I recently took a leave of absence from my current job, at an institution I’ve been working at for more than seven years. This marked the first step of my upcoming sabbatical. A year off work, a precious break, an opportunity to reflect on the future trajectory of my personal and professional life.
I had long planned to take a sabbatical to fulfil a lingering dream from my college days—to travel slow and immerse myself in places that I’m interested in. Thanks to the red pill of crypto, I now look forward to diving into not only the cenotes of Mexico, but also the onchain worlds of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) and other decentralised applications (dApps).
It is perhaps poetic to think of my upcoming sabbatical as a concurrent journey across two different terrains—one physical, the other digital. As a chronically online person, I know being offline is important, and I will make sure to get plenty of that when travelling. At the same time, this physical-digital dichotomy is becoming less salient in modern society. I firmly believe that our online presence can and should serve as a meaningful extension of our offline selves. This is the spirit that I hope to imbue as I strive to engage more wholeheartedly with this corner of the internet that I’ve grown so fascinated by—the chaotic, cacophonous world of crypto.
With this sabbatical, I have bought myself time and agency for real exploration in the crypto space, untethered to any ongoing commitments. But I know that I still ought to hold myself to something that can prompt me to make best use of this opportunity. In this regard, I plan to write more frequently, more fervently, about my journey here.
Paperwork (2023) by Ana MarĂa Caballero is a collection of AI-generated digital paper sculptures launched in partnership with Bright Moments. Each piece was prompted by the individual emotional responses of audience members to Ana's poetry performances throughout 2023, who were invited to write down one word on sheets of paper after experiencing her verse. The piece featured here is based on the Spanish word "comedor", which means dining room—perfect for the subject of this essay.
As the literary critic Walter Benjamin has written, “Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.” If I want to learn anything useful and build anything enduring from this time, then I need to will it into action, and the best way I know how to do this is by committing my thoughts into words.
This is thus the genesis of The Digital Buffets, my new personal blog through which I will pursue more dedicated writing on the broad subject matter of what I shall term “cultural production on the blockchain”. There is much to unpack here, so I would like to focus my maiden essay on the broader context of why I want to learn and write about this subject in the first place—how I see the internet evolving in the future, and what this would mean for the production and consumption of cultural assets online and onchain.
My premise is simple:
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If culture is food, then the internet is much like a gigantic network of buffet restaurants.
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These “digital buffets” are only going to become crazier in the future.
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I will need the right utensils and mindset if I want to have a good time here.
REWORLD (2023) by Roope Rainisto is a series of post-photographic works made with custom-trained generative AI models, launched as part of a group show titled “Post Photographic Perspectives” on Fellowship. It interrogates society’s complexities through a distinctively disorienting visual language—each piece seemingly unraveling our perception of reality, yet providing a glimpse of the familiar. Even though “Food Service Station No. 1” hints at the unhealthy industrialisation of food today, its spread of deep-fried meaty chunks still looks appetising!
Why buffets?
For much of my life on the internet, I’ve always used the word “buffets” in some form as part of my online identity. Unsurprisingly, when I became active in crypto in 2021, I did the same. Even before fully grasping what NFTs were about, I made sure to secure “buffets.eth” on the Ethereum Name Service. It was the first NFT I owned on Ethereum.
My love for buffets originated from fond memories of family vacations in my childhood, when most days began with the usual complimentary breakfast at the hotel restaurant, served in a buffet style. Rows and rows of yummy food, with no restrictions on how much I can take—a dream for a young boy with a healthy appetite.
Antonius Oki Wiriadjaja’s alter ego, Foodmasku, is based on an Instagram account he created during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he created face masks using food and then ate them while under self-isolation. As someone who enjoys eating, I find it delightful to see Foodmasku inject creativity into the journeys of our foods from farm to face. “Bánh Mì” was part of a series of works that Foodmasku released at his solo exhibition, “What we eat, who we are”, at the IHAM NFT Art Gallery in Paris in May 2022.
As I grew up, I became a frequent enjoyer of all-you-can-eat restaurants. Seafood buffets, sushi buffets, hotpot buffets—I regarded these settings as an invitation for indulgence.
Buffets have thus been my happy places. They are where I can seek contentment and fulfilment, where I can wander around in worlds of limitless possibilities.
Auntieverse (2024) by Niceaunties collectively represents a quirky, giddy world in which physical laws and social norms are upended. Each of the AI-generated images in this series of 1,000 works launched on Fellowship’s Daily.xyz showcases aunties and their friends living their best possible lives. This definitely includes feasting under levitating sushis, as “Factory #0237” reveals.
The internet is already a buffet
The internet is likewise an invitation to myriad worlds of possibilities. I recall fondly my first proper use of the internet to play Neopets as a kid, and how I progressively graduated to richer and more abundant online experiences over the years.
By Proxy (2022) by Shavonne Wong and Lenne Chai is a collaborative project fusing photography and 3D art. The series depicts an imaginary young girl's transition from girlhood to adolescence, set within contexts inspired from the artists’ growing up years. This featured piece, “Through the looking glass”, reminds me of the provision shops around my housing estate, filled with all the goodies that we covet as kids. Despite still holding on to some nostalgia for this past, I no longer patronise these shops anymore, instead flocking to the more well-stocked supermarkets now.
Indeed, from the user’s perspective, the internet is now analogous to a gigantic network of buffet restaurants. Here, appetite is only limited by bandwidth. Otherwise, you are free to consume anything you want, whenever you feel like it, and in whatever amounts you wish.
It is estimated that more than a billion images are shared per day on Instagram alone. Every minute, more than 40 years of streaming content are watched online. Each one of us are now buffeted by simply more digital content than we can ever consume.
An infinite scroll, a bottomless pit, all-you-can-eat just a swipe or click away.
Life In West America (2023) by Roope Rainisto, also commonly abbreivated to “LIWA”, is regarded as the pioneering AI post-photography series. Launched on Braindrops, LIWA paved the way for Roope’s second series, REWORLD (2023), as well as post-photographic works by other AI artists to enter the NFT market. Tapping on an improbably mangled visual language, each work highlights the rawness and dreamy possibilities within the vast American landscape. In “Mango”, we can almost taste the unvarnished sweetness of this imagined reality, where desserts can seemingly transcend space and perhaps even time.
The digital buffets are getting crazier
Much has been said about how we got here. The decentralised nature of the internet has permitted anyone with a connection to put content online. Subsequent improvements to the capabilities and accessibility of creator tools, especially with the advent of smartphones, have made it relatively easy to create digital content.
The eager emphasis on capturing user engagement by Big Tech has also all but reduced friction in terms of consuming this ever-growing glut of digital content. Algorithms now predict what we would like to see, served in slick, dopamine-inducing feeds.
Cognitive Behaviour (2023) by Alice Lane Gordon is another AI post-photographic series launched on Fellowship as part of its second group show, “Post Photographic Perspectives II”, in 2023. Through its pop pastel palette and surreal compositions, the series serves as a commentary on the alienation and anxieties of the younger generation. In the case of “Healthy lunch”, the subject in the center seems defeated, detached and awkwardly alone, perhaps numbed by the incessant, unsolicited performance of well-being on their social media feed.
As much as we think this state of affairs is crazy, things in the digital buffets are going to get much crazier in the future. If there is anything we’ve learnt from the history of computing and the internet, digital technologies are adept at putting crazy on an exponential curve upwards.
Over the next decade and beyond, I think the consumer internet is likely to be reshaped by the convergence of two technological trends: (i) generative AI, and (ii) spatial computing, or more commonly understood as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR).
While these two technological trends are nothing new in themselves and have many years of development behind their backs, the past two years have seen these technologies take significant leaps towards consumer accessibility. Today, I can easily use generative AI platforms like Midjourney and Runway to create images or videos, and Sora seems ready to take video generation to the next level. Apple’s latest Vision Pro headset also shows that hardware development has reached a stage where AR/VR is compelling enough to be used in daily life.
Birdwatcher (2023) by Katie Morris is a series of AI post-photographic works launched on HODLERS as part of its Horizon Collection. Building on the notion that AI is a meticulous observer and interpreter of humanity, the series provides a brooding, stoical take on our experiences and stories as part of society. The writhing, mangled mass of cows in “Medium Rare” is a sobering foil to reflect on how technology has transformed the production of the things we routinely consume, to the extent that they become utterly unrecognisable.
With the average user now able to get a taste of generative AI and spatial computing, it is worthwhile to start seriously imagining what the digital buffets of the future will be like. The following are some topline thoughts, which shouldn’t be contentious:
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Generative AI is poised to make digital content more abundant, as well as more bespoke. As their models become more powerful and compute becomes more accessible, the cost of producing digital content will approach zero. When all sorts of media can be generated on-demand, we can be sure that more of them will be produced—more of the same junk or fake content that already engulfs the internet today, but amidst this deluge, hopefully more high-quality content too. At the same time, the increased ease of content production via AI will allow for digital content to be hyper-personalised. With sufficient prompt engineering, it will not be hard to generate content in which every minutiae is tailored to one’s specific requirements. Thanks to generative AI, we may see our network of buffet restaurants soon transform into an ensemble of super-cooks, each with a menu limited only by our imagination.
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Spatial computing will make the internet much more immersive. Through these technologies, our interface with the internet will no longer be through a 2D screen, but within a 3D space. This will certainly elevate our experience of digital content, making them more tangible and more tactile. It will also open up the design space for digital products and services, allowing them to be engaged with in novel ways, or to be integrated more closely with objects and spaces in the physical world. Enhanced by VR/AR, the digital buffets of the future are therefore likely to offer us a more all-encompassing sensory experience, in which we can consume and create in a more multi-dimensional manner.
Fruit lovers (2022) by Jan Sladecko, part of the artist’s Silly Race series, is a delightful 3D work depicting a banana race-car trying to avoid all the junk food in its path. As we spend more time in virtual worlds, we must still remember to eat enough fruits and keep our bodies healthy. This is a race that I would like to be in and win!
Where I think things will start becoming really crazy is at the convergence of both technologies, when both generative AI and spatial computing fuse to create completely new paradigms for the consumer internet.
Imagine multitudes of generative worlds, manifesting across the spectrum from fully VR (creating destinations unto themselves) to AR (modifying our sensory perception of the physical world). Some will be ephemeral, others persistent; all adaptive and constantly being iterated, perpetually in a state of becoming.
This next evolution of the internet will be where digital content becomes fully dynamic—ontologically, spatially, temporally—flowing freely across multiple contexts. Attention also becomes cemented as the new liquidity here, although the source of this attention may no longer just be humans but other forms of machine-based “intelligence” as well.
The constantly-shifting visualisations of different foods in Leo Isikdogan’s A Machine’s Dream of Food (2021) reflects a particular neural network’s impressive yet tenuous grasp of our physical world. Since then, generative AI models have almost perfected their representations of our reality. But the question remains: can we truly recreate a reality that we never fully inhabit, whose underlying laws we can only approximate?
Fast food (2023) by Sheldrick is an AI video work launched on Fellowship’s Daily.xyz. It presents an overflowing mélange of different fast foods, continually dissolving and reconstituting themselves amidst a blend of liquefied pixels. While we don’t have to watch our calories in a digital reality, the ubiquity of supersized digital content could very well prove to be nauseating after a while.
In these digital buffets of the future, where scarcity is a relic of the past and space is malleable, what networked “constellations of digital objects” will we value and collectively derive meaning from? What forms of communities will arise to anchor and align our values around? How can our tiny, fragile human selves flourish in a world where nothing will remain unchanged?
I am certain that our identities will blur between the physical and digital, just as our sense of self will be challenged by an expanded playing field of entities with agency. This will be undoubtedly exciting yet uncertain territory for us as a species.
I am thus reminded of another quote by Walter Benjamin, hinting at the immense dislocations experienced by those who lived through the dawn of the 20th century:
“A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.”
Benjamin, W. (1972). The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov. In Arendt, H. (Ed.) & Zohn, H. (Trans.). Illuminations (pp. 83-107). New York, NY: Fontana.
Growing Pains (2023) by Alizé Jireh is a series of photographic works that is, in the artist’s own words, “an ode to the beautiful agony of becoming an adult.” Each image is deeply evocative, capturing the unfolding melancholy that lingers as we abandon who we used to be. In “The Shadow I Cast”, all the textures of a long-forgotten meal are laid bare—the flavours of the past reduced to dust and desolation in the present. Will this be the legacy of how we come of age in our changing, digitalising world?
Blockchains and the digital buffets
Besides AI and VR/AR, there is a third technological shift that I think will play an important role in the future of the internet—the advent of blockchains.
While blockchains are not necessarily tools for content production or distribution, they will be a critical complement. After all, in the digital buffets of the future where the food on offer will be virtually unlimited, we will still need eating utensils—tools to help us consume.
Brooke DiDonato’s photographic works have a knack for invoking the uncanny in everyday scenes. In Everything but the Kitchen Sink (2020), a nondescript shelf becomes a site of intrigue, suggesting that good plating still requires a raw, human touch. Perhaps this is what is a key to a long shelf life!
Blockchains are the plates, packaging and receipts in our network of buffet restaurants. Whether through smart contracts or inscriptions, they can be repositories of digital content. Blockchains can also help tokenise content, wrapping them in a consistent technological standard (e.g. ERC-721) that will enable them to be distributed, transacted, and built upon. As a shared and virtually immutable ledger, they serve as a tamper-resistant set of receipts too, recording every single onchain activity of a tokenised content for posterity.
In doing all the above, blockchains enable the concept of property rights to be conceivable for the digital economy, and for these “rights” to be enforced without a centralised authority.
PoS (2022) by Socmplxd was released as part of the artist’s “An Ordinary Life” editions drop. Continuing in the tradition of digital realism, Socmplxd taps on the simplicity and precision of his compositions to evoke feelings of stillness, restfulness and nostalgia. In “PoS”, the piece of steak in cling wrap, with a “certified” sticker and a price tag, presents a fitting analogy to the role of blockchains as custodians and catalogues of digital art.
In short, blockchains provide a comprehensive suite of accounting tools for digital content. They enable us to lay down waypoints within the infinite spread of the digital buffets, direct capital and attention to the most significant and valuable dishes, and store them as lasting memories.
Focus amidst abundance, provenance amidst ephemerality, independence amidst inter-connectedness—these represent the promise and powers of crypto. They are why I believe that blockchains can be very useful utensils for the digital buffets of the future.
First First (2021) by 0xDEAFBEEF is a series of 5,000 onchain generative texts, each commemorating a fictional event relating to crypto art by presenting it as a categorical first. The series is a parody of the absurdities abundant in the NFT space at the height of its speculative mania in 2021. Conceptually, it can also be regarded as a “worldbuilding project” from which imaginary realities emerge and are canonised for posterity, biding their time to turn real. In “First NFT #1636”, the role of mainstream institutions as arbiters of culturally-significant artifacts is highlighted and satirised. But who knows, a fruit-themed avatar NFT project may very well become historic someday.
Flourishing in the digital buffets
I have written about the three technologies—AI, AR/VR, crypto—in a generally optimistic manner, characterising them as drivers of defining technological shifts in the future internet. But I am no accelerationist, and I identify more closely with a more balanced, cautious form of techno-optimism, such as the defensive view espoused by Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum.
I thus acknowledge that there are many risks associated with these technological shifts. One may get afflicted with more than just indigestion in the digital buffets. AI could make the “Dead Internet Theory” a reality, and upend our collective notion of truth. Spatial computing may dissociate us from the physical world, encouraging social isolation. Crypto may also not live up to its promise, with blockchains becoming inhabited primarily by gamblers and grifters. These are certainly unhealthy outcomes for society, like chronic illnesses slowly debilitating our collective well-being.
all things fail (2023) by Mark Wilson, better known as “die with the most likes”, was launched as part of Season 5 of 6529’s Memes Collection. The artist’s signature style comes through finely in this work—his subjects literally festering and dripping with excruciating misery. There’s perhaps nothing more clarifying then confronting death and decline up close, knowing that every fibre of our being will soon be pulverised, putrefied, and pretty much utterly and irrevocably fucked.
Having a proper set of utensils alone will not be sufficient to mitigate these risks. If we want to truly flourish in the digital buffets, we need to go beyond relying only on “hard” technological tools or solutions. The “soft” qualities that make us human, that we embody as unique individuals, will have to become even more integral to our being.
As Steve Jobs said after introducing the iPad 2 in March 2011:
“It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.”
Indeed, the humanities have always been concerned about how we can elevate the human condition. This mission is now more relevant than ever before, as machines become equally competent at cultural production. When nearly all of the cultural information that we have produced digitally can be mapped within the multi-dimensional vector space of large language models (LLMs), what will set us apart as humans, as agents of cultural transmission? Amidst all of the craziness in the digital buffets of the future, how can we keep our guts running and our hearts singing?
Muraqqa - Data Miniatures (2023) by Orkhan Mammadov is a series of animated 3D works that builds on the tradition of miniature painting in the Islamic world. Through the use of AI to recreate classical scenes from this historic art form, Orkhan shows how diverse cultural traditions can be brought together meaningfully in new contexts. In “Feast in Nature”, the nourishment and connection that nature provides is brought to life through a dreamy particle simulation, reminding us of the continued relevance of fellowship even in our digital reality.
In this regard, I believe there are three qualities that we will need to nourish in order to stay healthy in the digital buffets:
- Maintaining a broad appetite. Even in the face of abundance, we should endeavour to stay hungry and expand the range of digital content we consume. We cannot be comfortable with just staying in our lane, gorging on the same foods day after day. Otherwise, we will never obtain all the nutrition we need. A broad appetite, sparked by curiosity and an open mind, will provide us with the widest possible cognitive aperture to perceive and engage the world—essential to resist any potential isolation and siloisation caused by technology.
Fruitful_2367 (2021) by Sofia Crespo is part of the artist’s “Artificial Natural History” series that explores imagined life forms generated using AI. By tapping on this rich space at the intersection of biology and emerging technologies, the works in this series encourage us to expand our imagination of the ecosystems we are part of, both in the physical and digital worlds. As “Fruitful_2367” shows, the fruits of our labour in this regard may yield strange results, but beauty can still be found amidst the blurred boundaries between the organic and inorganic.
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Refining taste. With the breadth of experience enabled by a broad appetite, we can also develop a more refined palate. As our online landscapes become more all-encompassing and overwhelming, we need to cultivate our own sense of taste to discern what is worth our attention. This will entail learning how to think critically amidst subjectivity and parse signal from noise, so that we can distil the intangibles that move us and engender meaning across space and time. Good taste will also be a conduit for collaboration with others—both man and machine—and it will be an important competitive advantage in an environment where there are no barriers to entry for cultural production.
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Being patient. Just as how the most impactful flavours tend to be the ones that linger the longest, what makes it into culture is often what can stand the test of time. Culture with a capital “C” is about legacy, not immediacy. It takes the best of us and passes them on to future generations. This process cannot be rushed, even in a world where content can be created, remixed and reinvented at the speed of light. After all, time is the fairest adjudicator of value. No matter who or what we are, the things we create all stand equal before the passage of time. Very few things can earn the right to enter the hallowed halls of timelessness and form the foundations of human culture. It therefore behooves us to be patient if we want to succeed in the business of cultural production.
Techno-Animism (2023) by Emi Kusano is a series of AI post-photographic works launched on Bright Moments. It explores the symbiosis between tradition and technology, set within the context of Japanese culture. With the backdrop of a tranquil home garden, “#217” points to how the spirits and stories that have always accompanied us can find new homes and ways of expression. In doing so, they may thus continue to animate the future of the next generation.
Curiosity, discernment, patience—these may not be uniquely human values, but when combined together, they do form a significant part of what makes being human special.
We as a species have always sought the frontier, seeking experiences that can invoke awe and the sublime. We do this not only because of the ego, but also because we want to pass something enduring, something valuable, to the generations that come after us. This has always been the bedrock of cultural production in human society, and it is how it will continue to be.
Even as the frontier is now digital and the stakeholders of culture are no longer solely human, I believe the same resilient spirit of being human will live on. We can adapt, we can thrive, and with the passage of time, we can also create beauty out of this.
Perhaps, just perhaps, a cultural renaissance of epic, unbounded proportions may be born out of the digital buffets that are to come. In the meantime, I’m getting my appetite worked up and my tastebuds ready. This will be a long game, but I have a hunch that it will be a wild ride.
Bon appétit!
Botto is a one-of-a-kind experiment in digital art, pioneering the concept of a “decentralised autonomous artist”. Combining the use of generative AI models to create and crypto rails to curate, Botto represents a promising way forward in man-machine collaborations, in which human participants play a central role in training Botto, while also being rewarded for their labour in this process.
Through Botto’s creations, we can see a fruitful fusion of our cultural history and the myriad possibilities offered by emerging technologies. For example, World’s Feast on Absurdity (2023) from Botto’s Absurdism Period seems to play homage to Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830) through its composition, while also upending all aesthetic sensibilities of that time. Set amidst a brazenly deranged feast, the heroic portrayal of a baguette, consumed by monsters from within and without, suggests the advent of a new class of subjects in our contemporary cultural landscape—its absurdities seen as an insidious threat, but also representing raw, unbounded potential.
Disclaimer: I have collected works by some of the artists featured in this essay, partly for investment, partly for personal enjoyment. Nevertheless, nothing in this essay constitutes investment advice. Please do your own research or consult your own advisers concerning any potential investment decision.
Credits: The header image of this essay was made with Midjourney v6.