Here’s a little poem I wrote while I was in Nashville for the Bitcoin Circlejerk 2024. I came up with it because I felt a little lost, as I often do around people, but this time I felt especially lost because I had to walk home in the dark for an hour, and my phone’s battery was almost dead. My VISA card was declined by Uber for no apparent reason.

When I got home, someone mentioned that I could have called them, and they would have ordered an Uber for me. I didn’t know that was an option, but even if I had known, I probably wouldn’t have called—I wouldn’t have wanted to bother them. The walk back also wasn’t terrible; I just didn’t like the circumstances that led to it. If I remember correctly, I walked down Broadway and passed some art covered in 1's and 0's.

I tried to decipher it in ASCII, and then it hit me: most people probably wouldn’t have any idea how text can be encoded in binary (or even what encoding means). They would just see 1's and 0's, while I was busy trying to recall the ASCII table in my head, hoping to uncover a hidden message. That’s when the idea for this poem came to me.

I wonder if 'internet feelings' would have been a better title.