Re: <nettime> Josh Hall: Blockchain could reshape our world – and the far right is one step ahead (Guardian)

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

After witnessing assorted Bitcoin, blockchain, Ethereum and related 
meetings, lectures, conferences and such, audiences ranging from people 
from the street to Ivy League PhDs:

- Most informal meetings have pure religious feeling; people smile and 
listen. The content is irrelevant. Idiocy rules. Most come for the cult 
value - tech scene lost the ideological steam, and anything, anything 
that projects into rosy (dys)(u)topia can get lots of attention. Every 
industry needs a church. 1 in 100 attendees understands issues;

- Professional/academic gatherings are fueled by the VC money, hoping to 
take a piece of the action from the finance folks. Large number of 
otherwise sane postdocs are churning out irrelevant papers with word 
'blockchain' in them. 1 in 10 attendees understands issues. Lots of 
lurkers from the finance industry. Some shake their heads in disbelief;

The confluence of the religious component for the masses, and a fuzzy 
possibility of grabbing control of money flows from the traditional 
players, appears to be the winning combination. One feeds the other.



> Since anything a blockchain can be put to use to can be done more
> easily, more efficiently, more securely, and usually also at a lower
> _final_ cost by humans, I have come to suspect, nay be convinced, that
> blockchain and other pieces of tech solutionism are mainly intended, and
> deliberately so, to take human beings out of as many loops as possible,
> possibly with the perspective of getting rid of them altogether when
> transitioning into the bliss of post-human algocratic singularity for
> the sole benefit of an ueberfintech elite, indubitably gifted with
> eternal (because machinistic) life to boot.

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