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Epoch 333K
I first met them in a depressing ramshackle café thus designed for the sake of spatial aura where the baristas free-jazzed espresso doppio at any anthropomorphic figure who ever walked into that house of stale odor, mumblecore chatter, and fresh pretension of non-existent highs.
The first rays of Sun tapped on the dirty windows outlooking the ocean like a Scott Walker piece whose drums were played by dommes racing with Muslimgauze in lush-sounding beats upon the very human skin.
Any wetware advancement in skin replication, especially that of self-generational ends, would be awarded in sums whose scientific and evolutionary significance would excel any finances. They were a trio—neither a tripartite of any body nor a sort of a ménage à trois. They were just three friends in search of the same dim light.
The first to have arrived was cosplaying—to be precise, they were all wetware doughing, which is a form of organic and self-assembling designer body moulding, however, this one was especially cosplaying upon his doughing. His name was Augustus, and he seemed to be utterly serious about it:
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He used to be a political theorist specializing in the protocol-level implications of brain-computer interfaces (BCI) during the early days of government-funded research.
He also did some research for Optimized Autonomous Organizations (OAO) in their special and free cybernetic & economic zones across betaverses.
These zones were granted a green-light by then-existent de-growth-modeled international organizations who decreed how culture should evolve—way before this primordial soup of micro- and macro-communes of utmost purity through. Some of them wanted to impose travel rules on abstract assets and store of value whilst others wanted to milk the meatverse dry. None survived except for the autonomies that understood that exit>voice.
I met Caesar Augustus or Octavian9000 on an image board on the Disruption333 federated isle of information. I still am not sure whether he is a troll pretending to be an early 2020s tradcath nootropics maxi pretending to be a right winger when it comes to the natural preservation of all the Montanas of the Planet Earth; or, a government agent trying to absolve himself for the good of the people by cosplaying his way unto presidency on his SEZ. You know the grift: You create a base connector tribe of yours via discordant forumaries which will then be delegating the governance NSTs (non-sellable tokens) to your name. Voilà!
You are now the mayor of Neo-Nova-Roma-upon-Hyperborea. Anyways, he was a good person, and the zk-key to others’ verified trust in me.
Sartorial Tendencies
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Arthur used to be a tailor for men with gusto. He was cancelled somewhere between 2010 and 2030 for the advertisement that read: for men with gusto. Since, apparently, his motto was to attire men who had taste in the elusive tangibility of textures, patterns, tactility, and ease of movement; he never was sad in having been cancelled.
During one of our chitchats over the yBODY pool counter, he confessed to me that any tangible effect of garment upon the tactile observant is indistinguishable from the utterly palatable darkness and bitterness that breezes with a cup of well-brewed craftsman, not the modern-day artisanal, coffee.
In order for himself to learn the intricacies of the trade, he even loaned some betaversal parcel from the neo-Ethiopian Forum of Foreign Caffeine Punks. It was kind of a long training session even for someone such as himself. He had to absorb all that mumblecore Tik-Tok videos on the delicacies of preparing a simple cup of espresso triplo in the morning alongside a frog grok induced lingua franca of coffee hedonists.
He’s been running this coffee shoppe, Sartorial Tendencies, for more than a decade now, and for the boomers amongst us who have not had a single dough upgrade since 2030s, he is the male incarnation of both the bartender from N1RV A-nna, and Coffee Talk. He also has a buddy named Aphe—a model trained on the modular rendition of the Aphex Twin œuvre.
Here, during an early morning espresso session, whilst talking about a dAppresso that can infuse a simple DeFi primitive with biological data and can forecast some evolutionary trajectories of our “species,” Arthur introduced me to Augustus and Éliane.
L’Île re-sonante
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Nay, in this Mirror selfie from 2022, that which Éliane was wearing was not another low quality museum garment to congratulate Kusama again and again. It was a specially tailored set of garments, a shirt and an overcoat, in collaboration with the Wüü Industries from Shenzen, China.
She was a PhD candidate in a comparative literature department in Hong Kong back then swimming in the rich dark forest of rhizome body problematics of Chinese phonetics, and the sonar contextualities of ideograms. It was a research in prod, was greenlit by the Party.
It was not her air that intrigued my interest but the works she had been on lately: zero-knowledge capabilities of sonar solar bursts through the time-conical instances of a given matrix that constitutes a circuitry so vital to the advancement of templexical singularities—and, believe me no slippery slopes exist thereabouts.
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“élaine” by Éliane (the tech was so far behind that we had to click the embedded link, and then click on the thumbnail on OpenSea, and then click the player) was the outcome of her first research question, a formulation of a ZK-proof sonar chitchat through time cones that was buried as a mere dronish sound art piece amongst the pseudo-indie music NFTs of 2020s that knew nothing about the shoegaze skies of 90s.
Hearing that piece was caused a sigh of relief both in me myself and Arthur’s Aphe assistant. That was how we made sure she was fitting for the mission from the very start.
An Honest Advertorial
Arthur was a man of pop-niché tastes when it comes to art, and he was fond of classic pieces. His coffee shop did not have a seamless silk screen. He had a better setup: a diligently-prompted and specifically commissioned remix of the entire œuvre of Nam Jun Paik. It was curated into existence by a script called KEK9000, trained through the subgraphs of all primitive onchain kulturwissenschaft databases.
Whilst Éliane, Arthur and I were debating on the intersection of late 20th century experimental poetry and avant-garde music, and mumblecoring into the relational impact of mycology and neo-liberally pervasice taproots and rhizome in the kingdom of flora; this uncannily rendered piece of tweeted critiques noticed my attention at the giggle of hence silent Octavian9000:
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Such was a single-tweet rant in the form of an ERC-721, a historical NFT if I might say so. It was from the early days of LLM acceleration, and the minter it sounds was angry at some low level of design space of so-called weeb3 fashion gaining traction. Much later were we to be informed that it was a ciphered message that gave a hint at what we would be asked to accomplish. Seeing it on a pseudo-Paik CRT setup was tubular, TBH.
Surfer
Surfer was a racer.
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He used to race in the Akira Prix back in the day. Also, a poster boi for MEVsports. Aye, trader by night. Had an eclectic taste in music, too. I knew him personally. I now know his wetware dough yBODY incantational self-assembly, too.
“Gilbert sent me. This is Plato.”
Albert nodded, and smiled: “The usual?”
“Aye,” Surfer replied as he was taking off that HUD whereby we were able to receive the signal from those crystal clear eyes that he was a safe one with pseudo-scan traces across the iris.
He put the vantablack core onto the counter while being served his usual Cortado with cardamom. Surfer’s real name was Darius. His parents were fond of the Persian culture is all we know.
The vantablack core was a Portable Singularity. Its name was Plato. &, apparently it was Plato itself that Gilbert sent via Surfer—the latter being the genuine surfer of networked techno-shamanisms and their tribal conflicts without being even noticed by a byte. G could have easily have the Bunny-powered yBODY pools mint an instance of Plato yet here we are all safe from that jazz.
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“These are the last words of Hassan Sabbah!”
“Ayo, sorrey mate. I was just listening to some rapidshared Burroughs. The man was really good at throbbing-gristling the words as were they, innit? Anyways, what we are gonna be doing today has nothing to do either with Harambe or Kevin, though, lest we forget. I am here, I am the oracle, and I have a responsibility to link certain parts of cones when it’s a must than a polite need. Hear, hear: Your per block time of existence is under threat because of neo-Luddites who like to write mediocre avant-garde fan fiction across some blogspot based forumaries. Some of them are ready to nuke us all ‘cuz of their not so successful taxation desires on the partial commons economy.
…and, you have been chosen to educate the past geniuses by just arriving from the past.
How?”
Free jazz again…
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That was how it began. We were to form a DAO of the past, and use it as a springboard to revive late 1960s Fluxus perfomance bands. As a node to the legendary Negativland, we wanted to call ourselves Positivland.
Octavian 9000 (almost Andre 3000), Arthur, Éliane, Surfer, Plato, and the Frog the Grog. We were all complicit. Our task was to infiltrate the early days of LLMocene via onchain arts funding, and create a series of short movies in the form of disruptive arthouse soundcollage performances, and alleviate the thread of these Neo-Luddites.
We were selected just because of our collective efforts to coordinate around a collaborative security think thank for the betterment of privacy-by-design efforts during the early days of zk-rollups. They just had to track our main addies back to the genesis.
…to be continued.