Morton, In Progress update #4

The Game, image generated by ChatGPT (2026)

In the last update, I talked about the attention economy as a system that compresses identity into something to be sorted.

That was the darker side of the question this art project poses:

Can a modern artist avoid becoming a brand?

Today I want to talk about the power of translation.

And I want to start with the most cliché content creator guru advice:

Just do it for a year.

Well, I started this account a year ago.

So I’m sure you’re all dying to know what I’ve learned.

Hey, don’t leave. I was joking. I won’t bore you with 25 pages of backstory. I’m familiar with bad exposition.

So instead I’ll talk about my art over the past year, and I think the rest will fall into place.

My Year on Substack

My year on Substack began four years earlier, when I watched enough TikToks to realize I was probably more neurodivergent than I thought I was.

Then I learned about masking, and discovered I was already a master at the craft of mask-making.

So I began deconstructing the beautifully artistic mask I called identity.

{[Insert movie montage here.]}

Skip ahead to a year ago.

I had discovered I still loved art, even though I had set it aside for ten years to pursue wealth.

So I created this Substack.

I started publishing art again.

The first few weeks on Substack taught me some important lessons.

The person with 1,000 followers who just wants to read your work because you have less than 10 followers yourself is most likely lying. And if they aren’t, that is probably the person you need to subscribe to.

But more importantly, I learned that people often won’t read your posts, but they will see your notes.

So if you want your published work to be noticed, you need to translate your larger work into standard social media language.

In other words, you need to find your niche.

That was when I first started thinking about digital identity, which eventually led to this project.

I could understand what niche my long-form writing fit inside, but I didn’t understand how to find the people who would appreciate it.

So I started trying to understand what the algorithm wanted from me.

I tried some bizarre things that never caught on.

I once restacked an entire article one paragraph at a time, in a patterned rhythm, as a conceptual piece about memory and time.

Another conceptual art piece I ran in the notes was restacking the word “performative” with the word “performative” from the week before, every Sunday, as a reminder not to become a brand.

That piece ran for four months.

I learned things from these weird projects.

All the while, I continued my original quest from four years ago of deconstructing my masking so I could finally understand myself.

If that sounds like a spiritual quest, it was essentially secular non symbolic self-actualization.

Yes, I would say social media is creating a kind of awakening, by accident, or through unconcious will.

And yes, I see the irony of the institutions of capitalism trying to profit from the mechanism that will inevitably reshape capitalism in ways they fear.

But I digress.

This essay is about art.

Morton, in Progress is a conceptual art piece about digital identity and personal identity. It gives me a canvas to translate my personal experience into a digital form that can be understood by both personal identities and digital identities alike.

And while all my digital art projects to this point taught me something, none of them really lived beyond the moment.

Which is fine.

A flower doesn’t bloom forever, except in fairy tales.

Even the greatest art is eventually forgotten.

I’ve never felt it was fair to judge art by its ability to persist in human consciousness. The reason for this is simple. I believe all art is equally art. There is no real container for good art and bad art. Those are containers we shape arbitrarily in our minds.

They are biases that make some art harder to translate than others.

I never stopped trying to translate my art into notes, but I also never felt like I had captured the essence of my published work in a way that would attract the people who were meant to find it.

In my first month on Substack, I learned that just because a note was wildly successful and brought in three subscribers, that did not mean those three subscribers would appreciate my long-form digital art.

In fact, many of them never noticeably engaged with it.

At the same time, many did.

I have made some great friendships here over the past year. I’d say about 40 percent of my subscriber base actively engages with one piece of long-form content of mine a month, and about 20 percent of those engage weekly.

I’m happy with that.

But it also leaves a lot of room for improving how I translate my long-form work into the notes section.

That translation is something I keep working toward.

After my last update, I started treating every note as a canvas for art.

But most of them were too high concept, too abstract, and too cryptic.

And being cryptic is the opposite of what I was aiming for.

Then one cryptic note caught on.

Seventeen people participated in the game.

And I want to be honest as an artist. My original note had two intentions.

One, treat the note as a canvas for art with no expectations.

Two, write something people would engage with while still capturing the complexity of my long-form work.

So I thought up an interesting riddle.

I created a game to see if the participants could solve the riddle.

And I became the first participant.

Later, I started calling myself participant zero because people kept mistaking me for some kind of game master.

I agreed I wasn’t identical to the other participants because I knew the answer to the riddle.

But one of the rules I found early on is that it is rude to give out the answer to the logic problem once you know it, because that might take away someone else’s enjoyment of the game.

So when the second participant responded to my note, I asked a question:

Do you want a clue, the cryptic answer, or the sincere answer?

That became a binding contract with all new participants, I asked each person the same three questions.

This made sense to me because it helped me understand what kind of game people thought they were playing.

As participant zero, I felt my role was to help us all solve the riddle, while also creating a similar game experience for each player.

So I created some rules.

But they weren’t really game rules.

The game only has five rules I know about, and I only know about them because Cookie helped find them before the game resolved personally for her.

Those rules are:

1. The original post is the invitation to play.

2. Anyone who responds becomes a participant.

3. Every comment is a move.

4. A move either continues the game or resolves it.

5. If a move does not resolve the game, the game continues.

If you’re wondering about resolution, apexrose was pivotal in helping define the first layer of resolution for the game.

Then DE DeGraw helped me realize there were more resolutions than apex had found.

That put my own participation into perspective.

I have believed for a while that art is not the artist. The relationship between artist and art is closer to the relationship between parent and child.

My role is to build momentum for my art. To tend the garden of my work until it becomes time for an idea to spread.

And I realized this note, which was now a game, was gaining momentum as a piece of conceptual digital art.

So I continued making moves whenever someone else made a move in the game.

This created momentum.

I eventually lost track because the game is not linear, and counting every move is hard. But this round of the game had over 150 moves.

I’m not sure all participants enjoyed the game.

No single participant experienced or played the game the same way.

Some participants only took one or two moves. Most took three to ten. A few took more.

But one participant took more moves than anyone else.

Thirty Poems had the longest story arc within the game.

Something about the game was alluring to people.

When people stopped playing, I started treating that as a partial resolution, or a personal resolution for that participant.

They were not out of the game.

They had simply found a personal understanding that resolved the game for them.

Maybe something will draw them back later.

But for now, the game felt resolved.

For Thirty Poems, resolution wasn’t that simple.

She was equipped with what felt like infinite curiosity, we took turns making moves toward the solution.

asking questions.

I looked for the mechanics where her understanding of the riddle was hitting a snag.

That took us on a pretty amazing journey that started with the null set and ended with us both better able to define patience for ourselves.

That journey organically led us back to the original note, and to a question for both of us:

What have we learned?

Thirty offered to answer first, which I was grateful for because I wasn’t ready to answer yet dispite offering too.

Within the game, they said they learned the following:

I see that sometimes a discussion is about more than the question at hand.

Great precision is sometimes required to achieve a clear understanding of another’s point of view.

Sometimes language is not sufficient to achieve this precision.

Definitions, like people, are often interdependent. It’s difficult to say where one ends and another begins.

I don’t think I’ve learned or discovered anything new about whether order is a subset of chaos.

They also published a poem/song inspired by the game, which you can and SHOULD check out by following the link:

On Patience

So What Did I Learn?

In round one I promised Thirty Poems that I would tell them what I learned so here’s the list:

I learned about patience.

I learned about time.

I learned about assumptions.

I learned about humans.

I learned about process.

I learned about artistic process.

I learned about myself.

I learned about others.

I learned about communication.

I learned about math.

I learned about language.

I learned about chess.

I learned about grace.

I learned about rules.

I learned about games.

I learned about possibility vs probability.

I learned about questions.

I learned about Clues.

I learned about abstract concepts that do not translate easily between people, but can still be recognized in each other.

I learned that art also takes patience.

Which brings me back to the advice this channel started on:

Give social media a year.

A lot of what I learned from playing this game with sixteen other people is the same lesson I learned from social media itself.

If my last update was a warning about the darker side of social media, let this update be a reminder that social media can also be a wonderful place of self-reflection, personal development, and modern digital art.

It can compress identity.

It can flatten people into brands.

It can train us to become more sortable.

But it can also build momentum.

The artwork became the movement around it.

The artwork became something none of us could fully control once the game began.

I promised @thirty poems that I would tell them what I learned.

I hope this essay answers that promise.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE GAME YOU ASK?

Yes, let’s not forget the artwork that brought people together.

I think it’s time for round two.

And this time I’ve made the first move clearer.

Lastly I just want to thank all the players who bravely took part in the first round of the game: U.R.M Technologies Inc. , The Maat Movement , Sudhir Kamatkar , KelleyTauffel Fiction Shroom , Evelynn Keyes , epimedes , apexrose , Bart Bounds , Elias Lumen , Cookie , @robopulp , Melissa McGuckin , 0.5 , Ian McKerracher , Thirty Poems , Dr.Morton , DE DeGraw

I invite everyone who read this far to make a move in the new game.