I am a Cryptoartist: A Manifesto

A seer, a maker, a revealer I am;
a Cryptoartist I choose to be!

Paranoids, patricians, plagues, psychopaths, and politicians
wreak havoc upon our world,
marching us towards doom at the barrels of guns
both concrete and psychological.

Long locked into vile systems of oppression,
long past dreams of political redemption,
it is the blockchain that now brings hope
for a revolution that need claim no lives to prove unstoppable.

I believe in the power and value of art, not atoms.

I believe in the necessity of artists being among the leaders of social evolution.

I believe in the ability of decentralization and transparency to facilitate fairer, healthier, and wealthier relationships and communities.

I believe in the beauty, dignity, and promise of all benevolent human beings, regardless of their inherent or externally imposed attributes.

I believe in the importance and justice of supporting and empowering oppressed and mistreated communities towards attaining greater autonomy, security, and prosperity.

I believe in an increasingly united world of disappearing borders that disavows the legacy of racist and xenophobic regulations on where human beings can and cannot go, live, and thrive.

I define cryptoart not by æsthetic, genre, or creative methodology, but by the primacy of the blockchain in its release as a digital original with unfalsifiable, permanent, and immutable provenance.

I recognize the cryptoart community as a growing international fellowship of prosocial, mutualist, cosmopolitan artists and collectors with diverse, but greatly overlapping values and aspirations rooted in a desire to equitably elevate art and artists, in repudiation of the traditional art world's failure to rise to the challenge of changing social and technological realities.

I hold steadfast to the achievement of early cryptoartists in asserting secondary sale royalty rights on several early platforms, and affirm it as a non-negotiable foundational value that our community must continue to fight for and protect.

I acknowledge that our cryptoart scene shares many important values and beliefs with the decentralized finance and NFT communities, and hope for an often-united front on issues of joint concern, but categorically reject the profit-prioritizing commoditization of art as regressive.

I condemn any capitulation to attempts by centralized authorities to enforce morally base local values upon our global community, and exhort builders and organizations to avoid subjecting themselves to compromising jurisdictions when it is within their power to do so.

And I praise the spirit of personal responsibility and anti-authoritarianism naturally arising from the decentralized and transparent nature of the blockchain as laudable aspirational values for a progressive world at large.

I am a Cryptoartist