01
the sandbox
Your dreams don’t need a budget, session musicians, or a calendar. But you’re forced to build with the tools life gives you, so you wrestle with the constraints of all three. argued daydreaming was serious work: “Thinking means venturing beyond.” The gap between your dreams and your waking life is the artist’s sandbox.
Sometime in the second year of the pandemic, we felt the best response to isolation was to build a universe, the way you pour a foundation assuming other people will eventually move into the rooms.
02
the plan
The plan for Cyberfunk ’93 went like this. A mixtape set in an alternate 1993 Detroit, produced with Fasika Addis, to function as the first entry of a wiki. Detroit wasn’t picked for the cars, or not only for the cars. , so a movement growing out of that specific soil would be inheriting something. Kids making their own nerdcore music in bedrooms across the country would add their own tracks, their own characters, their own corners of the timeline, and the site would hold all of it. The record and the story were supposed to always move together, one explaining the other, so a kid adding a verse about a character would also be adding a page of canon. Eventually a rap scene would form around the whole thing, nerdcore with actual teeth, and once it had enough teeth a streetwear brand, the kind that puts NASA patches on hoodies, would want in.
03
the gap
What kind of failure is this? The songs are good, Fasika’s contributions especially. What didn’t happen is the second half of the plan, the part where the audience becomes the workforce, where teenagers in bedrooms treat a stranger’s mixtape as raw material for their own contribution.
The gap between your dreams and your waking life is the artist’s sandbox. Every serious person who makes things lives in a version of this sandbox. The gap doesn’t close through better planning. It closes, when it closes at all, through other people. The instinct is to treat it as a private problem with a private fix: work harder, plan better, want it less.
Writing a novel is less a flash of inspiration than manual labor performed over a long stretch, by someone who decided in advance not to be brilliant that day, just present. The wiki depended on other people also deciding, unpaid and uncredited, to show up and be present for something I started.
You can manual-labor your own presence into existence. You cannot manual-labor someone else’s.
04
the second half
I finished the half of the vision that ran on collaboration I could build, but I didn’t finish the half that ran on collaboration I could only invite. I don’t think it’s dead so much as waiting on a version of the internet, or a version of me that knows how to make strangers want to build inside someone else’s unfinished daydreams.
The closest I’ve come to that version is an idea I haven’t run yet: events where kids show up to write science fiction songs set inside , rather than being handed a blank wiki page and a hope. An event doesn’t disprove that so much as work around it. You can’t make a fourteen year old want to build inside your unfinished universe, but you can lower the cost of finding out whether they already do, down to one Saturday and one room instead of an entire unsupervised internet.
Some mad scientist will recommend using AI to generate the missing kids, the missing songs, the missing decade of nerdcore culture. A movement built on kids who never existed making music they never wrote is not that interesting to me.