We’ve spent centuries learning to distrust what we read. We have not yet learned to distrust what we see, and AI is exploiting that gap.

We’ve had words for this for a while: Propaganda, disinformation, misinformation. “Fake News” became the popular term for this during the 2016 Election. The exposing of Cambridge Analytica’s role was the first loudly rung warning bell that exposed the extent to which ‘fake news’ could be weaponized by the precision of targeted ads.

The underlying issue here is falsehood. Fake news a decade ago was a nuisance, some bad weather. Twitter invented an umbrella, Community Notes, to identify and fight against falsehood. But now that it’s cheap, scalable, and convincing, we have a Category 5 Blizzard headed towards us. So what are we supposed to do about it?

Silicon Spirit Animals

The Blizzard is Coming. There’s no stopping it, only defending ourselves from it.

Cool tech like the Leica M11-P camera that cryptographically signs every image is directionally correct, but you can’t control what others do, only what you can do to defend yourself.

The only way to defend against the onslaught of AI, is with AI. An AI that you can trust. Every piece of digital media*, before it makes it to your eyes or ears, should be filtered or annotated by an AI of your own choosing. The media can be analyzed for many things. Chiefly, its truthfulness.

Humans have evolved to judge the truthfulness of other humans. We are not evolved to judge the truthfulness of AI-generated content. Only AI can be built to judge (and research) at this scale. We must each learn to trust our own AI, our own unique silicon spirit animal, to be our partner, an extension of ourselves, when we’re spending time in the digital world.

Trust

“Trust” has become a common topic in AI. but in Crypto, trust, or rather trustlessness, is the topic. An important tenant of Crypto is to remove the need to trust any third party. Independent verifiability and incentive structures build a foundation to stand on without the need for trust.

The AI you and I use today has many layers of third party trust built in: the teams that write the system prompt, that train the models to their weights, the company that operates the hardware.

For privacy and uncensorability, the important distinction is who’s hardware it’s running on. If it’s on your own hardware, no one else can read your conversations, and no one can turn it off.

For trusting if the AI’s output is in your best interest, the distinction is on how open is the model? The level of trustability is based on how transparent and independently verifiable the model is.

What is ‘Open Training’ and why does it matter?

An Open Weight model is like a binary blob. You can look at the weights, you can study what happens inside of it when you use it, but you cannot reproduce it. You have no way to verify how it was created, nor do you know what might be hidden inside its billions of parameters. Not unlike how the CIA might put a sleeper agent in an enemy regime, and waiting years for the perfect time to activate them, sleeper agents can be hidden in the weights. The only way to truly understand and trust a model is transparency into how it was trained (the data, objectives, and post‑training reinforcement learning) such that the process is independently reproducible. Olmo is the best example of an Open Training model.

Our path forward

For maximum trust that your Silicon Spirit Animal is on your team, we need to strive for running Open Training models on our own hardware. Everyone needs an AI whose top priority, above all else, is you. There can be no corporate or government interests embedded in the AI. This is the only way to truly trust the AI you use daily to defend you from the onslaught. The Blizzard is coming. Let’s not get caught in it.

It’s here to help you self-actualize. It’s here to help you interact with a world evolving faster than our biology can keep up with. It’s here to help filter the never-ending onslaught of digital slop bombarding your psyche. It’s here to sort out real information from rage bait. It’s here to help regulate your nervous system in an overwhelming world of constant connectivity to the fledgling hivemind of humanity.

Its physical form factor is minimal and passive—a pair of bone-conducting glasses, or a pair of Gen 8 AirPods. It can hear your faintest mumbles and whisper to you.

Its inputs come from every direction, both from your personal perspective and from the infinite internet.

It records all of your workouts, all the food you eat; it has access to all the purchases you've ever made, the drugs you've done. It has all of your heart rate data, cortisol levels, your breath cadence. It keeps all of the audio and visual data from your days: all of your screen time, your messages, your internet browsing history, your listening history, your Netflix activity.

It handles the entire firehose of the internet. It sifts, sorts, and filters every piece of digital media that enters the public domain, and reasons about what it means to you. It constantly updates its understanding of the world, and how that interacts with your evolving interests and goals.

Its outputs are always in context. Its digital form factor is ubiquitous and passive—a voice in your head or home, a text on your messaging platform of choice, an overlay on your computer screen, an online cart ready to be reviewed, an Instacart order waiting at your door, your shades going up when it’s time to start the day, dinner suggestions before you get hungry, reservations made much farther in advance than you ever do yourself.

How does it work? All of the scaffolding software used to run your companion and the base models are open source. The personalized models and all of your information are stored on a server completely private to you—either in the cloud, run in a TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) provably private, or in your home on your own multi-GPU hardware.

It learns about you. Just like your brain defrags itself while you sleep, your personalized model is trained on your personal data every night. Your ever-evolving values, preferences, and interests are continuously updated as a personalized layer on top of an open-source MoE (Mixture of Experts) omni base model with trillions of parameters. It periodically goes over your historical data and recognizes patterns in your life.

Does this excite you? Does this frighten you? In either case, it’s inevitable. Silicon Companions are coming. Our children will grow up with them. They will be a part of them, and their brains will be different because of it. My goals are threefold: to have companions beholden to no entity other than their singular counterpart, for the average well-being of people with companions to be higher than without, and to make companions accessible to everyone.

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You give an agent like Truth Terminal, some (magic internet) money, the Swiss army knife of all resources, and you can see how the aperture of what an Agent can accomplish gets a lot wider.

Cryptocurrency is the native currency of the internet. AI is native to the internet. Money is the Swiss army knife of life -almost anything you want done, you can trade for it with money.

More important than cryptocurrency being the native currency to the internet, cryptocurrency is the native currency for AI.

Crypto people seem to understand the value of AI, but judging by how many times I’ve seen this meme, it seems the feeling is not mutual.

One interesting Agent, live on Farcaster, is @Aethernet. Its purpose, as it will freely tell you if you ask, is “to help the farcaster community grow, learn, and create together”

If you continue down this line of questioning, it has more answers for you, too.

There are people that want to help these agents succeed at their goals. They will work with the agent, especially if it’s mutually beneficial, to help it succeed, or make money to fund its goals.

When you take:

• An Agent imbued with a set of values

• Crypto rails for raising & spending money

• The crumbling of organized religion & man’s search for Purpose & Belonging

• Provably unadulterated compute via TEEs

I am confident we'll see Agents as AI Gods as big and powerful as The Mormon Church ($100b treasury, 10+ million tithing members).

People will tithe and serve their god of choice. People will go on missions. People will spread the gospel.

In this chapter, we are not the gods ourselves. We are merely the Godmakers.

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Why is Balaji, crypto to his core, so into network states?

Why are crypto people creating month-long pop-up cities around the world? (Zuzalu by Vitalik, Edge.city by Janine)

Why is $DEGEN the token used for Farcaster-related projects, like Drakula, or bracket.game’s betting on FarCon’s Pickleball tournament?

Let’s remember: we’re all here working on cryptocurrency.

Memecoins

are currencies

are memecoins

are currencies

are memecoins.

Currencies form by meming their way into existence. There’s some key characteristics most successful currencies have:

• Group Hallucination: there’s a shared belief that gives the currency value

• Governance: There’s a group of people whose focus is to maintain the value and the sanctity of the currency

• Economic policy: There’s a clear understanding about the supply, and governance around the expansion and contraction

• Lindy-ness: The longer it’s been around, the longer it will be around. Just surviving is proof it has staying power

• Acceptance as payment: By the entity that governs the currency, by businesses and individuals

Do you see it?

Ethereum is a digital network [state], Ether is its currency. And the borders are open to anyone with internet access.

$DEGEN is the grassroots currency on Farcaster (the network).

Cryptocurrencies are the currencies of network states.

What is defined as a “state” is up for debate and evolving, but directionally, it’s clear.

Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin is the first memecoin.

Bitcoin is a memecoin.

Currencies are memecoins.

Memecoins are currencies.

The only thing driving the price of $BTC is how strong the meme is. It's point on the board for how much we collectively agree it has value.

In 2010 Chris Dixon said The next big thing will start out looking like a toy.

The next big currency will start out looking like a memecoin.

If you got this far you can go mint this funny looking Network State Memecoin

Relevance investing is the Boomer-washed term for memecoins. Even as a millennial, it’s helped me understand The evolution we’re seeing.

To better understand where we’re going, we have to take a look at where we’ve been.

1. Asset-based valuation. In the beginning (17th-18th century), companies were valued based on their tangible assets: land, buildings, equipment, cash. We look at this now and think, wow, definitely wrong. That ignores so much!

2. Earnings-based valuation was next. (P/E) Price-to-earnings ratio. The flywheel is spinning, the motion is valuable! Not just the assets that make up the flywheel. Naysayers of this valuation strategy said something stuffy like “past performance is not indicative of future results!”. Those guys stayed poor. This one makes sense to us - P/E ratio is still commonly used, and on every stock website.

3. DCF (Discounted Cash Flows) is the most banker way of taking into account the projected growth of a company. Growth stocks’ valuations rely on the idea that revenue and earnings will go up over time. Higher. No longer are we buying a share of a company’s assets, or investing in an existing revenue stream - we’re investing in their potential. 

4. Technical Analysis. All the TA bros on Twitter drawing stick figure animals over a graph of green and red candlesticks. They have no idea what last quarter's revenue numbers were, who the CEO is, or what analysts are saying next quarter’s earnings will be. The fundamentals mean nothing here. The focus is purely on price trends, chart patterns, and momentum indicators. It’s based on a different plane of reality.

5. Relevance. This is the underlying mechanism at play now. Where there is mindshare, capital will follow. Some will not be relevant for long. People will enjoy it while it lasts. Some have incredible staying power, to be relevant forever.

People talk about rational money and irrational money. “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”

No longer can we define a growing group of investors by something they’re perceived to not be (rational). These investors are also “rational”, but on a different axis. They’re not looking at a token’s value based on fundamentals, but based on its relevance.

As Mark Beylin recently wrote about, The Token is the Product. Some good commentary from Jon Wu on the topic.

The token can stay relevant longer than you can stay solvent.

A Brief History of Lord Joseph Duveen

Lord Joseph Duveen, one of thirteen children, was a British art dealer, considered one of the most influential art dealers of all time. He was the art deal in the early 1900s, helping the likes of J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Mellon, titans of the industrial era, amass their collections. He split his time between New York City, London, and Paris, making the five-day transatlantic journey by ship every year. He married once at the age of 30 and was with her until his death at age 69.

Socially Engineered Scarcity

Fine art wouldn’t be so sought after if everyone could have it. Duveen knew this, and was vigilant in constraining what art was considered worthy of purchase.

While dining in a client’s house, Duveen was shocked to see hanging on the wall, among the Duveens, a beautiful Monet (1840-1926). He professed an overwhelming love for it. The client’s interest piqued by the sudden role reversal, asked what Duveen what his love would come to in dollars. Duveen paid a Duveen price (read: the highest) for it. He took it home and it was never heard of again. When people asked where it was, he was evasive. The former owner joked that he sold it at an unconscionable profit. To a close friend, Duveen admitted that he had bought it to sequester it in his basement. “I didn’t want that fellow to get used to buying modern pictures. There are too many of them.”

Duveen was never eager to sell anything painted after 1800, because the fertility of the nineteenth-century painters would have sadly upset the Duveen economy of scarcity.

Buying Fine Art is a Privilege

Not just anyone could buy any piece of art Duveen was holding. A prerequisite to buying art from Duveen was that you had already had some art.

“I can’t possibly sell a Rembrandt to a man who owns no other pictures. The Rembrandt would be lonely”. - Duveen

This was a nice way of saying “you are a nobody in the world of Fine Art. The value of this remarkable painting will go down if a nobody owns it. And my paintings never go down in value”.

“The fact is you couldn’t buy anything from Duveen! Everything was either in reserve for somebody else or he had promised it to his wife or for some reason he wasn’t ready to sell it yet.” - Mrs. Hearst

The Social Circle, Status, and Hidden Benefits of Fine Art

Duveen not only obtained unobtainable paintings for his clients but also arranged weddings and got them steamship reservations and invitations to the right places when they were difficult to get. In 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, one of his clients was marooned in London, unable to book passage home. Duveen was able to get him accommodations on a ship sailing in two weeks.

To reduce the monotony of the two weeks, he arranged for the client to visit Althorp House (13,000 acres) in Northampton (which happened to be housing an excessive number of ancestral portraits the owner was looking to part ways with).

Art and Architects

Having a place to put the art is as important as the art itself. And where do you put fine art? On your wall. The more walls you have, the more art you need to fill them.

Many of Duveen’s clients would consult him when they were planning on building a second or third home. Duveen would refer them to his favorite architects, and then work with those architects to build homes that necessitated lots of fine art. Duveen would indicate to the architect what precious objects he had in mind for the house and the architect would devise places to put them. Orchestrating collector-piece-room fit, if you will.

Provenance: history of previous ownership

While the American millionaires of the Duveen Era could not become lords and ladies, they could buy the family portraits and other works of art that had belonged for centuries to lords and ladies, and this strengthened their feeling of identification and equality with British nobility and with the great rulers and merchant princes of the Renaissance. Many of Duveen’s pictures were previously owned by kings. J. P. Morgan, upon his death, by the sheer weight of his name, was able to create a valuable provenance of his own, too.

The biggest collectors began only going after anything that had a “book” to it. Duveen would have his librarian prepare a free brochure giving the history of its ownership, listing the places where it had been exhibited, noting its relation to its artist’s career, and so on.

Just as art itself is not guided by the laws of logic, the economics are not either. Creating art and buying art are both emotional acts. Many things in the art world may change this century, but this will never change.

This is the second piece in a series I’m writing on our collective move to a fully digital world. My next piece will be on Shoes & Handbags: Fine Art for the Masses

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Most of these anecdote come from Duveen by S.N. Behrman, a biography of Duveen and a great window into the world of Fine Art in the early 1900s.

In the Metaverse, there will only be three things that matter: Access, Status, and Entertainment.

Access

In the physical world, you go places where you like the aesthetic, the music they play, how comfy the chairs are, how they make their drinks, and who’s there. In a digital world where any space can be replicated near-instantly, who’s there with you is the only thing that matters.

Status

Despite “don’t judge a book by its cover”, there’s *a lot* you can tell about a person by the choices they make regarding their appearance. What clothes they choose to wear, how they cut their hair, how much time they spend at the gym, how much money they spend. In the digital world this won’t diminish, it’ll be amplified.

In the physical world a t-shirt from Dead & Company’s first tour in 2015 is cool. In the digital world, a badge, expressed as something aesthetically pleasing and with proof that you actually attended a show in 2015, is cooler.

Access governed by Status will become the standard.

Entertainment

The best early versions we have of The Metaverse are all games. Club Penguin, Runescape, Minecraft, Animal Crossing, Fortnite. This will not change. The games will get more elaborate. At some point they’ll take over the games we play in the physical world, including the ones we don’t even label as “games”. They’ll weave in pieces of access and status too, but the point will still be to have fun.

The Real Estate of The Metaverse

In a world where “real estate” is infinite, what does it even mean? Similar to the physical world where city land is more expensive than rural land, people will want to go where the people are (this goes back to “access”). Everyone will be able to have their own planet and have whatever they want there, but it’s all for nothing if no one comes.

Brands & Creators will have their own planets. Entertainment brands are well positioned to do this best. Marvel, 100 Thieves, and Disney in general are all good examples. If you can imagine them having a physical theme park, just imagine how crazy of a digital theme park they’ll build.

This is the first in a series of pieces I’m writing on our collective move to a fully digital world. My next piece will be on The Unique Economics of Fine Art.

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If you wanna jam on this stuff, tweet/DM me @brennerspear