It feels like I spent all of my waking hours in 2023 preoccupied with the crypto space -  its problems, its politics, the potential metaphysics and cosmology that compliment it. This meant everything I read and encountered was seen through its lens, for better or worse. This is a short list of some of those encounters - Happy New Year.

Hannah Weiner’s Open House

The American language poet Hannah Weiner’s had an acute and vivid form of schizophrenia which fueled her prolific output - her work has been described as a collage of “words and phrases clairvoyantly seen.” What’s most compelling to me is how a robust artistic community empowered her to filter her mental illness into such salient output (check this televised Public Access ensemble performance of her work with two other New York poets).

If Burroughs thought that language was a control apparatus, potentially from outer space, Weiner is like an anomalous mind that, fused with the scenius of her time, was able to disentangle the control grammars, generate a syntax of exit, or at least the start of one.

With the tools we’re building, especially the low-overhead, federated organizing and slew of direct democracy capacities emergent now in the DAO space, I hope we can generate a culture where more visionaries and anomalies can find support to build more exits. As Deleuze writes, the point is to get out.

(Reading Weiner this year inspired one of my favorite Open Machine surveys).

Quote: “I wanted to create the feeling that people all over the world were doing a related thing at a related time, although they would be doing it individually, without an audience and without knowledge of what others were doing. It is an act of faith. We have unknown collaborators.”

Ozark

Once you see past the appealing visages of statecraft and corporate propaganda, all of the sudden a reality that is more gritty, more violently consequential, but also more full of power and lucid intensity comes into the fore. Her name is Ruth Langmore.

The show is a case study in situated ethics in a world where the treatise between powerful families and powerful bureaucracies is what colors prescribed morality. If we want to decouple legitimacy from this truce, we might have to start thinking like Ruth.

Quote: “You see, I’m a cursed Langmore, long inured to violence and death.”

Lamp DAO: A Cybernetic Experience in Collective Governance by Jessica Zartler

This piece was a report from Amber Case’s CyborgCamp. I know from experience that Emmett, Case and Barton can each totally electrify a room, but I was more amazed by the ability of Jessica Zartler’s gonzo crypto-journalist style to capture that electricity. This article came out when Sam Bankman-Fried was front and center in the news, and Zartler’s article was a huge and needed reminder at the time of why we’re all here, and the possibility space we’re dealing with with these new technologies.

Quote: “There's a TV streaming fractal, psychedelic art, while high-intensity electronic dance music pulses in the background. There are lamps of varying shapes and computer chips strewn about on a long, polished wood table. On another desk nearby, electric engineering and soldering equipment rest on the table with a hand-drawn picture of a dead stick figure labeled "danger" in red permanent marker.”

The Passenger and Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

I’d been following the breadcrumbs of McCarthy’s final novels for over eight years, mainly from this recorded excerpt - from an obliquely referenced documentary on the Trinity Site to the foundations of cybernetics and game theory that arose in the bomb’s context to a long list of mathematicians, including the stateless anarchist Alexander Grothendieck and the mystery of mathematical platonism their work points to. It was too perfect that the book came out just as my dive into cybernetics - with books like Turing’s Cathedral and How We Became Posthuman - was coming face to face with the crypto space.

The books follow the fictional mathematical prodigy Alicia Western and her physicist, speedracer and salvage diver brother Bobby, the two children of one of the architects of the Manhattan Project. If the second volume has a paranoid and Lovecraftian take on the problem of mathematical platonism (the intuition shared by most pure mathematicians that mathematical forms have a reality beyond the human mind), the first directs that same paranoia toward the federal government, with an extended sideplot about gold, the IRS and even digital currency that you might call “monetary sovereignty in the many worlds.”

Encrypted in both books is a belief that behind the bleakly totalizing veil of mathematics, the existentially burdensome acts of physics it permits and the bureaucracies that protect that pact is a surfeit of worlds and entities and mysteries of kinship that weave them. Preoccupied as I was with McCarthy’s bleak modernism in my 20’s, all I could read in these final books was a subterranean sense of possibility, egging me on in the work of applied pluralism.

Quote: “He climbed into the loft and sat at the tower window wrapped in his blanket. Spits of rain on the sill. Summer lightning far out to sea. Like the flare of distant fieldpieces. The patter on the tarp he’d stretched over his bed. He turned up the wick of the lamp at his elbow and took the notebook from its box and opened it. Then he stopped. He sat for a long time. In the end, she said, there will be nothing that cannot be simulated. And this will be the final abridgment of privilege. This is the world to come. Not some other. The only alternate is the surprise in those antic shapes burned into the concrete.”

Sara Imari Walker Tweets

Aside from the cosmic eclecticism of her interviews, her relationship with the Sante Fe Institute (where McCarthy wrote the above books) and her mind blowing concept of assembly theory showing how materials are encrypted with the unique relational events which occasioned their emergence, it’s been just a handful of her tweets that have taken me places this year. I’m not sure what kind of psychedelic design horizons get opened up if we fully integrate the notion of the blockchain as a static machine in a spatio-material time fabric, or if we think of DAOs and protocols as Mortonian hyperobjects that we can use to steal power from a hidden realm of state-sanctioned memory. For now these are just blurry images I rotate around in my head before falling asleep at night, and that’s enough.

Quotes: “Information is the manifestation of the materiality of time.”

Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudo: Nine Lessons to Myself by Toni Negri

Unless one is in a very well funded phd program, they probably aren’t going to find the time to give this extremely dense treatise on time, ontology, Spinoza and Marx a proper treatment. But the basic themes: the death of the monarch god and teleology (or totalizing future determinants), the open future the death implies, and the way control apparatuses parasite off of the creative freedom of the knowledge of that openness. “The event of real knowledge is produced precisely at the point where the restlessness of time reveals itself as power.” We live in the shadow of legacy institutions that hold onto supernatural specters - not because those specters are powerful, but because they suppress the as yet unrealized creative power of materialism, experimentalism and technological realism before an open future, “common machines through which men and women stretch out beyond the edge of time… turning the technological monster into the angel of the to-come.” Or something like that, I dunno I’m not in a phd program.

Quote: “The eternity of matter reveals itself as temporal intensity, as innovative presence; and the full present of eternal time is singularity. ‘Singular’ and ‘eternal’ are interchangeable terms; their relationship is tautological. Whatever has happened is eternal; it is eternal here and now. The eternal is the singular present. … In materialism, ethical experience is the responsibility for the present.”

Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains by Josh Stark

In the same token as these cosmic level reflections on mathematics and time is Josh Stark’s indispensable essay (written in April 2022 but it was only this year that I got to it). When trying to understand the core insight of the blockchain, the frame of “hardness” is crucial to show the civilizational stakes of the technology.

I love this essay as well because it provokes a challenge, supported by Sara Walker’s emphasis on the exotic materiality of information (note that work this year by Leonard Susskind and peers showed that material phenomena in black holes (decoding circuit complexity in AdS/CFT correspondence) are mathematically equivalent to block cryptography). The challenge would be to say there are only two classes of hardness - institutions, which find hardness by force or the arbitrary legitimacy of repetition derived from its legacy, and “atoms,” - blockchains included - which involve exotic configurations of matter-in-time designed to the end of civilizational harmony. In other words, doing the counterintuitive brainwork of materializing information and affect clarifies the stakes: there is no other realm, there is only the real, configured for life or configured for death.

Quote: “What do we want our civilization to be made out of?”

**Letter to Uno: How Felix and I Worked Together** by Gilles Deleuze

My work this year in and around the crypto space has been nothing but the most generative and fun collaborations of my life, so running into this letter by my favorite philosopher on his collaboration with Felix Guattari was a moment of happy resonance. The short letter emphasizes the contingency of collaborative strategy, and how potent it can be ( like any high valence material encounter) with lessons and new knowledge (“Our differences worked against us, but they worked for us even more”).

It also confirmed a feeling I was picking up on, that any collaboration (say a collaboration of two) has a special thirdness, a quite other partner, a djinn or egregore that comes into animation, and it becomes the love for this third persona that fuels the difficult labor of mutual coherence.

Quote: “In these instances, under Felix’s spell, I felt I could perceive unknown territories where strange concepts dwelt.”

Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America by Dan Flores

This first few chapters of this work of deep history covers 300 million years of mammal evolution in North America, moving back and forth between language thats lyrical and mechanistic (just as a network thinker should). To see how belligerently robust and chaotically expressive the processes of biology are, and to see the chance events in which the ordered products of that immense expression is contained, I felt tricked into also seeing the extant world not for what it is but what corridors of possibility it contains. Negri is right: the surface of the world around us hides a huge power, not in a supernatural sense but in the sheer, multiscale genetic potency of the material world. Fork, combine, branch, evolve…

Quote: “In one fascinating interaction the tracks appear to show a young woman, carrying a child on her hip who she occasionally put down, walking a stretch of lakeshore and returning by the same path, which in the interval between her two passages both a mammoth and a ground sloth crossed. The mammoth paid no obvious attention but the sloth reacted, rearing on its hind legs in what may have been alarm.”

Venus in Two Acts by Saidiya Hartman

If you’ve followed Kei Kreutler’s amazing work on memory and protocols, I would argue Saidiya Hartman’s essay (which is just a reflection on the writing of her major work, Scenes of Subjection) is a mandatory supplement. Fuck that, if you’re interested in crypto at all, this should be mandatory reading. I was first exposed to Hartman in college, but revisiting “Venus in Two Acts” this year gave it new meaning.

The essay, a reflection on emotional and ethical dilemmas inherent in researching the archives of the Atlantic slave trade, is searing with immediacy - about the past, about remembrance, about the archive and the power relations that occasion, preserve and occlude it. In between the lines for me is the once again blurry outline of a democratized, openly realized account of the past, a counter-archive.

The violence of the archive should be a burden on us, a responsibility to realize the stakes of state power, state machines, stateliness, and to actualize in our technology today counterstates that can make the being of all legible (and therefore defensible, repeatable).

Can we disrupt the violent swing of history with a nonviolent state machine?

Quote: “My account replicates the very order of violence that it writes against by placing yet another demand upon the girl, by requiring that her life be made useful or instructive, by finding in it a lesson for our future or a hope for history. We all know better. It is much too late for the accounts of death to prevent other deaths; and it is much too early for such scenes of death to halt other crimes. But in the meantime, in the space of the interval, between too late and too early, between the no longer and the not yet, our lives are coeval with the girl’s in the as-yet-incomplete project of freedom. In the meantime, it is clear that her life and ours hang in the balance.”

Joanna Newsom: “The Air Again” and “Marie at the Mill”

In 2023, after an eight year hiatus, my favorite songwriter Joanna Newsom showed up at a Fleet Foxes conference to play five outrageous songs from a forthcoming album. They are all great, but the lyrics to The Air Again and Marie at the Mill (dutifully transcribed into Genius and notated by fan-scholars) fucking killed me.

They are both imaginative stories of women in California in the last quarter of the 19th century - of a fictional widowed lesbian being responsible for a famous fire in Amador City in 1878, and the true life of the opera singer, esotericist, and architect Marie Russak. But both songs have a dizzy persistence that transcend the narrative, so that these stories of women trapped in patriarchy sound equally like stories of beings trapped in time. (Check how the prolific marriages of Marie quickly slip into metaphysics: “For if you were born at the wrong time, my dear/ Just keep trying and trying and trying again,/ As for the end, it is not what you fear/ You’re just slipping a glove from your hand,/ Like this,/ Down, down, down, down your wrists,/ Down down the list of lives,/ Husbands and wives,/ Dozens of times around again and then…”)

Like Wild New World, delving into these songs and the depths of subjective experience they hazard, the reality of other times and the swirling extantness of the processes and affects that animate them gives me a feeling of exalted awareness - an aura of pluralism that I can taste like rain in the air. The streetlamp outside flickers and I think of the organic and geological entanglements, the chemical reactions that negotiated that event, how its material instance is inseparable from the meaning I assign to it, and that others assign to me, in a complex hyperobjective thread that you could follow down to the caverns of an Amador County gold mine. Our entanglement, our weird togetherness, enables the wildest singularities. It’s all coordination.

Quote: “Despite the lies we are grist in the mill,/ On the list I am Helios still,/ Sunwielder, Brunhilde,/ Spun in shields,/ Running round and round and round/ And round and round and round and round.”