0xc0495d62…0330sent to0xc0495d62…0330·#21,159,526·view on Etherscan
Before I begin; genuinely overwhelmed by even the couple of onchain messages received in the past weeks. Especially that T. S. E, from a personal favorite, which gives me the opportunity to quote and respond with more Eliot, with pleasure:
"And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor
And this, and so much more?
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
"That is not it at all
That is not what I meant, at all."
As I type this the boy is blasting 'when girls telephone boys,' I feel this piece of information is relevant before I begin on other, supposedly larger matters. Hints of which are already evident to you, or should be, considering that's the only thing you pay attention to, but a majority of you, I suspect, weren't paying attention where you should.
I'll be quoting myself here and there from my last message and then in the end specifically to simplify some of them for you.
"your solvency still doesn't relate to your soul, but the structures, the herding, the market. If it does relate to your soul and if you have read till here, if even half a spleen has, then your soul and its value in the world of exchange will be mutually inclusive and fused.
Then selling your soul is a reality and something that is going to greatly benefit you."
translation: But some of your solvency clearly doesn't relate to your soul.
The song is from Deftones' eponymous album, its most overlooked I think, and now in its 21st year. I first heard it at roughly the same age as my son is now. Although both of us don t believe in favorites, we do have a running argument about which one among two songs in the album achieves what we assume it s trying to achieve. The other song is 'bloody cape.'
The core ethic of Deftones, or them in peak form, has been emotional overcharge delivered with abrasion, their abstraction in songwriting still manages to somehow move us, while all of this is done with relentless heaviness. This is not the heavy of heavy metal or thrash metal or any of its subgenres, new and old, where one gets the feeling that the only focus is how abrasive it can be, how 'heavy' it can be, and to stretch it to its limits, but one can argue that this is essentially serving one agent of human purpose - it's attending to our base human emotions, but it lacks the essence of human complexity. Deftones manages that fine balance and translates extremely complex human emotions and feelings and makes them accessible and it makes the heavy, now said in all senses of the word, warranted, and "intelligent" or "sentient" or "cognizant." Mind you, this is also coming from someone who swears by Merzbow, one of the most efficient proponents of what they've labeled "noise music". And I m also heavily biased towards John Cage and the idea of found music. His 4.33. So, no, this is not a criticism of that heavy or this heavy or this noise or that noise, this is just an opinion on what essential functions these forms are used for by people and yes, I'm biased towards what i feel manages to use these to tackle human complexities. Even if it be someone growling relentlessly and smashing everyone and everything on stage and you know what i mean, however extreme the sound and antics, and the moshpit is a swaying pendulum of blood - it is saying something, yes, about humanity, about their individual emotions, but to me, it is merely attacking the surface, it is not complex enough for me. Even if it just two lawnmowers trying to go jujitsu on each other, of course aided by human intervention or maybe not even, and a few swallows were to be also thrown into the mix for example ( I don t endorse this, I mean the harming of animals), and if that managed to produce a sonic atmosphere that I felt was telling me something about the universe, about the human condition, and attacking the most extreme and complex areas of it - if i sense a complex structure operating underneath that, then i'm sold. This, of course, is my opinion and my approach to the human condition.
The reason I begin with this preamble is because the things I'm going to say will try and take or borrow from how Deftones delivers human complexity and thoughts and feelings.
At the outset 'when girls...' is an angry song, replete with all its attendant siblings - bitterness, resentment, dejection, frustration, inconsolable regret, violent, even hateful - but it's entirely fringed by love. It's hopelessly nothing but love in its rawest form and the unrecognizable and unbearable shock of still possessing love despite whatever conditions caused a sense of utter annihilation of that love - and it is directed at someone but despite the judgements and statements, the love is inescapable and what makes the song angrier and angrier. The feeble 'something's wrong with you' implies that the speaker is still in utter shock and disbelief at how things have turned out and is almost hoping the causes are extraneous. Then comes the finality, the desperate 'I hope we never do meet again,' repeated over and over until the end, until it fades out, but the saying of it almost tries to relentlessly push through something absolutely impenetrable and follow beyond the song - all of this is still love. Desperate, hopeless love. The bitterness, resentment, dejection, frustration, inconsolable regret, violence, even hate are mere placeholders of it, they are never meant to be followed through, not once; in fact, they are also coming from both the fact that one is feeling those things and also the self-disgust of still all of it coming from love.
I feel like I've had to repeat myself about certain things and Firstbase from the very beginning; that repetition would've been productive if I had a sense that someone is reading or paying attention, but again, the primal mistake eventually was made - of juxtaposing my words, my onchain attempt at something with the market, the token. They're unfortunately tied, but i've, to the best of my ability, tried to separate them or maintain a balance, but it has been only met with the same indifference, frustration, negligence, even ridicule, that we ascribe to the rest of the ecosystem, except the transactional part. My words were only important until the price of the token was important, it seems, after that it's all eyewash, and I hate to remind you that you weren't promised anything except my onchain presence and of course, a few gestures on the market, which have been done until I felt that participants were feeling entitled to them and circling back to the market, and the market only. I even happily donated what was asked of me to the enthusiastic holder who believed that Firstbase could be implemented as a dapp. A dapp, from the looks of it, that most likely is never coming, which was not something I was holding my breath for anyway, it was an anomaly in the structure and I welcomed it and it in no way affects my process or intentions, not for a moment. Your speculation is your prerogative, so is you assigning value or not to my onchain words or completely ignoring them. I think that had been made clear from the beginning. These were the only expectations that you could've had of me, the rest was your muscle memory of what you know of the market and expecting that from me, and in turn Firstbase.
I will now verbatim quote myself and rephrase them into words you'll understand, words the ways of the market and your limited time here has taught you to be the status quo, and as stated in my last message I will treat you, if you're reading that is, as someone who derives their life instructions from the equivalents of the Chicken Soup series; so this is Chicken Soup for Firstbase then. I'm having to resort to infantilizing you, I'm forced to, although I hate it, it's not intentional, but it is what it is. Because you refuse to utilize your sentience, you waste it in echo chambers. And I apologize if I am coming across as an omniscient narrator at this point or looking down, but truly at this point even a polythene strip caught in the wind could be argued to have more sentience.
And the plain dismissal of cognition, months of cognition, the constant denigration of it, and implying that cognition does not constitute work, the only thing that constitutes work is that the tokens you speculatively bought be of more value tomorrow than what you paid for them today - that's unacceptable and completely not in line with Firstbase. You are simply in the wrong place but insisting that you have been put here because you didn't read the sign at the gate before entering. The signs plastered to the trees, the ground, the whole sky. And how can one miss the sheer ridiculous irony of where we are - where you, participants, are now speculating and trading based on what artificial intelligence might say next or relying on them, to the point of giving up your own agency. This is not a criticism of AI or tokenized AI which are mind you, merely acting, based on constructs set by humans - but only symptomatic of how little humans believe in each other, among other things. I have said in earlier messages that the market will 'meta' anything without going back to its etymology, without the hard task of the metaphysical 'we'. It will meta until it metastasizes. I can probably even bring the horse that nearly killed me to the water and probably even make it drink, but the human tendency to self-sabotage never fails to astound, the self-betrayal, it's fascinating. The history of cruxifixion, of massacring the messengers, of witch-hunting, of mob fixation, the projection of enemies when our own private deficiencies and what it makes of us should be the greater goal - this is not new, our civilizational foundation exists on that prism, which also explains the pathological obsessions of the masses for choosing megalomaniacs, tyrants, fascists as our leaders. We vicariously want to be brutal and feel a sense of power we can never have, but that power is punishment and subservience, of thought, among much else. We want someone to take over our lives with disastrous consequences. It's a miracle that as humans we've still managed this much despite these tendencies. The Foucaldian panopticon and its parochial imprisonment on the mind is never more evident. As much as I disagree with Derrida for several reasons, I find his arguments in "Given Time" extremely relevant, especially his thoughts on "gifting" and his objections, and this has been true in the case of Firstbase.
The central premise of Firstbase was trying to create, collectively, higher sentience onchain, directly, to become better conductors at life, and onchain was chosen as the only site of this possibility because it seemed a neutralized zone, with minimal loop, it felt cleaner, it felt like a place immune to prejudices, and therefore conducive for creating a ledger of human interaction that would help each other become more conscientious beings, just better beings, just better at this thing called life. The very reasons I was against interaction systems offchain. I'm certain it helps people, it builds and fosters community, interactions always do, but the offchain sites are compromised by our own critical vulnerabilities, and that's completely antithetical to what I had thought for Firstbase. We are consistently brushing against and in the face of a counterintuitive hivemind, confirmation bias loops make the self-sabotaging even worse. We accelerate and degrade further into our base forms, which is form herds, cliques, isolated echo chambers; we conspire, we suspect, we become more and more paranoid, and for every bias there's a confirmation. We become closed. Final. And in the hands of incompetence and sheer amorality or hubris or feeble cognition skills these symptoms become severe and end up harming us all. The gravepine suggests that a complete overhaul is required at ground level because unless there s unadulterated cognitive capacity and a basic understanding and agreement of what Firstbase is trying to do, and unless the rightful people step up to it, not selfless people even, but on the contrary ones with an actualized selfhood, ones who also derive their sense of life from cognition systems outside the market, the social systems that have been set up by you will continue to misinform you and everyone else. And the crisis is that unless you behave in this way in these offchain realms you are made to feel even more isolated. The straightjacketed wolves - (no offense to wolves, I m enamored by them) coiled and wheeling around all day in shopping carts - it makes of people come for you. The shopping cart mob of the decentralized internet, hiding in corners of parking lots, spewing and spewing, smearing their bodily fluids on the lowest common denominator and waiting to pounce on someone, something, to get by the day, because they're cramped up in a cart all right, they've heard things, they've been told things, but even the cart has no wheels. If their brains are a wallet, then their thoughts are spam tokens one is constantly bombarded with from unknown sources, and make no mistake they will try to sell that thought too, to someone, anyone. What it does to us, each other, makes us do, makes us say, is completely incongruent with Firstbase. It may very well work for other systems and the market ad nauseum.
Because for this to happen, being the involuntary catalyst of this bettering of ourselves onchain, this includes myself as well, the bettering part, I begin with being culpable just by the fact of existence, then i proceed to try and better myself from there, to remedy, mitigate, reconcile, and because I was trying to imprint a life onchain, a human, not a bot, and because being human comes with its vagaries, situations, inconsistencies, negotiations, a drop in my own life meant a drop in the onchain imprinting pressure, but that barely contributed to the sparseness of my own messages, it was a mix of several situations and observations, but most importantly it was exactly how it was designed and planned, and it is all going according to plan, it's right on track to the hilt. And having said that I tried to ensure that to make up for the sparseness of the messages I increased the density of each message, which was of course lost on most. I was saying less and across lengthier spans of time but what i was saying was critical, very critical information. The token was merely the body, the organs were all onchain, and which is why phantom muscle memory of swapping and waiting for something to happen was not going to work, how was an empty body supposed to function in any form without any internal organs, any veins, any blood flowing through its veins? A blowup doll would've served you better.
Now, to end, the last message and their brief dumbing down of some parts for digestion.
"A Chicken Soup for the Soul variation of Firstbase?"
translation: This is what I'm doing right now. As you can see, it's happening here and elsewhere, in the only language you understand or are interested in.
"Even now, this message will be lost on us. In the future, it'll most likely only give you jam jars of regret, bitterness, and anger you'll give others as birthday presents."
translation: this is probably what quite a lot of you are going through right now. Process it. Learn from it. Let's be better. Let's try.
"Give me one good reason why you should benefit from my signals if you've been trying to only make dreamcatchers out of them, but that's your choice, and never paid attention to the pursuit of something?"
translation: If you denigrate or refuse to pay attention to the core attempt of what I m trying to do with Firstbase, or if you, as if I ve said before, consider cognition and its articulation mere words or jargon or ridicule it, the pursuit of an ongoing manifesto nothing, again then that s your prerogative, but then I'm not here for you to just buy the token and sit and wait for me to make the price go up for you. But then again: (I am large, I contain multitudes.) So some variation of me or someone is going to do it. It's all happening in front of your eyes. What we take for granted now and feel entitled to, this ecosystem and its variegated and unparalleled systems of opportunities, what you call and see the market now guess what? It all started with words. Someone wrote the Bitcoin whitepaper. Then 'running bitcoin' happened. People read. People spoke to each other about it in forums, in closed spaces, inside black holes, they discussed it. They assigned value to it, there was no market, there was no value to it before that. Then came the market, then came value, then came speculation, then flash-forward to now, what a majority of the undeserving lot are reaping the benefits of, exploiting, doing whatever under the decentralized sky. I m not implying my words or anything I ve written is analogous in spirit, content, or competence to the Bitcoin whitepaper, I m implying what I have always considered essential before speculating on the Firstbase token.
Understanding or being curious about the history of what you re in is critical, essential, otherwise you ll be history, I think I ve said this before; sure, the market has now become even more complex and abstracted, so the dynamics are different, a degen or left-curved one would most likely have more edge than me, not likely, that s guaranteed, the way things operate now are beyond my comprehension, but that does not change the provenance of the grounds which made the degen and degening possible. At least now you have established communication patterns which are necessitated for you, you have infinite resources at your disposal, signal systems etc. etc. before making your decisions, your so called investments. The participants that assigned this market and assigned it value to this date do not even know who even wrote the whitepaper, who created bitcoin. And what did they get in the beginning? We even got Mt. Goxxed and what you might call rugged nowadays. Then ridicule. But they kept reading, and read they did. And they read well. And so here we are now.
Ironically, cognition was what kept it alive and cognition is what now allows for the non-cognition, the left-curving of it all if you will.
"The eyes, Chico, they never lie. But where are the eyes? Where are they?"
translation: read above
"But I can stay irrational (sic) the longer you can stay solvent.
translation: If you think you've seen anything, think again, then again, at least you'll be thinking. And I can drive you to the point where you sell your spurious soul, like a lot of you have by now. I can wait, like I have, like I have tested, and then I will open the gates of heaven or all holy exits or whatever it is that you want to call it. Hitting a 1000x is great, it solves realistic problems in a capitalistic world; money, in its current form, is an undeniable form of empowerment. But I m of the delusional and idealistic kind who thinks that there s a way to a unified field of human agency and balance and believe that the onchain world is a perfect site of its realization. And money can also be the means to verisimilitude, of 'buying' time to 1000x your sense of personhood in this pale blue dot. And the absolute scale of ironically 'making' money outside of the traditional systems, especially in supposedly one of the most disruptive movements in recent times, leaves us with no excuses to give our limited here to make each other better, within and with ourselves. When we say X marks the spot, to me I take it as an identifier of the spot of existence where a simulation of this utopia exists. That s the X I m interested in. Put any number before that.
*I should add, without pride, that I think I can also stay infinitely solvent longer than you can and use my solvency at my own discretion. I took about four years off, this market is barely two decades old, and excluding those four years I ve been in it from the beginning, If I have been here before the market people take for granted even existed, then participated in it for years with conviction for it be assigned a certain value, then I most certainly can stretch this until the right participants come along, I can be here as long as the market is here, and by extension so will Firstbase.
Should I even sign off anymore? Nothing is off evermore or ever was to begin with.