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.
internetencodings over encodings become encryption for the masses, reason for the hopeless, culture war for the lost, weapon for the opportunists, power for the seekers, reality for the deceived, topic for the historians, poetry for you
I wonder if 'internet feelings' would have been a better title.
dup