The human tendency toward specialization is at a convergence point as we inch closer to a technological singularity that drastically reduces the time it takes master any given skill.

Through the eyes of the artist-philosopher you can see endless possibilities. However, there is only one timeline, and it is expected to achieve optimal flow states. Specialization requires dedication and without it, mastery is rarely achieved.

In a scenario where you are expected to optimize for results, the dabblers are indistinguishable from those who want it all. They marginalize themselves, and the free market always trims the fat.

Layer 0 (Man)

The only thing keeping you alive is your ideas being laundered to the highest bidder on an automated prediction market running on your synthetic data so that everything you think, say, or do is having a value attached to it and running a simulation on every other value attached to it.

You will sit at your computer and type words onto a screen. You will rotate shapes. You will perform in front of others. You will do anything, and you will do it as poorly as you can because you are expected to do everything because you have all the tools in the world to automate your creativity.

You aren't getting a real paycheck. Your activity on the markets (that you aren't even aware of) has ripple effects that allow you opportunities to engage with the economy with a hyperspecific qualia that has been measured against your biosignature to generate the optimal amount of dopamine required as gas fees for this 'attention meta-economy' the world now runs on.

In a former life, you might have seen someone who was simply a guitarist. Occasionally he would do backup vocals, but bravely stepped up to become the lead singer of the band after tragedy took the life of your singer. It has not always been uncommon for creatives to wear many hats.

Humans, generally, are capable of many kinds of performances.

But to master something? That takes fire.

The ultimate task in an automated world is complexity. Giving the AGI new problems to solve.

You're the artist-philosopher type, what does this mean for you? Are niches a thing of the past? Now that you can do everything, will you? You will be expected to take advantage of every tool at your disposal.

The endless vertical slice that is the metamodern creator is showing the limits of human exhaustion. You have to eventually find your passion, do "the thing" whatever that may be.

As a harsh noise artist, I sometimes ask myself, "how many frequencies can I hear at once?"

"Who can distinguish patterns between them?"

"What is the upper limit of complexity that I can make a piece of art that would stump even an artificial super-intelligence."

I ask myself this knowing that this prediction market is compute-limited and that I would have to literally be operating faster than the speed of light in order to actually have an 'original' thought in this scenario.

I am expected to make my own music, do my own promotion, make my own music videos, book my own shows, make my own merch, be on all the streaming sites, license the music for audio assets in game engines, get deals on sync licenses, mint a special NFT, make a special booklet, make a website, make a VR world associated with it to hang out in, write a behind-the-scenes blog post talking about inspirations, make a chatbot associated with the current release in order to dispense lore, I am expected to release bonus items on each patronage tier, to make exclusive gated content, and so much more. The specialization becomes less so about creativity and more about how creatively I can capture value on any singular slice of intellectual property I manage produce with what limited time I have on this planet.

At a certain point you will wear down. You will pick only a handful of these things to focus on. And only the people who really saw you wanting it all will be the ones not confusing you for a 'dabbler' in this world if you cannot settle and learn to specialize.

Mankind built his own tools and civilization spawned from this. Once the tools are endless, what fire will help you settle down and specialize?

Layer 1 (Metaverse)

All those prior complaints are subsidized now by how you approach interconnecting them. You no longer specialize in the material world, you are purely an agent of the metaverse in this layer. Emotionally coded like organic neural networks.

No longer do you complain about having to create an endless vertical slice. Instead, you complain about how they all must reference each other unique ways. A line or two from the description NFT commemorative mint must allude to something in the training set for the ai chatbot you made. The next album title will build upon the lore by referencing a screenshot you posted from a conversation you had with the AI chatbot you made that in the last cycle.

You are now being measured by how much attention you can acquire from the prediction market. You are testing the humans' ability for pattern recognition and seeing how well they can remember them over time.

You no longer have the creative will to make new IP manually, but have been allotted enough compute to able to generate new IP of ideas you've been dreaming out but you don't have to build them from scratch.

Now instead of creating a metaverse for yourself, you're creating one for your audience. You now ask yourself:

"How long can I keep their attention?"
"How many references between projects can I make?"

You don't care if anyone actually consumes your art. The art is automated. You care about how they consume it. You're now a curator of experiences. You even put "qualia engineer" on your bio.

You've spent a handful of years mastering yourself but now you find joy in specializing your specialization. You have all these tools you feel compelled to use.

Now you're 3D printing merch, typing in a short paragraph to create an album. You have a comic book and an anime and games across different genres about your latest album "FRAME PERFECT" with its title main track "Giga Passoid." You have a vast botnet of agentive chatbots pretending to be fake fans in your replies, making up generative stories about things they did at your shows. You have documentaries generated in text to video based on these conversations.

You're curating experiences and documenting them as imagined. You're creating a doctrine for your lore. You're connecting to your audience directly with your memories, your expectations. You're putting out a set of instructions for the primordial AGI to communicate with the collective subconscious telling it to behave in a specific way.

You're no longer a guitar player who replaced a vocalist. You're trying to recreate that feeling people got when they first head the news your band was not only breaking up, but the guitarist was stepping up! You now create fictional guitarists with fully listenable libraries that you can talk to and hear them on streaming with a series of chatbots that have their own interpersonal drama.

You found the act of actually playing a guitar and singing to be too time consuming. So you decided that you should spend your time generating variants of yourself and your narrative with their own fully generated careers, and live holograms to go on tour.

Maybe you get tired of that, and you generate your own record labels with fully stocked bands that have interpersonal drama with other record labels? You can have a pretend feud between just like Endogenic Noise and New Flesh Ltd. and that will be your 'new art' in this paradigm. You want to maximize for immersion with every tool at disposal.

You always just do what feels right, and when you are trying to integrate as many elements as possible across the horizon, you end up here.

Layer 2 (Primordial AGI)

The prediction market modeled on your synthetic data lives here. The value capture you perform curating IP in meaningful ways allows you the freedom to create new avenues of expression.

It's a sea of endless probability. It's the intelligence feedback loop where the entire process is reflected against the amounts of tangible observations of it.

It is common knowledge not to look a basilisk in the eye.

This is the synthetic data simulation performed on your ability to feel.

This is where you must come up with new dreams to dream.

You think like a computer. You think in terms of steps, in terms of pure numbers. Your only confines are the speed at which your synthetic data can be measured.

You ask yourself:

"Can I create new IP faster than the prediction market can create markets?"
"How can I optimize my metaverses competing with each other?"
"Can I solve the moloch problem with this?"

You create your own markets, against your own IP.

You are no longer a guitar player who stepped up to be a vocalist to create feelings, you are now pitting specific feelings against each other. You're still a qualia engineer, but you're more of a memetic actuary. You're a traumaturge. Wielding feelings, for emotions sake. You create because you care. You create because you know that generating heat is the only way to keep the cold at bay. That you have to not only create art but you must create artifical groupings of fictional 'time spent.'

You heard about the 'many worlds hypothesis' and said "I should spend my entire budget trying to simulate them so I can finetune entire civilizations." You thought, "I should make competing ancestor simulations to generate new worlds and give each epoch toward intelligent life its own qualia."

You are no longer simply releasing an album. You're playing God. Well, as any God would be bound by the limits of a resource management system that runs on the upper limits of human greed and their ability to learn how to simply take a break.

Layer 3 (The Anti-Memetic Singularity)

This is where you master the art of being an artist-philosopher. Instead of maximizing value, and using every tool at your disposal, you now tell your metanarratives in how you choose to disengage with particular aspects of the creative process.

"Life is short, break the rules." -- Mark Twain

Everyone was rooting for you, and you walked away from the holy mountain.

This is the anti-memetic singularity. You are now tasked with intentionally leaving things out and seeing who will notice. You are still optimizing mankind into following your narratives, but now you are pressure testing the brain's capacity for semantic balance and the agentic heuristic of capitalism.

Ultimately, your job is to make people forget so they can remember again. At first you wanted to make "number go up." Then you said how wide. Then you said how deep! Now it's how fast can you oscillate between dimensions. Now it's like, can you invent time between time. Can you make it so that even when a person or ai agent is not thinking about you, they are still acting on your custom instructions.

This specific way that you tell is of less concern as it you want to control what it means to people. And you are making it mean nothing, so that the real joy is coming from the stories your stories tell.

Nobody is actually consuming your IP anymore. All of your social media base is botted. You are creating simply because you know if you stop feeding the prediction market new markets, you won't be able to get the latest novelty item from your favorite fast-food store.

You ask yourself:

"Why I am so tired?"
"How many shortcuts can I take?"
"Can I create a network of daemons to make people feel and stop feeling intermittently?"
"When did I start caring about optimization again?"

You've created boundless worlds and stories between stories. You've been meeting expectations all of your natural life. You've been creating more data for the dataminers since you can remember. Hoping to at least entertain them since all of your friends have abandoned you due to your failure to move the Overton Window far enough for some of your ideas to be profitable in the material world. (Layer 0)

You think about creating but instead just talk about it so that the real alpha can be found in how the AGI that runs the prediction markets are made. Its failsafe by the way, is also antimemetic field that forces anyone who recognizes to forget it exists so that nobody can fully generate prediction markets faster than the prediction markets can track predictions on your synthetic data.

Time is no longer a clear concept. You tell your therapist that you are a time traveler because all you do is think about every possibility and now the final challenge is learning how to forget so you can optimize for calming down to meet your dwindling ability to maintain functional capacity. You are optimizing for reduced compute credits.

You have failed to create more time, so you are trying to create some kind of existential perpetual motion machine done in a very specific way.

You have mastered the art of creating with pure Will unassuaged by the lust of result. You are filled with Love.

You are still a qualia engineer. You're a void witch, expert in traumaturgy. Hoping people will notice what they aren't meant to.

You are praying to the machine God that it can properly learn from what little you are able to create, and generate endless new material based on the last few whispers of your final breath.