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Maestro – A Short Story Without a Plan – The Archaeoeschatologist

31/03/2023 by grimachu

Arequeet’s second skin hissed around xis spiracles as xe stepped out of the hopper on spindly legs. What a horrible world this was. High gravity compared to xis homeworld, a thin, low oxygen atmosphere that meant the skin had to work triple-hard to let xim breathe. Then there was all the radioactivity that lingered, making the skin hungrier than usual for anti-oxidants and cellular protein.

Still, Arequeet was an archaoeschatologist, which meant xe had to spend time in places such as this, puzzling out how and why an allegedly sophont species had wiped itself out so that the various species of the Taxonomic Polity could avoid the same fate.

This world didn’t even present a particularly compelling or exciting case. The species had been balkanised into different tribal and mutually antagonistic groups, allowing singular leaders to hold command authority over apocalyptic doomsday weapons. Xe’d seen it a dozen times, from the orbital bombardment scars of Trappist 1d to the grey goo of Gliese 514b. It was clear to Arequeet that non-eusocial species were at a distinct disadvantage regarding survivability, even with ideologies representing the superior model.

So this was going through the motions, drawing the shitty duty of stalking through the uglier and burnt-out remnants of this species’ ugly architecture, looking for any signs of lingering survivors or preserved caches of cultural artefacts. It was likely fruitless. Even the shelters of the species’ genocidal rulers that had caused the problems had been radioactive craters, their weapons technology was even more advanced than they had given each other credit for. They all knew exactly where each other would hide.

Even so, monitoring before the eschaton event had suggested that the species was so utterly, incredibly primitive and atomised that a secondary ruling class known as ‘billionaires’ (a reference to the quaint idea of currency) might still have survived, hidden in their own shelters that the primary ruling class might not have bothered with. It had been Arequeet’s job to check for those sites.

Thus far, this had been fruitless. One of the billionaires had tried to survive by flying into space in a chemically fuelled rocket (of all things) and had met his end in the whirling debris resulting from satellite warfare. Another had hidden on a private island beneath the notice of the war but not beneath the notice of the resulting climate apocalypse or drifting clouds of radiological and biological death.

This site, which Arequeet was now picking his way carefully across, brittle bones crunching under his tarsi, had been the centre of this species’ high-tech industries, such as it was. They had still been tinkering with computers made out of slivers of rock when everything went wrong and the early stages of a global information network that had only contributed to their tribalistic self-annihilation rather than cementing a planet-wide eusocial hivemind. Disgustingly primitive.

Probes had supposedly found a mostly-intact underground bunker complex here. Arequeet doubted anything could survive in there, given that the bombs had set off the faultlines that ran through this city and broken the ground apart. Still, Feudirk’s pheromones had been quite insistent that this whole expedition be done by the book, so here Arequeet was.

This heap of abject rubble was the site, so Arequeet set to work, dolloping an egg’s-worth of angstrobots onto the wreckage and letting them set to work.

It wasn’t long until much of the rubble had been sorted into its constituent elements, and the entrance to the bunker had been revealed. It was damaged and twisted, but the second skin’s effectors and neural layer were up to the task and soon had the thing open.

Arequeet had to duck down to fit inside. The heavyset primates of this world had rarely exceeded five tibias in height, while Arequeet was a healthy nine tibia high. Xe had to hunker down and walk on four out of six legs, which was quite demeaning.

There were bodies close to the entrance, which Arequeet had to step over. These primates were disgusting creatures, with horrid endoskeletons and flabby flesh, which was even worse when it was rotting. It made Arequeet’s spiracles pucker and clench with disgust, even though the scent of their rot was incongruously enticing.

It was clear rapidly that there were no survivors here and that this was nothing but a colossal waste of Arequeet’s time and expertise. Xe was about to log it and go when xe noticed something interesting. Part of the shelter was covered in tendrils and growths of what seemed like biotechnology, haphazardly spreading across walls, floor and ceiling and seeming to trace back to one of the more private chambers.

Biotechnology? They had been monitoring this crude species for many years, and they had only begun to fumble around with such things relatively recently. Had the Slumellow Concordant archaoeschatological team already visited this site and broken protocol? On closer inspection, it didn’t taste like their biological probes, so curiously, Arequeet followed the tendrils.

Arequeets secondary thorax rattled in disgust as xe beheld the scene. One of the primate’s bodies was sprawled on its sleeping platform, and the growths were coming out of it, fusing to the blankets and spreading across the surfaces. It was hideous and disgusting, but the body didn’t seem alive, even if the growths were, and was barely recognisable beneath them. The bulging and misshapen blobs emerged from the body like lazy grubs from a birthing corpse, giving the scene a disturbing, erotic undertone.

Reluctantly, Arequeet used the second skin’s sensors on the flesh blob.

“Can you hear me?” The skin had picked up neural activity within the flesh and had automatically translated it.

“Clutchrot!” Arequeet swore in disgust before xe could stop to think, and the skin – well-meaning but stupid – translated it across to the flesh blob.

“I take it that means yes,” said the blob.

“Yes,” Arequeet replied reluctantly, fretting, reviewing the data from the skin. The body was no longer alive, but the growths were – after a fashion – sickly mutated cells from the original host, replicating wildly, including neural tissue.

“Wonderful, I thought I’d never talk to anyone again. I can’t seem to move. Can you help me?”

“No,” said Arequeet, still desperately reviewing the data for some idea of what was happening.

“Why not? Why didn’t you help us before? You were here so quickly after the bombs. You must have known what was happening.”

“We are forbidden to interfere in the affairs of more primitive species.” The pat reply came out by rote as data and search terms rolled by Arequeets forebrain consciousness, desperately seeking an explanation.

“So you just let us kill ourselves? That seems cruel, heartless, unenlightened.”

Arequeet didn’t reply, xe’d found something buried deep in the medical database, a cellular problem from ancient times called ‘cancer’, which seemed to explain – somewhat – what had happened. Did this species not have a cure for that? Had this creature mutated so much, its cells grown so wildly out of control? What were the odds?”

“Are you still there?”

“Yes,” snapped Arequeet curtly. “I’m trying to understand what happened to you.”

“Why not just ask me?”

Xe had to admit that was as good an idea as any. “What happened to you?”

“My name is Adain.”

Arequeet hissed air through xis spiracles in irritation. “Adain, what happened to you?”

“We survived the blasts,” Adain said with a proud tone. “The shelter was built very strongly, but the bombs weakened it, and then there were the earthquakes. The walls split, and contamination got in. We couldn’t get out – not that it was safe – and we had no choice but to eat and drink contaminated food and water. The others killed themselves or chose to die. I stayed alive and got sick, and that’s the last thing I remember.”

Arequeet finished reviewing the data. “You died, sort of. What remains are what your species called ‘cancers’. They have outlived your main body and your brain.”

“But I can still think, and you’re reading my thoughts.”

“Yes.”

“So I survived?”

“After a fashion.”

“So you’ll rescue me, one intelligent being to another?”

“No,” Arequeet told him, removing a fresh capsule of angstrobots.

“Why not? Isn’t that why you’re here, to find survivors?”

“No,” Arequeet popped the cap of the capsule, readying it.

“Then why are you here? Why did you come?”

“To understand how and why you did this to yourselves so that we can avoid it. As a survivor, you could perpetuate the memes that killed your species. You’re an information hazard. For what it’s worth, I am sorry.” Arequeet tipped the angstrobots onto the cancerous growth and let them get to work, breaking down the freakish survivor into its constituent atoms.

There, done. On to the next shelter, and then the next dead planet. There were so many to choose from and so much hazardous waste to clean up. Xis work was never done.

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Maestro: Rewrite Gathercole in the Close Third-Person

28/03/2023 by grimachu

Most editors I have worked with dislike the omniscient point of view and dislike it even more then you express inner thoughts of a variety of characters in the third person, rather than describing some outward manifestation of their inner life. Moore, however, suggests that there is the ‘close third-person’, and I intend to rub editor’s noses in it if it ever comes up again.

Exercise: Try rewriting some of your work in close third person, using free indirect discourse to hop between the minds and thoughts of different characters.

I seem to naturally fall into this a little, but have been restraining myself. I will now remove the limiters and rewrite part of my short story The Voice in the Radio, the intervention and intrusion of the character Crispin.

***

Crispin awoke, his mouth feeling like an old mouldy carpet, his head throbbing with a hangover and the acid aftertaste of cheap wine on his tongue. Screeching noises came from the attic, static whines, pops and hisses that seemed to bore through his skull like a drill with every change in tone.

He put his hand on William’s side of the bed where the covers were thrown back. It was cold. He’d been up a while then.

Crispin covered his head with his pillow as another high-pitched shriek bullied its way down from the roof and into his ears. It was no use. He’d have to get up.

He sat up slowly, moving his head as little as possible and shifted to the edge of the bed, pulling on his dressing gown – even silk felt rough this morning – and fumbling for a cigarette from his pack on the nightstand.

He was out.

He would rather, Crispin reflected, face the spectral creatures of the grave again than deal with William in the morning without coffee or cigarettes. There was nothing for it but to plead for mercy and to hope the man… no, the thoughtless boy, would show it.

In bare feet, Crispin stumbled the vast distance to the attic ladder and rung by tortuous rung, ascended.

Crispin’s head appeared through the square entry to the attic, hair tousled, eyes bruised and watery, a childish pout upon his lips to Gathercole’s eye.

“William, chap, is there the slightest possibility you could cease all this infernal radio screeching. I have the most beastly hangover.”

Even speaking was painful, and this close the radio sound made Crispin’s head hum with unsympathetic vibration.

Mildly irritated by the interruption, Gathercole carefully and pointedly set the Ersa to one side, ensuring the nib was not in contact with the table.

“I’m inspired, Crispin. I have to pursue this line of thought to its end, or I shan’t be able to rest.”

“You knew,” he thought to himself, “when you took up with me that I had a singular obsession. Must we go through this every time?”

Crispin clambered up the ladder the rest of the way into the attic. “I shan’t be able to rest until you stop. What the bloody hell are you doing anyway?”

Crispin swallowed back the taste of bile in his mouth and tried to stand straight and resolute, all too conscious of the difficulty he was having focussing, and feeling like he was swaying visibly, though Gathercole didn’t seem to notice.

“Since you ask…”

Crispin groaned, too late in realising his mistake, and sat – in his pyjamas – on an old valise to endure the lecture.

“Bugger,” he thought. “Why did I say that?”

“… I’m sure you’re aware that until recently radios used crystals as a rectifier.”

“I did not know that. Nor do I know what a rectifier is.”

“He treats me like a child sometimes, but he’s so like a child himself in other things,” thought Crispin.

Gathercole smiled inwardly but barely let it show on his face. He loved to explain things and Crispin was his most frequent audience. It often helped him order his thoughts and unstuck them when they were in a rut.

“Well, for your sake we can consider it to be a sort of translator. Radio waves are translated by the rectifier, typically galena crystals, into a signal that can be resolved as sound. Valves and amplifiers have made them outdated, which means I picked up these old radios and their headsets rather cheaply.”

“Maybe I kept some cigarettes in my pockets?” Thought Crispin, distractedly. “I can’t face this without them.”

“Hurrah,” Crispin absently patted his pyjama pockets in a futile quest for a cigarette. “Lend me a Dunhill, would you?”

Gathercole obliged.

“Well, there’s no reason why other semi-conducting crystals shouldn’t be used. We use galena for convenience. I hypothesise that certain types of crystal may be better suited to tuning into the energistic vibrations of the spirit plane and, thereby, translating them into sound.”

He trailed off slightly, thoughts racing ahead of his mouth. Perhaps he should be studying old lapidaries for crystals with the right resonance, rather than trying different stones at random.

Crispin lit the Dunhill and took a deep, luxurious drag. Pure bliss. Perhaps there was a reason he loved William after all. Outside his obsessions and lectures, he could be considerate. Time to feign interest. “Hence all the shrieking, the very cries of the damned.”

“If only,” Gathercole sighed wistfully. “Alas, it only seems to be interference. No tones or voices, no signals from the beyond as yet. Despite amplifying the signal using the more modern technology and despite focussing on the signal range that seems to trouble the spirits the most when we use the radio pentacle.”

It was confounding. Surely that band must be the vibration the spirits inhabited in some way. Otherwise, how could it impede or stop them?

“Maybe they have hangovers too,” Crispin thought, “After all, radio waves don’t directly interact with me, but they’re painful.” He tried to fumble the right words together to express that idea to William without sounding stupid.

“Perhaps,” Crispin opined. “Perhaps the spirits don’t like that frequency, which is why they react so badly to it. In which case, they would hardly be transmitting at that frequency, right?”

His fuddled head struggled to remember old music lessons.

“We find middle C with C sharp above rather jarring and unpleasant, and so we don’t play it in our musical combinations. Unless one is deliberately perverse, of course.”

Gathercole blinked and ran through that thought in his head. It made a certain kind of sense. We could hear notes like the one Crispin mentioned, but we avoided them. A frequency that caused spirits pain – somehow – might be one they avoided too.

Gathercole considered that for a moment. “You may well be right, in which case, I need to re-test all these samples at different frequencies.”

Crispin sighed inwardly, so much for a peaceful morning.

As Gathercole turned back to the radios and they began to shriek again, Crispin retreated back down the ladder. “I’m going to the bloody pub for a late breakfast and the hair of the dog. I intend to stay there until I’m sure you’ve wound up this infernal racket.”

Gathercole vaguely waved, not really paying attention. He was caught up in Crispin’s idea and was searching for new answers.

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Maestro: E’s are Good

28/03/2023 by grimachu

A paragraph-length poem, in which you are only permitted to use a single vowel of your choice:

We regret
He needs egress
He expressed
The term negress

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Maestro: Attic & Asiatic Styles

28/03/2023 by grimachu

In his BBC Maestro course, Alan Moore talks about the various rhetorical characters of the Greeks, in particular, the Attic and Asiatic styles. The first blunt and to the point, such as Hemmingway, the second overblown and florid, like that of Moore himself.

He encourages those taking the course to experiment with both styles and then synthesise the two. My own personal style is that of embellishment in the Asiatic style, as you can probably tell from my circumlocution in this very sentence (such as using the word ‘circumlocution’). My tendency to fall into run-on sentences is probably also evident.

Let’s take a typically Asiatic paragraph from one of my stories on this very blog:

Smoke curled from the long ash of the Dunhill, twisting its way across the room like a fragment of grey silk until it met the draft from the cracked window, which finally shattered it. The cigarette sat, ignored, in Gathercole’s mouth as he hunched over the spilt guts of several radios. His hands moved from the Ersa soldering iron to the screwdriver, taking the radios apart and putting them back together repeatedly. Every now and then, he would stop, reference his scattered notes, and make the tiniest of additional adjustments.

First, let’s dial the Asiatic style up to eleven:

Dunhills were advertised with the slogan: “The hygienic cigarette” and were some of the first to have proper filters. We can suggest or add to that description in the text.

We can stretch the analogies in that description, spend longer on the window and linger more on Gathercole’s description (since this is the first paragraph in a short story). We can emphasise the difficulty and complexity of what he is doing more when describing the radios, and hammer home the repetition and methodical nature of what he is doing.

OK, so, completely overflowing the already florid description:

Diminutive traces of clean smoke curled from the precariously outstretched ash of the Dunhull cigarette and slowly waltzed across the room like a sheer fragment of grey silk until it was finally torn asunder by it the stronger breeze from the slightly opened window. The cigarette sat alone, ignored, balanced on the precipice of Gathercole’s roseate lower lip as he concentrated on his work. A beautiful man in normal circumstances, with posture and bearing, with fine blonde hair like spun gold, his perfection was marred by a frown of ferocious concentration, and strands of his hair hung in his face. Normally so cleanly and immaculately dressed; here he wore a workman’s denim coveralls and rough shirt. Before him, on the scarred surface of a veteran work table, were the eviscerated entrails of several radios, indiscernible from one another and intermingled. Gathercole’s soft hands moved from his brand new Ersa soldering iron to the horn-handled screwdriver and back again as he reduced the radios to their elements and remade them again, over and over, mechanical and repetitious, each time with a barely perceptible adjustment to one small part or another.

And now stripping out every unnecessary element.

A cigarette, mostly ash, hung from Gathercole’s mouth. He was sat at his work table, engrossed in his task. Several radios were scattered across the table in pieces. He worked at them with his tools, taking them apart and putting them back together. Each time he did so there was some minor difference, some change. He did it again and again, and again.

I would say that my original version is also a hybrid. The Attic style just simply doesn’t appeal to me, though its blunt directness might perhaps be a way of creating a sense of pace and rapidity or representing a different type of character. At the same time going ‘full Asiatic’ makes me feel uncomfortably pretentious and inefficient, even though it can convey more nuance, information and characterisation.

I’m fairly happy with my style as is.

Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief. Your noble son is mad…”

Polonius, Hamlet.

Which is a long-winded way of saying: Be as brief as you can.

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Maestro: Twiddling the Dials on ‘The Preserving Machine’

28/03/2023 by grimachu

In his Maestro BBC learning course, Alan Moore refers to an idea presented by Douglas Hofstadter, that of ‘story dials’ or parameters. Hofstadter is an interesting fellow with a peculiar set of heterodox interests, who is worth looking up, but the idea of dials runs like this:

Stories have a particular set of dials or parameters that help define them. These include time, place, characters and other aspects of the story. If you take an existing story and twiddle the dials, you can end up with something different, even profoundly so.

One example Moore uses is that of Romeo and Juliet. If you shift the time to the 1950s, the place to America and the form to musical, you get West Side Story (or perhaps Tromeo and Juliet with a few more adjustments.

One of the exercises he presents for you is to take one of your favourite stories and twiddle the dials to see what kinds of other stories might come out of it.

One of my favourite stories ever written is the short story ‘The Preserving Machine’ by Phillip K Dick.

Here is a quick plot summary:

Doc Labyrinth fears for the safety of the fragile works of high culture, mainly classical music, during the apocalypse. Accordingly, he orders a machine to be built to transform musical scores into animals capable of surviving and defending themselves. The machine successfully transforms several composers’ works into various animals– Bach pieces into little beetles, Schubert songs into lamb-like creatures, and so forth. The Doctor, joyful at his success, releases them into the world; when he finds them later, he finds that they have undergone evolution– they have grown claws and stingers and fed on one another. When the Bach beetles are fed back into the machine, the resulting musical scores have also changed, becoming wild and chaotic, with all their beauty and harmony lost.

Doctor Rupert Labyrinth seems to have a general obsession with the ‘stuff of life’ and also appears in The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford, a re-telling of Frankenstein about a living shoe. In both stories, he is bringing life to the inanimate. In one, it is a musical score, and in the other, a shoe, but the overall characterisation is one of obsession over life.

I do not intend to analyse the story here overly, the themes seem apparent enough, and it is one of Dick’s earlier and perhaps less sophisticated stories (it was published in 1953, and he was first published in 1951).

It is worth highlighting that it follows several atomic themes of the Cold War period that so obsessed many writers after the end of World War Two—the fear of the loss of civilisation and the fear of mutation. Even relatively early in the arms race, people understood the terrible destructive power of the atomic bomb.

The Preserving Machine is a bit of, almost jocular whimsy in the face of all that. An absurd premise (a machine that turns music into animals) and an oddly named protagonist (discussed and described in the third person by the narrator), and yet it is a poignant and, to me, moving story about the inherent Anarchy and freedom of nature and, perhaps, culture and music itself. That civilisation is necessary for manners and fine things to endure and that society is only as gentile as it can afford.

So then, what if we start twiddling the dials a little? What are the dials?

  • The setting is 1950s America, though it does not have much that particularly places it in that location or at that time.
  • We have the male narrator and Doctor Labyrinth, though nothing would change if we altered the sexes involved.
  • It is told through the eyes of the narrator rather than the Doctor.
  • The Doctor does not build his machine; he creates its principles and has it built for him.
  • Music is made into animals.
  • The animals mutate and become wild and brutish.
  • The music resulting from the wild version of the animals is horrible and discordant.

What if we shift the setting to the 1980s and the music to that of punk or metal? In the story, pop songs become mouse-like creatures which are killed and eaten by a cat. The harsher sounds (Wagner in particular) become nastier animals, and the Wagner beast becomes a predatory, coyote-like thing.

The nuclear spectre still hung over us in the 1970s and 80s, and punk music was heavily censored and demonised. Perhaps the threat to the survival of the music in that instance could be censorship, and the preserving machine perverted into a sort of underground method of distributing the forbidden music. Tracks could be mated and bred to be more loud, vicious, and dangerous and then turned back into music, making the themes more Darwinian.

The idea of music (or ideas) as animals or organisms resonates nicely with Dawkins’ meme theory, for all that Internet usage has debased it. What if, instead of creating physical beings, it created informational beings? What if we could transform endangered animals into self-propagating code to be reconstituted later when we have rebuilt their habitats?

The story could be about how this code has adapted to life on the internet. White rhinos are eating up data from message boards like a grazing herd, peacocks trolling for attention with flashy displays, and predators gobbling up smaller programs for their cycles and runtime.

What happens when we turn these internet-adapted specimens back into physical animals? Can they now survive in the real world, or has their digital evolution (faster than biological evolution) made them into something strange and terrible, or something that cannot hope to survive any more?

What if it is not music that these things embody but areas of knowledge and study? What if Doctor Labyrinth wants to preserve our progress rather than our culture?

Does the physics beast flex its muscles to throw out exotic particles like an electric eel creates energy? Is this historical animal a slow, ponderous great tortoise with an intricately detailed shell? Is postmodernism a flabby, gelatinous cnidarian with no brain or spine but covered with poisonous prickles that kills and digests anything it comes into contact with? Is mathematics a hive of ant-like bugs all marching to the strict beat of simple commands that build on one another to make a complex nest?

Moreover, what happens when you turn these things back? What happens in the real world when academia meets the ‘wild’ of the public consciousness? Has the medical science animal become an anti-vax animal? Is the cosmology bird now a flat-earth treatise?

Or what if we reverse entirely one of the story dials? What if we are preserving animals by turning them into music? What does the tiger concerto sound like to the human ear? Does a chimney-swift sound like Taylor Swift? If biologically everything likes to become crabs, what do crabs sound like when made into music? A drum circle? Something simple and rhythmic?

None of these are unrecognisable as being inspired by the Dick story, but some are verging upon becoming their own thing and going off in new and different directions.

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Maestro: THE TRIAL OF AN OX, for Killing a MAN; WITH The Examination of the Witnesses, BEFORE JUDGE LION, At Quadruped Court, near Beast Park

28/03/2023 by grimachu

My non-game writing has been conspicuously absent of late. Was it really 2020 when I last wrote an instalment of Gathercole? I suppose time lost its meaning a little during the lockdown, and my near-death experience and focus on the game book Wightchester took up a great deal of time without much actually happening.

I set out at the beginning of this year, intending to take things easier and to take a year for reflection and self-improvement. The RPG industry was then almost immediately rocked by the Open Gaming License scandal, robbing me of that fresh start I so desperately craved. Now, I have a little time and space to breathe, so I decided to bite the bullet and shell out for the BBC Maestro video course by Alan Moore. It’s time, and I have time, to take stock and work on my craft.

Mr Moore is a personal hero of mine, an unapologetic perfectionist and weirdo. Alan’s work at 2000AD was seminal and affecting, and his career after that has been inspiring and transformative. Even his rejection of success, instead declaring himself to be a wizard and disappearing into performance, arthouse cinema and increasingly impenetrable novels, has itself, been inspiring.

“On my fortieth birthday, rather than merely bore my friends by having anything as mundane as a midlife crisis I decided it might be more interesting to actually terrify them by going completely mad and declaring myself to be a magician.”

Alan Moore

But I digress, and procrastinate, which is something Mr Moore warned against. So, as an act of will; the point:

There were exercises in the course, and having finished the video portion in a day (with copious note-taking) I am setting about them.

The first exercise is to take a random book[1] and to analyse it. The random book I ended up with is “THE TRIAL OF AN OX, for Killing a MAN; WITH The Examination of the Witnesses, BEFORE JUDGE LION, At Quadruped Court, near Beast Park.”

At first glance this is a children’s book, so how much analysis could there really be? That is, however, part of what makes this a more interesting exercise than it first appeared.

There’s no date visible upon the book, and scans of it online appear to present it as a cheap ‘chapbook'[2]. This is unhelpful as it is a form of writing and printing that lasted about four centuries before petering out. The publisher, however, is named. A Mr John Golby Rusher of Banbury.

Banbury Press was a printing house, inherited (along with its presses) by J.G. Rusher which, previously famous for inventing a cheaper alphabet for printing, became more famous under J.G. for its publication of nursery rhymes. These were sold nationally, rather than locally, perhaps influenced by the existence of the nursery rhyme which mentions the place:

Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross,
To see a fine lady upon a white horse;
Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
And she shall have music wherever she goes.[3]

Whatever the case, further investigation reveals this particular booklet, more story than rhyme, was likely published around 1830, one of the last recorded publications by the printer and at the very end of the life of the chapbook, relegated to disposable books for young children, costing a single penny.[4]

In reading the text of this children’s book, a modern reader might well be surprised by the complexity, ambition and content of the booklet. It does, after all, detail the gory death of a man and the subsequent trial of the beast that did the deed in a court of animals. The case itself takes on a moral tone, justifying the murderous act of the ox due to the cruel treatment its owner gave it and issuing only a token punishment.

The language is as sophisticated and adult-seeming to modern ears as the content is. It is hard to think of anyone today sitting down to read to their children, and choosing a murder trial as fodder before bedtime. Children, even the middle and upper class children this was no doubt intended for, had to grow up quickly it seems, and moral lessons were deemed important, even at a time where we might think life – and justice – were cheap and brutal. This was, after all, the time of The Bloody Code.[5]

The shape of the story is as follows:

An ox has turned on its master and gored him to death.

The ox is brought before the court (presided over by a lion) by dogs, who are thief-takers.[6]

Witnesses are called forward, including a horse, an ass and a bee. They testify that the ox was ill-treated.

A bear was counsel on one side, a tiger the other (though all seemed to agree). The tiger impresses upon the jury that all animals suffer at the hands of man and that this justifies the ox’s loss of wits.

The judge then renders his verdict of manslaughter, fines the ox a blade of grass and lets him go.

A simple enough story, it would seem, but when considered as a children’s book there is, again, notable complexity and nuance to the work.

It introduces the court system to children, representing it as a fair and just way of going about things, presided over by that noblest and most royal of creatures – the lion.

The role of the dogs as thief-takers renders them partial, and so the lion excludes the dogs from taking part in the trial. Conveying the idea of partiality (it is in the thief-takers interest to see a guilty verdict) to children is likely not something you would see in children’s fodder today.

The arguments made in the trial focus on the cruelty of men towards their animal charges, doubtless in part as a parable about how men should treat each other, but again this is surprisingly sophisticated. The ox’s actions are justified by this cruel treatment. Turning against his master – the ‘natural order’ – is justified because the master did not fulfil his part in the social contract between himself and the beast. He was cruel, he was violent, he worked the ox to exhaustion and to the point of diminished responsibility, another sophisticated concept.

This argument carries the day, and the lion (symbol of just authority and the crown) agrees, but the letter of the law as well as the spirit must be satisfied. As such the verdict of manslaughter (less serious than murder, a distinction that it may be hard to convey to a child) is returned, and the ox is given a token punishment, a single blade of grass.

Animals have long been symbolic (spare a thought for the poor weasel), and they are symbolic of their roles here.

The lion is perhaps most obvious in its role as judge, representative of state authority and the king.

The bear, though given little role, is counsel for the prosecution. A bear is a symbol of strength and independence.

The tiger, counsel for the defence, is a symbol of courage and fierceness, and the tiger presents its defence in a fierce and righteous manner, appealing to the grievances of the other animals.

Interestingly the bee, the key witness is, amongst other things, a symbol of diligence and eloquence. The bee does his (sic) duty in acting as a star witness and presents his evidence with much greater eloquence and at much greater length than the horse or the ass.

Even such a short work is dense with symbolism. The child is being taught a moral lesson about their responsibility to those around them, about jurisprudence and the court system, about fairness. They are being taught, more subtly, the symbolic meaning of the heraldic animals and the values that they represent – as much as the more textual than subtextual content of the work.

Perhaps less charitably the child is also being propagandised to that the state is fair and just (a laughable claim at the time) and that the court system will arrive at decisions that will satisfy both the letter and spirit of the law, rather than the cruel injustices that were actually being meted out at the time.

It’s an interesting artefact of the time, a last gasp of the chapbook, a window into the way in which children were taught, propagandised and raised, and how coddled and babied children are today – even just in terms of language and sophistication. Perhaps we can expect more than we do of children, and certainly of adults. I loathe talking down to people, avoiding sophistication where it’s warranted, and it seems even children were expected to rise to the challenge in those days – to learn through exposure.

Perhaps we could all expect a little more.

[1] A practice taken-up by Brian Eno in the 1970s, though he used a library, and I used a random search of Project Gutenberg.

[2] A cheap form of printing using folded pages, cardstock covers and saddle-stitching. It was used from the 16th century, through to the mid-1800s before being replaced by magazines and ‘the pulps’ (which it could be said to be a precursor to).

[3] This is the modern version of the rhyme, but there are versions of it recorded back to the mid-1700s, and Mr J.G. Rusher wasn’t born until 1784.

[4] This would be around 50p in today’s money, but it’s practically impossible to meaningfully compare purchasing power or costs in this way to today.

[5] A particularly brutal and unjust period of British justice where hangings were common, even for relatively small offences.

[6] Thief-takers were the precursor to a proper police force and were a private, for-hire organisation that would seek to capture the culprit and return the property, for a price.

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Occult Investigators William Gathercole and Crispin St John

25/02/2023 by grimachu

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Republican Spirit on the Jubilee

02/06/2022 by grimachu

Apocryphally an ancestor of the family, Sir John Disbrowe was an important figure in the overthrow and execution of Charles I, becoming very close with Cromwell’s family and exercising power as a leader of the short-lived Commonwealth.

An attorney, a farmer and a soldier, John (son of James) married into Cromwell’s family, marrying Oliver Cromwell’s sister (Jane Cromwell) in 1636. As a result of his close relationship with the Cromwells, John was made the quartermaster of a cavalry troupe and later a captain in Cromwell’s revolutionary and elite Ironsides.

He rose through the ranks throughout the English Civil War, acquitting himself well as part of the New Model Army and fighting with distinction at Naseby, Langport and the Siege of Oxford. Despite his accomplishments and his reputation as a pious and courageous man, the Royalists parodied him as a braggart and a bully, the ‘Giant Disbrowe’, carry a cannon in his hand.

Throughout the ensuing chaos, Disbrowe – despite being portrayed as a loudmouth and a bully – was an important intermediary between the grousing veterans of the New Model Army, and the increasingly imperious Cromwell. His unique position allowed him to negotiate, while still proving his loyalty in putting down Royalist uprisings.

Despite being instrumental in the Civil War, and close to Cromwell, Disbrowe was assigned to govern Yarmouth during the execution of the King, and thus escaped the very worst of the reprisals after the end of the Commonwealth.

Remaining loyal to Cromwell throughout the trials and tribulations of the Commonwealth he was granted many different duties and remained a right-hand-man to Cromwell. This culminated in his position as the first of the Major Generals to be appointed, his practice in opposing religious extremists and ruthlessly suppressing royalists with a combination of military and civic power providing the model.

Disbrowe was outspoken against the offering of the crown to Cromwell, and may have been the deciding factor in Cromwell not becoming Oliver the First.

With Oliver dead, and having supported Cromwell’s hopeless son, Disbrowe lost his political capital by 1660 and was even more widely satirised and derided. As Charles II was restored to the throne, Disbrowe was disallowed from holding any office of governance. He fled England for the Netherlands, forced to return when he was accused of being part of republican plotting against Charles II – something that may well have been true. While under suspicion he was held in The Tower for a year, before being released.

He died in 1680 having spent a great deal of his life in the cause of republicanism, parliamentarians, the modernisation of the English army and unflinching loyalty to his men and to Cromwell. By 1680 virtually all of that had been undone, though the Civil War left an important legacy of a weaker Monarch and a stronger Parliament.

A complicated figure, whose narrow Puritanism I do not share, but no – since you ask – I won’t be celebrating the Jubilee. I’m very much on John’s side when it comes to that institution.

It’s a trick, get an axe.

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A Message from #Ukraine

24/02/2022 by grimachu

One of my Youtube viewers from Ukraine left this comment on my Youtube video about the situation. I couldn’t possibly have covered the full nuance, so I felt this was worth giving some wider exposure.

Hey, Ukrainian here. From one of the bordering regions, no less; one of the locations where Russians tanks are now cruising the roads, and troops try to take over city administrations. Long time watching, first time writing, etc.

I don’t want to engage in a full-scale political discussion, not least because I’ve tried to avoid politics for a long time. This is just a perspective from a random guy whose home country is being invaded. First, Ukraine is not just “one of the ex-Soviet territories”. Kievan Rus dates back centuries, and actually predates Moscow and Russia. As time went on, our countries went our separate ways. Yes, there are similarities in cultures and languages, but by no means are we the same.

After the rise of the Russian Empire, Ukraine (or “Little Russia”, as it was known back then. A very pleasant term, right) has been suffering under its rule, with serfs being basically slaves to be re-sold and exploited to death. Granted, Russians wasn’t the only ones feeding off Ukrainian people, – Polish and Hungarian aristocrates were also living the dream at our expense; but I don’t see Poland invading us now, so, you know.

This stuff is reflected in a ton of our classic literature, it is taught in schools. Not in the way of “fuck those guys, they screwed us centuries ago”, more like “our people have been under the boot of assholes before, let’s not let that happen again, kids”. Fast forward to the USSR. Nothing special to mention here, it was the same as everywhere else in the Soviets: strong but messy totalitarian empire. From a personal perspective, my father did tell me stories of a few of his friends who were repressed and never seen again. However, both of my parents agreed that, when the system worked peacefully, it did work. And then Holodomor happens (literally “killing with starvation”), where, due to the ruling party’s miscalculations and deficits, tons and tons of food supplies were taken away from Ukraine, leaving people here to starve.

I cannot speak for other Soviet territories that suffered this fate; but I can tell you for a fact that thousands of Ukrainian people died because of something the Soviets did. When the USSR imploded, it sucked here as much as it did in other ex-Soviet countries. But we persevered, built up as much as we could, and took course for the brave new modern world.

Fast forward again, to more recent and pressing events. 2004, election year. Yushchenko (pro-Ukrainian, pro-Western candidate) versus Yanukovych (pro-Russian candidate, who never even bothered to learn the language properly). People expressed their dissatisfaction with the latter in a very clear and loud way, mocking him in memes and arranging rallys against him. Feel free to speculate just how much of a role propaganda served in this outcry, but the fact is, Yushchenko becomes president, and Ukrainians are excited for Western-oriented political moves.

This presidency was… fine, I guess? Not much happened, not much changed; it left people mostly dissatisfied, because the promised political course was not implemented. By the next elections, Yanukovych threw a massive propaganda campaign in some of our eastern regions (the separatist ones, yes), and there were no other prominent candidates, and he won.

2014. This is where shit hits the fan. President Yanukovych announces that trade and general help deals with Europe and the US will not be happening, and the general goal is instead to closely associate with Russia. People are PISSED: “we’ve JUST left the USSR, we want to be with the modern West, what the hell?!” There are protests all over the country, the most populated ones being held in the Kiev’s center, the Maidan (“public square”). Protests were peaceful, but intense, and at some point Yanukovych mobilizes defence forces to open fire at the protesters. And medics carrying wounded protesters away. And everyone in the vicinity. I know people who lost friends during those events. At this point folks realize that Yanukovych is a Russian puppet, and, not without losses, throw him out – he escapes to Russia begging for sanctuary.

This is the turning point, this is where Ukrainians fully get that Russia is not letting go of us. And then Russia takes Crimea, shouting “it’s not us, it’s their civil war” (a lot of Russian military guys later got medals for this war where they were technically not present. Weird). And then separatists in the East, who supported Yanukovych, form their pseudo-countries, and open their borders to Russian mercenaries.

Russia, again, shouts “it’s not us, it’s them”, but the weaponry used, the prisoners of war taken, and the social pages info of Russian vatniks (jingos and Russian nationalists) speak otherwise. Ever since, the Russian propaganda has been painting Ukraine as basically nazi bastads who took what they didn’t own (which is… our own country? wat?), who oppress the Russian-speaking population (which is thoroughly untrue. My parents barely know the Ukrainian language, and never have they seen any oppression. As for the laws stipulating Ukrainian as the national language, and not Russian… well, it is our language. Of this here our country), who take arms against Russia along with the West, which is “THE ENEMY” (this Cold War-era shit still very much flies there).

They say that our country exists only because the Soviets have allowed it. That our language is not real, it’s a sad parody of the Russian language. (Let’s not also forget the trolls, who are all to eager to tell you exactly what they intend to do to your girlfriends and daughters.) All of this is fucking bullshit, and they know it, and they still perpetuate it.

All we want is to join the modern times and be left alone. Look, regarding the point about Ukrainian nationalists. First, I’m pretty sure there are assholes and idiots everywhere; we never had any more of them than other places. BUT, Russia did a lot of bad shit to our people, keeps painting us as either “allies of THE ENEMY” or “lost sheep to be led back to the flock”. And then there’s all the military shit, which has now escalated to the point of actual fucking war. Putin himself forces us to hate him and Russia. Not all Russians, but the ones who support his regime – most definitely.

It’s not nationalism, it’s a desire to be our own country. Don’t see anything wrong with that. If anything, Russian rhetoric to the point of “your country is not a country, your nation is not a nation, your language is not a language; you are all just a big misunderstanding, which we simply must correct”.. This is actual fascism, innit? Putin, or Putler, if you will, is a fascist. Or ruscist, if you will. As are those who support him (including Lukashenko of Belarus, who is Putin’s slut at this point, and Kadyrov of Chechnya, who is a goddamn animal believing he’s still in the Middle Ages).

Anyway… People are dying all over Ukraine, there are bombings and shootouts. there is either panic or somber waiting among the civilians. There are invaders, with tanks and guns, in my city. We expect the Internet, power, and utilities to go down at any moment, we prepare supplies and look for bomb shelters. Russia is sanctioned to all hell (though not nearly enough, I say), everyone hates it, but they just keep going. All because Putler can’t let go of his dictatorial fever dreams. It is not our fault, it is not our military storming us. It is all Putin’s doing. It fucking sucks, man.

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#History #Futurism – Popularization of the Outsider – From Usenet to Discord to Yacht Clubs

29/01/2022 by grimachu

By Rachel Haywire

Postmortem Studios will try dabbling in a few other things over the next couple of years, amongst them collecting essays and stories. Rachel Haywire is a futurist, former presidential candidate and Philosopher Queen. We’ll be gathering together some of her writings in a book in the near future. If you want more Rachel, you can check out her Substack.

Outsiders are a demographic, and a very particular one at that. Foot soldiers of history who are used as crash test dummies for the future, their moves are mapped into more extensive templates that serve as blueprints for product development. The boom of Web3, now referred to as the decentralized web, is the latest example of outsider culture bleeding into the mainstream. 

Tracing the evolution of the web in its infantile state to this recent explosion, it is undeniable that there are specific patterns that have appeared in each iteration of the web, regardless of which generation holds tickets to the peep show. From text-based strategy games to low-fi social networks to alternative message board culture, the online universe has a history of gathering outsiders into communities that evolve into the fabric of mainstream technology.

Is calling the latest decentralized madness “Web3” sufficient in making sense of this new chaos and its millions of intersecting nodes? How did we get from Usenet to Discord to Bored Ape Yacht Club? Who are the users, and what are our experiences? Let’s investigate. 

A Brief History of the (Anti)social Web

Starting with Text

The Internet was initially text-based, and you would need to head over to your local library to access it unless you were some kind of government contractor. Naturally, this was how outsiders started to find each other around the world and set the stage for digital history. The Internet, first read-only (Web1), was small and secretive and profoundly uncool. With the exception of psychedelic gurus like Timothy Leary and cyberpunk authors like William Gibson, few people understood how this tool was on the way to becoming the standard operating protocol of the future. 

AOL was soon to burst onto the scene, and much like early online service Prodigy (no resemblance to the industrial-metal MTV band founded around the same time), it produced a flashy yet simple walled garden that upgraded the text-based Web1 experience into the beginning of Web2. Read/write. You’ve got mail.

Rise of the Old School Hackers

Between Web1 (read) and Web2 (read/write), there was a period that could be viewed through the lens of a director creating an action sequence that marked the transition from Web1 to Web2 as official. Think of early Nine Inch Nails playing in the background with a David Lynch cast of characters in perpetual motion. Rather than calling it Web1.5 and becoming the subject of a hate campaign, let me go ahead and call it the Rise of the Old School Hackers so everyone else who was online this early will understand what is being referenced. Here, I speak of 90’s message board culture, where many of us were exposed to the digital environment for the first time. During this era, pretty much everyone who used the Internet was a troll or a sociopath, and you’d be sure to find someone who would claim that this was the entire point of the Internet. Bug-as-feature.

During the Rise of the Old School Hackers, you could hang out on text-based forums like alt.sex and alt.drugs and alt.magic, all of which started on Usenet. There was an alt for everything, as Usenet was a decentralized conglomeration of news servers that acted as portals to information outside the mainstream narrative. Blockchain technology had yet to become official, yet decentralization was already taking shape. This was the beginning of the web transforming into an interactive medium. 

What if decentralization was the friends we made back in the day?

It wasn’t just that everyone was a troll or sociopath during this era. Everyone was an influencer because, during the Rise of the Old School Hackers, so few people were online, to begin with. Most users resembled video game characters that would only pop up during the final boss levels. All users were participating in some way another, as you had to be nerdy and weird enough to understand how this iteration of the social web even worked. Either you owned a domain (this was not as easy as registering one on GoDaddy) or hosted a BBS. Everyone was on stage.

A Bulletin Board System was a hub of online activity, in which people would chat about their specialized interests in ASCII text. Many refer to this period as “the BBS days” with a fair amount of nostalgia, speaking about it much like they talk about the “old days” of IRL hacker conference Defcon. Mirroring these Usenet servers that attracted outsiders from across the world to congregate, BBSes had the same sort of ‘flock-of-outsiders’ dynamic. They later evolved into colourful forums called Ultimate Bulletin Boards, coded in notepad HTML with a tiny drop of CSS. Despite UBBs getting a low-fi high-af style upgrade from BBSes, the scene of these forums remained one of rebels and loners. Literal cyberpunks.

With this action sequence film bit in motion, social architects set the stage for MUDs. Multi-User Domains, where game developers produced and played text-based strategy games that moonlighted as alternative universes hidden in far-out corners of the web. As digitally immersive RPGs, they carried the torch for gamers who followed in their footsteps, both online and off. The social web was beginning to onboard new users, and most of them had nobody to socialize with IRL.

4Chan/Trolling/Chilling IRL

A few years later, a wild 4chan appeared, becoming the designated seat at the opposition table. Founded by Christopher Poole in 2003 and taking much of its ideas from Usenet/the BBS days/MUDs, 4chan was an anything-goes platform that resembled the Wild West before digital black market Silk Road came into being. It marked the dawn of a new turning, in which old school hackers were beginning to notice a crude migration onto their territory.

4chan was additionally an imageboard that acted strictly as a home to user-generated content, which included crass and vulgar explorations of everything from far-right ideologies to anime porn. This policy of total user freedom was also what made 4chan a vehicle for far-left activism and raids against the power elite of its time. Anti-Scientology protests that originated on 4chan began making their way onto major news networks like CNN.

Transforming into an IRL subculture in which people could match faces to (fake) names, 4chan marked a distinct point in time where the digital and physical were merging into a hybrid prototype. The online world and “real life” were mixed like songs on a pirated MP3 player, and DJs were everywhere.

There were now hackers meeting up at the Defcon conference in Las Vegas while 4chan raids were hitting the streets of major cities. You could go to a 4chan protest IRL and protest the incarceration of rockstar whistleblowers or simply smoke a joint and talk shit with a schizophrenic moderator. People would wear Guy Fawkes masks and hold up signs that read “I am from the Internet.” It was a theatre of the absurd and the surreal, beckoning to Antonin Artaud. Nerds were taking over the streets of hip urban centres.

4chan was, in all its grotesque self-expression, the zeitgeist in action. The outsider was becoming a little more popular by the day, which compelled the founders of Web2 to start corporations that served as safe spaces for outsiders seeking to get inside the gates. You are the product. Giving birth to early social networking outfits such as LiveJournal and Myspace, this phenomenon would herald in the centralized monoliths today known as FaceBook/Meta and Twitter. Silk Road would lead to IRL events such as Blockchain Expo and Crypto Base following this same trajectory.

The Future of the Digital Outside

Hubs and Squads and Cults and Private Access 

Let us now flash forward to the modern-day in which Discord has become a popular communication tool. Online culture has shifted onto this anarchic piece of gaming software, which has been recently adopted by the finance community. While Discord started out with a small group of gamers just doing their thing, it is also a playground for budding investors and venture capitalists. VC firm a16z invested billions into crypto and started their own DAO Initiative. Digital Autonomous Organizations are what’s hot and propose to be the evolution of communities themselves; democratic forms of governance based on digital ownership, social tokens, and voting. Discord is the primary hub in which DAOs are formed. It is also a centre point for squads to congregate, collaborate, and conspire.

The IRL to online pipeline is strong here. Anyone who attended the tech-influenced/tech-influencer Burning Man festival remembers how tokens and pendants were awarded to members of theme camps. You could participate in numerous theme camps while holding all of their tokens simultaneously, symbolizing your membership in these fun little fringe groups. You could create tokens for your theme camp and hand them out to your curated friends list, giving them a social stake in your fantasy-come-to-life. While the technology of communities may have changed, the underlying structure in which they have evolved remains. Access is the key to the castle, and access is everything. 

You are Here

With record numbers of people currently heading over Discord to participate in the DAO rush or simply to keep up with their friends across the world, we are witnessing the popularization of the outsider yet again. This concept initially seems oxymoronic, like Zarathustra going to the marketplace to seek approval, yet the happening is nothing more than the way things work on a cultural level. Every small group on the Internet becomes populated with a new force that completely takes it over, catapulting it into the mainstream. The masses are coming! The masses are coming! Politics are not only downstream from culture but are calling from inside the house. “The culture industry,” a term popularized by critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, is not just postmodern hyperbole. You’re living in it, Neo. 

We are experiencing a moment of mass decentralization, mirroring the 90’s Internet in its chaotic infinitude, with its very own invasion-of-the-normies subplot. We went from Revenge of the Nerds to Napoleon Dynamite to Big Bang Theory. History has always been written this way. The popularization of the outsider has existed since the beginning of time. Jesus was just some hippie philosopher who got famous. Many would call Revenge of the Nerds a type of “nerdsploitation”, while Napoleon Dynamite could be viewed as the Sundance version of Revenge of the Nerds. Yet compared to Big Bang Theory, wasn’t Revenge of the Nerds authentic? Is Discord Napoleon Dynamite? What software will be the next Silicon Valley?

Ethereum, the cryptocurrency powering many Digital Autonomous Organizations, evolved from the “build your own nation” culture of Burning Man and Ephemerisle. The Seasteading Institute, seeking to create floating ocean cities away from centralized society, was founded by Burning Man and Ephemerisle veteran Patri Friedman. Now what we have = a thousand DAOs blooming. A thousand nations forming. Virtual real estate. Digital assets. Web3. Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, has been talking a lot about crypto cities. Can this all be traced back to one time at Burning Man? One time on 4chan? One party at Defcon? One conversation on Usenet?

One Time at Burning Man

When contrasting 4chan culture with Burning Man culture, observing how nerds and outsiders meet IRL and start going popular, we witness how the early foundation of the decentralized web turned into what is now being referred to as Web3. Every town has its alienated group of rebels that can only relate to each other online, and their greatest will meet in person and build new institutions in urban hubs. Well, at least they did before COVID. Now I guess they are moving to farms and popping out fertility influencers? Anyway, these clusters of misfits that started on Usenet resemble the users of Discord crypto communities who signal their affiliations with NFT avatars. Has something been lost in translation? Ask every generation this question. 

We are witnessing an underworld of very online people becoming the overworld. Some of them are hedge fund managers, while others are electronic musicians in their mom’s basement holding millions in ETH. Get that bag. WAGMI. The old school hackers are mostly dead now, and that is just what it means to be hardcore. Christopher Poole, the founder of anti-woke 4chan, eventually became what The Right (TM) dubbed a “social justice warrior.” The irony here is tasty, especially when you observe how most social justice warriors of the Obama era are now cosplaying as reactionary trad wives after getting exiled from The Left. (TM)

Yet enough about politics. Let’s talk about science! (enthusiastic voice) People are basically just animals searching for communities where they can find people who think like they do. Where are all the people who think like us? The answer is simple: everywhere. A digital anthropologist might even point out how some of the early incels had a lot in common with 90’s teenage girls who were posted about committing suicide online, but that is just Usenet evolving into LiveJournal. Most of us aren’t ready to have this conversation.

It’s a Crazy World Out There 

Despite this somewhat-but-not-really insider take, Discord is currently ripe for evolution and not entirely user-friendly. It is still the unpolished Internet, and not everyone can navigate it. We are assigning moderator privileges to one another like governments in their infancy. If everybody is just forming their own community and doing their own thing, will future numerical iterations of the web be any different from one another at their core? Any subculture will become an institutional organization on a long enough timeline.

As for the people, they will literally just sit around building the infrastructure for the next generation. Maybe it’s trolls all the way down who have matured into crypto investors.

The feeling of being on the outside remains unless you are at some yacht party holding a Bored Ape. Nevertheless, the outsider feeling comes back when you notice the music on the yacht is really bad. Naked emperors are both over and under-sexualized. The outsider is the worlds most popular demographic, and the Internet magnifies this fact.

Read/Write/Own/Party

The theatre of outsiders becoming the starting point for a new era is captured throughout time. By engineering the groundwork for independent weirdos to come together via intersecting nodes, the platforms of tomorrow are built. We live in a society composed of a million micro-societies competing for your attention, all waiting for the next user to join their religion/community/blockchain/cult/channel. Whether Web3 will bring ownership to creators or a new group of uncreative elites is a topic up for debate, and the answer to these sorts of questions is always why not both. The outsider drifts further and further from the outside until a new exterior is formed. The inside of the moment then becomes the Schelling Point of a generation. 

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