It’s hard to get the news from coblage.
Fragments of headlines, blog posts and news articles reassembled into something that almost makes sense. You read it and think there might be a sentence there, you make a connection.
It is difficult to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.William Carlos Williams
The connections show up whether you’re looking for them or not. The algorithm doesn’t have a point of view. It just cuts and pastes and reassembles. If the same themes keep surfacing, that’s not the script making a statement. That’s the material itself. Meaning slipping through the cracks.
The daily cycle. Wake up, query the feeds, run the script, prepare the post. The artist comes along and adjusts the images, orientating them quickly in a way that makes sense, but doesn’t think about it too much, and inserts them into the post. About 10 to 15 minutes a day spent on it.
The title surfaces from the material itself. The same faces, the same conflicts, the same narratives cycling back around under different names.
The news cycle. The war cycle. It’s never really stopped, just shifted shape. The crypto cycle. The bull market, the bear market, the hype, the crash, the slow crawl back. All of it happening at once, all of it running through the same feed.
This is a down period. You can feel it in the texture of the daily output. The algorithm just reflects what’s there.
But cycles can be broken. Recognise the patterns. Trust your instincts.
I almost got caught in another cycle this week. Someone reached out, said they were a collector, wanted to know more about my process and my work. The kind of message every artist hopes to receive. They asked questions. Built rapport. Had opinions about pieces I’d minted. It felt like a conversation with someone who actually understood what I was doing.
Then came the pivot. Could I verify my wallet? Prove I was who I said I was? Share my private key?
It keeps happening. A different username, a different angle, a different story — but the same cycle. Someone exploits a desire — for recognition, for connection, for a sale — and tries to take something.
I don’t want to write about the scam. The scam is boring. What interests me is the asymmetry. An artist spends years building a practice, developing a voice, learning to trust their instincts. A scammer spends an afternoon with AI and a playbook and fires off a thousand context-aware hooks. The artist is supposed to spot every single one.
Some won’t. Some are more trusting than me, more eager for the validation that a collector reaching out seems to offer. And the tools keep getting better. The personas keep getting more convincing.
But this is not a post about scams, even if they keep cycling back around. Just be aware the tools are here to help as well as hinder. Check with the AI if you think you’re being tricked by another one.
What gives me hope is a different kind of cycle entirely.
Last week the Teia community exhibited work in Lisbon under the theme of Cycles. Artists from a platform that was supposed to die, revived by the community, showing work at a conference, in a plaza, in the sun.
There’s a quiet cycle happening there too. One I’m proud to be part of.
Collect. Curate. Swap. When you list something you’ve collected from another artist on Teia, you’re curating it. You set a price, add your markup. The platform remembers the history — the artist’s royalty percentage, usually 10%, flowing back to the original creator on every secondary sale. Yes, these are tokens we’re trading. But they relate to artwork. They link back to something real. A token of appreciation that could lead to more art being created.
The Teia community continues to amaze me. The small group of core organisers and the artists actively using the platform are a source of inspiration. Against the odds, through market collapses, platform failures, scams, hype cycles and endless predictions of imminent extinction, people keep making things together.
Every day someone publishes a piece of work. Someone experiments with a new process. Someone shares knowledge, helps another artist, maintains the platform, contributes. Not for a token price. Not for recognition. Because that’s what artists do.
Maybe that’s a cycle too.
Not the cycle of power, fear and spectacle that dominates the headlines. A quieter cycle. Making, sharing, rebuilding. Making, sharing, rebuilding. Over and over, regardless of what the market or the news or the scammers are doing.
That’s the one I’m interested in participating in.
I’m happy to be part of that experiment. A core team member of a platform that proves another internet is possible, one with shared ownership and collaboration.
The market has cycles, the news has cycles, the scams have cycles. The wars have cycles, the art has cycles…
But the artists will still be here. Making things. Showing up. Supporting each other.
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