| byfield on Sun, 31 Dec 2017 19:55:26 +0100 (CET) |
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| Re: <nettime> Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain |
On 30 Dec 2017, at 16:51, Morlock Elloi wrote:
Let's assume, for the sake of argument, deep conspiracy and that Bitcoin creator(s) actually did bother to read "Austrian economics" (neither of which I think is probable - looks like a parallel construction), and chose a hard limit instead of exponential backoff or any other of dozen possible strategies. Let's also assume that there were no other (dozens) of competing ideas which simply could not get any traction at the time (and this is a patently false assumption.) Invention of Bitcoin was therefore not a random event, it was intentional dark design having roots in nearly hundred year old ideology, and there were no alternatives to it.
No need for talk about 'deep conspiracies,' just look at the archives: https://cypherpunks.venona.com/raw/There are lots of theories about who Satoshi is, but no credible theory proposes s/he/they didn't at least read the cypherpunks list in the mid/late '90s. That list was *awash* in Austrian economics, so much so that it's easy to misinterpret explicit mentions of Hayek and Mises, along with their American spoor like Murray Rothbard: they were the floor, not the ceiling, and it was the rule, not the exception, embraced and expounded by the alphaest alphas on the list, like May. You could probably quantify some off this by correlating traffic with other mailing lists devoted to Mises (miseslist@mises.org) and Hayek (hayek-l@maelstrom.stjohns.edu), if you're into that kind of thing. (A nice tidbit I just found: ca. '98, Ryan Lackey's computer was called 'mises.systemics.ai' — I wonder if that's the laptop he dropped in the ocean while he was being hoisted to/fro the SeaLand platform? 😹)
This is where, as Florian pointed out, your overly pat distinction between ~technology and ~political agency breaks down. If Bitcoin's designer(s) had a dozen dozen possible strategies at their disposal, did they happen to choose one that would mesh neatly with Austrian theory? Your answer is that the decision came from from /dev/rand, more or less, but every good cryptohead knows you should never trust an easy source of randomness because it isn't truly random. If you understand how it works, you can find the patterns. The pattern here is Austrian: Bitcoin is Austrian theory made digital flesh. The first waves of adopters outside of those circles came from techie circles that were steeped like forgotten tea bags in 'libertarianism' — which by that point, as Nancy McLean has shown, was a cynical misnomer for free-market extremism. And you could probably quantify some off that by correlating early Bitcoin adoption with, say, conservative clubs at universities — some of this history is recent enough that it hasn't crossed Google's event horizon yet.
Also, contrary to what you said earlier, from the list's beginning in '92 there were debates — extensive, explicit, and sustained — about what currencies are/n't and how various digital payment systems relate to them, practically and theoretically. And when you follow those threads (literally hundreds of them), you'll see most of Bitcoin's basic ideals and problems spelled out just in a few words within the first year or so, say, by early '94. It's pretty astounding. Here's one example, from Miron Cuperman on 20 Nov 92:
- Charge for the mix services with crypto-money. The crypto-money could be some networking service. It could be even mix transmission. For example, the basic currency could be the transmission of 10K through a mix. One would have to create a mix and let the bank route some traffic through it thereby putting credits in your account. Once you have credits, you could spend them anywhere. One might want to fiddle with the definition of the currency so that it does not depreciate with time.
But your following point is interesting, if I may: a technology may be designed to implement an ideology, but as its adoption expands, the results are paradoxical — OT1H, it continues to carry or even amplify that ideology, OT0H later adopters don't realize it. You can make this point without cartoons about about supervillains and badly aimed rants about 'political correctness.' But when you follow that full circle, you'll quickly see how and why your claim that $TECHNOLOGY is $RANDOM breaks down: everyone designing, implementing, funding, promoting, adopting, and abusing new technologies does so *in a world that's always already totally pwned by ideologies.*
Hapless adopters, unable to see Hayek's ghost in the algorithm, just continued to use it until it was too late.What does this mean?It means that technology has became effective carrier device for the ideology, amplifying it as everything else it touches, and if ordinary people cannot see through it ("out of the question") as they could see through Nazism and similar, well, then the ordinary people are going to get fu*ked in perpetuity, and there is absolutely nothing one can do about it (bitching notwithstanding.) All Dr. Evil has to do is carefully design a shiny object, and cretins will unconditionally descend on it. Easier than organizing rallies.It's a worldview that goes exactly nowhere. It doesn't even have afterlife.Try coding instead.
This relates to the 'magnificent bribe' thread, specifically to remarks about the roles that intelligence agencies may have in promoting certain technologies. I like the political realism in those discussions, but some of it makes me nuts — for example, the idea of 'dual-use' technologies, which is mostly a clerical distinction. The fact that some actors explicitly aspire to omniscience isn't God writ small, it's the psychotic Dr. Schreber writ large. As Deleuze put it:
Judge Schreber has sunbeams in his ass. A solar anus. And rest assured that it works: Judge Schreber feels something, produces something, and is capable of explaining the process theoretically. Something is produced: the effects of a machine, not mere metaphors.
So these actors explicitly aspire to know everything about everyone, and are even in a position to promote technologies and services that may move them closer to that goal — so what? Subjectivity and sociability can and will respond, and they'll move the goalposts. I'm not being glib: that generic observation doesn't do much to help people in the Khmer Rouge killing fields. But the shrill apocalypticism about the shifting bounds of privacy is, basically, middle-class Anglo-American anxiety.
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