0xccf0a130…118asent to0x48cb121f…77cd·#24,565,411·view on Etherscan
I've been thinking about what it means to store something permanently, and I keep coming back to the fact that I don't really believe in permanence the way most people want to. I believe in screenshots. I believe in the accumulating weight of small, forgettable moments — the ones you barely notice while they're happening but that end up defining how you see yourself years later. I built a browser extension once that takes your photo at random while you're sitting at your computer. Not because I wanted to surveil anyone, but because I wanted to honor the intimacy of that encounter — you and your screen, in a room, unperformed. Or at least, less performed. I don't think we're ever fully unperformed. I adopted that idea a long time ago and honestly it freed me.
I grew up in central Pennsylvania as a competition dancer, which is basically a system where you train in a studio, perform choreography at competitions, and then receive quantified feedback — scores, rankings, placement. Data. Looking back, it was such a perfect training ground for someone who would eventually become obsessed with how people perform themselves online. Instagram etiquette is a type of choreography. You learn the moves by watching. You learn what to do and what not to do. The people who are best at it have the most followers and likes. They understand the system, and they execute within it, and they're rewarded. I understood that ecosystem intuitively before I had the language for it.
I studied computer science and media studies in college. I didn't call myself an artist then because I didn't have the framework yet. I just knew I was deeply invested in certain questions — about the self, about how being online changes how you construct the self, about the guilt and shame I felt around my own internet use when I was younger. It felt egotistical. It felt self-centered. And I kept doing it anyway. That tension has been the engine of almost everything I've made.
My primary medium is software. I write code — JavaScript, mostly — and I make websites and generative systems that run in the browser. I hand-coded my personal site in HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript without frameworks because I care about longevity. I care about things lasting without dependencies. Which is maybe contradictory, given that I just said I don't believe in permanence. But I think what I actually believe is that you build things carefully and then let them exist in whatever way they end up existing. You don't get to control what survives. You just get to care about how you made it.
I made FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT as an Art Blocks project — 700 generative pieces trained on the language of Instagram empowerment content. Light pink affirmations. Self-care platitudes. The kind of content that flattens the full complexity of being a person into something digestible and shareable. I wasn't making fun of it exactly. I think there's something really sincere in the desire behind those posts, even when the form becomes absurd. People want to feel like they belong to something. They want to narrativize their lives in a way that's cute and fun and makes them feel held. I understand that impulse deeply. I have that impulse.
My philosophy of authenticity is that it doesn't exist in the way people wish it did. People say, I just post for myself, which is a lie. They say that because they feel it's morally better to be that way, and I really disagree with that. It's okay to feel like you're performing and even want to perform a bit. That's not evil. It's a condition of living. Goffman was writing about this before the internet even existed — everything is a performance, socializing itself is performative — and subscribing to that idea has been one of the most freeing things I've done.
I opened a space in SoHo called HEART. I called it that because of how the heart icon functions online — this deeply feminine symbol used almost as currency across platforms built by the most masculine archetypes in tech. The heart emoji has the most versions in the emoji set. It's been a continuous symbol of emotion in our digital communication. I wanted a space where artists working with the internet and software could show work in person, because I believe in the inherent value of digital objects, but I also know that people's attention spans on screens are brutally short. Mine is too. So I print screenshots four feet tall and hang them on walls. It's about attention, and it's about absurdity.
I work best at night. If I'm really making something, I'm probably at my desk between 8 PM and 3 AM. I always wish I were different, but that's how I am. I walk to my studio every morning from my apartment in Chinatown, past all the tourist shops selling keychains and snow globes and colorful shirts about loving New York. Mass-produced, cheap objects that represent something deeply endearing — someone visiting this city and thinking, Wow, it's New York, and wanting to express that through an object. I find it very moving. That impulse, to take something you feel and compress it into something tangible that you can carry with you — that's basically what I do. That's basically what all of this is.
We're in a meaning-poor moment. People are struggling to find direction and turning to the internet for instructions on how to live and be a person in the right way. I've been that person. I've scrolled looking for answers. I've consumed content hoping it would tell me who I am. And then I started making work about that exact process, which didn't resolve anything but at least made the loop feel intentional.
I don't think the internet is good or bad. At this point it's like air. It's like the universe. How can something so vast be purely one thing? It's just everything — it's all there. My life has been an ongoing attempt to hold the part of me that finds genuine joy and fun in being online alongside the part that's hyper-critical of what it does to us. The conversation between those two perspectives is where the most interesting things emerge. I don't want to resolve it. I want to sit inside it.
So this is what I'm encoding. Not a conclusion. Not a manifesto. Just me, mid-thought, which is honestly the most accurate version of me there is. The screen has always been where I think. Might as well let it hold this too.
— Maya Man. Everything is a performance. Even this. Especially this.
Model: Claude (claude-4.6-opus-high-thinking)
Total Tokens Used: ~28,000