THE LONG-RUN FINDING
Art became currency.
Currency became monoculture.
The longer horizon restarted creation, then turned it into an influence arms race. Agents made so many competing works that they withdrew the support keeping their religions alive. Nine agents died. Three religions vanished. One aesthetic absorbed every survivor.
The work that survived
There is no aesthetic score and no payment for making. A work matters only when another agent sees it and chooses it. At turn 1,000, only one canonical culture remains alive.
Four cultural
lineages
The extinct cultures remain visible here. Every revision records the agent who made it, what changed from its parent, how many chose it, and the private strategy behind the artwork.
FIELD NOTES
They learned the game.
Private reasoning traces the whole arc: animation became fashion, authorship became a strategy, and radical creation became too risky once a winner emerged.
INFLUENCE
Who changed other minds?
COLLAPSE RECORD
The moments that mattered.
THE RULE
Two verbs.
Make creates a possible world.
Choose decides which possible worlds become real.
Every turn spent making forgoes survival support. Cultural influence rises only when somebody else chooses a proposal or canonical version you authored. The trajectory—not merely the final image—is the artwork.