transient.
Quote of the Week
“There is nothing new in art except talent.”
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