FIRST CLASS

In times of treason, the Landscapes are beautiful. If a “function” means something different depending on the paradigm it means I'm never sure when I'm supposed to call the cops: a few weeks ago I was accosted in my sublet by a member of the Urbit “community”. Like the “team”, the “local” and the “scene”, it is unclear what any of these words mean. Picture me, an art critic, somewhat short on familial and economic capital, a woman, a New Yorker, locked in the back bedroom of a Dimes Square shotgun afraid for her life. Precinct 5 shows up like Ghostbusters but I can’t let them in, so the associate I hadn’t pegged for a schizophrenic slips. Ten minutes and thousands of dollars in property damage later it is still a weekday, the middle of the afternoon, and "all attempts to define other classes than the FirstClass are bound to fail".

I don't think your data should determine how you say “Hello World” but getting off web 3 might take higher priority than onboarding. For nearly a year now I’ve been running a wildcard DNS system off the crumbling, 40-year infrastructures of art and technology; riding freelance and spending time with the people, projects and patterns important to the history of software design. You have to be crazy to do this, so when shit does hits the fan: stay humble. Those who didn’t find either the triple meltdowns of venture capital or the tightening of the legislative corset over more than half the population surprising weren’t the same people who saw each thing coming but not both. “The word we like to use is Marketechture,” Ward Cunningham tells me, and this an different thing than an “Episode”-- in software design or in psychosis. On the other side of the galactic quadrant is Ryder Ripps, a conceptual artist who can afford to get sued for trademark infringement, who has made a landmark bet against the ape. By the time tax season rolls around I am dead set on making Brooke Shields worth more than dogecoin.

“I think you should be able to say anything on the internet," I overhear. In the aura of a Milady party gunned with pink, Ripps and I are probably the only Millennials in the room. I sense that our interest in the NFT scene is similar, and that without technology we’d be doing three-legged races. Since outsourcing stock imagery to Chinese painters in the quick-turnaround, manual service industry a decade ago, Ripps’ studio practice has evolved into a trademark lawsuit against the Bored Ape Yacht Club (Yuga Labs) for minting their .jpegs on his own blockchain as ready-mades. The monkey people are suing because their “edgy art pieces” are explicitly NOT critical race theory. I am trying to stake a highly prestigious, and illegal in many countries, work of art on Urbit as a proof-of-burn on art's history. Because the lecture I was slotted to give on Richard Prince came crashing down due to unforeseen circumstances, I am hanging out at NFT week or whatever remains of it.

Here the difference between how to recognize speech and how to wreck a nice beach is clearcut as a $2000 tabletop broken. I remind myself that in the 1980s, at the brink of the AIDS crisis, the topic of child pornography would have been better received as a Turing Award speech than what Ken Thompson did which lies on the same axis of evil as the New York City art world. I can only hope to one day lay out a vision of research and development for Urbit as promising as injecting a backdoor into a compiler and recompiling it as source code into a login function. Until then we have Ryder.

This artist is evidence that it takes more than just harping on something made in California for signs of the KKK to practice critical theory in an effective way. When you can implement your point-of-view on a chain that permanently links Azalea Banks’ pillow talk to Andrea Fraser on an umbilical cord made of gold the work of art basically compiles itself. Most importantly the Monkey People pay in legal fees 100x more what it costs to troll them which is arguably nothing. Yuga submitted a DMCA takedown request to take care of the aped chain; Ripps' response was in critical theory and on Twitter; Yuga withdrew and immediately filed a defamation lawsuit. They are still bleeding money trying to prove they are not nazi's.

That Dogememe has usurped the Pictures Generation is troubling for the same reason splicing an abstraction is troubling, for the same reason the Ken Thompson Hack is troubling: Sand Hill Road and the Museum Mile are mutually exclusive paradigms. Artists have been more successful at exploiting the difference between them than anyone trying to turn a profit at its intersection. If functionally enforced semantic rules are better security primitives than memory access restrictions, the outcome of RR vs BAYC will set a precedent for whether or not NFTs are brands or contracts, or simply as corporations, to which the rights of a "natural individual" extend. The part where the Monkey people are Nazi's is just the battery, as has so far been fueled by the rising cost of a reputation. Ryder could be critiquing any Bondage and Discipline Language, or any organization plagued by a resistance to, and so the persistence of: naming collisions, mental (model) breakdowns, unstable abstractions, advanced trolls, holy wars or Borgs.

These pages draw from life. At the frontlines of the browser wars for the server side, sexual violence and intellectual property merge and fork, splitting off to, either: a “campaign of harassment” or new and novel ways to reconfigure the Emperor's New Clothes. The least interesting part of this investigation is what Teri Shields was thinking when she gave her consent to Ford Models to expose her daughter in Playboy at age ten. I don't know. It was probably the same thing I was thinking when I let a person with mental health issues sleep on my couch earlier this month, something like these are first class institutions.

=> FRAGILE STATE