I made i through another year of making internet blockchain art or whatever this is. I’m not going to lie, this second year was rough. Not because of the obvious reason of the whole space crashing in valuation – I’ve spent my life as a NEET in creative fields where I’m accustomed to living in minimalist squalor anyways so my practice wasn’t really too disrupted by the market conditions¹ – no, the tough part was seeing so many people and projects around me drop off and disappear as soon as the money and attention dried up. I won’t hold it against anyone who needed to shift their priorities for their livelihood but it was still disheartening.

It made me question more than a few times why I’m still here. So I may as well take this anniversary to reaffirm why.

In my view, the ruined and abandoned state is actually the best time to make things. During good times, it’s easy to become complacent and fall into predictable patterns because, when times are good, you don’t want to jinx it by changing things up. When things are good, you want to keep delivering the same things that are working. It can be repetitive. But it’s during the unfortunate times that it’s possible to try out many different things, actually chase crazy visions, experiment freely and wildly with full abandon. Cut your bangs to weird lengths because, fuck it, nobody care me. That is basically what guided me this year as my work branched into new ideas and territory.

This year, I expanded Gooolnet into the Very Internetwork with Very Internet Person. With it, I expanded my presence into Ethereum mainnet² and Ethereum layer 2s like Base and Zora, adding to my work on Fantom, Tezos, and Optimism. I expanded the form of my work beyond pixel art/animation and websites into 3D animation, music, AI assisted photo imaging, and even physical merchandise. Despite feeling like a survivor in a depressing post-apocalyptic crypto wasteland, it was actually a lot of fun to play with so many new things! And I met a lot of cool new people – artists, devs, miladys, and more – through different platforms like Scatter, Farcaster, Caviar, Zora, etc.

But since my earliest Goool work³, I’ve always been driven by the condition of the internet. And that remained the same this past year. If you go through my old comments, you’ll see the motivating force in all my work isn’t really just about making trading tokens at all. It’s about embracing new technologies to recapture the beautiful aspects of what makes the internet good – decentralization, net neutrality, free/open access, and being a weirdo online. The ideal that the internet is an open space that allows fully independent, user-generated content to exist and thrive and compete with the manufactured content fed to us as not much more than a form of mind control by powerful entities. This internet ideal is deeply woven into all my art. I am constantly sending love letters to the internet.

As I write this, things like Twitter, which used to be a fun internet place at one point in history, continue to mutate into grotesque, watered down, mockeries of what the web can be, adding more gates and censors, less free, less useful, less beautiful, at the whims of a centralized controller, emphasis on “control.” This is the trajectory of megacorp platforms, even if they paint themselves in opposition to each other with different, opposing colors. As profit-seeking businesses dependent on keeping audiences captive, it should not be surprising that their business model is to develop algorithms to cheaply and ruthlessly “flood the zone with shit” (an incredibly effective psyop technique to keep the masses dazed) and occupy as much space and attention as possible. But this is not what I want the whole of the internet to be. And the only way to counter this is to flood the zone with love.

More internet, very internet.

So as long as there is still a free and open space on the internet, I’ll keep uploading. I’ll use the blockchains to harden and distribute the things I make so no one can take it away. I’ll support the projects doing the same.⁴ The only way to save the internet is to make more, better, internet. Keep making posts and jpegs and websites to fill the internet with the things you actually care about. Make the internet what you want it to be. That’s what I’m doing. Do I really think I can actually save the internet? Maybe not. But it’s still fun to try. I want to have fun on the internet.

Thank you to everyone who stuck it out this past year and kept logging on to win forever.

FOOTNOTES

1. When I wrote about my first anniversary last year, the space had already crashed six months prior but there was still some hope and lingering euphoria in the air. Besides, I give away most of my work for free. If you minted a Riot Goool in 2021, you’ve been pretty much getting non-stop free art from me for 2 years now if you’ve kept up with claiming the key collections. So it’s kind of business as usual regardless of whether the market is up or down.

2. I had flirted with Ethereum a bit before this year with the eGOOOL collection, shortly after the merge, but VIP was the real introduction to my work for many people on Ethereum who had never heard of me before.

3. I occasionally get asked about future Fantom/Goool projects and I don’t really have a solid answer. Currently, the crypto space is in a contracted state and most of the attention, capital, development, and energy has retreated from the altchains. By the end of 2022, I was basically just spending a lot of time making art to drop into random abandoned Fantom wallets. It felt unproductive. So that’s why I’ve been exploring more widely this year, learning new things, making new contacts, growing.

I still enjoy using Fantom when the opportunities arise. My Goool collections are all there and I have no interest or desire to port them anywhere else. In my mind, that’s where their history is and that’s where they live. So unless the Fantom blockchain/DAG completely shuts down, that’s where they’ll remain and I can do more work with them whenever I feel like it.

4. I do have to admit that I am somewhat excited about the possibility of Twitter totally failing and collapsing. Its network effect is the only reason I continue to use it but I think the ongoing negative platform changes will drive more people off the site or reduce usable signal to zero. If that happens, there would be no point to use it and it would be great to reclaim the time I spend on there and divert it towards platforms that I feel more aligned with like farcaster, gallery, mirror or even just more of my own websites.