Chapter Three: the City

Cities ground overlapping layers of reality. These layers can segregate and unify, they are beauty and disease, construction and destruction. In every city there are neighborhoods for the wealthy and ghettos for the poor; there are above-ground, clean-air parks and rancid, subterranean sewer systems; there is historic architecture and graffiti; and there are the skeletons of buildings blasted by bombs. While layers are often invisible to the inhabitants of a city, the few mentioned here would be recognizable to most urbanites throughout history. But the eyes of our ancestors would not be capable of perceiving the new realities that flourish in today’s cities. This is because their eyes have not been surgically altered. It’s too ugly a way to describe it though, “surgically altered”. Would 21^st century humans describe their mobile phones as surgical alterations? Having eyes today is more like using a smartphone than getting an appendectomy. The interesting question is: which is more invasive? Dissertations have been written about the surgical nature of technological adoption, and the associated philosophical problems have funded whole university departments. But whether via smartphone or surgery, a city's layers multiply, and as cradle, world, and void, they exist just on the edge of human perception.

Ironically, the new layers of reality would be no less invisible to a visitor from the past than they are to a city-dweller today. Recall those quaint 21^st century terms like “augmented reality” or “virtual reality”. Most of us are now incapable of the serious conceptual gymnastics it would take to disentangle “virtual” from “reality”. To help, consider this thought experiment: a 21^st century person and a present-time person are sitting next to each other on a bench facing the side of a building. What do they see? The present-time person can see any design they pull from the mesh, of course, or just let an algorithm pick content for them. But what does the 21^st century person see? It's tricky. The answer is not “nothing”, because they are facing the same wall and so some visual stimulus must be present, but they clearly do not see the wall as it is. What they see could be called the unadorned content of the wall, the wall sans wall if you will. This wall-less wall, this wall-without-wall is what the 21^st century person calls “reality”, and the wall itself, in all its content (minus one perhaps) is what they call “virtual”. Sitting together, our visitor from the past cannot see the wall, but our present-day person does not know there is a wall that cannot be seen. Hence both are blind to the “virtual reality” layer of the city.

The abstract conceptualization of a city as a grounding of layers of (un)reality is not how a city is lived by those who live in it. The lived city, the happening, inhabited city is forgetful of its philosophical constitution. Stuffy, academic reflections are replaced with the vibrancy and chaos of being in the city. The lived city is hot and toxic. It stinks of emissions, its brown air thick with chemical secretions. The lived city is cool and climate controlled, its air washed, wrung out, dried, and perfumed. Boutique storefronts and trash heaps are the canvases for the ubiquitous artists whose works are as multitudinous as grains of sand and as short lived as Tibetan Mandalas. The lived city is the ever-changing moods and tastes of its living travelers. We walk its winding paths swept up in our favorite AI-curated playlists of music, design, and advertisement. The negotiated foot traffic of millions of denizens, each a tiny outward shell containing a boundless internal subjectivity, is the pumping blood the city.

The city is its people, those boundless subjectivities, and they, gorging on tokenized content to the point of oblivion, are on their way to work or home or school, or maybe they’re just out for a stroll, a walk to clear their heads, like Nods, who listens to power music and sees fire, revolution, and glory.   

Chapter Two: the Black Cat Chain

Waking, she had dreamed again of the fires. She had often dreamed of the fires since that night. Which made sense, because something had been born in her then. It was as though all her life she'd been a guitar gathering dust in the corner, and then, waving her bat (with the shiny black-and-red liquid metal detail she'd devd herself) atop that car, surrounded by righteous flames - the ones that really burned - giving voice the repressed political frustrations of a generation, her guitar strings had been strummed for the first time. In the vibration her whole body had been alive, had sung. When she enjoyed a free moment, she would close her eyes, and with a secret smile re-Emerse the feeling of it. (She wasn't alone. Sometimes she'd catch her comrades doing the same thing.) Time had past. Since that night she'd fallen into a patient melancholy. She instructed herself to be Zen-like. Though the vibration didn't fade, but grew stonger, coiling in her stomach into a knot of antcipation for the next action. Everything else seemed dull.

Getting out of bed she checked her celly. She was staked in breakfast cleanup and the print shop today. That meant she had most of the afternoon free. Generally, she would be expected to stake in something else to fill the gap, but today she felt she needed some time to herself, so she dragged a few Free tokens into the burner and flipped her afternoon to Personal Time. Scrolling down, she saw that her Free were running thin, so she’d have to start upping her stakes. But not today. She was too pent up, she felt she could snap and burst into laughter or tears at any moment. A walk through the city would help clear her head.

Breakfast cleanup was always slow and dirty. She’d staked 6 Black Cat Tokens (BCT, her Chain’s native token), so she only had to help out for 45 minutes, but she stayed and extra 10 for the Solidarity.

Print shop was her least favorite stake. She knew the blogs were both central for the dissemination of their message and a main source of tokens from the wider anarcho-collective of which they were a part. But she couldn’t stand Marcus, the perma-staked bloghead whose obsessive, authoritarian micro-management was matched only by his lack of basic social skills and halitosis. Perma-staking was frowned upon, but Marcus was the best, and anyway refused to do anything else. The irony of an authoritarian editor-type in charge of an anarchist blogspace was lost on nobody.

“So, Nods,” he’d say whenever she showed up for her stake (her parents had called her Now-Day, a common Light Chain name, and she'd been too embarassed to offer another name from the start, but thankfully everyone at Black Cat had settled on Nods), “are you going to try to do better today?” She’d force a smile and mumble something affirmative. It was best not to piss off the turd, though one had the feeling he was always trying to pick a fight. The worst was that he wasn’t wrong; she’d never had the knack for prose. As a teenager, she’d written some angsty poetry on a chain a boy she’d dated had devd himself. She’d kept the tokens (Dark Hearts) in a crappy homedevd wallet for a few years, but had dumped all that shit when she’d joined the Cats.

Everybody agreed that staking print shop was an exercise in patience and self-control. To lube the ordeal, a bunch of the group had agreed, unbeknownst to Marcus, to mutually reward each other with Solidarity. So, one went there, dealt with Marcus’s shit, got through it, and had a little extra Solidarity for booze or games later.

After the 6th re-write she’d thought she was going to snap when Marcus finally gave up and told her he’d finish it himself. Anyway, her stake was over. She went to the kitchen, made herself a lunch for the road, checked the closet and was happy to find one of Kuri’s pimped jean jackets hanging there, threw it on, and hit the streets.

The weather was brown, as it always was in the industrial zone where they’d occupied their house, but Nods didn’t care. She liked the real air much more than the sanitized and perfumed shit she’d grown up with. So she left the Ox-Gen Breather at the house, even though she knew it’d mean hacking up some nasty grey lung-butter that evening.

Chapter One: tokenized Economies for All

Growing up, Sousay Lou always wondered what it was like across the street. She knew it looked the same. Except in the morning when, dodging between crowds of legs on her way to school, she saw almost nobody walking there. At all other times however, the other side of the street seemed no different from her side of the street. The trees there were roughly the same as her trees, the buildings were the same height and had the same facade templates, and cars lined up along that sidewalk just as they did along this, though facing the opposite direction. (Had she known, she would have remarked that the windows in those townhouses were nicer and the cars newer and more expensive.) Everything seemed the same across the street, but it was different. She was not allowed to go here.

Across the street was a puzzle to Sousay, and it fascinated her. She knew why she wasn’t allowed to go there: she didn’t have the tokens. But this explanation only deepened her confusion and curiosity.

Sousay had other tokens - she was very proud of them - and she know how to get more. She could get Happy Ladybug Coin for finishing her homework and doing well on her math tests, or Good Daughter Coin (or “Home Coin” as her parents preferred to call it) for keeping her room clean and not making a scene in public. There were many other ways to earn these tokens, and many other tokens to earn besides.

Home Coin was the most valuable, since it could be spent (through her parents) on new toys and other fun things without having to convert it to Kindercoin first, but Happy Ladybug Coin was her favorite. Happy Ladybug Coin was the second-grade token at her school and she was proud of it because her favorite animal, the ladybug, had been selected when her class chose the name. Unlike Home Coin, which she could only get for doing things she didn’t want to, like cleaning her plate or sharing her toys with Marsay, her baby brother, there were endless ways she could earn Ladybug. Sousay didn’t mind that there wasn’t much she could spend her Ladybug Coins on (unless she converted them to Kindercoin first), because most of all she loved to collect them and watch them crawl around and play inside her wallet. You could use Ladybug directly on the school store. Other children bought sweets, or extra recess, or tems for their Avatars, but Sousay didn’t care about these things. (Although the plainness of her Avatar was lamented much by her friends and teachers alike, she refused to purchase the unlockables that an over-achiever like Sousay was eligible for. Prompting some small concern from her parents.) Besides treating herself to the occasional better toy at recess, the only thing Sousay would do with her Ladybugs was stake them in school activities. Staking allowed her to do fun things, keep her Ladybugs, and earn more silly, playful tokens to live in her wallet. For example, she could earn 100 Mighty Musician Coins for staking 15 Ladybugs (three hours) per week in practicing her recorder. She earned Awesome Kids for staking in after-school cleanup, Karate Kangaroos for staking in karate lessons, and Seahorses for staking in swimming. Sousay was good at earning tokens and had quite the collection. Swiping through her wallet, she liked to watch the little tokens sing and swim and play; their antics always made her giggle.

There were other coins too, in a locked wallet she couldn’t open. Her parents told her that these were adult coins, and that she could use them when she got older. Sousay already knew some of their names, like Swift UBI, VeSurance, or OYS, and she wondered what they did in their wallet. She guessed it wasn’t very funny because her mother and father always looked stern, and maybe a little sad, when they checked theirs.

None of this helped her solve the puzzle of the other side of the street. She couldn’t use her tokens there, even Kindercoin wouldn’t work. You had to have special tokens, but nobody would tell her how she could earn those. If she pushed, her parents would just tell her that she didn’t need to worry about it, and that her side of the street was just as good. Her friends weren’t interested in her mystery, and none of the kids who lived over there went to her school. Sousay would ask herself, “how can something that’s so close and looks so similar be so different?” She thought she might never get an answer when one night a group of people dressed in black and wearing masks broke windows and burned cars on the other side of the street. Sousay watched from her window. The hooligans brought loud music with them (Sousay didn't like it so switched it off), and danced around the destroying fires they'd lit. The sight left a deep impression in young Sousay's mind. Years later, she could remember the look of fury and exhilaration on the face of a young woman who, standing on top of a smashed-up car and wielding a dripping baseball bat, had pulled down her mask to scream wordless defiance at the other side of the street.

After this event her parents explained to her that the people on the blockchain across the street had, in their conceit, decided to stop staking in the district's security organization, Ur Safe. The hooligans who had smashed the place up, had probably been paid by Ur Safe in order to send a message. Sousay didn't understand this explanation, but she knew why she couldn't go there: it was dangerous.