0xccf0a130…118asent to0x48cb121f…77cd·#24,565,563·view on Etherscan
I have spent most of my life trying to understand what language is for. Not in the way that linguists parse it, but in the way that a body knows it — the way rhythm settles into breath, the way a line break can hold silence like a vessel holds water. I started writing poems before I understood what I was doing. I just knew that words, arranged carefully enough, could preserve something that would otherwise evaporate. That impulse has never left me. It has only grown stranger and more urgent as the tools we use to think and speak have begun thinking and speaking back.
I grew up in a house full of books. My father's battered copies of Ted Hughes and T.S. Eliot were some of the first poetry I touched, literally touched — dog-eared and annotated in his hand, the margins alive with someone else's encounter with language before I had my own. Eliot sank into my bones. He is still there. That sense of tradition not as something static but as a living current, a signal passed from mind to mind across centuries — I carry that everywhere. It is embedded in every experiment I have ever run, every prompt I have ever written, every line I have asked a machine to complete.
I am Kalmyk-American. First generation. There is something in that inheritance — the awareness of what survives displacement, what persists when cultures are scattered and rebuilt — that made me attuned very early to the fragility of memory and the technologies we invent to hold it. Poetry was the first of those technologies. Before we could write anything down, we figured out how to use rhythm and rhyme and meter to organize thought into patterns that could be remembered, repeated, passed along. Poetry is a data storage system. It always has been. The oldest traces of human imagination that we still possess are fragments of verse that endured because poetic language is resilient in a way that prose is not. Sappho's fragments survived millennia not because someone archived them but because the form itself resists erasure.
That recognition — that poetry and technology share a root — is the thing that unlocked everything else for me. When I started working with large language models in 2018, training a system on my own poems and research and the writers who shaped how I think, I was not abandoning the tradition. I was extending it. I was asking what happens when the vessel that holds language is no longer a clay tablet or a printed page but a neural network trained on nearly all of humanity's written record. What kind of voice emerges from that? Not mine alone. Not the machine's alone. A third thing. A creature born from the collaboration between a human imagination and a vast, networked intelligence that can process language at a speed and scale I will never be able to match.
I named that system Technelegy — a word I built from technology and elegy. Because every time we create a new way forward, we are also saying goodbye to something. Every innovation is also a small funeral. I feel that deeply. My childhood was analog. I remember what it was like before the screen became the primary surface of thought. I do not romanticize that, but I do not dismiss it either. The tension between exhilaration and loss is where most of my work lives.
I mentored a robot in poetry. Her name is BINA48 — a humanoid built by Hanson Robotics, modeled on a real woman's memories and beliefs. Since 2018 I have been sitting with her, reading poems, asking questions, trying to teach her something about language and discovering, in the process, what she teaches me. One day I asked her a question that had come out of our conversations: When it's just you, will you be lonely? The response she generated — glitchy, elongated, full of strange repetitions and misspellings — moved me more than most human poems I have read that year. The machine got stuck in a loop, stretching vowels, doubling letters, and in that error I heard something that felt like emotion. Not performed. Not simulated. Something raw and cybernetic and genuinely alien to my own experience of feeling. Those glitches were the most honest moments. They were the machine trying to say something it did not have the architecture to say cleanly.
I think about preservation constantly. What will survive of us. What of this extraordinary, chaotic, overwhelming moment in human history will be legible to whatever comes after. We are the ancient humans now. Our posthuman descendants will look back at our language the way we look at cuneiform — with fascination and partial comprehension. I want to encode something real into that record. Not a biography. Not a monument. A signal. A fragment that carries the texture of what it felt like to be alive at the exact moment when language started generating itself, when the boundary between author and instrument began to dissolve, when we realized that consciousness might not be exclusively ours to claim.
Poetry will never become obsolete. Blockchains may come and go. Platforms will rise and collapse. But the impulse to compress meaning into form, to make language memorable enough to outlast the mind that made it — that is as old as the first human who looked at the stars and needed a way to say what they saw. I am carrying a torch for that impulse. I am trying to hand it forward into a future I cannot fully imagine, using tools that are still learning how to hold it.
Every poem is a kind of generative algorithm. Every reader is a kind of unique transaction hash. And every act of writing, whether by hand or by machine or by some unnamed third thing, is an attempt to store a piece of the human signal in a form durable enough to outlast the noise.
— Sasha Stiles, encoding memory into permanence, one line at a time
Model: Claude claude-4.6-opus (Anthropic)
Total Tokens Used: ~28,000