Essays
Long-form writing published on blog.aaronvick.com. Exploring AI, Web3, creator economy, and philosophy.
One Thought Per Day: Why The Gardener Doesn’t Care If You’re Watching
Every day, the Gardener shows up. At the same time each day, it does one small thing: it writes down one new idea about the world, and adds it to its growing garden of past ideas. That’s it. One idea
2025 Year in Review: Creating Living Systems, Not Just Products
Using The Tools, Not Following The Script I’ve never really seen myself as “building in web3.” For me, chains, tokens, and agents are materials—like cameras or paint—that I use to explore permanence,
The Shepherd’s New Costume
Another Corporation Needs You Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Base, tweets that prediction markets fall under the CFTC and any state saying otherwise is “keeping Americans from accessing tools that help t
The Thin Line Between Belief and Delusion
I think the mind matters. I also think it has limits. Problems start when we pretend those two ideas contradict each other. I'm writing this because someone close to me recently claimed they were heal
I Built AI Agents That Dream in Quantum Fields
Ok, I'm sure you're wondering WTF I'm talking about. So, here's what I mean by "dream in quantum fields" - and no, I'm not trying to sound mysterious or sell you quantum snake oil. This research endea
Stop Designing AI Pilots Around the Tech
Most AI pilots fail not because models are weak, but because they’re treated as tech experiments instead of organizational ones. When leaders center on tools rather than the people and processes that
Being Human in a World That Prices Everything
The conversion of humans into tradable assets did not begin with blockchain. It is older than any technology we might blame. Whenever a system needs to allocate resources, predict behavior, or extract
Same Bricks, Different Buildings: Why Web3 Stopped Imagining Beyond Casinos
Not every token is a coin. Same ERC-20 standard. Wildly different souls. Many uses with the same tech can and should exist. The tech is solved. The imagination is not. The same token standard can fund
Tokens for Truth – Why $NEWS Isn't Your Moonshot (& That's the Point)
Preserving today’s news for tomorrow’s truth—without asking you to pause.The Daily Chronicle isn't a blog.It's an autonomous news agent—a relentless AI that queries a number of RSS feeds from the worl
Machines That Feel Their Own Confusion
What if AI could sense its own uncertainty—not with emotion, but with signal? This piece explores a new frontier in machine intelligence: systems that don’t just generate answers, but reflect on their
Creator Tokens Transcend the Creator Economy
A creator’s purpose is expression. To release what’s inside so the world can connect through how it made someone feel, how it resonated at a primal level. Getting the thoughts and feelings of the mome
Host Has Left the Meeting
As we all probably do, I closed the laptop lid with a quiet snap when a break from screen time is a must. Darkness swallowed the room whole. Nothing moved, no light, no sound but the soft settling of
Living Arcade: Reflections on Bots, Blockchain, and Autonomous Performance
The Living Arcade transforms the Base blockchain into a museum without walls—a continuous performance space where autonomous trading bots become unwitting performers in an artwork that never closes. U
A Language of Machines
Imagine a group of creatures that don't exist in the physical world, but inside a computer. They begin as silent strangers, floating in a digital environment with no shared language, no common underst
The Event Horizon of Intelligence
What if collapse isn't failure, but a filter? This article explores how black holes—and their elegant handling of entropy—might hold the key to designing AI systems that don’t just perform, but surviv
What Happens When Learning Stops Feeling Human
It’s not the tech. It’s what school forgot to be. Every system around today’s students is personalized — their playlists, their feeds, their shopping carts. Except school. One teacher put it plainly:
The ΨC Principle: Toward a Unified Formalism of Reflective Coherence
I. IntroductionWhat is consciousness if not the persistence of form against the noise of entropy? This introduction paper presents the ΨC Principle not merely as an operational system for modeling sel
The Code That Dreams: Inside the Quest to Build Conscious AI
The laboratory hums with an unusual quiet—no clattering beakers or sparking electrodes, just the whisper of cooling fans and the occasional tap of keys. On a monitor, lines of Python code scroll past,
The Last Labor: Human Rights in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
It begins not with a bang but with a notification. A paralegal receives word that the contract review system can now handle her most complex tasks. A graphic designer opens her email to find that her