About Starholder

Starholder is an art project exploring networked media and generative storytelling.

Thematically, it is an alternative timeline covering 1999-2099 which imagines that our world is being actively managed by a Cosmic Corp of Engineers (CCE) who are trying to keep late capitalism from failing before a viable replacement economic system can be developed. The CCE does this by creating the Starholder Timeline, which acts as a buffer system where all sorts of potential harmful butterfly events are removed from our world and dumped into the alternative timeline. This process creates a world that is weirder, more anxious, and accelerated in its technological development than the one we live in.

The creators who contribute to Starholder are aware of the CCE and its shuffling of events from our world into Starholder, but the timeline of Starholder itself is not aware that it is an alternative world that is diverging from the base reality its creators live in.

Starholder operates within our realm of physics. There is no magic inside the Starholder Timeline. Some events may appear magical, but that is the result of accelerated technical development and a warping of allowable norms within society.

The one major divergence Starholder makes from our current reality is the introduction of alien life into our solar system. First contact comes to Starholder because we want to explore a timeline that is dealing with an event that irrevocably alters the course of human history and reorients society. It is simply more enjoyable to explore a world that is turned on its head, then to follow the corrosion of our current trajectory into some gloomy dystopian endpoint.

The timeline runs in a 100 year arc that forks from our world in 1999. Its reality slowly diverges from ours, but those divergences compound so that the further you go into the Starholder timeline, the less it looks like the world we live in. This drift allows for an entire range of genres to be explored. Stories late in the timeline will inevitably veer towards science fiction, but earlier chronological texts are very much genre novels more influenced by postmodernism, philosophy and capitalism. The overall theme of Starholder is what it means to be human in an age when technology advances at dizzying rates, and that can be explored in any number of styles. In short, Starholder is a speculative sandbox that basks in the extreme weirdness of technology-induced anxiety, late-stage capitalism and the human race's transition into a networked species.

Starholder starts in 1999 with the creation of the Starholder Institute by the comedian Dan Aykroyd. The Starholder Institute is unaware that it is the founding event in an alternate timeline, but its membership also acts as the governing body of the art project, placing it in a role where it must be both the actor and the audience, player and game.

The objective of the timeline is twofold:

1. Render up a 100 year history that becomes an important myth within our culture.
2. Create a historical arc in the storyworld that does not end in failure and collapsing upon itself in its year 2099.

These objectives operate on two levels:

• A meaningful rendering of 100 years of alternate history is a goal of the art project itself. Can it capture the necessary attention of others to see the timeline built out and its story told to completion in a way that achieves cultural importance?
• The second objective is to deliver a satisfying ending where the Starholder Timeline overcomes the odds of failing and finds a viable alternative to the dystopias assumed by late-stage capitalism. The construction of the Starholder conceit stacks the deck against this happening, as the CCE is removing all the really gnarly stuff from our timeline and dumping it into Starholder to deal with. Think of it this way, if you are pessimistic about our survival, then Starholder as it twice as bad.

Starholder begins as a timeline seeking its text, but it is a networked multimedia project. Rendering up is central to the construction of the Starholder universe. While it will begin with fiction, the timeline can be expressed in any number of other media formats. The vision is that the Starholder timeline contains enough creative work within it that when technology is ready, it can act as the source material for AI-driven simulations of an alternate universe.

Rendering in the context of this project means that the stories, objects and history of Starholder gradually come into focus across a variety of media. There is no requirement to deliver completed works of art into the Starholder universe. Things may be begun and abandoned. They may be picked up by others to carry on or they may just exist as incomplete artifacts which can be drawn on as source material for other works within the timeline.

Rendering also means things may be started and left fallow until a later date with their outlines acting as the scaffolding for the larger arc, only to be painted in when the larger story is better understood. This is both an invitation for others to contribute without placing a high entry bar into the project, and the founder's own desire to dance around a multitude of different storylines simultaneously. Rendering up as a style of construction is also a gamble that generative AI will advance to the point where it can paint in abandoned works, and the spark of human creation is the valuable seed it needs for that task.

The central gambit of the project is that networked media is going to lead to a shift in how entertainment operates from passive consumption to active co-creation. In this regard, we are heavily influenced by McLuhan on technology & media and Arendt's Human Condition when it comes to the re-emergence of public life. Our belief is that late capitalism has stolen the role of the individual in public life and left them with only consumerism as a means of expression. We believe that networked media is a starting point for the reclamation of expression. By telling stories together where there is no fixed ending, we can express values that matter to us and recapture agency and meaning from a world that only wants to sell us luxury goods.

Networked media is an emerging form, so no clear definition can be provided of it yet. We postulate that a successful early template involves humans using generative AI and crypto primitives to form networks centered around the act of group creation where the network both programs the entertainment and consumes it. Our vision is that Starholder begins as text and images in an openly editable online information repository that everyone is familiar with, the MediaWiki system that powers Wikipedia. The contributions made to our wiki come from human authors and prompt engineers using generative AI systems such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion. In time, crypto primitives will be introduced to Starholder. The first being an NFT membership pass for the Starholder Institute which will govern the IP rights and editorial direction of the timeline. After that, the goal is to start putting the world of Starholder onchain so that it can interoperate with the larger creative ecosystem that exists in crypto and serve as a credibly neutral and immutable substrate for others to interact with. Eventually, we believe that networked media reaches the point where individuals and communities can live out stories in real time through AI-powered simulations. A long term goal is for Starholder to generate enough source material that others can live out their own adventures and myths against the backdrop of our alternate timeline.

Starholder is an exploration of an emerging form of media. It is also an art project, not a startup or a crypto project that will financialize itself early on and flame out. There are no dates or timelines for its completion. If the community takes no interest in it, then it will simply serve as a framework for its founder to write fiction against. If an active community forms around it, then the hope is that it will embrace the exploration in a quest to both create a new form of media and as a way to revitalize our agency in public life. Above all, Starholder should keep it weird and hit people in the feels while it goes about its search for meaning.

Our mission is to Render the Timeline.

Spaceman