Exhibitions, Research, Criticism, Commentary
A chronology of 3,585 references across art, science, technology, and culture
“Bryan Johnson—the man who transfused his son’s blood, dumped his fiancé when she was diagnosed with stage III breast cancer, and takes 54 pills every morning—is poised to be a major literary inspiration of our contemporary age. The longevity bro is the Dracula we deserve.”
“To curate an exhibition about a world where the principal ideal is decentralization involves a certain contradiction because curation demands selection, exclusion, and gatekeeping.”
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin surveys network states, popup cities, and experimental governance zones in a sprawling blog post. Drawing on Zuzalu—his 2023 experiment gathering crypto developers and rationalists in Montenegro for two months—he sketches “digital tribes” as intermediaries between atomized individuals and states, warning they often regress into “glorified coworking spaces.” His solution: hubs and zones for testing radical democracy and “culture as social technology.”
“The one part of financial history crypto could never replicate was the beginning part, where financial products had real-world references. Because of this untethering, all that you have is the most Byzantine and Baroque patterns. Whoever can build the most Baroque pattern will win.”
“Even the word cypherpunk, I think it’s at least two-thirds gentrified at this point.”
“The best thing about Tezos is its incredible community of left-leaning artists who have created a circular economy and systems of mutual support. It’s almost like a communist chain.”
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“Crypto is a dark forest and arguably getting darker. The combination of lightly regulated exotic mechanisms, extreme leverage, and technical instability creates unquantifiable levels of risk, and the veneer of rational settlement can disappear in a second as the referees at centralized exchanges pick winners and losers.”
“Projects involving mixers, zero-knowledge proofs, multi-party computation, and other privacy-preserving protocols could face existential legal risk—not for what they do, but for how someone uses them.”
OUT NOW:
Poliks & Trillo
Exocapitalism
Theorists Marek Poliks and Robert Alonso Trillo map capital’s migration into algorithmic territories—from AI to memecoins—developing conceptual tools for navigating life in an era of automated finance and distributed computation.
”A sci-fi idea that everyone said would fail, built for a vision of the future that seemed unattainable. We took that future and planted it in the present, the beginning of an infinite machine that lets anyone, anywhere access that future, make commitments to it, to write code and build things that will persist into it.”
“I DO NOT CARE ABOUT COINS. I DO NOT CARE ABOUT COINS. I DO NOT CARE ABOUT COINS.”
“I love NFTs because I can spend a year being super serious about making an artwork, release it to the public, and then see that it was minted by someone named drwhetfaaartz.eth and be genuinely delighted. You just don’t get this anywhere else.”
“The optics of power are simultaneous with power itself, a continuous surface.”
“What if I shove a billion monkeys in a GPU and asked them to write a game for the Atari 2600?” asks San Francisco hacker Brian Benchoff in his Finite Atari Machine project. Generating 30 billion random game files, filtering them using patterns from real Atari games, then testing the ‘survivors’ in emulators yielded several ROMs with moving graphics—and one that even responds to joystick input. Searching for random games is more productive “than mining Fartcoin, at least,” he jokes.
“By making high-stakes speculation feel like a game, crypto platforms increase convenience and encourage sustained activity. This is not accidental; it is an engineered dynamic that drives volume, visibility and, ultimately, revenue.”
“Described in blockchain terms, sex is not soulbound—it is a matter of stake. If you want more masculinity for yourself or your workplace, simply buy some.”
“The ‘red-chip’ art collector eschews the historicized trust in federal wealth and believes that all money should be decentralized and put on the blockchain—taking money into our own hands and not trusting the government whatsoever.”
OUT NOW:
Other Internet
2018–2024
The definitive Other Internet anthology collects the Web3 research collective’s published essays and reports, traces crypto-cultural history in six new pieces, and surfaces new material from the archives.
“The advent of the internet, social media, and cryptocurrency all promised revolutionary social transformation and returns for investors. In each of these cases, the rewards ended up concentrated in the hands of a few, while the risks were borne by society as a whole.”
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- Perspective: research, long-form analysis, and critical commentary
- Encounters: in-depth artist profiles and studio visits of pioneers and key innovators
- Stream: a timeline and news archive with 3,100+ entries and counting
- Edition: HOLO’s annual collector’s edition that captures the calendar year in print