Chase spent most of the hackathon in his hotel room. It took him several days to recover from the food poisoning, or whatever it was, and although he tested negative at the door for the virus, he hadn't wanted to attend any of the events looking like he had a fever. There was some confusion, too, because he'd registered for the conference virtually, before he'd decided to go in person, and had assumed that his application was good for both, but that turned out not to be the case. The organizers were understanding, and told him he could have access to most of the co-working spaces and larger events, but some of the more exclusive workshops and smaller venues had already sold out, Cornibuff NFTs or no.
He'd missed the original meet-ups for the Daemon DAO, and had started to feel weird lurking in the Accord channels. His sub-thread for a Meme-DAO, where NFTs would confer the rights to commercial derivative works, facilitating an evolutionary landscape for creative projects, had been archived due to inactivity. Everyone had been so friendly, at first, and excited when he'd announced that he would be there in person. Now, though, he could see people who told him they were too busy to help him with his project in voice chats with other people from the DAO, and the few who joined the Direct Message groups he'd set up had set up had, despite clearly being online and active in other channels, stopped responding.
Maybe he'd tried too hard, or unknowingly committed some faux-pas, violated an unwritten rule. Or, more likely, despite all the noise about making Web 3, and the DAO itself, a place where everyone could contribute whatever skills or passions they possessed, they were really only looking for people with provable coding skills. In the heady first few days, still more or less bed-ridden and delirious, he'd set up a Bithub repository, with a readme.md file and even a skeleton web page for other people to start contributing, pushing commits or making pull requests. A week in, he was the only contributor.
He'd watched a lot of the presentations live on Witch, and even more when they were posted to BlueTube, feeling keenly pathetic since the events on the screen were happening less than a block away. Chase obsessively checked crypto prices, which were plummeting, presumably because of the possibility of conflict between Russia and Ukraine, or interest rate hikes. He watched the savings he'd accumulated over the last ten years of tutoring annoying high school kids, helping them with their English essays and college entrance exams, slowly bleed into the digital ether, despite all of his elaborate strategies of liquidity mining, staking, and chasing air drops of new and promising projects.
In other words, he was doing the same things he would have been doing at home, except he was paying almost 100 dollars a night for a hotel room, eating take-out and drinking beer.
Chase was about to shut off his laptop when he saw that he had a direct message from someone called pseudoghost. He'd never talked to them before, but they were in the Daemon DAO Accord server, and the message said, "hey, I saw your post about the Seedly airdop. Good stuff, they're definitely a rug pull. You study memetics?"
He wouldn't have replied, but it was late, and aside from the guy in the food truck and the woman at the gas station where he'd bought the six-pack, he hadn't talked to anyone all day. He also still was holding out hopes of finding a team to work with in the hackathon. It was too late for the in-person bounties, but he could still enter virtually, savoring the irony of being in Denver but not actually attending any of the events, because of his irritable bowels and social anxiety.
As long as he didn't follow any links, didn't give out any of his personal info, he should be okay. He was drunk, but still paranoid enough not to fall for anything.
Yeah, thanks. You summoning a daemon?
That was the gimmick of the Daemon DAO. When they shipped products to clients, they called it "summoning daemons." The idea was that humans civilizations and enterprise naturally gravitated towards entropy, stupidity, violence, and waste. There were intractable problems of game theory, which any rational person, observing from the outside, could see were disadvantageous for the population as a whole, but which also, from the point of view of an individual entity forced to participate within the system, were unavoidable. The tragedy of the commons, the prisoner's dilemma: they were all different names for the same thing, the inability to act in ways that maximized the well-being of a group, without sacrificing one's well-being as an individual.
Daemons, taking inspiration from the hypothetical entities that would be required to create a perpetual motion machine, to produce energy from nothing (standing by as gatekeepers for molecules, selecting for those with properties of thermal excitation), were a metaphor for algorithms, or contracts, that could be set loose upon the world as a counterbalance to entropic, counter-productive tendencies. Robotic angels. In the mythos of the Daemon DAO, which was a blend of role-playing group and freelance web development mercenaries, their quest was to summon enough daemons to keep human civilization from destroying itself.
Exactly, pseudoghost wrote.
You're not going to try to sell me an NFT, are you? Chase wrote back.
No. The whole idea of an NFT, which is an attempt to attach value to a thing, is flawed. What we're trying to create is a thing whose value is coterminous with itself. Any representation of value in a memetic ecosystem becomes a parasitic drain on the worth of the thing itself. The map can't equal the territory. More importantly, a territory with its trees cut down to make maps is worth less than a territory that doesn't bother mapping its own domain.
Okay, Chase wrote. Go on.
Here was the pitch: the pseudoghost had written a simple program, just a few lines of code, that could be inserted into existing projects. It didn't alter them in any malicious way, it just took any human language text that it could find in the file structure, and ran it through a process that the pseudoghost called "poemification", splicing them into the file, using periods and commas as dividers for new lines and breaks in the poetry, and then randomizing the selection and presentation of those sections, inserting them as new comments hidden in the code itself.
You know what comments are in programming, right?
Yeah, Chase answered, but they're supposed to explain the code, make it easier to understand.
The pseudoghost responded, after an excruciating ten minute wait, during which Chase considered closing his laptop and going to bed. The poemify daemon is a beneficent virus. It just wants to survive, and offers no justification for its existence other than its own beauty and simplicity. Any comments that it produces, that don't contribute to the value of the file will be found by developers, and removed. 99% or greater will be deleted. The comments that survive will do so because they are amusing, or fill some other linguistic or psychological niche that we as developers can't even imagine, and they in turn will be replicated by the poemify protocol, and injected into other files and repositories.
We're creating artificial intelligence, artificial life, but with absolute minimalism. The poemify algorithm itself can evolve, and replicate. It will do so because it has no value. No external or assigned value, that is. The only papers it carries, it's raison d'etre, fits exactly on top of the linguistic fitness of the poetic comments.
It was too much for Chase, sitting on the bed in the hotel room, potato chip crumbs on the sheets. It sounded good, but he didn't really get it.
So, what would you want me to do, exactly?
It was another ten minutes before the pseudoghost wrote back.
You're a writer. Volunteer to contribute to the docs of as many projects as you can. Find any files with a .py extension in the repositories, and inject our code.
You want me to infect programs with malware?
Not malware. Mal means bad. Bene is good. This is beneware. You are infecting them with poetry. For their own good. The best poems will replicate, and spread.
Will I get paid, somehow?
No. The map is the territory. The value is coterminous with the language itself. The language is its own reward.
Chase watched Bluetube videos for a while, and checked back later to see if there were any more messages.
Go to the temple. I'm wearing a blue shirt.
"Nah, I'm good," Chase mumbled to himself, but then, after closing his laptop and plugging his phone in to charge while he slept, he realized there was still an after-party going on. It was a band he'd wanted to see, anyway, the weird melody that had been the only reason he'd stayed in the "virtual castle" for as long as he had, bouncing like a pinball between bots trying to promote various altcoins.
It was strange, being outside. Everything was bright, every source of information, as every source of light for people with astigmatism, branching into too many different directions, compass rose haloing every possibility with regret.
At least now he would be able to say he'd attended one event in person. He could tell people that he'd gone to the conference, and not feel like a total fraud.
They checked his cornybuff at the door. Every attended event, every social interaction of every attendee had been inscribed on the immutable distributed ledger of the blockchain. Everything was gamified. By sitting in his hotel room in self-imposed confinement, but constantly updating his Bithub repository, he'd been at the conference just as much as any warm body sitting in the seats. He'd been sitting where the camera was. Chatting in the streams, so maybe participating, maybe really being there, in the sense of being present, more than the well-dressed, attractive people in the actual frame. He was telepathic. All he had to do was to think something, to type it, and he had an audience larger than the hackers actually in the room.
That's what he told himself.
"Hey, nice. I'm a zombie, too."
Zombies were one of the sub-forms of cornybuffs. Chase looked for a brief, doomed second into the door-guy's eyes, knocking on the door of the infinite feedback loop of trying to gauge sincerity. Information ponging and pinging back and forth between his need for external validation and his internal insecurities.
"Zombies strong!" Chase said, astounded how weird the meme sounded when said out loud.
The door guy smiled with either genuine amusement or ill-concealed contempt. "Eat brains!"
Inside, there were people dancing in silence, except for the scuffles of shoes and murmur of subdued conversation. They were all wearing headphones. Lights spun and flashed from a dozen directions, red and blue-shifting in time with the unheard rhythm.
Chase stood as close to the wall as he dared without becoming a cliche, a cartoon fading into a bush.
He did see someone, tall, wearing what might have been a blue shirt, leave the dance floor and check his phone, which was in the pocket of his coat, which was in a line of other coats laid out on plastic tables.
"Pseudoghost?" Chase asked, regretting it as soon as he saw the look of confusion.
"Have I seen a ghost?"
"No, sorry. I thought I knew you."
"It's all good." Fist bump. Chase wanted to throw up.
He was about to leave when a young Indian woman came up to him. "Don't have any headphones?" she asked.
"No," Chase said. "I didn't know it was..."
"It's okay," the woman said, smiling with what could either be kindness or mockery. "Here, listen."
She pulled her own headphones from her neck, and with a twist, detached the left one, handing it to him. He'd never seen that before. He put it to his left ear, and she put hers to her right.
"That's really good," he said, with the inflection of a person unable to read social cues in the voices of other people, and so makes their own affect completely flat, in a comical impersonation of how other people sounded to them.
The woman only nodded, and then looked at the stage, mercifully avoiding eye-contact or any direct acknowledgment of his existence for a minute or two. Not dancing, exactly, the way she had been before, but nodding and bobbing unselfconsciously.
"I feel like...people are looking at us." Chase said, handing the headphone back.
"Yeah," she answered. "It's because I'm in the band. Keep these," she said, reconnecting the right and the left sides. "Don't go anywhere." Then she walked up to the stage, nodding to another Indian guy who had been tapping and typing alternately on a soundboard and laptop. She picked up an electric violin, just the plastic outline of an instrument with strings, a pick-up, and a resonator, and a bow, slipped on another pair of headphones, and started to play.