"The DAO that can be forked, is not the eternal DAO" :::info In its purest sense of the notion, a DAO never existed and never will. ::: A future taxonomy of web3 orgs Pre-DAOs Platform Co-ops Mutual Credit Societies

I You lucky fools I envy thee who Narcissus kissed on the cheek. Even a mirror is enough to make you climb steep hills from which you can look down on ...YOU! But, I'm content,

The Radical Aesthetics of the 2nd hand I just love roaming around endlessly in other people's trash. A social decomposer, wondering in aisles of other people's clothes, other people's furniture, other people's electronics, things that they chose to sell, or give away, things that either they didn't like or couldn't carry. Thank god I am both a fucking hipster and a hoarder. Because these people don't know what they are leaving behind! They are giving away gifts and gems and diamonds for people like me to wear with pride, things that always have an aura, things that always are more valuable in the hands of a decomposer, who is able to recycle the joy of having a new thing into the joy of reclaiming a thing and recreating it again into something novel, a subtle alchemical art of turning shit into gold! But instead of adventurous expeditions into pawn shops and charity shops and yards sales or greyzone marketplaces, the culture of 2nd hand seems to be something more than just consumerism or a Berlinesque hipster business initiative. There's a philosophical vein running through it and a cultural counterpoint to a world of endless production of more meaningless commodity, more single-use replaceable (no)things. In fact, the art of the past 3 decades has embraced this new 2nd hand culture. What if instead of a composer of art, of music, of fiction, one was to be like the compost flies and the dung beetles, a decomposition agent? In music, especially in electronic production, we know this quite well. Sampling is the artform and medium that allows us to be decomposers, to take something that has been produced already and to re-use it, to break down into its constituent elements and recycle it. Samling brings unlimited potentials. You can sample anything! An amen break, a old decayed vinyl of New Orlean Jazz, the sound of a flock of seagulls, my voice, your voice, our voices smushed together. And then sample the sample itself, slow it down, speed it up, stutter it, cut it into pieces and throw it into a sonic soup, make it completely unrecognizable. And then use the samples in a drum rack, or a midi keyboard and play the urecognized lump of sound as a pianist. Or add the sample to a generative algorythm and make it play forever adding slightly more chaotric novelty each time. This pattern is also known in the visual arts. The analogue of sampling is editing. Take a picture of anything, your self, your dog, a random dog, an AI generated dog, a non-dog and strecth it, splice it, colour correct it, use the lasso tool and tame it and turn the dog into a cat in photoshop! And then use an image of a mountain top and put it on top of it, then inverse it, put distortion and noise and mirror it 100 times to metastasize it into a Russian carpet pattern. Fictional fiction negates itself towards the Real

by Jebra Gizlem Sometimes legends are mere historical remnants of people and ways of life that are too hard to capture but as mere hints or fanciful speculations. The legend of the Nazre, a highly advanced nomadic tribe of the Fertile Crescent, is an attempt by the agriculturalist of the Euphrates to create a history out of the lack of any archaelogical ground. They left traces of their brief presence all over the basin that led to civilization and these traces are what Iranian historian [[Kamran Malzar]] has tried to connect and recosntruct into a map of their nomadic existance. This was hard however because there was no narrative to hold on to and the traces were too scattered and too distributed, which led him to the neccesity of innovating on historical methodology and what it means to do reconstructive anthropological work. It is through his encounter with von Djikes, a Dutch anthropologist that [[Malzar]] realized that a more suitable method would be to follow the indirect marks indicating flows of materials left in the settlements around the extended nexus of the tribe's activity. And so he did for a whole decade of self-sacrificing research. Out of this period of scientific sainthood came a plethora of novel recinceptualization of human history, technology, social systems and cognition. In the following chapters, I pay tribute to the depth and richness of Malzar's framework and his coneptual innovations. Geographical Recycling There are three things the Nazre mastered early on, technology, long-distance coordination and trade. The origin story of the Nazre traces their prehistory to the hunter-gatherer native tribes along the Euphrates river without an initial identity or scale. Their emergence starts out of their racial mixing with early transitionary populations moving towards the sedentary cultivation of wheat, but after a certain point, population growth would give way to disputes and conflicts, so they started forming small groups of dissensus and disagreement that would pull themselves apart and start roaming around mostly in the direction of the flow of the river. This is the earliest sign of non-violent system of conflict resolution. Despite their division however they would still hold a memory of identity and the ones that stayed behind would send some gifts in the form of baskets of fruit, or baskets of artifacts like a beloved person's hair which they would recognize through odour. So in this way, they developed a system of water transportation through rudimentary floation tools based either on air-filled goat's lungs and tripe or floater plants, such as lillies strapped to the baskets. The social formations if the Nazre were based on social deformations, with some of the disbanded groups following a pattern of growing and further iterative disbanding, especially after children were grown to keep the population going. The youngeat and oldest members would coalesce and form small bands that would go north, against the flow of the river, while the rest would continue down, creating a system of geographical feedback loops of recycling population.

The War on Drugs never stopped. Even in the face to decriminalization and the re-appreciation of the therapeutic and clinical effects of psychedelics, even the normalization of them in popular consiousness is a war tactic. Because the war has alreeady been lost. We are now allowed only to talk about psychedelics, to research them, to wear them as fashion, as cultural aesthetics or as badges of honour. We are allowed to engage with them only under the strictest clinical conditions. And we are even allowed to to engage with them in their non-psychedelic forms. But we are not allowed to simply do them, to share them, to share wisdom and knowledge of their use other than "harm-reduction", which should give as the hint that we have long lost the culture war of psychedelics, since in the spotlight, they are a harm to be reduced. We are not allowed to manufacture them, and enter into economic relationships that involve them, even if they are grassroots, uncriminal and community oriented. We are not allowed to explore their potentials.

2 months from now... what kind of project, publication, label do I want to be a part of? What KIND of project is that? A convival, small scale and high-trust collective of people that have come together through very niche, very unorthodox and weird interests and backgrounds, pushing the boundaries of form and format in terms of publishing ideas and doing work. A quasi artistic, quasi-researcher, quasi nomadic group. Configuration of humans and how I fit in? I like Richard Florida's notion of the "creative class". These people are a mix of hackers, hipsters, hippies (and hermetics) sometimes embodying all of these to a certain degree. I am more of a hipster, so my contribution is always one of being mindfull of culture-buidling, good aesthetic standards of work, aiming for cultural novelty and emeregence and making interesctions between diffetrent projects happen.

Statement of Intent. Think about what brought you here. Envision a set of solutions to the personal challenges you may have expressed earlier. Write down what you can see as a concrete outcome that could emerge for your practice from this experience. I am here because I've struggled with publishing and writing for years and because I always realized that my struggles aren't private, aren't my own... that they are shared. I have recently started my PhD and was confronted with the challenge of getting used to a very different form of writing than I am used to. However, I saw the value in the principled and rigorous manner of scholarly work and saw that this is something I can gain from. I quickly discovered though what a lonely place thesis writing is. It was when friends started confessing of panick attacks, self-hatred and even suicidal thoughts that I realized that there is soemthing horribly wrong with the atomizing social infrastructre of thesis writing. I propagated to people that I wanted to make a "thesis therapy group" which eventually became more private little sessions I had with friends for them to open up and share their struggles. Through the expereience I realized that despite the difference in fields and writing styles, people have common struggles when it comes to scholarly writing; weaving together concepts, narrowing down the scope, producing novelty etc. I have been thinking that there is a whole space that is missing in terms of social infrastructures and media for collectivizing scholarly work in a mindful manner. I am not sure if I am motivated enough to do something in the context of scholarly/academic writing because, honestly, I am not a big fan. But what I am motivated about is creating social contexts and spaces for helping people get to the bottom of their thinking, especially when it comes to intellectually difficult work such as philosophical writing, experimental fiction writng (e.g. theory fiction) and multimedia art.

:::warning On January 27th, we received an anonymous submission in our Nexus email with the title "Balenciaga Revolution" and a seemingly void body. We lately discovered that there was an invisible text with an encrypted cipher hidden in plain sight. After some months, we cracked it with the key "hyperstition". Below you will find its contents: ::: 2023: It started off as a Balenciaga catwalk. Redditors spread memes of the catwalk which go viral, generating a retail-side demand for the collection. Balenciaga launches a campaign and invests in R&D for cost-efficient mass production. Resellers further drive down the cost of owning a piece.

Mao Zedong A spectre is looming over cyberspace, the spectre of western imperialist degenerates. DAO tools offer an unprecedented opportunity for the emancipation of the web3 legworker and a weapon for the overturning of the bourgeoisie of whales. DAOs have been left to the whim of capitalist markets, exploiting the many and leaving them cloutless with shitty useless tokens. As an alternative, we propose the MAO, Militantly Anti-capitalist Organization (or Mildly Authoritarian Organization or Maybe Another Oligarchy). The MAO is a communist party on the blockchain, simple as that. Below we outline the party line of The MAO: To join the party on Discord (soon to be Tencent) you must show your allegiance by purchasing a Little Redpapper NFT on OpenXi. A share of $MAO tokens will be airdropped to all NFT owners but if we find that your IP comes from America, you'll be airdropped new strain of corona.

Planning the perfect release is not only counter-productive, but also counter-creative. It's difficult to consider an artefact as complete in a world of constant transformation. There is always going to be something missing and the mindset of mental stiginess associated with keeping good ideas to ownself for fear of negative feedback is an old and rotting pattern that needs to be superseded. But wisdom is essential. A good balance needs to be struck between accesibility and quality. There is a big design space between the instantaneous tweet and the life-long magnum opus and it is our duty to explore it. Thinking about Issue 1, Black Sky's collective mind opted for a more organic process for publication, a gradual flow of content outside the membrane shileding Black Sky's internal cryptic machinations. This release will be continuous rather than discrete, a process rather than static artefact. This is an unrelease. The imitation of life is the great source of inspiration and forms the ground of this unrelease. The complex adaptive systems acts, gathers feedback and reiterates. The process forms a circularity recursively closing in on itself, creating a cycle of constant improvement and development. You the reader, you are invited in this dance ebtween openess and closure, linearity and circularity. You can be a part of this as much as we are. The edit button is in your controll, the version control is in ours. Let's collaborate. What to expect as part of this process? The first components are infrastructural. Initial texts will offer navigation support and guidance."How to Anonymously Build and Contribute to Crypto Projects" is a guide for curious contributors wishing to be more privacy-aware or for b. Carefully arranged steps outline what you need to do to protect yourself while offer a multitude of provacy-preserving resources we have reviewed to choose from. We admit however that amazing people are constantly building amazing things and everybody is welcome to propose equally amazing edits.

One of the most impactfull memeories that tranformed the way I think is participating in a philosophy conference in Athens during my sophomore year. The keynote speaker's lecture centered around the theme of the value of "useless ideas", "intantgibles" and things with no apparent utility. Needless to say this was a fiery defense of philosophical studies against criticisms coming from practically and technically oriented fields. What stuck to me the most was a certain example that the speaker gave which I will incorrectly paraphrase: If I give you an apple, I have lost an apple while you have gained one. You are better off, while I am not. But if I share with you an interesting idea or life advice, you will now have gained something without me losing anything. We are both better off! This realization has slipped into the backend of my mind for years powering my fascination with the dynamics of memetic contagion of ideas as well as piracy, music sampling and free software. But it is only lately that all the pieces have come together to integrate under the notions of the "commons." The Commons are resources that are held collectively without ownership being delegated to a single point of authority which singlehandedly decided about who and how they will be used. Under a modernist/industrial mode of thinking inspired by the Hobessian asssumptions that life in societies without the surveillance mechanisms of modern states was "brutish and horrible", the commons are not a mode of societal organization but a fundmental paradox, a problem, a tragedy. This thinking has inspired 20th century economic theory whose basic axioms include that of scarcity of resources. Ostrom's original formulation of the elements of sustainability of commons had to do with material and scarce resources that required constant and effortful maintainance. But when we speak about open-source software, scientific data, cultural products and of course theories, ideas and memes, the scarcity assumption hits against a wall. Intellectual goods require a different approach than materially tangible goods in that they are governed not by a logic of scarcity but of abundance. The sharing of ideas, happens in the same way that the copy-paste function or bacterial replication does. The content of an idea is not merely tranfered but replicated anew. The dynamics of tranmission are memetic and the transactional exchange of ideas is always a positive sum game. But in order for this process to happen it must operate under the condition that the peer with which one shares ideas with is not withholding ideas for personal gain. It is only by withholding information that one is playing the game of scarcity and creating value out of scarcity. For example, in Austrian Economics and especially in Friedrich Hayek's coneptualization of markets, when it comes to production, underlying goods are scarce and producing more is costly but when it comes to the communication layer where prices are set, information about prices is assumed to be freely available to everyone flows symmetrically and every economic agent is assumed to be equally informed. But as is the case with physical commons, information can be distributed unevenly and in the worst case, captured and used as an asset/tool or a commodity to be sold. There is a theoretical tension when dealing with artifacts that can be quickly replicated rather than merely tranferred that results from approaching abundance from a lens of scarcity.

Through elaborate and fine-grained visual representations of Earth as Euclidian space on a plane, natio-states increasingly try to fill empty space and expand their apparatus inside their borders in doemstic affairs and outside the borders in international affairs. This has been first achieved through the commodification of all domestic land, whose ownership can be monitored and tracked. States have spread an invisible veil of ownership over geographical space. Regarding the question of, "where is the state", what is its shape and what does it look like, although nation-states would like to think themselves as the shape of their land bounded by its boarders, in truth, state is where taxation can be effected. Essentially this makes the shape and location of the state dependent on the civilians as units. The shape of the state then exists in an abstrarct multidimensional space, a dynamic Hilbert space of constant tranformation around a center of consolidation. The space where the State lives, is a state space. A stateless society then is not one where the state is necessarily abolished but the society that can exist in all the areas of empty space in this multidimensional state space that don't intersect with its monitoring capacity. The goal of the complexity anarchist is then to naviagte this complex state space and settle in the non-State intersectiong void. Cyberspace has further complexified the shape of this state space and added additional dimensions that escape the traditional Euclidean space of geopolitics or the Riemanian space of vertical building, boradband connection, ocean and space exploration. Cyberspace is able to condense 3 dimensional space into points of singularity and adds the dimensions of server capacity and connectivity. Virtual space is no longer contained by a Cartesian space and is not volumetric but "infometric", and contained in memeory space. However, if one wished to totally dismantle the state apparatus one has to do much much more. Essentially one has to revert the clock of the history of visual thought 2.5 millenia and bring back what McLuhan and Cornford refered to as "acoustic space", a spherical discontinuous space of simulatenity that is nit dicorced from the rest of the sensory apparatus and is aways contextual and inseperable from the environemnt of the congitive subject. McLuhan claims that the phonetic alphabet is the single culprit for the emergence of the visual space which didn't exist in western cultures before that and still doesn't exist in culures that don't use a phonetic alphabet. Thus, visual space is a human artifcat that once emerged as a consequence of a tranformational shift in cogntion that the phonetic alphabet brought, mainly the seperation of perceptual forms as they are presented in experience from their environemtn in which they are presented. This led to the ability of high degrees of symbolic abstarction that led to the possibility of the written tracking of oral speech and the translation of different languages into one alphabet, a radically disruptive technological development that marked a non-linear leap in human cognition and the production of media. Geometry, Ptolemaic Astronomy, Philosophy and Engineering where all derivative forms of this basic tranformational shift. For example, in philosophy logic couldn't have emerged without the requirement of continuity and coherence which was essential to construct a syllogism on paper. ....

Succesfull communication of a work's genius should be assesed according to how well it can adress the normie rather than the knowledgable individual. From the side of the innitiated, the work is "elaborate", or "enlightening", or aesthetically pleasing, but from the side of the normie it is not. From the normies's point of view, it is merely "deep". It is no conincidence that it is very usual to use the word deep for describing the sublime in teh realm of the layman rather than words such as "illuminating". What I suspect to be the case is that the metaphorical use of the word itself hints to the viewpoint of the normie when it comes to sublimity; if the work is succesfull in communicating its sublimity, the normie will admit that it is deep because they acknowledge its depth, that there is more to be explored and found if only the normie had the time and willingness to enagage more. Pronouncing something as deep is a highly humbling experience not only for normies or degens but even more so for groups or individuals of the highest intellectual capacity. To acknowledge depth is to acknowledge open-endedness and possibility of new knowledge. On the other hand to call something illuminating hints to the fact that what has been once in the dark depth of ingorance is now shone a light at and can be seen with full clarity and disambiguity. The thing is now tangible and the possibilities suddenly converge in the sole object of insight and are thus exhausted. Open-endedness ceases to exist since what there was to know is now known. The teleological destination has been reached. To be "deep" is to be in a non teleological realm. It is to be open to exploration and possibility. The normie has epstemic access to a domain that highly educated people would only wish to be able to access again. Therefore, to really adress the normie and make the profoundity of a work perceivable, one must seek to make explicit that there is a world of hidden possibilities to be explored.

The news about Ukraine's invasion hit hard. Five days later, the world has still not processed the full consequences of this aggression. But one thing is clear: This is not just about Ukraine! Putin's international-law-breaking geopolitical moves without any resistance from the EU, NATO or the UN show that imperialism is not dead and the fragile peace among nations is all too easily broken. And that begs the question: What can I, as a mere citizen, do about this? As it turns out, we can do quite a lot. Thanks to web3. It is up to us as global citizens to use information technologies as weapons againt sovereign state agression and disregard for human life/rights. And, maybe for the first time in history, we have effective tools to do so. Sadly, the potential of decentralized finance and web3 infrastructure to empower people has been overshadowed by greedy money-grabbing schemes and media hype. But under all the hype and FUD, web3 technology is giving global citizens a way to impact the world, including by resisting sovereign imperiealism. DAOs have already proven how much power they can yield with [Constitution DAO] (which almost bought an original copy of the U.S. Constitution), and Free Ross DAO [^1] and AssangeDAO [^2] (which raised funds to support political whistleblowers). This fits within the braoder rise of online platform-enabled mass coordination attempts such as GameStops's Wall Street short squeeze. There is nwo an effective way for ordinary citizens to put serious pressure on big and powerfull institutions by putting their money where their mouths are.

We have been using personal computers for so long that we have totally forgot how eerily suspicious the language used to describe basic features of their opeating systems is. Take the desktop for example. In a sense the desktop is the first form of Virtual Reality. It is a functional simulation of an office space. A great example of the absurdity of this can be seen in a surreal stand up by Alan Reznik (which some of you may recognize as the schizoid artistsic genius between Adult Swim's surreal infomercials and Youtube ARGs). For the purposes of this arguement I have to unfortunately spoil this for you (so go watch it first). Alan plays with this absurdity by having a projector of a chaotic desktop as well as an actual physical desktop with all the the stuff seen in the virtual desktop. As he adds stuff to the physical desktop they get added to the virtual one. The climax comes at the last moment when Alan just wiped all the stuff off his desk in front of him and the messy desktop in the screen gets wipped-up clean! This is a great example showcasing the cheap metaphors we live by. If the desktop of your OS strived for accuracy and "realness" as computer graphics, physics simulations, neural networks and of course Virtual Reality environments try to emulate, then we might as well have a full desk electronic Minority-Report-type desk interface of the computer along with the good ol' mouse and keyboard. But don't be deluded by the vertical placement of the screen, the desktop is a simulation of a horizontal plain where gravity is encoded as icon placement, as seen from a top-down view. Everything on the desktop can be arranged in a flat manner with no difference in degree of importance. The desktop is flat and immediate, all objects are present at once. But when a folder is added, then we have something different, a verτical element is added. Folders can hold files within themselves and even other folders. Folders introduce an element of mediation and indirectness for the sake of organizational efficiency and simplicity. They can escape the 2-dimensional flatness of the desktop and create new plateaus on which to drop files and applications. They can store, hold and without them programming as we know it would be impossible. They are a simualtion of the dossiers and notebooks and documents behind you, on the shelves and in your drawers. But there seems to be a fundamental constraint imbued in this whole design. The aboslute foundation of all base operating systems is a simualtion of an office room and of office-related tasks. This makes sense as personal computers were originally manufactured and used as work-facilitation machines. But what if you don't want to use the computer as a traditional office space? You don't spend all your time in an office space so why default in the same default interface when you don't use your pc for work? Or what if your work is quite different from traditional corporate desk-work ala The Office? And here is where I would make the McLuhany hot statement; what if the 21st obsession with 24hr work and the increasing trend of the inability to seperate work from non-work due to the rise of remote jobs is due to this specific unexamined quirk of the base design of Operating Systems? And what if other interfaces such as Anrdoid smart-phones who try to emulate personal computers actually also emulate and even exaggerate the corporate work environment and make it mobile, portable and omnipresent? There is however a more alarming effect of this weird quirk, what I would call the bureaupoeisis of quotidian every-day human activities. The etymology of this portmanteau comes from the unholy mixture of the word "bureau", meaning office (or desk) and the greek word "poiesis" which denotes the process of making. In short, bureaupoiesis is the process by which all activities involving the interaction with computing devices are steadily tranfroming them into types of office work or office-related behaviours. Using a PC is obvious enough, you need to sit down, write, search navigate betwen files, etc. The browser provides a possibility of escape due to the non-linear and exploratory nature of surfing, but is still an element on a desktop and happens inside the confines of the bureapoetic structure of the OS, being cosntantly reminded of this fact by the presence of the "taskbar" and "tabs". The structure of the topbar of a browser is a bare-bones corporate task management system.

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