Please gather around, and listen to this cautionary tale of schadenfreude and greed. This is not a tale for the faint of heart; it involves a cabal of crypto-enthusiasts involved in a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO), a failed film adaptation by Alejandro Jodorowsky of the classic book Dune , and Read more…
Amongst many other things, writer Neal Stephenson is famous for having coined the term “Metaverse” in his 1992 cyberpunk novel “Snow Crash”, but he has also written a lot about virtual worlds in some of his later work, particularly the novel “Reamde“, which is a techno-political thriller which introduces a Read more…
2021 has been the year of the NFT here at Llama Towers. It seems like there’s no shortage of stories coming out of the NFT scene, so to avoid having to rename the blog to “NFT Weekly News” I haven’t been reacting to the latest occurrence with the same enthusiasm Read more…
Text of my presentation at the IGF panel Videogames and their Uniting Power. Thanks very much to the organisers for the kind invitation to join this panel, it is an honour. I have to start with a disclaimer, I am just an academic who has been writing on the interface Read more…
It’s been another interesting day in the wilderness that is NFT-land. While many people (myself included) have spent a good part of the legal commentary on the NFT art market, the most valuable tokens can be found in collectibles, these usually take the shape of a stock character that is Read more…
This is the text of my presentation at this year’s Gikii Conference, expanding some of the themes and giving more detail. The slides can be found here. Before I begin, I need to make a quick explanation of the title. The phrase comes from the painting by René Magritte “The Read more…
Hi, I am Trovare, your personal AI assistant. Your AI-ssistant if you will. Hahaha. In compliance with the Turing Act 2027, I must inform you that I’m a fully automated sentient entity, if you would rather speak to a human one will be provided to you, but I must warn Read more…
In 2005 artist Matt Furie created four cartoon characters for a cartoon called Boy’s Club: Andy, Brett, Landwolf, and Pepe. You’d be forgiven if you were not familiar with the first three, but if you’ve spent any time online in the last decade you’ll almost certainly have come across the Read more…
The free and open source developing world is abuzz with a new feature from GitHub called Copilot. This is a programming tool that has been trained using code from GitHub’s own corpus. For those familiar, GitHub is the world’s largest open source software repository, it has 40 million users and Read more…
We live in strange times. People post selfies getting an injection. A football tournament is being played with half-empty stadiums. Sotheby’s is selling digital assets and sneakers, and it will be selling an NFT of some code by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web. The auction Read more…