Story by Rob Myers
Illustrations by Lina Theodorou
Afterword by Ruth Catlow

FREE TO DOWNLOAD HERE

Print edition offered for sale at £10 or equivalent cryptocurrency amount
(0.01BTC at time of printing but varying wildly)

Bad Shibe is a sci-fi novella set in a future society that may or may not be based on a descendant of the Dogecoin cryptocurrency, where it’s as hot and as dusty as a virtual money mining rig. A trusting young shibe called YS questions the basis of their utopia and their place within it and  feels … bad.

The story invites us to imagine what kind of society emerges when a system designed to verify the transfer of digital assets is combined with a world where reputation is based on “followers” and “likes”. The story deals with the implications of a new wave of fully financialised planetary-scale automation and the struggle to discern right from wrong when human and machine agency merges.

This special print edition of Bad Shibe is a prequel for the upcoming book, Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain. It is a collaboration between Torque and Furtherfield, connecting Furtherfield’s Art Data Money project with Torque’s experimental publishing programme. Imagined as a future-artefact of a time before the blockchain changed the world, and a protocol by which a community of thinkers can transform what that future might be, the publication acts as a gathering and focusing of contemporary ideas surrounding this still somewhat mythical technology.

Read the afterword here