Dear Geert,

Thanks for sending me your post on the talk page of the “Geert Lovink” Wikipedia article about the paid editors who have given you a shake down. Wild!

A bit of context, two hot takes, and a cool calm question:

Context: I have been less engaged with Wikipedia since I stepped down from the Art+Feminism board (as planned) in 2022, so I don’t know exactly what the precise state of affairs are with paid editing. There is a tug of war that shifts slightly every few years between people who think editors should be able to be paid to make edits, and those who think it is slowly killing the project.

Hot take number one: your page looks pretty good, and your page is regularly being edited by a broad array of editors, who are making constructive edits. They are for the most part doing the things that those two opportunistic editors are suggesting should be done. Here is the full edit history where you can see quite a bit of activity. This edit in particular is a sophisticated restructuring. This is a fair amount of work and consideration — much more than the average. It is more or less what that paid editor said they would do for you – I wonder how much they even looked at the page before they pitched you.

Hot take number two: this is more about AI than it is about Wikipedia. Wikipedia is just a suitable text-based forum for which a scammer can scam. These messages are clearly AI generated, and the contributions would likely be AI generated as well. Wikipedia has had a long, and complicated/conflicted relationship with paid editing, but once you add AI into the mix it becomes something different.

Which is to say: AI makes spear phishing trivial.

I recently received an invitation to a podcast interview (full text below). It is a crypto focused podcast, which kind of makes no sense, except for the fact that I showed a body of work with an NFT-forward gallery and we used NFTs as a blockchain certificate of authenticity. The work is still the print (not a digital file), but you can see the NFT-as-COA in the Whitney Museum’s wallet.

Anyway, I get this invitation, and it is either the best researched interview request I have EVER received, or more likely it was written by AI. It didn’t smell right. It looked like the uncanny valley and tasted like slop. So I did some pretty deep research and found someone else’s even deeper research that the podcast is part of a scam that targets people in the crypto world. They have cloned some other legit podcast, and use that as a lure to get victims to download an app that drains their crypto wallet.

They wouldn’t have gotten much from me. I think I have about five dollars worth of Ethereum, which was the minimum I could buy to set up the certificate of authenticity.

Of course, This is all part of the enshittification of the internet.

On some level, the whole post feels like a thoughtful theoretical meditation on the state of Wikipedia, in which case it is in and of itself the thing it needs to be. In this view, the audience is not Wikipedia at all, but rather your own media studies/media criticism audience.

From another angle, this is brilliant, wiki-lawyering. The page is not at any real risk of being deleted – you certainly meet the notability requirements! But the presence of this evidence will ensure that it won’t be. Thus the audience for this version of the post are the editors who discuss Articles for Deletion.

This also seems like an indirect RFC (Request for Comment as well as Request for Contributions.). To reach out to editors to fix the article? To deal with the AI scammers? To debate the future of the good faith collaborative Internet in the face of AI slop?

Let me know,

Michael

—

Hey Michael,

My name is Sachi, and I’m the host of Web3Unchained, a podcast exploring the cutting edge of Web3, crypto, and AI culture. We have a community of around 42,000 followers on Twitter/X and an engaged audience of artists, builders, and onchain collectors. In the past, we’ve had conversations with people like Avery Ching (Aptos Labs), Gabby Dizon (Yield Guild Games), Greg Osuri (Akash Network), Uma Roy and other innovators in the Web3/crypto/AI space.

I’ll also share our links:

Twitter/X – x.com/web3unchained

Website – web3unchained.com/podcast

I’m reaching out to invite you to appear on Web3Unchained for an episode focused on your path as an interdisciplinary artist working with the poetics and politics of the information age – from projects like Print Wikipedia, The Real Costs, FDIC Insured, Postmodern Times and Live Study to your long-running work as an educator, writer and co-founder of Art+Feminism. Your way of working inside systems to make invisible processes visible feels like a perfect fit for our listeners.

Episode Focus & Format

We’d structure this as a two-part conversational episode.

Part 1 – Print Wikipedia, Live Study & making infrastructures visible

First, I’d love to talk about your trajectory as an artist: internet art, objects, installations, and performances that trace how information structures our lives. From there, we can use works like Print Wikipedia, The Real Costs, FDIC Insured, Postmodern Times and Live Study as anchors to explore how you choose which systems to surface, how you translate abstractions like carbon emissions, financial collapse or digital labor into concrete form, and what you’ve learned about authorship and collaboration in these large-scale projects.

Part 2 – Art+Feminism, pedagogy & the future of open digital culture

In the second part, we’d focus on your work as an organizer and educator: co-founding Art+Feminism and the Wikipedia edit-a-thons, New York Arts Practicum, and your teaching at CUNY around media culture and digital practices. I’m keen to talk about how you think about knowledge gaps and participation, how organizing and pedagogy intersect with your studio work, and how you’re reading today’s shifts in social media, AI tools and decentralized tech through the lens of your long engagement with open networks and collaborative infrastructures.

Interview Details & Next Steps

Proposed Recording Time: December 3–4, 2025, at 2:00 PM EST. If that window isn’t ideal for your time zone, I’m very happy to find another slot that works better for you.

The tone will be warm, nerdy and conversational. My co-hosts and I will have a few guiding questions, but we prefer an organic dialogue. The session would run about 60 minutes, and we’re flexible around your schedule. Since it’s pre-recorded, we can edit for clarity, and you’re welcome to review anything you’d like so you can feel completely comfortable with the final episode.

Would be really happy to have you on Web3Unchained for this one.

Best,

Sachi Tanaka

Web3Unchained Team