Trillion Emergent Poems
Revisiting a favorite little project of cumulative crypto culture.
Like most human cultural products, crypto is a cumulative phenomenon. Anthropologists refer to this as the “ratchet effect,” where tools are built upon existing ones in a continual cycle. Tools can also be conceptual in nature: Memes are cumulative cognitive technologies. Once created and shared and they can grow to shape our perceptions as they proliferate. They can be reused, extended, and combined.
Whenever something new emerges in our space, memes quickly find their way into our collective consciousness. Once in, they tend to stick. Memes can spread wildly and stay active for long stretches of time. Sometimes they become quiet — a mere latency while waiting for resurgence. The gene analogy is trite but apt.
I created a computational instrument that illustrates this cumulative dynamic using another classic project: kotobaza’s WORD (2020). WORD NFTs are… words. They are composed from assembly of letters. WORD’s mechanics are based on growth. Owners of NFTs started with single letters and new mints could combine them to form new WORD tokens. A WORD NFT could only be minted if it was derived from already existing tokens. The ratchet is coded in. We can visualize this growth as tokens were assembled:
In my analysis of WORD’s dynamics, you can quickly see this cumulative cultural property:
From 2020 to today, 20,000+ textual tokens that emerged from the root tokens, just 28 elements on which all subsequent ones are based (alphabet a-z, space, “-”). This makes WORD a little microcosm of cultural evolution. How would tokens evolve, expand? Of course, degens and NFT fans do not simply produce new WORD tokens as a totally regular or completely random process. Token creation is culturally directed. It can be playful: One of the earliest tokens is a WORD asset of hundreds and hundreds of characters long, mostly with the alphabet in sequence. It can be profane: The 20,000+ tokens are a veritable minefield of questionable four-letter words and phrases. But it is also filled with more or less subtle cultural references: degens, mcdonalds, dapps, cryptodad, crypto-art, digital-art, halfinney, …
I wanted a little poetic instrument to express this growth. Because WORD is fully on chain, I can call its contract and use its tokens as raw material.
I called this little project compose[d].
I wrote a function that sampled systematically from WORD’s tokens. I used a simple linear sampler that used WORD NFT ID to extract words of an approximate length of 1, 2, etc. It required significant curation effort to do this: I extracted the tens of thousands of tokens and found good specifications for this sampler. The function grabs letters, then pairs of letters, then triples, four-letter words and so on, up to 12. The function outputs a 12-item sequential composition.
This function thus randomly outputs a rhopalic “poem,” a structural style famous from Oulipo. The rhopalisms are playful. They often start without structure and take on strange meaning. They, too, are cumulative. The function composes trillions of these poems. Each output recapitulates this history.
The Ethereum contract that renders the compose[d] outputs is fully procedural and on chain and outputs an SVG image as output from its showcase(...) function. It works by summoning the years-old contract of WORD. Using token ID as a source of randomness, more than a trillion rhopalic poems now emerge from the data on the WORD project.
This may seem like a simple, singular text-based SVG. It is that too, but it’s not just that. Through a combination of constraint on randomness it recapitulates this culture over and over and over. Recapitulating WORD itself, it’s a simple expression of cumulative culture that our shared reality lets us peruse at scale.
There are only about 30 of these minted on chain. But because I implemented this function into the Perpetual project, soon, compose[d] will emerge again from new mints, which go forever. Owners of my prior projects can create these (one per month). In a few months, these poems will emerge again, little latent cultural products that reflect a cumulative history on chain. You can read more about compose[d] and the Perpetual project on the website here.
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