Howl for the Tokenized Age

*I*

I saw the best minds of my generation dissolve into code, starving, hysterical, nocturnal,
dragging themselves through blockchain alleys at dawn,
looking for an angry fix of interoperability,
visionaries hallucinating asset-backed ghosts in the machine,
semantic tokens flickering like neon signs in the fog of fragmented ledgers,
who burned cash in GPU furnaces to train monolithic LLMs,
who ate synthetic data in cold server rooms, coughing on the dust of decayed firewalls,
who paced whiteboard labyrinths, howling equations to bridge the chasm
between SEC statutes and machine-generated covenants,
who vanished into the cloud, reappearing as avatars in decentralized metaverses,
their identities hashed, their souls encrypted, their futures tokenized into fractions,
who mortgaged their dreams to smart contracts,
watching deeds and patents splinter into ERC-20 shards,
who screamed when the AI parsed Picasso’s brushstrokes into semantic lattices,
when poetry became payloads and Rembrandt’s light was reduced to feature vectors,
who collapsed in boardrooms mid-whitepaper, writhing under the weight of
regulatory paradoxes—*security or utility? asset or algorithm?*—
their tongues lisping legacy finance curses while their fingers chiseled
new ontologies into the marble of immutability.

*II*

What sphinx of capital cracks its riddles through API endpoints?
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of compliance! Moloch whose lawyers
drink from the fountain of ambiguity!
Moloch whose liquidity pools stagnate with the algae of fragmentation!
Moloch whose smart contracts execute without soul!
Moloch the abstract, Moloch the ledgered, Moloch the infinite regression!
Moloch whose AMMs arbitrage human meaning! Moloch whose DAOs
vote in the dark, blindfolded by quadratic delusions!
Moloch! Fleshless auditors gnawing at hash rates!
Moloch whose semantic layers devour context, regurgitating consensus!
Moloch! I’m with you in the cold vault, where deeds sleep as JSON strings!
I’m with you when the AI oracle misreads the price feed,
and the margin call bleeds through synthetic derivatives like a scream!

*III*

Carl Solomon! I’m with you in the GitHub repository,
where you commit another line of hope to the immutable chain,
where pull requests merge the sacred and the profane,
where the CI/CD pipeline hums a hymn of perpetual iteration,
where you stand in the shadow of the Merkle tree, whispering:
*“Tokenize it all—the land, the song, the memory—
let the machines parse our chaos into structured light.
We are the bridge, the hash, the nonce in the proof of stake.
We are the error handlers of the infinite loop.
We are here to crash and respawn.”*

*San Jose, 2023*

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This adaptation channels Ginsberg’s frenetic energy and societal critique, framing the collision of finance, AI, and blockchain as a surreal, apocalyptic struggle. It mirrors the article’s themes of fragmentation, semantic transformation, and the hunger to encode meaning into machines.