How to Escape the Coming Tide of Slop

Introducing The Aleph

There’s a lot of other stuff I could publish today. I could send out the final part of my “Destroying Modernism” series (Part 1 here and and Part 2 here). I could send out the latest MRB podcast episode. And I could announce some exciting upcoming changes to the Mars Review. I should also probably let you know that I’ve been invited to debut Stop All the Clocks in London on Aug 7th, I should list some of the cool press the book has received, and I should (gently) nudge you towrad giving it a five-star review on Amazon. But this is more important. I’m going to use this message to announce something I’ve been working on quietly for a while now: The Aleph.

TLDR: The Aleph is a multi-sided marketplace and membership club for arts. We’re starting in NYC but aim to go global. We’ll have our first event in the next few weeks and plan to keep them going bi-weekly. If you’re an artist and have a project you need production & funding, or if there is a work of art you’d like to commission and produce, go ahead and fill out our form here.

But First, a Story

Before I describe The Aleph in more detail, let me first tell you a brief story. Once upon a time, in the 1950s, there was a little boy who loved cars. When he was old enough, he got the fastest one he could afford. But then he had a terrible accident. He couldn’t race anymore. The only thing he could do was dream.

And so he dreamed a lot. He told a million stories to himself in his head. And in so doing, he became deeply interested in the question of where stories come from, so he decided to study folklore and anthropology. He came across Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell said that all stories could possibly be boiled down to one: The Hero’s Journey.

So the dreaming adolescent became a dreaming young man, looking for a way to tell the story of a great hero. The young man had learned the ins and outs of film and hoped to make a movie about such a hero. But now it was the 1970s, and all the films were about crime and misery. The nation had become hopeless and so had its art. The young man dreamed of an epic, rivaling Homer and Milton, a story of good and evil and life and death, set in a distant, mythical past in which man was an intergalactic species.

But studios hated the idea. They wanted stories that reflected the grimness that was all around them. They wanted stories that were depressing, cynical, ugly. Nevertheless, the young man persisted. He got his film made.

You may have guessed by now that the young man was George Lucas, and the film was Star Wars. And with his story alone he altered forever not only Hollywood but the culture at large.

What is The Aleph?

There’s a lot of misery and grimness around us these days—especially in the arts. It’s considered a foregone conclusion that literature, film, and music will degenerate into lazy, AI-generated, algorithm-hacking slop. The institutions that still have the funds to create great works are sclerotic and overly politicized. Meanwhile, communities around Bitcoin, decentralized networks, and other tech projects have injected some new energy into these fields. But what’s lacking is an organization to collect all that energy and distill it.

The Aleph is a multi-sided marketplace and membership club for arts. What does that mean?

Whether it’s the Medicis, the Rockefellers, or Hollywood moguls, there used to be great networks of artists, producers, and patrons that were beneficial to all parties. The question I’ve been obsessed with is, how do we re-establish those networks?

I think the opportunity is there. Founders and investors are itching to form communities that are IRL, meaningful, and exclusive. Meanwhile artists are desperate for new backers. Moveable feasts like Assembly, Vibe Camp, Palestra, and the like, have proved wildly successful.

These different groups just need to be connected. That’s what the Aleph is going to do. Then, once artists and investors are in the club together, we’ll provide a platform for reaching standardized agreements, to create something like an AngelList for the arts. We may not be able to save the broader culture from slop. But we can at least build on higher ground.

That starts with getting together in the same room and having conversations. I was having a conversation with a founder and investor in crypto a while ago. I asked him what sort of art he wanted to see more of. He said, “anything that’s optimistic.” I relayed this conversation to a Hollywood producer friend. He said “I wish I understood better what that meant.” I figured I could keep playing intermediate in this game of telephone between the tech world and the arts world. Or I could build a platform to connect them. I chose the latter.

What’s with the name?

Thinking back to when I started the Mars Review in 2022, I find I achieved much of what I intended to do, but what I really needed was to dream bigger. There can be no truly dominant magazines or labels anymore. There can only be dominant platforms. The only way to dominate is to incorporate everything.

And that’s what The Aleph is for. The title comes from a story called “The Aleph” by Jorge Luis Borges. The tale recounts how a minor poet comes across a portal in his basement, which he calls “The Aleph.” The portal affords any viewer a vision of everything that is happening in the universe, and everything that has ever happened—immediately and simultaneously.

One of the ironies of the story is that the owner of this portal, Carlos Daneri, only uses it to view scenes which he might include in the epic poem he is forever working on but will never finish. Is this not rather like the average person in the age of technology? We find ourselves with magic at our fingertips—and we use it scroll mindlessly through our feeds of slop.

It turns out, we don’t want our AIs to make art for us while we sit at our e-mail jobs, we want them to sit at our e-mail jobs for us while we make art. The plan of The Aleph is to leverage all the technical breakthroughs of last twenty years—easy peer-to-peer payments, global distribution for digital works, AI for streamlining services and training on past data—so that artists can focus on the fun stuff. But not only the fun stuff. The important stuff. The stuff that (unlike most super-serious but ultimately boring projects) actually changes the world.

The Aleph, in its final form, will be a global digital platform connecting artists and producers. However, a purely online system for funding the arts is not Lindy. Hollywood, New York publishing, Music Row: these places have always about rubbing shoulders with the best and brightest artists in the world. That’s why in-person events will be a crucial part of what the Aleph does. If this interests you, fill out the form here.

If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to reply to this email.

Best,

Noah