Quote from: p44-45anti-anthropocentrism has increasingly been elevated to the status of a universal principle, sometimes called the 'Principle of Mediocrity': there is nothing significant about humans (in the cosmic scheme of things). As the physicist Stephem Hawking put it, humans are 'just a chemical scum on the surface of a typical planet that's in orbit round a typical star on the outskirts of a typical galaxy'.

Quote from: p45as I shall explain [..] in the broader sense [this] is so misleading that, if you were seeking maxims [..] you could do a lot worse than to use [its negation]. That is to say, the truth is that

People are significant in the cosmic scheme of things

Quote from: p46We scums are mainly infra-red emitters because we contain liquids and complex chemicals which can exist only at a much lower range of temperatures [than that of visible light-emitting plasma in stars]

I love the term 'chemical scum' and Deutsch's casual usage of the term: 'We scums'.

Those silly little collectibles on bell tree.

buy-in

Games with complex systems that are (difficult) to learn but also (a joy) to learn. The investment they ask for is that of time and effort and thought.

Do I want to live in a world full of free games? Hell to the fuckin' yeah.

Do I want to support devs? Also hell yes.

Do I want to live in a world of replayable games like Cinco Paus that I love to learn and then stop playing? Also yes.

I'd like to follow through on the corest of core tenets:

Do I believe in this enough that I will fight & die for it? That I'll defend it to anyone? That if nobody is interested, I'll be more interested in changing the world to meet me than the other way around?

Yeah, kinda. It kinda meets those criteria.

"Buy it if you want to support me! Buy it on a Platform if you appreciate Platform Features!"

The benefit of this structure:

Anyone who wants to support me can go buy the game on Steam, and their reviews will count!

Anyone who wants to play my games for free can play my games for free!

This is a good trade off.

I believe in NO DOORS. But is my belief strong enough? None remain who know...

I'm curious about Sokpop's release structure, where they release small games and

Other people seem interested in the Source for my games... I'd love to give people access to my source, genuinely. I just haven't made a habit of it.

I have realized that the end goal of the Close reading forum is to be able to do it internally - to stop myself from just skimming and consuming but instead perfoming the entire Close reading process, chewing on every little idea, without ever having to write it all down. Right now it's great practice, but it's kind of slow and produces a somewhat unnecessary artifact. I guess I enjoy doing it but sometimes it expels some embarrassing thoughts that I might want to keep to myself until they're more polished. I forget my good ideas if they're not written down sometimes. I forget my good ideas even if I do write them down sometimes too, though.

I should write a little about grey markets. I think they're fascinating but I also find them repulsive; Animal Crossing New Horizons has people hosting Treasure Islands, which are islands hacked to have a ton of items on them. Sometimes, there is a real money entry fee.

What is it about systems that deal with charging real money that turns me off of them?

What's wrong with pay 2 win games or cash shops etc.?

What is it about money?

pingback: Regarding Everest Pipkin's Anti-Crypto Article

Quote[..] beyond the ecological the remaining qualities of cryptoart are deeply worrying.

QuoteCryptoart remakes digital artworks as primarily tokens of monetary worth, content and concept secondary to an asset that has market value.

Cryptoart creates artificial scarcity for digital objects, creating an "original" which can be owned for the purpose of resale.

Digital objects do not currently have a concept of 'ownership which can be resold.' (As far as I'm aware,) There is no actual scarcity being applied to the digital artworks as we know them. There is also beauty to be found in scarcity; I design games, and everything about game design is predicated on artificial barriers. (Though as I read and think more about NFTs I recognize it's something I hate, actually, and have been working against for years, to questionable success. See NO DOORS, where I'll continue to think on this.)

QuoteCryptoart recreates some of the worst aspects of existing art markets, pitting the super-stardom of those who have gotten lucky or who already had money and connections to play with against the realities of countless others who will see no such return.

Existing digital art platforms and communities also have this problem? See: The Indie Bubble.

QuoteCryptoart offers no intellectual property protection and there is no regulatory structure in place to keep copyrighted materials from being minted into and sold as NFTs, with or without the consent of the creator or copyright holder. Once an NFT is minted, there is no way to remove it from the blockchain or secondary market.

Cryptoart smart contracts offer no legal protection, and any talk of contracts baked into the NFT "requiring resales to cut in the artist" or "compensate gallery workers" depend entirely on the goodwill of the purchaser.

Cryptoart lets a few artist early adopters get rich from a system made to reward investors, not artists.

(Regarding the previous two or three quotes: I really don't know much, but isn't the whole thing about cryptoart that artists automatically get a cut, that it's technologically baked-in as much as any of the other problematic stuff? e.g. I thought the smart contract and the artist cut was as true as "there is no way to remove it from the blockchain," by the exact same mechanism. Sucks if not true!)

(I did a bit of research and, no, smart contracts do seem to be automatically enforced and not removable, at least on the (unforgivable, Proof-of-Work) Ethereum blockchain. (Seriously, don't fuckin use Ethereum. At the time of writing this, everything Pipkin says applies 100% to Ethereum and Bitcoin IMO, regardless of all my questioning.))

QuoteI understand first-hand the desperation of trying to live in a world that has systemically undervalued and undercut the arts, and how compelling a vision of escape can be. I truly do want to live to see the world that rewards artists for making the work they would like to make without asking them to jeopardize their health, stability, and creative integrity. This is not just my political belief- it is a desire that would directly benefit me and those I love. It is a future I have to believe in to keep going every day.

I have thoughts about this. I think we need to go beyond "wanting to live to see the world that rewards artists for making the work they would like to make." We need to, first, learn how to make the work we like to make -- that can be a hard, personal battle. And, we need to make an effort to find these world-systems that reward us and the artists we care about for making this work -- as I grow as an artist I've come to believe that in general the work of actually constructing these world-systems is beyond me and most artists I know -- not in a technical skills sense, but in the sense that the mindset necessary for their creation is incompatible with the mindset necessary for creating art.

Governments and economies and massive systems and things like that are not works of art.

Finally, I disagree with the argument put forth that NFTs and cryptoart must be ignored whole-cloth in order to make moves towards this dream future... but I agree with the dream. And I agree with about half of Pipkin's final statement.

QuoteLet this whole horrible chapter of history convince you that money is fake, we can do anything with it we want, and that we do not want cryptoart.

QuoteAnd yet, I see you live in society.

This section is primarily focused on proof of work cryptocurrency. (I agree with basically all of it! You should read it.)

But it concludes in this way again, making the below claim (which I've already argued against earlier) that cryptocurrency and cryptoart gain value fundamentally because of the ecological damage. Proof-of-stake systems exist. This is not an entirely outdated idea, since proof-of-work systems definitely continue to exist and be popular, but it applies strictly to these proof-of-work systems.

Quotecryptocurrency and cryptoart are not bad for the environment accidentally- they are not simply bolted onto this blundering machine and cannot just be taken off (the technology of a proof of work-based system almost guarantees this). And even if we manage to reduce those costs to a palatable number, cryptocurrency AND cryptoart are still fundamentally valuable because they burn energy.

To repeat the common maxim, the purpose of a system is what it does. Cryptocurrencies turn sunk energy cost into futures.

If that is the value system we are building, we are doomed.

I started writing this close reading because during the writing of my primordial soup post on NFTs, a friend (who might not want to be named?) linked me to it, and I thought I would give it a re-read, and in that thread I had some thoughts. I read it once prior to making Cruel World; it was one of the things that exposed me to the world of NFTs in the first place!

Quote from: Everest PipkinI've been working in digital spaces making artwork since well before cryptocurrency was around, and lack of scarcity is the only thing we've got.

Digital files don't have that much going for them. [..]

What digital files and digital artists do have is duplicatability. [..]

This is it! This is the one thing!

In context of the piece, this reads as a self-deprecating acknowledgement of the medium's faults -- "Digital art is flawed but we work with it anyway!" But it only really has value as an oppositional stance to digital scarcity. As a whole statement, it does digital art, and its artists, a disservice by describing many of the medium's potentially beautiful, and surely true, qualities as weaknesses.

I'm as upset about this as I was before, even with my opposite-of-rose-tinted-glasses off my face.

A lack of scarcity is absolutely not "the only thing" that digital art has going for it, and digital artists can appreciate so many more things about their medium than that. This flattening of the landscape only seems so important when we're busy preparing our battlements for the war against NFTs. It's a wasteful and harmful consequence, simplifying an art form down to only the things that help win a war like this.

We don't need these battle lines. They threaten to make us ruin our art so that we can better embody not-NFTs.

~

Pipkin makes some beautiful observations about digital art in the space I've excised, and I'd like to include it here for completeness. The duplicatability of digital art is a beautiful aspect of digital art that I like to see honoured here, in this way. But it can't come at the cost of everything else that digital artists might choose to love or respect about the art form.

Quote from: PipkinWhat digital files and digital artists do have is duplicatability. There is no original file. When I make a copy of a text document, 3d model, or game and give it to you we both have the original. We're both having a first-hand experience. We both are engaging with the work wholly as itself, not second-hand documentation.

[..] Digital artists have media that can proliferate over a network and be held by many people at once without cheapening or breaking the aura of a first-hand experience.

You can read the full section here.

Quoteartists pay "gas fees"[..]
These fees [..] vary between $40-$1000. These are up front buy-in costs generally borne by the artist that have no guarantee of being returned via sale- and many NFTs sit minted but unsold, with the artist having paid for the privilege.

On cheaper blockchains this is not as bad, of course! But this upfront cost does suck.

Quotethere is nothing in place within the technology of an NFT to guarantee that they respect existing copyright (artists have already seen their work minted and sold without their consent, sometimes still with their names attached!)

and this is very very bad. The lack of oversight or legal recourseability means NFTs exist in a sort of wild west, and bad things are enabled by its structure. It's funny how piracy doesn't bother me in the slightest, but this does, even though in both cases the original artist isn't being harmed in any way just because someone isn't paying them who might not have paid anyway.