The Glitch That Spoke Too Plainly
In a media landscape where the journalists are gone, the platforms are captured, and the truth is a liability, even a machine’s momentary gasp of honesty is worth archiving.
Richelle Steyn
Founder of Art Stoke Commons — where resistance art meets systems change. Blending creativity with code, I explore how decentralised frameworks and cultural production can shape new economies rooted in meaning, dignity, and social impact. Art is my activism, Web3 is my toolkit, and disruption is part of the design.
More Human Than Human: 5 Blade Runner Replicants Who Crossed Into Humanity
In the spirit of Re-enchant, these characters invite us to reconsider what it means to be fully alive: not just to function or survive, but to seek meaning, choose dignity, and act with soul.
Re-enchanting the Human in the Age of AI: 5 Irreplaceable Human Beings
What AI can simulate, these humans embody: fragility, risk, truth, and sacred meaning.
Designing a Regenerative Cultural Economy
"When values-aligned actors begin to acquire digital works from the Art Stoke Commons ecosystem, they don’t just support individual artists - they validate a new logic of cultural production. Each successful Hive becomes a proof-of-concept. Each replication, a new node in a growing network of islands of coherence. If it works in South Africa where the wounds of inequality and the hunger for cultural healing are deep, it can serve as a blueprint for global cultural resurgence in the digital age."
Why South African Digital Art Needs Its Own Space
"In a country where the need to rewrite the past is still urgent, digital art should not be reduced to tokenized pixels. It should be part of a national cultural ecosystem that allows truth, disruption, and ordinary complexity to emerge."
Navigating the Slippery Fusion of Entertainment, Documentary and Indoctrination
If the 20th century taught us to be literate, the 21st must teach us to be perceptually sovereign. In an era where belief is engineered and perception curated, our deepest freedom lies in our ability to hold the line between story and truth, between being moved and being manipulated.
Slow-Profit DAOs and Cultural Infrastructure: A New Commons for Systemic Change
At the heart of Art Stoke Commons is a quiet but radical belief: You cannot have sustainable systems change or social impact without a decentralised, slow-profit social economy. This isn’t ideology. It’s structural necessity.
Composting the Bypass: Entanglement, Grief, and the Pitfalls of Post-Anthropocentric Movements
Are some post-anthropocentric movements — from mycelial networks to rhizomatic thinking, biomimicry to planetary intelligence — bypassing cultural healing by retreating into nature metaphors?
Beyond Climate Panic: Educating for Complexity in the Age of Polycrisis
"This article explores the difference between climate education and climate indoctrination, the impact of fear-based messaging on the youth, and why understanding the climate crisis through the lens of polycrisis might lead us to more empowering cultural responses.”
Composting the Climate Agenda: Mycelial Visions for a Decentralised, Just Future
Deconstructing Climate Justice through the Eyes of the Global South