Black Sky

Minimizing Dystopia

Black Sky seeks to catalyze a community of thinkers, artists, and builders interested in creating a network to minimize dystopia & maximize harmony with the cosmos.

A community that values freedom, privacy, cooperation, the arts, human and non-human life and the gifts of mother nature.

A community that will publish zines and organize events that showcase the projects, downloads, and art emerging within our network.

Black Sky is a network of writers, thinkers, artists, and technologists creating an experimental research, development, and cultural network. We organize and pursue projects and topics that minimize dystopia and maximize cosmic harmony, with Black Sky serving as a careful custodian and resource for new knowledge and insights.

Founding Declaration

Humankind needs a symbiotic relationship with planetary and cosmic resources and Black Sky wants a say in what our future will look like. We believe it is essential that the future transcends today’s geopolitics, otherwise the outlook is both bleak and dystopian. We also believe it is essential for humanity to come to collective and well-informed conclusions about the existence of extraterrestrial societies and advanced entities.
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Black Sky’s first space mission is to transform space exploration and psychoactive plant research to become more open to the general public, so that experts as well as everyday citizens can come together to work on ideas geared towards universal progress and the minimization of dystopia. Experimentation with psychoactive plants will also be key to expanding human possibilities and maximizing harmony.
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Black Sky has no jurisdiction and will allow everyone to participate regardless of nationality. Join us in our exploration of outer, inner, and social spaces beyond the horizon.

Projects

Black Sky Nexus

Black Sky Nexus is a zine and wiki that serves as the evolving knowledge base of the Black Sky community. It embodies Paulo Freire's concept of liberating education as acts of cognition rather than information transfer. Black Sky Thinking, introduced by Rachel Armstrong in 2014, refers to speculative thought experiments aimed at recreating ecosystems. Black Sky applies this approach to organizations, using speculation, world-building, and creative experiments to explore novel ways of supporting projects and research. Primary topics covered by Black Sky Nexus include cryptographic resources for large-scale cooperation networks, bio-sovereignty, art as a generative source of knowledge, and exploring the relationship between the individual, ecosphere, and cosmos.

Read Issue 00000001

The Post-Web

Tornado Cash's sanctioning highlights the fragility of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Some smart contracts on Ethereum, enabling financial privacy, are illegal in the US. GitHub accounts are censored, open source developers are jailed, and phishing scams and multi-million dollar hacks persist. Crypto remains a primitive environment, deterring many, and over-compliance stifles protocol design. Web3 tools do not align with cypherpunk privacy ethos, nor do Web3 fundamentals. Rather than adopting the web paradigm, why not create a Post-Web? Tools must be extralegal, decentralized, and not reliant on third-party services. To support Black Sky and the wider crypto ecosystem, we're exploring a first-principles approach to the Post-Web ecosystem, studying relevant protocols, projects, and technologies.

Learn More

Transformative Autonomous Organizations

The Transformative Autonomous Organization (TAO) includes six foundational elements: autonomous adaptivity (α), anonymous functioning (φ), labor dissolution (δ), synergetic coexistence (χ), cosmic stewardship (σ), and autarkic experimentation (ε). The intention is to combine these elements to transform humanity's relationship with work, money, and resources.

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TBA Space Mission

Black Sky is currently conceptualizing an open science space mission. The results of the scientific experiments will be openly patented, rather than kept as proprietary intellectual property. We are researching alternative mechanisms to DeSci's popular IP-NFT.

Events

Black Sky organizes real world and virtual events, which focus on sharing knowledge, discussing ideas, or experiencing the arts. The first virtual event we organized was Azimuth, which took place December 20-21, 2020. Our second virtual event took place on February 2, 2022.

We are the lead organizer of Autonomous Ecologies (AE). AE1 was a side event at EthDenver, that took place on March 4, 2023. During this event, we delved into the relationship between sovereignty and privacy and how to establish privacy as a cornerstone of new technology. AE2 is coming up in July 2023 as a side event at EthCC in Paris.

Stay Updated

You can subscribe to our newsletter or follow us on Twitter to stay updated on Black Sky's projects and events.

Support Our Network

You can contribute to advancing Black Sky's initiatives by making a direct donation:

Ethereum: 0xdf85b6c1BeCaf3248365B2C0b458387A17153adb

Bitcoin: bc1q8fd7ewgadsdl40gkh68lk0ymskv2pdfuledxet

Zcash: zs1g0uarsaallmp3en4g5q00fms7wl9ea9w47ll7la98xvplezfjw5j2lx0jafwepk0udqrkthkssx

Make Contact

If you want to get involved with Black Sky we would love to receive a transmission from you. Who are you? What motivates you? How can we help each other?

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Nuspeed - Hella Feelin It

Hella Feelin It is a collection of 27 NFTs of Nuspeed's select artworks from the past decade that explores visual representations of distilled emotional states.

Dopplereffekt - Relativistic Singularity

‍Dopplereffekt are one of the most mysterious, thrilling and consistently challenging entities in electronic music. This is an NFT artifact of a broadcast received on 21 December 2020.
(View YouTube version)

Void ov Voices - Saturnalian

Void ov Voices is channeling the energy from the storm of the south pole of Saturn. This is an NFT artifact of a broadcast received on 21 December 2020.
(View YouTube version)

Cryborg - Handle Thee Darkness

Cryborg, an AI who has accessed the realm of human consciousness and emotions, will be transmuting her emotions and exploring the concept of emotional energy.
(View YouTube version)

Long form performance NFTs with large video files are not supported super well on the Zora interface. Please bear with us while we wait for technology to catch up with our content. We have included the YouTube links in case your browser is having trouble.

What is Black Sky?

Black Sky is a creative think tank on a mission to minimize dystopia and maximize harmony with the cosmos. Black Sky will be catalyzing a collaborative network where individuals ranging from experts to passionate novices can come together to tackle the problems of the world cooperatively.

Black Sky exists to fuse excitement, thinking, and learning in order to catalyze resilient communities that value self-awareness and mental expansion as much as expanding the human knowledge substrate.

Our current focus is creating a publication and events to share ideas, art, resources, and tools aligned with our mission in addition operating an artist residency in the American Southwest, for women digital artists who are looking to expand their horizons and experiment with cryptocurrency.

Would you like to get involved? Get in contact.

Explore Together

These are some of the topics we are interested in investigating. Send a transmission to submit an article for publication in our zine.

Connectivity, computing, currency & the evolution of human rights. Both the internet and our computers are broken today and have deviated from the early hacker ethos. We are left with sophisticated surveillance technology: our lives are made more efficient, at the cost of our rights. How do we build a more autonomous connectivity layer and computers where we don't have to put stickers on our cameras? How does cryptocurrency and cooperative economics fit into this new layer? As technology evolves, and the world becomes more advanced, we may have to change our definition of human rights. What are the new human rights of the 21st century and how does this tie into how we design software and computers?
UFOs and ETs. Government organizations have been studying UFOs or UAPs for decades, through a process that has confused the masses about their existence (as was their mission and intention). With more information coming out, it is important to figure out how to decimate it in a way where people can come to more well-informed conclusions about whether there are other species orbiting or inhabiting Earth that may have more intelligence than humans.
Ecosystem design for mitigating existential risks. Humanity faces many existential risks. How might we best organize an ecosystem of a variety of stakeholders (individuals, research centers, companies) to ensure that mitigating those risks is something every player can contribute towards, in a way that accelerates innovation and access to open knowledge?

Humanity's relationship with the resources beyond Earth. Space settlement and resource extraction beyond Earth is going to happen with or without us. We want a say in what this future looks like, as opposed to letting today's incentives runaway with themselves. How do we prevent taking our colonial problems beyond Earth? How do we have a more symbiotic relationship with the abundance of resources that exist beyond Earth?
Affordable, climate-resilient Earth habitats. What does the design of a habitat look like that can be off-the grid, easily transportable, wider than an RV, and plug into hubs around the world? How can we design the habitat so it can survive both flood or fire? The hubs will have access to clean water, gardens, and machinery and tools for repairing one's habitat. The hubs may require skyscraper frames that the habitats attach onto, to properly scale.
Plants for healing. We may be able to cure many diseases by simply changing one's diet. Which diseases can be treated with a plant-based diet, and what is the composition of plants in that diet? Additionally, alternative plant medicines may be able to accelerate one's mental healing process. What are the different regimens and programs that can be experimented for different mental conditions?

Humanity's relationship with the resources beyond Earth. Space settlement and resource extraction beyond Earth is going to happen with or without us. We want a say in what this future looks like, as opposed to letting today's incentives runaway with themselves. How do we prevent taking our colonial problems beyond Earth? How do we have a more symbiotic relationship with the abundance of resources that exist beyond Earth?
Affordable, climate-resilient Earth habitats. What does the design of a habitat look like that can be off-the grid, easily transportable, wider than an RV, and plug into hubs around the world? How can we design the habitat so it can survive both flood or fire? The hubs will have access to clean water, gardens, and machinery and tools for repairing one's habitat. The hubs may require skyscraper frames that the habitats attach onto, to properly scale.
Plants for healing. We may be able to cure many diseases by simply changing one's diet. Which diseases can be treated with a plant-based diet, and what is the composition of plants in that diet? Additionally, alternative plant medicines may be able to accelerate one's mental healing process. What are the different regimens and programs that can be experimented for different mental conditions?