---
# System prepended metadata

title: 'Comic #4 Medium Fidelity Storyboard'
tags: [Gitcoin Graphic Novel]

---

---
###### tags: `Gitcoin Graphic Novel`
---

# Comic #4 Medium Fidelity Storyboard
April 19, 2022
- First four pages have been sufficiently sketched:
    - Iteration 1: [Design Sprint Notes (super high level)](https://hackmd.io/@TravisWyche/Comic4DesignSprint)
    - Iteration 2: [Low Fidelity Storyboard](https://hackmd.io/@TravisWyche/Comic4-HighLevelStoryboard)
- Now we will dig deep into the meat: Pages 5-onwards

### Themes

- **Eternal return**; basically a cycle of destroying and recreating the world and all its content to demonstrate the utility of the *Universe Guide*
- Expose of each allegorical inflection point:
    - Canaanite Moloch
    - ETH Bot
    - Anon
    - Metaverse-as-interface
    - RaidGuild
    - Quadratic Lands
    - Phantasmagoric Moloch
- **Dispersed, omniscient narrator** that speaks through each character to provide a meta narrative, questions the foundations of truth/reality.
    - Will speak to and beyond the veil (of apocrypha, apocalypse, catastrophe), beyond the scrim of the unknown and unknowable
    - Will prognosticate what is to come. As a reader, we cannot tell if we are being steered into our own delusions, into a cast (Molochian) delusion, or if this would-be future is the result of our collective (memetic) hallucination
    - Will continuously be revealed and obscuring itself through psychological and psychosomatic means. ie: Moloch is manipulating the dream sequence of the story.
- **Futuring and Defuturing**: meta inflection points that question how we know where we are going and what is sacrificed in trying to get there
    - Definition and Visualization, based on these opticocentric diagrams:
![](https://i.imgur.com/k5uJgVW.jpg)
    - Described literally through dialogue text and shown abstractly through the art
    - Depict the allegorical inflection points as simultaneously futured and defutured: like before/after juxtaposed on top of each other as a flickering signifier of uncertain potential
    - Do we have a destiny? Do we have agency or choice in shifting our own direction?
	- Determines how the reader will participate in the UG:
		- Cynical: no agency, comic-tragic patterns playing out for all eternity
		- Optimistic: always trapped in a game scenario, but we might learn to play differently, focus on the rules that determine the rules, or create an alternate game
		- Agency: total autonomy, game designer, master of two worlds (of their own destiny), critically embodied
- Building upon the **biomimicry metaphors of collaboration** to illustrate that all of the components interface together as part of a larger image we are all trying to visualize, the meta game board
- **Critical embodiment** is the key to emancipation, autonomy, anonymity, etc. Demonstrated by:
    - a critical use of language: how we *spell*, ie: magic as casting intention from afar. Introduces lunarpunk themes of occult mysticism.
    - a critical orientation towards the future: introduces atomic punk, dystopian characters, and other grimy points of realism that illustrate what the world coule become
- **Procession of Anon agency**:
	- Imagine an alternative world
	- Believe the alternative is desireable and can become reality
	- Pronounce it (with language) critically and carefully to defy Moloch's stranglehold on language (miscommunication)
	- Manifest intention consciously and critically to inflect upon behavior, turn it into action
	- Changed behaviors change the world we are building around us

### Details: AIPs as Instances of Moloch

#### Canaanite Moloch

- A story of an ancient god to represent our own coordination failures, but really more of a meme than anything. Doesn't really exist.
- We cannot defeat this Moloch as it is a delusion, lacks definition, cannot be visualized beyond the superficial icon.
- Moloch is not the god we sacrifice to, but our own interior voice that is willing to sacrifice anything/everything if we believe it might help in times of war. Moloch is war itself. The sacrificed children are only a metaphor/symbolism of the magnitude of our commitment to conquering each other.

#### ETH Bot

- Automation, technological reliance, technocratic faith that our tech will lead to emancipation
- Techné: technique, skill, technology... as a curse, prosthesis, crutch.
- Artificiality as the artifice holding us back or propelling us forward? The anchor that keeps us rooted in our patterns, or as a vehichle that transports us to a new orientation to the world?

#### Anon

- Riddled with trauma (like all of us). A complex character on the cusp of maturity (not age, but as spiritual development)
- Tormented by the horrors imposed upon her in her life/experience, witnessing horrors inflicted upon others, and remembering epigenetic traumas accumulated throughout history
- These terrors terrorize her and lead to her terrorizing in turn. This generates guilt, shame, self-resentment.
- Realizes the need to practice a radical eye-hand-heart coordination to overcome herself, even while faced with this inifinite cycle of terror. Towards a critical embodiment.
- Her internal war of torment leads to an understanding of definition and visualization.

#### Metaverse-as-Interface

- Should not be considered leisure, as an escape from labor
- Should not be designed as a simulacra of this world: catastrophic trap, conceptual entrapment, dystopian cultural capture, military-industrial prison of the mind, manipulation of desires
- Should not be considered another land to conquer and develop: even worse that IRL, as it is parasitic upon material resources to run the simulation
- Will be depicted as a coordination tool to unfuck the imagination of the inhabitants of the trembling world it is built upon, as a tool for increasing the fidelity of our vision
- Serves as a bridge from degen to regen behavior, facillitated through increased future vision
- The mental miasma our minds mediate through

#### RaidGuild

- Technology can be critically embodied by redirecting language (code) towards transparency: tech used to emancipate through the slaying of demons
- Demonstrates the interdependencies we have on each other. We must come together to cast a spell more powerful than a individual can summon.
- Represents the applied intention to work together for a common purpose.
- They summon the portal: a lens, quasi-tech quasi-magical device for increasing vision, allows us to be critically embodied. Through the portal we see the Quadratic Lands

#### Quadratic Lands

- Starts with just the city, urbanity as a coordination mechanism.
- An uncertain future. The image is continuously created and destroyed.
- A procession of civilizations sweeping over the globe, each time being destroyed, each time rising to be stronger and larger, always increasing terror and intensity.
- A scene of blood and gore, turning the ocean red.
- Forever perpetuating rivalrous competition for resources.
- Ever rivalrous game creates a fleeting win for the winner and a catastrophic loss to the whole ecosystem.
- Every character represented in the scene has black mirror eyes representing obsessive degen behavior.
- The window becomes a mirror, showing the present moment to the characters, that they can also choose to be self-interested and serve Moloch.
- Faced with this brutal image, they choose otherwise.
- The portal reveals the future, but they understand this vision is a possibility not a certainty. A great unknowable void.
- "How do we use coordinate our vision of the future to work backwards to set the path, to be very intentional with how we get there and ensure we don't get lost along the way?" Brings back definition and visualization as techniques for manifesting intentionally.

#### Phantasmagoric Moloch

- It infuses everything: the portal, identity and self-interestedness, war and terror, the mediated relationship of the interface the characters use to communicate, in the suspicions and doubt that breaks apart the party and threatens to turn them against each other.
- The big picture of Moloch emerges by putting together all of these pieces.
- The difference between the utopia or dystopia to come is measured in the amount of suffering/thriving. The mechanisms and other elements of the story are in service to one or the other.

### Conclusion

- At the ultimate apex of tension, where all hope seems to be lost and Moloch casts a shadow on everything, there is a sudden snap back to the present moment.
- We see Anon waking up on the floor of her room, drooling on Comic #4, a copy of the *Gitcoin Universe Guide* on the shelf, action figures of all the Gitcoin NFTs and other meme easter eggs scattered around the room.
- Anon has been reading the comics, dreaming about the story, implying that she was also writing the story, or Moloch was writing it through her.
- This realization creates a final inflection point of the radicality of choice and the necessity to practice critical embodiment... but *how?*
- A processionof choices:
	- Go outside to nature
	- Yoga, meditation, self-care
	- Hacking feverishly at code
	- Social organizing
	- Plant a garden
	- Read about sustainable living
- Eventually leads to the realization that she can't do it alone.
- Final scene is all the choice/agency and privilege of Anon. What will she choose?








