Every song tells a story to me. Fascinating visuals broadcast through my mind like an IMAX presentation when I close my eyes and put my headphones on. I'd like to give you a glimpse into what I see, so feel free to listen along as I present the stories I've found while listening to some of my favorite tracks.

Today's track: Strife II - How Do I (Maduk Remix)

002 - Welcome to the Steemit Hivemind

A kaleidoscope of color washed over my mind as I was integrated into the Steemit hivemind. As reality stabilized around me, I found myself welcomed by a dozen friendly faces, all eager to greet me, like I was a long-lost friend returning after being separated for decades. The spatial reality construct before me was clean and futuristic, with just a hint of the stylistic embellishments that I recognized from my childhood, before the hives appeared. I was lost in the amount of dancing, cheering, and smiling I saw in the crowd. Everywhere I saw people sculpting, writing, and showing their real faces. No one was using a holo-avatar saved from their best smile of the week. Everyone here looked very natural, which in itself was unusual.

I was no stranger to being in a hive mind, a collective group of thousands or millions of minds all plugged in to the same digital reality. After the first couple of times it becomes just like any other adventure, and one is free to traverse between them given enough time and social status. Generally, those who couldn't pay could donate a portion of their own brain's processing power to keep the simulation going, and many did. In the last few years though, questions began to swirl through the dominant hives as to just how much brainpower they were taking from those in the simulation, and many saw diminishing returns on their investments, which started to shake the foundations of the larger hives. People were getting tired of being absorbed in a reality that promised the world but delivered nothing. The masses grew tired and restless, searching for validation of their own personal realities amidst the crowds of fake personalities and the bland landscapes delivered by the hive's steady distancing from stable and creative realities to more advertisment-heavy cityscapes made of copy-and-pasted code stripped from the stretches of the net, code we'd all seen before and were unimpressed by.

I wasn't the first of my group to leave, but I was already growing tired of my current hive, casually spending more time away from it than plugged in, when a good friend of mine, a trusted photographer and uniquely creative individual started ranting and raving about a hive that would pay you not just for your processing power, but just for showing your personality. They'd pay you for watching others and being the first to identify a particularly nice holo-field, artistic ability, or just a caring stranger willing to help those in need. Not only that, but they'd pay the creator of said art, inspiration, or story, all for just being a part of it, and helping it grow into something beautiful.

Naturally I questioned him, aware of promising schemes where guarantees of plugging in would net you great rewards, just to have your mind slagged and your bank account ruined. I didn't particularly like the feeling of having to pay off the debt of a neuro-wipe at the hospital, and it had been a while since I performed a backup anyway, being barely a middle-class citizen myself. He swore up and down that he just made his first major deposit, that it wasn't fake, and continued with the semantics of the cube-chain and decentralized currencies. The conversation blurred somewhat over the advertisements of a nearby coffee shop coming in over my sub-vocal receiver, but I got the gist of it.

That evening I took off from the office early, headed home, and sat down in my den. I punched in the coordinates of the Steemit hive mind, and waited as the scanners in my room synchronized to my current frequency. I knew I'd never be the same as soon as a kaleidoscope of color washed over my mind, and I finally felt at home.