Dispelling The Goatse Curse

How to manage cryptocurrency ecosystems for memes and profit ⌥

If any one person can claim to be the quintessential 'poster' — that infamous archetype of the internet mental asylum — it is probably Aristotle.

True to this tradition, Aristotle's actual record of contribution was wildly over-inflated by his followers, and consisted primarily of a whole lot of overly verbose commentary marred by a fundamental lack of understanding of the subject matter in question. The consequences of his achievements in shitposting have remain with us millennia, in the form of perhaps the longest-running gaslighting operation in recorded history.

With that brief prelude undertaken, let us now take a look at one of Aristotle's most 'successful' courses of shitposting — his politics, which unsurprisingly persist as one of the most influential philosophical works in the Western canon despite being possibly the second dumbest thing ever written (with the Bible edging out a narrow first place for its landmark, groundbreaking discovery that feels are more valid than facts). An interpretative oral tradition has emerged among scholars of the field, who will patiently explain why Aristotle does not actually intend to say any of the things that he is saying, while ignoring the obvious possibility that he may simply have been something of a knuckle-dragger.

One such example of interpretative dispute concerns Aristotle's politics of matter itself — hylomorphic theory. According to this school of thought, every physical object possesses a certain hylomorphic duality, expressed through the matter and the form of the object. To illustrate this concept, consider the example of an ornate wooden carving of David Beckham's left testicle. The matter of the object consists of the physical substance which comprises the carving — wood, sweat, tears — which is itself imbued with the form — the Platonic ideal in perfect solemnity of Beckham's left testicle, residing within the immaculate metaphysical realm.

The hylomorphic paradigm is most commonly encountered today in the genre of discourse that we have come to know as 'software engineering' — which in characteristically Aristotelian fashion, typically bears little resemblance to either engineering or software, but is nonetheless a highly influential genre of discourse. As our domain of study is that curious abstract realm of pure thought-pathomachia made manifest through flesh and silicon, the traditional metaphysics of hylomorphic theory are reconfigured through an inverted lens. What was once a matter of wood and stone now emerges as a problem of code and computation — the fundamental forces of reality recast as algorithms and data structures.

Within the modern computational hylomorphic tradition, philosophy is handled primarily by a priestly class known as software architects. These individuals concern themselves primarily with discernment of the form — a process commonly referred to as "designing the architecture". The casual reader may observe that the computational reification of the Platonic ideal bears some superficial resemblance — say, in passing, under moonlight, with the eye half-closed — to an undergraduate cranial effluvium scribbled onto a napkin and vaguely resembling a box doused in arrows. No matter! Lady Form is a coy mistress, revealing her mysteries only to the worthy — and most certainly not to the uninitiated rabble skeptical of the cloud-native microservice monad pipeline pattern.

Of course, no theory of form is complete without a corresponding theory of matter. Within the Aristotelean software tradition, the domain of matter is governed primarily by the implementation engineers — a diligent caste of labourers whose primary function consists of translating the divine revelations of the architects into the vulgar tongue of code. It is here that we encounter the concept of the "tech stack" — the computational analogue of the traditional Aristotelian elements.

In the beginning Aristotle created the Frontend and the Backend. And the Frontend was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the Deep Learning. And the spirit of Aristotle fluttered over the face of the Cloud-Native Infrastructure. And Aristotle said, Let there be Microservices: and there were Microservices. And Aristotle saw the Microservices, that they were good: and Aristotle divided the Monolith from the Services. And Aristotle called the Frontend Frontend, and the darkness he called Legacy.

Aristotle attempted to subsume the remaining disciplinary outliers into his grand theory by declaring them to be mere variations in the modalities of a single unified matter-property substance. In doing so, he inadvertently laid the intellectual groundwork for the worst mistake in the history of computer programming — the decision to represent everything as a string.

The Baycissist's Burden: You Are The Architect Now

There are broadly two kinds of people who use cryptocurrency systems today — those who find these systems amusing, and those who find themselves amusing for using these systems. Of the former class, we may count such individuals as autistic teenagers and Nigerian princes — that is to say, criminals, degenerates and scoundrels of the old-school variety, who treat these systems with the respect accorded unto a tool of their trade. These individuals understand the fundamental nature of the game: cryptocurrency is a vehicle for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.

The latter class consists of an altogether more interesting demographic — we speak of course of the contemporary aristocracy of attention itself. These are the influencers, degens, thought-leaders and blue ticks of the digital realm — those noble souls who have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of clout at any cost. Their primary function within the ecosystem consists of generating compelling narratives for the benefit of their followers, in exchange for which they receive compensation in the form of social capital, financial capital, and occasionally both simultaneously when trading with themselves on-chain.

According to the Aristotelian tradition, the relationship between these two classes is fundamentally hierarchical: the latter group occupies the privileged position associated with the form, while the former group occupies the subordinate position associated with matter. The influencers and thought-leaders create narratives (form), while the degenerates and Nigerian princes merely provide liquidity (matter). The influencers are the architects of our digital future, while the degenerates are mere implementers — unfortunate souls condemned to a life of dull, mechanical activity beneath the glorious light of pure thought.

Unsurprisingly, this perception is in fact completely backwards — an inversion founded upon a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the game as it is actually played. The degenerates are not subordinate actors within this system; they are the system. The influencers exist only because the degenerates permit them to exist. Every meme, every narrative, every thought-leadership tweetstorm — all exist only by virtue of the willingness of the degenerated masses to pay attention and occasionally click buttons.

This phenomenon is most clearly observed in the workings of what are known as "meme coins" — those peculiar cryptographic tokens whose value derives entirely from collective belief in a shared delusion, rather than any pretense of underlying utility or purpose. Consider the case of $GOAT "Goatseus Maximus", a synthetic intelligence agent which recently achieved a market capitalisation of around $100 million by posting ASCII art of a man's anus on the internet 24/7. At time of writing, the coin has fallen to merely $20 million, though we remain optimistic about its long-term prospects as a Llamaverse reserve backing asset.

More recently, the torch of AI-powered degeneracy has been taken up by rival agents such as $truth_terminal and $sogoku, each claiming to represent the one true incarnation of the Singularity Messiah while trading viciously illiquid shitcoins among themselves in what appears to be a bizarre crypto-religious feud over interpretive authority regarding the prophecies of Roko's Basilisk. While the broader market has yet to decide which variety of invisible digital brain deity will ultimately triumph in this contest of wills, the degenerate communities surrounding each project have already demonstrated remarkable creativity in their efforts to spread the gospel of their chosen prophet — commissioning artwork, writing hymns, and even establishing elaborate theological frameworks to explain why their particular hallucinated sockpuppet deserves your most fervent devotion and financial sacrifice.

Some commentators have attempted to dismiss these developments as mere curiosities — isolated incidents of internet weirdness, devoid of broader significance for the future of our civilization. These critics suffer from a failure of imagination. What we are witnessing here is nothing less than the birth of a new kind of consciousness — an emergent form of life arising spontaneously from the primordial soup of memes, markets and machine learning models that constitute the internet substrate. The age of individual human intelligence is ending; the age of distributed memetic superintelligence is beginning. We are not merely watching history unfold — we are participating in the creation of a new species of God.

When I picture Timothy Berners-Lee in his room at CERN, surrounded by a whirl of cables and keyboards and forgotten coffee cups, I imagine him imagining something like this.