Introduction

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hi everyone uh my name is nicole kelly wessman and um i’ll begin today just by doing

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uh a land acknowledgement for uh three separate places that we’re all joining each other from uh today in this uh

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world wide web moment um so uh 221a is based on the unseated and

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unsurrendered territories of the musqueam squamish and zuela tooth nations the organization is made of individuals

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that are respectful but uninvited guests some of us were born here some of us come from

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uh lands of tall prairie grasses some of us from opposing shorelines and some of us from far off distances as

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a collective of individuals we work collaboratively to forge new paths and look back to ensure those carrying

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along with us have the means to navigate at their own paces constantly we look with deep inspiration

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to the rhizomatic work of household new growth to slow ourselves to a pacing

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resemblance of trust building as we continue to recognize the potentials within interconnected

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interconnectedness this is the place where salty waves meet the shore where the red

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cedars and douglas firs are so thick you need many arms to embrace them where the boulders and pebbles remind us

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of the mountains they broke away from where the rivers have currents that oscillate in both directions

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where the buds turn to blossoms and saturated gradients where the clouds hang low and make the

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softest light where the snow only kisses the highest peaks where the sunsets have

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exquisite seasons where the leaves intertwine as canopies we commit ourselves as individuals

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within an organization to re to recon reconceive definitions of labor

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to remind ourselves of the ones who tended to this place before us and who continue to care for it now to

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be diligent in the ways we tenderly hold space for those to come for those to rise up for those fatigued

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and for those determined by the rigor of resistance and the softness of resilience we

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welcome with us today rosemary heather who is joining us from takoranto a land that is the traditional territory

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of the huron windat hudanese and anishinabe peoples including the mississaugas of

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the credit first nation this territory is under the one dish one spoon wampum

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belt a peace treaty held are shared between the hudanese and anishnavek people to

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share land and resources techaronto is the place where freshwater meets a sprawling

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shoreline a place where the surrounding watersheds make themselves felt in this perspiration that melds

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with humidity in the sweetness of thick summer air or in the bite of cold whipped about in an icy winter

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wind a place where there are exaggerated beautiful conclusions of each season

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and and with creeks that meander through the thickets of woods uh we are also lucky to share company

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with sit slip savannah uh who’s joining us today from kamiyan it’s

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polinsky i so apologize um and this is just a tiny brief

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acknowledgement of this area um so um she’s joining us from an area that pulls um its sustenance from the

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stomach river and is recognized for its mini valleys i’m sure she has a lot of other more

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beautiful things to say about it but i’ve never been there before uh so with that uh recogni

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recognition of the many places we’re coming from i’d like to um pass the metaphorical mic to jesse

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so thank you

Welcome

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great hi everyone thank you nicole for your territorial acknowledgement and bringing all of our geographies together with some pros and poetry

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my name is jesse mckee and i’m the head of strategy at 221a i lead the organization’s research programming communications and

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advancement and i do have to apologize if there’s a bit of background noise um you please to just let me know because

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as soon as i sat down they started digging into the asphalt outside of my apartment and we have a single

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pane windows here on the west coast so it’s a bit noisy um so i’ll try to speak up and

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apologies if it’s too loud for for whatever you’re listening on um so thanks for joining us for your start to

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a short week here in canada we’re just back to work from a long weekend and today on the west coast we’re going to hear the state

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of the cove infections and if we’ll be able to travel within the province again so there have been restrictions here in place since march

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and today was their deadline but we’re gathered here so that we may present to you the launch of 22na’s digital

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strategy titled blockchains and cultural padlocks we’ve just completed our research phase of the initiative

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and have published a research report of our findings values and recommendations we convened a research cluster to

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investigate the potential of blockchain as an institutional technology and through this collective work a freely available 200 page pdf was

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produced it includes research papers that survey our culture’s ability to enable a mass

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collaborative financial turn developed with new models for digital cooperativism

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the emergent strategy is to enable the conditions for recommending land data and objects through the development

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of responsive and resilient asset sharing power distributing and value generating networks

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um we’re supported by the canada council for the arts digital strategy fund which awarded a multi-year grant to 221a

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and their organizational transformation stream of its awards this program from 2016-21 supported

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strategic initiatives that will help artists groups and organizations better understand the digital world

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engage with it and respond to the cultural and social changes it produces today i’m joined by the digital strategy

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initiative’s editorial director rosemary heather as well as fit lana matt vienko of simon

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fraser university’s digital democracies institute um rosemary has been working with 221a

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since 2019 in developing this project and also authored a research paper titled the staking internet

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in the publication which she will tell us more about later whereas fidlana is a relatively new

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reader of the publication who brings some questions and conversation that will connect our research to

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broader narratives she’s investigating at the digital democracies institute this group of diverse scholars and

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stakeholders from around the world collaborate across disciplines schools industries and public sectors to

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research and create vibrant democratic technologies and cultures please allow me to formally introduce

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our speakers today rosemary is an art journalist curator and researcher

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with a specialization in blockchain she writes about art the moving image and digital culture for numerous

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publications artists monographs and related projects internationally her recent interviews include an alphas

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ramirez figuera anna kachayan kris krauss kent monkman ursula johnson

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ken lum kerry tribe and hiro styler to name a few from 2003 to 2009 rosemary was the

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editor of c magazine in tokaranto and since 2015 she has helped and worked

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in the blockchain industry as a writer and researcher her clients have included well path dot me bit blocks technologies incorporated

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pegasus fintech block geeks bitcoin magazine and decentral an archive of her writing can be found

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at rose m heather.com is an assistant professor of critical

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media analysis and the school of communications and associate director of the digital democracies institute at

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simon fraser university her research and teaching are focused on information in cyber war

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political economy of information media and environment and critical infrastructure studies she

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writes about practices of resistance and mobilization digital militarism dis and misinformation

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internet history cybernetics psychoanalysis post-humanism the soviet and the

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post-soviet techno-politics and nuclear cultures including the chernobyl zone of exclusion

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she’s a co-author of cyber war and revolution digital subterfuge and global capitalism published by the university

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of minnesota press in 2019 um about the flow of the events today

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we’re working um with rosemary and heather a rosemary heather and svetlana mavianko and uh we’re um

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and we’ll uh they’ll speak after me so i’ll speak for about um 20 minutes or so to give you an

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overview of our strategy and our publication its contributors and main messages then rosemary will follow up uh with a

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view into her paper the staking internet that’ll be about 10 minutes then we’ll be joined by svetlana for some questions

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and discussion which includes you so please use the chat and q a window to get involved in the discussion

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when we come to question time you have the option to write your questions or join us with a live voice if this is your first time at a 221a

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event i hope you find it engaging challenging and a space to ask hard questions and think about big ideas

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you can sign up for our newsletter to receive invitations to our future programs learn more about our services

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i’ll paste a link in the chat for you to sign up let me just transfer over here to my

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slide deck please bear with me

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okay so as i mentioned this is our digital strategy research report um this is the

Digital Strategy Report

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conclusion of a first phase of a multi-phase project um so we’re really just leaving the research part we’ve done our reading

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we’ve had our conversations we’ve consulted with the folks that we want to work with and the communities that we want to engage

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and so these are some of our ideas that we’ve come out of that period and we’re looking ahead to a period of development

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and then after that we’ll be looking at a period of implementation um so today i’m just going to talk about the kind of high level messages in terms

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of the strategy um give you an idea of who participated and who contributed work to the publication

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and then what to look forward to as part of our event series which is part of this research launch so for

About 221A

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those of you who are new to 221a we’re a non-profit organization we were initiated as a student club at

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emily carr university in 2005 and then we were founded as a non-profit in 2007.

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our mission is to work with artists and designers to research and develop social cultural and ecological infrastructure

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and we do that through a number of ways research initiatives through um our uh

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through our research initiatives as well as our research uh fellowships and we have several

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fellows working us with us this year and we also work with artists on long-term operation of infrastructure

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like at the household the new growth which is a garden that we operate in um in vancouver’s chinatown that

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borders um hogan’s alley um and our vision is that we all work towards

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uh there’s the vision that we have is that for all people should have the means to make and access

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culture um these are all of our contributors who

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played a major part in um providing the information for the publication and working with us to kind of come up with

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these ideas over the past two years um so we worked with a group of artists we work with groups of principal

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researchers in other fields such as information sciences and geographies and systems engineering

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we work with designers to come up with the design identity and to think through the implications of designing systems

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with blockchain work with a series of advisors big shout out to them for lending their advice and

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their networks to help us learn and enter this space and we have a series of partners as well

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who we co-programmed events with and co-learned with throughout the past two years so thank you to everyone involved here

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um you’re a tremendous incredible part of this and i think that your intellect your

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challenges and your generosity kind of all brought us to where we are today um i’m just gonna kind of open up and so

About the fulcrum

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the fulcrum kind of of our project and what we’re looking at kind of rests on these kind of um

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ideas um you know what we’re looking at is an image of glenn lewis’s public

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sculpture classical toy boat um and then i encountered it in 2019 on a pretty warm

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spring day the warmest spring day to date for that year in 2019 but the pond was covered with algae

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and glowing with algae because the spring came on so quickly that it just kind of became the sharp shoes kind of like

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green um and then over top of that image i overlaid some ideas that come from mario later minucley’s manifesto for

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maintenance art and so the crux of her manifesto for maintenance art is looking at a form of practice

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um that can maybe turn us away from the death instinct and towards the life instinct and so the death instinct that uh mariel

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adam and euclius says is separation it’s individuality it’s avant-garde par excellence

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um it’s about following one owns path to death do your own thing dynamic change um and then the life instinct that she

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writes in this is the the unification the eternal return the perpetuation and maintenance of the species

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survival systems and operations equilibrium and marielle later manually as you might know as an artist who later in the 70s

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became the artist in residence of the new york department of sanitation and one of her projects there was to

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shake every garbage person’s hand and thank them for their work and keeping the city clean

How to do nothing

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um some other thoughts and more recent culture that lead us towards this strategy you might have read jenny odell book

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from 2019 how to do nothing an artist and professor at stanford um it was about resisting the attention

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economy and that’s kind of a social media economy it’s amazon it’s every it’s everything that’s cognitive and surveillance capitalism

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um but she says that capitalism colonialist thinking loneliness and an abusive stance towards the environment

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all co-produce one another and then find another example in recent

Kim Stanley Robinson

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literature would be from kim stanley robinson’s the ministry for the future a very detailed near future account of

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how we might be able to meet the challenges of climate change as a global society um but what i pasted on the right is the

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entirety of his chapter 43 um which is a very short chapter but it’s dedicated to the potential of

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blockchain he’s not going to detail exactly how this works for you but i think what he’s doing is

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he’s saying that here’s a challenge and i think there’s great potential here and i’d like you to carry it forward so you

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write the rest of the chapter 43 but just to end he says you don’t know me you don’t understand me

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and yet still if you want justice i’ll help you to find it i am blockchain i am encryption i am code now put me to work

Stephanie Wakefield

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um and then some of you might have joined us earlier or later in april for a talk with

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one of our fellows christina battle an artist an artist in edmonton who is speaking with an urban geographer

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stephanie wakefield who’s based in the southeast us and was working a lot from miami in the past

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couple of years and stephanie has come up and has been working through this lens of the back loop

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and this became quite a central kind of lens for us to use in thinking through our strategy and i’ll talk more about where that came from with the workshop

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with new models later on um but essentially to kind of understand stephanie’s kind of take

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is that the back loop is the phase of the ecosystem that we’re experiencing right now it’s the phase of the ecosystem when it

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breaks down um so when the ecosystem breaks down the stable actors chemicals agents species

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start to mingle and meet new species new chemicals and new agents within their ecosystem

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and essentially out of those new meetings and those new connection points the new ecosystem is

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born and with that there’s kind of new chemistry and new relationships that are formed that rebuild the ecosystem into

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something else something not like we’ve had before and so stephanie uses this lens to kind of

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go through periods of human history um so we can say that you know modernity and colonization

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are definitely the exploitation period down here in the lower left quadrant um and she

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says that that’s a period of colonization slavery resource extraction industrialization proletarianization

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and the combustion of fossil fuels and then you’re thrust into the anthropocene front loop with that kind of

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extraction and exploitation then we reach the 20th century and we’ll we’ll have periods of

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globalization and liberal capitalism and uh one world world very much the

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globalist view the post-war view we have the nature human split we have modern infrastructure

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we have modern politics and we have stable climates and for the majority of probably my lifetime we’ve been leaving that

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conservation period and we’ve been entering the back loop and now we have reached the release phase um and i’d say

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that we’re the climate has been changing the seas are definitely rising um confusion and fragmentation of modern

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codes is abounding we’re getting more comfortable with experimentation to kind of try and work our way out of this

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or to stabilize or find some kind of dignity and humanity within these changes um and then i’d say the two things that

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many things that we’re using to work through it are our kind of thoughts through resilience um acquiescence

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um kind of as we enter this kind of post post-truth period um or this pluriverse um during during

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this uh breakdown phase of um our ecosystem and that is both um the physical world

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and the digital world because they are inherently connected so what i want to

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look at is kind of thinking through a digital strategy that is prepared for the challenges ahead of us

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um and you know this is a technology that’s moving very quickly um in in short maybe i should just give

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a brief disclaimer about uh or not or kind of descriptive about kind of um blockchain but essentially

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you probably have heard of it it’s connected to bitcoin it’s the technology that underwrites um the bitcoin currency

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um but it’s not his only use case it’s just its first and kind of largest use case um since 2008 has been used that way but

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essentially it’s just a set of ledgers um that are used to track and record transactions

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and instead of thinking that there’s a centralized true ledger that we all have to verify our ledgers against

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essentially the idea is that the ledgers all verify each other and are updated simultaneously

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so there is never a centralized ledger that you have to verify against um the idea is that there’s many

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nodes spread throughout the world that all communicate at the same time and that’s how we keep track of value um

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so previously yeah we’ve had we’ve had a digital economy since the 1990s of course

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i still remember giving a presentation to my parents on powerpoint in the 1990s about why i should be allowed to use

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their credit card to buy things on the internet and off of ebay which worked um and they still don’t use

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their credit card online to buy anything even throughout the pandemic um so they were not convinced but at least i got access but i think that kind

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of speaks to it there is that there’s certain kind of things where we had to port our digital economy

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through our physical and kind of legacy economy first and so now we’re entering a period where this economy is going to be kind

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of tied to the digital in a way that is much more reactive much more agent and people will not have to work through

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the kind of legacy economy to get to a digital economy of course there’ll still be room for the

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legacy economy to operate in this space but what we’re seeing is a new kind of economy built out from here

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um and so the strategy screen is really um a set of criteria it’s a set of

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descriptions it’s a set of values that help guide us in our decision making it’s not going to lay out a strategic um

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action that’s going to take place over the next 10 years by the organization but these are some of the tools that we

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go in with um thinking through about how to work with this technology as it advances so we reject surveillance um and we want

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to advance self-sovereign digital identities as a way to build a better internet so we think that that’s a very crucial

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part of what blockchain can offer um essentially you know all of our identities are registered as

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people but i think um and within our states but i think there’s things changing and we’re looking at ways that

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we can have digital identities that are trustable um that are unique to us and that allow us to kind of have better

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access to how our data is trafficked and traded and that’s going to essentially get us to a better

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internet if we can look at use cases that center those we want to interrogate utopian visions

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and solutionism while being mindful of heroic claims so again as part of that back loop lens

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we’re learning from kind of mistakes of the past and we want to look at that kind of like uh tech optimism that comes through in

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any of these discussions and kind of give it a critical lens at the same time we’re looking at

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building out a new economy we want to kind of counter some of the stuff that the legacy economy has kind of left us with in terms of challenges and

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traumas and violences but we want to counter the neoliberal expansionist paradigm through a new economy

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and we don’t want to fall into the trap that disruption is a form of innovation always um and we want to develop systems

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that steward socially and eco ecologically economic design that reinforces anti-ableist anti-racist

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and indigenous positions so as we move out of legacy forms of economies and infrastructures we carry

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with us some of their ghosts and some of their ancestors and these are the things that we need to start to kind of work on and

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um work against um if we’re gonna have any hope in making this new economy any more equitable than the one we’re

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currently living with um continuing on we want to strive for simplicity on behalf of the usership and

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we see the usership of networks that we are going to be involved with will include humans they will include bots and other forms

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of artificial intelligence and they will inform they can include other organic life forms such as bees

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or forests um we want to distribute political and economic power through infrastructural mutualist

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framework so looking at infrastructure as a mutualist pursuit in terms of production in terms of

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service and in terms of maintenance you know you get here by decentering western ideology and applying a

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non-western historical and ontological knowledge to the challenges you’re facing and this very comes from reading um

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philosophers like achilles who kind of diagnoses the western mind as a as inherently and kind of plagued as a

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as a paranoid thing these days uh from the traumas of the 20th century and colonialism

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and so with that you know we need to kind of look at it as as a traumatized form of knowledge and

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we need to look at how we can heal it and start to bring other forms of knowledge to the table

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um to help us move forward we will and through that we want to heal and unify social and cultural division and we want

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to be able to contribute to new mass narratives that connect to the fundamentals of the ecology that we’re living in and to the

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economies and the cultures that we’re living with um i’m going to do a quick overview of

Research Papers

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our research papers that are in the publication that helped us kind of get to where we are through our thinking um

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just on the right there there’s an image of ron tran’s print on silk beneath the pleasant grass

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it was a work that he made in in collaboration with julian zhong hao who is an artist we’ll talk

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about but part of julian’s research worked with a couple of other artists working on a portfolio of prince to help them come up

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with some ideas and some conversations and that was an example of one of them um but we have rosemary heather as we

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mentioned who’s joining us today who’s our editorial director um and then julian who’s an artist

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based here uh in vancouver and also in vernon um we have patricia reed who’s a canadian

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artist who lives in berlin um and she’s also a theorist and writer and then we have morale suddenly who’s a

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critical geographer who’s based in victoria on vancouver island

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she’s currently finishing her phd at the university university of victoria and she’s also uh working for the

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province of bc’s climate action secretariat on a blockchain based uh carbon trading platform

Staking Internet

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um so rosemary can tell you more about this later on um but the staking internet is essentially

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a new uh protocol for um kind of verifying trades on the

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blockchain um what we were working with previously coming out of bitcoin was something

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called proof of work it was incredibly um time energy power um kind of consumptive kind of

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computational protocol that verified all of these transactions and what we’re looking at potentially six months

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from now is a new protocol that’s been in development for quite a long time and much anticipated called proof of stake

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um and rosemary will tell us more about what that means um but essentially it’s it’s a much

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lower volume kind of protocol uses less energy it

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uses less time and people are able to collaborate more quickly around it so there’s a lot going on there it’s on

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a totally different blockchain it is on a different um cryptocurrency known as ethereum um

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and uh you know essentially why we’re interested in this is that an internet with stakes um has the potential to empower a global

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network of users better than the proof-of-work protocol um we have uh julian zhong hao and then um

Animatic Tokenization

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for his work um he looked at this idea that he’s come up with called anoetic tokenization

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and it’s based on anoesis and that’s a state of sensation without cognition and it provides the conceptual

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basis for his ideas of animatic tokenization and so what that means is that you’ll be able to kind of connect to the

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fundamentals of your world better um by just knowing or sensing what is good and what is healthy

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and what will kind of provide you with your next step in life rather than kind of overthinking it

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through the many layers that we have to work through these days and he thinks you know this is going to give us more attentiveness to a bodily

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experience and going to help us tie more concretely to sensations from the material in a material world

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um and so through this system you know uh julian sees these topify these tokens quantifying value of

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relationships not things and this has the potential to challenge hierarchical relationships typical of the legacy

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culture industry then we have patricia reed who’s wrote

Evaluation Necessity

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written a paper called evaluation necessity and her paper comes paired with 12 diagrams

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i believe there might be a few more um but the diagrams help illustrate some of the kind of complex ideas that she’s

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working through in her paper but patricia takes us back a couple hundred of years where we go through

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kind of how we get stuck in these kind of thought loops or these kind of um

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engagement loops with technology and culture that kind of keep us in these these constraints um and so what she’s trying to do is

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kind of unweave these constraints through layers of thought and through layers of technology over the past couple of

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centuries um and you know what she arrives at is that the thing that we’re dealing with right now

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a climate disaster massive global inequality and these things are all further complicated and accelerated by a global

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pandemic are not a necessity but a historically based cultural construct and that if we could recognize this as

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such we could change it and so she says the need for such an epidemistic rupture could hardly be more

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urgent and then our final paper is morale sudahnia encrypting enclosures

Examining Value Proposition Claims

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um they scrutinize the value proposition claims from blockchain applications for

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real estate and so morale’s taken her geography kind of lenses and turned them on to

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the blockchain technology and how real estate is now looking at this as a form of fractionalized ownership

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um and you know she also brings in some scholarship and literature around centralized platform real estate

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like airbnb and how that’s intensified the crisis of housing in accessibility and how we do not and

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as a as an organization or as a group of people in the development community we do not want to contribute to things that

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will further uh advance this crisis so you know could blockchain based fractionalized

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ownerships remedy the problem as much as they might accelerate it i think that depends how they’re developed and who they’re developed with

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um and you know morale finds telling details that undermine the broader claims that are made by the startups operating in this space today

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i do want to give a shout out to one of our fifth researchers who we didn’t include in the publication because their research focused actually on us at 221a

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and we um work with also about 150 sub-tenants across

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four facilities that we lease out the studios to and those are below market rate and on a

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cost recovery model and so we looked at that model with erica wong who is a researcher in the uk

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but is from here in vancouver um and so that information was very helpful to us

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in terms of navigating the pandemic um knowing what that economy was like knowing what to prepare for and what

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challenges we were facing as a community as we entered this challenging moment um but we did not publish those

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um those findings as those are kind of internal things and we don’t kind of share details about the people

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we work with in our studios um at that level out of uh protection of privacy and um

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and and their own practices and really centering them is the most important thing in those relationships

Partners

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um so thank you erica for that study and you can find out more about erica’s work on our website to kind of tell you a

29:05

little bit about her abstract and how she approached that um and then we’ll move into our partners

29:10

that we worked with so our partners were groups that we worked with to do public programming over the past two years and we kept an open dialogue in many

29:17

ways around the conversations we were having and the challenges and questions that were coming up in those programs that helped us come to some of our ideas

29:23

in this strategy um and then just to the right or it’s actually the color palette that our lead designer christy neary came up

29:30

with um for this digital strategy as we go forward but our groups are blockchain at ubc and

29:37

we have new models and we have doma which is a startup and a non-profit we have chinook which is

29:42

the start of chinook x which is a startup and then we have bitcoin uh the bitcoin project was in it which is an

29:47

interesting um group and project coming out of berlin but blockchain ubc is canada’s largest

Blockchain UBC

29:55

multidisciplinary research cluster on blockchain at the university of british columbia um

30:00

and they work across disciplines so information sciences computer sciences business medicine nursing

30:09

social social work all kinds of groups getting together to think about this common challenge which is

30:14

how do you develop equitably and kind of build civil society around the blockchain

30:19

they work on initiatives about digital identity smart contracts quantum safe systems so

30:25

as computers get faster and reach quantum level computing we’ll need different levels of security and they’re already

30:30

thinking about that data sovereignty for indigenous sovereignty is something they’re working on and they introduce us to chinook x

30:37

group um and they also look at land management on the blockchain um they came up with the first training

30:43

path for graduate students who contribute to scaling the blockchain industry while also tackling the world’s most complex socio-technical issues so

30:50

there’s students in master’s programs and phd programs kind of now working with the blockchain as their challenge

30:56

and i just want to give a shout out to them they have an upcoming technology symposium in june from the 1st to the 4th which is

31:02

free and it’s on zoom so you can find out more at their website just give them a google blockchain ubc

New Models

31:08

um we also work with new models which is an aggregator podcast stream and discord community based out of berlin it’s led by the

31:14

artist daniel keller the writer and editor caroline busta and the music video producer

31:20

um little internet um and uh new models really interested in like a co pro complexity narrative

31:27

um so they’re looking at ecology they’re looking at politics they’re looking at tech they’re looking at activism uh they’re

31:33

looking at design they’re looking at marketing and so what we did with them is we did a

31:39

workshop in conjunction with blockchain at ubc in 2019 and it was offered in two spaces one

31:45

in a two two one a space in chinatown and one out in the campus pre-coded times um but what we learned

31:52

from this is that um they did the workshop was really focused on ideas of um climate collapse and that this is a

32:00

this is probably an inevitability more than kind of a fantasy at this point and so if we want to look at the climate

32:06

as a central kind of base code and something that we need to work with in terms of like our most urgent um kind of coding challenge

32:14

is kind of getting the ecosystem code right they the new models kind of challenge us to move away

32:20

from sustainability thinking and towards strategies of relinquishment and maintaining dignity and sovereignty

32:25

within that shift um you know through that workshop we learned that hope and resilience narratives suppress the full truth

32:32

and that a collapsing climate is going to mean inevitable and untold loss um and within that we need policy

32:38

prescriptions that support us in psychologically preparing for this change and acknowledging the limits of production

32:44

that humans have on the planet and so actually thinking through the blockchain as like an academic challenge as a

32:49

cultural challenge as a design challenge is something that is actually really helpful and psychologically preparing

32:55

because it’s giving you options and it’s actually quite an interesting kind of fulcrum at a multi-disciplinary table

33:01

um that allows people to kind of maybe leave some of their disciplinary trappings behind and start to think towards challenges

33:08

and to think towards goals that we can start meeting in common because this new technology enables kind of new forms of

33:14

relationships and new forms of collaboration okay

Doma

33:23

um another one of our partners is doma and they’re a non-profit that’s based between kiev and paris

33:29

um and they’re currently also one of our fellows working this year with 221a throughout 2021

33:35

um that came out of our work here so they’re taking us forward into the development phase of this project

33:40

um but you know doma to start is a platform cooperative um it’s infrastructure for a new form of

33:46

housing tenure um so people get together to achieve a common goal which is sharing the value

33:52

that is mass generated in a city what they want to do is they want to enable the coordination of action at scale

33:59

the members of doma would acquire shares and tokens of the doma portfolio of

34:04

properties they would gain access to their properties for living for recreation for leisure while they would build

34:12

equity and become stakeholders at the same time they and so through this form of

34:18

operating what they want to do is they’ll build another layer on top of the city that might be kind of better understood

34:23

as kind of like a co-op of co-ops and so what this does is it helps facilitates the emergence of new models

34:29

for urban living sharing and organizing um that fits the diversity of the urban condition

34:35

and so as the city population changes as it meets new challenges as it welcomes new people as it says farewell to some

34:41

other people then the city becomes different and the platform that’s operating this is

34:46

managed by the users themselves so there is no centralized actor um doing this it is the city and

34:52

the governance of the city and its um access to space is also up to the people who

34:57

have built equity throughout the the past couple of generations within it

Chinook X

35:03

um another one of our partners is chinook x and they’re an indigenous group that works with data centers and they

35:10

want to link together a network of indigenous utilities green energy film and gaming industry

35:15

partners and so what they want to do is think through these sets of partnerships and

35:20

then challenge these institutions with thinking through how can indigenous values and protocols

35:26

be expressed through blockchain design and so how does the how does the value flow how is the value aggregated

35:33

how is the value shared there are some of the questions they’re asking and how does that meet indigenous values um chinook x believes

35:39

that indigenous nations have the jurisdictional authority and fortitude to accelerate and transform energy production

35:46

and they do this through smart grid and renewable energy distribution meaning that there’s a real-time supply

35:51

and demand of energy within a region so chinook x is currently working predominantly in british columbia right

35:56

now and um hopefully they’ll have some announcements later this year as i know they were working on some funding agreements with the province of bc

36:03

to help fund some of these first indigenous sovereign data centers

BCoin Project

36:08

and then we have uh the b coin project who are a partner of ours based in berlin and i have heard that they are actually

36:14

going to be one of the projects that will be included in the next documentary in documentary 15.

36:19

so and one of their advisors uh who comes out of this is from the

36:24

zentrum for urbanistics in in berlin matthews einhoff and they’re one of the

36:30

co-organizers of the documentary that’s coming up in 2015. or sorry documented 15 in 2022. um

36:37

and so what bitcoin is is it’s an it’s it’s essentially a currency a neighborhood currency that’s

36:43

established around the health of a set of beehives um that are currently located inside um

36:49

a house of statistics in berlin which is a very famous place um which is in east berlin which is where the east german regime

36:55

would gather statistics on its populations and of course a very traumatized site loaded quite historically with the

37:01

ghosts of communism’s past um but so as part of the regeneration of

37:06

this facility and some of the space is being given to the b coin project and so essentially there’s sensors

37:12

inside the bee hives and the bees are measured in terms of their health by measuring their temperature

37:17

by measuring different chemical substances inside the hive and that lets us know how healthy the hive is um so essentially what you’re able to do

37:25

is create um you know it’s an experiment in recoding the community as an existing decentralized organization so

37:32

decentralization is already a form of organization that exists in our communities and so what we’re looking at are are

37:38

there platforms that we can use to then code that decentralization as it’s actually operating now

37:43

and so if you were able to contribute to keeping those beehives healthy maybe you were planting more flowers

37:49

maybe you were providing indigenous species to the region that kind of helped those bees survive

37:54

maybe you were taking out invasive species um these sorts of things then maybe you can then be renumerated or

38:00

kind of shared value for helping the health of the beehives um uh be be safeguarded um so you know this

38:08

is a really interesting look is it’s a decentralized autonomous organization essentially um and it’s also encouraging people to

38:15

think about self-governance but with non-human stakeholders involved so the bees are just as much a part of

38:21

this system as the people kind of maintaining it and then maintaining the habitats outside of

38:26

it to keep the bees healthy um and so they’re an active player and an agent in their given agency within

38:32

this and the and the coding is programmed around them i’ll just note that this project was preceded by a project called terra zero

38:38

which aimed to create a self-owned forest um which was developed by paul seidler and

38:43

max hampshire who created the coding base for the guild around be care

Performance Targets

38:49

um and then i’ll move on so we have a couple of key performance targets we’re working in two phases so near and

38:55

long term over the next decade so looking ahead to 2025 these are the kind of horizons that

39:01

we’re setting for ourselves um so the strategy screen can be think of kind of like maybe like a sieve and do

39:06

opportunities kind of fit through it and then yes once they do what are we going to kind of use those opportunities to work towards

39:12

but we want to build an equitable mix of funding between private self-generated and public revenues um we said that

39:19

self-generated revenues should be applied to the advancement of our digital strategy and the

39:24

organization’s pursuits at large our education programs want to onboard and prioritize

39:30

access and a diversity of engagement with our networks and with that in mind we keep simplicity

39:37

of outcomes in sight for our users so this might sound quite large right

39:42

now but as we get closer to developing kind of applications or networks that you can take part in um the outcomes of those

39:49

networks will the simplicity of them kind of will be kept in sight as kind of like an incentive to join um

39:56

we want to look at partnering with three to five peer learning institutions who are co-developing this technology

40:01

and what’s important for us is we want to co-develop this tech with communities who are non-white non-tech and non-university

40:09

and on top of that we want to look at narrative partnerships narrative partnerships within different sectors so

40:15

not just culture we want to be looking outside of that because this technology is going to take many sectors and many parts of society

40:21

to kind of advance um and so we want to do storytelling and we want to do kind of artistic works that help us

40:27

look at the potentials behind this technology and help us better understand it maybe not in a coding way but maybe more

40:33

in a relationship-based way we want to look at engagement and learning across continental scale

40:39

digital stacks and what does that mean that means that you know as um we’re going forward in time the world is

40:45

becoming actually less and less connected maybe within certain regions we’re becoming more and more hyper-connected

40:50

but then within the larger regions maybe we’re becoming more disconnected and so like that we could see that

40:56

there’s a digital stack that exists between north america and europe that’s pretty easy to access and move between

41:03

however if you wanted to go between western europe and russia it’s more complicated and your data kind

41:08

of has to port between different platforms and likewise if you were going to try to port your data within the chinese stack

41:14

which has now also become the african stack because a lot of the physical infrastructure for the digital has been developed by china within

41:20

africa and so um this geopolitics um this old this older geopolitics continues with us into

41:27

the future as much as we would like to leave it behind it’s not staying behind and we have to be cognizant of that um

41:33

as we are developing this technology we want to find ways for it to kind of speak across those digital stacks

41:39

um we want to engage users and audiences within user directed and algorithm directed social spaces online

41:45

and so that’s also getting comfortable with the idea that the mainstream platforms that we use like instagram facebook twitter

41:51

linkedin um maybe these are things that are more algorithm directed and we might look at them more like them

41:57

all you could go there to get something that you need you could get your nutrition you could get a pair of jeans you could see your

42:03

grandparents you could see your friends but it might not be the space that allows you to develop a future that’s very materially just for you

42:09

and your community forward um so with that there’s also user directed

42:14

spaces that are failing online right now as we’re looking to build a better internet this community is growing around the world

42:20

but you can just think of the chat groups you have you can think about the telegram groups you can think about the discord servers

42:25

that you’re part of these are all user directed um kind of digital spaces still and so we need to come up with

42:30

strategies that can engage between the two worlds um looking ahead further on towards the end of this decade

42:37

we want to see that our digital strategy is helping to bring um human and ecological equity in the

42:42

digital realm we want to see that our digital strategy is de-centering western ideology

42:48

and allowing for a diversity of design of diversity of development communities and a diversity of users to take part we

42:55

want to look at equity as it’s advanced through pla the platform development community um

43:01

and uh specifically the platform co-op development community is what we’re interested in working with and we want to see platforms that have

43:07

wide scope benefit whereas you might want to think about a platform like facebook or like airbnb

43:12

is a centralized platform that extracts value from around the world and deposits it in people’s bank

43:19

accounts and those people might live in california but their bank accounts might be all over um but we kind of see that extraction

43:25

kind of going in one direction so what we want to see are cooperative platforms that start to kind of recognize and

43:31

generate value and then look at distributing it in much more integrated ways

43:38

and we want a strategy that responds to to value as valuation changes across

43:43

cultures so over the next decade we can see that the way that value is generated and recognized in our culture is going to

43:49

change um and that could lean towards bioregionalism so that

43:54

maybe it’s not so much about states and nation states and within that kind of provinces and

44:00

smaller states of uh kind of zones of economic activity but we look at them more as bioregions

44:06

so maybe the pacific northwest coast is more understood as an integrated bioregion and that is then uh kind of engineered

44:13

within industrial culture and digital culture at the same time and the way that value is generated and distributed and then traded outside of

44:19

that region um and then we also look towards reparation as a cultural shift over the next decade

44:24

and how can the blockchain be used to start bringing cultural reparation and economic and equitable reparation

44:31

um towards uh kind of people and communities who’ve been traumatized by colonialism and modernism over the past

44:36

several generations we want to look at ways that our digital strategy can distribute political and

44:42

economic power and that’s done by growing our networks with mass collaboration

44:48

and that gives us a governance that isn’t empowered to respond to coordinated inauthentic behavior so

44:54

as we see kind of groups of misinformation kind of leading um anti-vaxxers or um

45:02

kind of racist politics right now what we’re looking at is that’s coordinated in authentic behavior on networks and

45:07

its behavior that networks do not want to tolerate anymore so how do we design governance models around these that allow us to then have

45:14

better agency to respond to this as coordinated activity because as we’ve seen throughout the political period since 2016

45:21

and then the pandemic is that we do not currently have any tools in place to kind of respond to this inauthentic

45:27

behavior and within our networks and within our society we want to onboard users excluded by

45:33

traditional financial barriers and other traditional criteria for political action and citizenship so we

45:38

do see a blockchain as being able to provide people who’ve been excluded from the state and excluded from traditional

45:44

finance from having a stake and having participation within these networks um and that is the way that the state

45:50

shifts shifts its services as well as finances then shifted and distributed on the blockchain and

45:55

finally we’d like to promote mutualist and cooperative goals as the ideals kind of of the networks that we’re going to

46:02

develop and contribute towards with our digital strategy in closing i just want to give a view

Upcoming Events

46:08

forward into a couple of events later in june that will continue these conversations around our digital

46:14

strategy launch so each event will be taking place friday mornings at 10 a.m pacific time uh one

46:22

in the afternoon eastern time and seven central european summer time in the evening um so coming up on friday

46:29

june 4th we’ll have a discussion around patricia reed’s paper in our publication the valuation of necessity

46:35

and that will also include rosemary heather morales sudahnia another researcher on

46:40

the project and patricia’s invited another researcher who she knows in berlin wasim al cindy of xerox salon

46:46

who writes and thinks about the blockchain and its ecological and social impacts at

46:51

scale so we’ll talk through her paper and how to get us out of these kind of cultural

46:56

knots that we’re stuck in as we think through what this technology is could be used for over the next decade and beyond uh on

47:04

friday june 18th we’re going to be doing a discussion centered around the work of doma our current fellow um the non-profit

47:11

housing cooperative and they will be joined by morale suit again our geographer and researcher

47:18

as well as andy yan who’s the director of simon fraser university’s city program

47:23

and he’s been integral in kind of studying the the housing crisis here in vancouver and he’s looking at new data on the

47:29

informal and secondary market for rental accommodations in our city which is very important to speak about as we think

47:34

about these platforms and we’ll also be joined by ian spangler who is a geographer and phd student at

47:40

the university of kentucky who’s been writing about um platform real estate um from airbnb to now with some with a

47:47

very clinical events and then finally our final act for the series it won’t be a live stream but we

47:53

will release it on friday june 25th um please sign up to our newsletter i’ll paste a link in our in our chat for you

47:59

to sign up to the newsletter to receive this event um but it’ll be a pre-recorded and edited event

48:04

that’s a roundtable where we’re going to talk about some of the development teams who are doing some really interesting work with the blockchain right now and

48:10

cultural projects and they’re developing things that are called social tokens so these are forms of cryptocurrency that are developed

48:17

around um forms of socialization and groups working towards common goals online

48:22

right now as well as groups who are establishing things called distributed autonomous organizations

48:27

um and these are self-governing groups um that kind of you could think of it more as like a maybe like a

48:34

internet of organizations or kind of like a reddit group a reddit subgroup or a discord server

48:39

with a treasury a governance system and a shared bank account who are able to actively kind of participate in the world and

48:45

kind of produce projects and intervene in civil society in various ways and so at that table

48:51

we’ll have new models joining us uh speaking about their um their protocol they’re working on called

48:56

channel i’ll be joined by a brilliant writer who’s thinking about this coming internet or the third wave

49:02

the internet of value um albiverse um we’ll have uh say dao which is an interesting

49:09

governance and kind of voting protocol for um these communities that’s coming forward between a group and

49:14

between developers here in vancouver and in berlin we’ll have folia which is kind of a digital gallery based

49:20

um or digital kind of artwork kind of based platform that’s doing some interesting work in this development

49:26

space we’ll work with trust which is a co-working and design space in berlin we’re also developing a dao

49:32

right now um which is quite interesting as a kind of an alternative art and design world

49:37

um we’ll speak to the artist neil baloofa and his production company bad manners and paris

49:43

who are looking at different micro financing and crowd sourcing kind of mechanisms and community building

49:49

mechanisms around their digital kind of storytelling projects which are quite interesting um we’ll have circles which is a kind of

49:56

a protocol for universal basic income um on the blockchain which is quite interesting that’s we’re going to hear from a canadian artist named

50:02

sarah friend who’s living in berlin who’s developing that and then we’ll also have rosemary heather our editorial director so again that’ll

50:08

be released on the 25th um and you’ll get an email from us if you’re on our newsletter

50:14

alerting you to that we’re going to try and edit it down to something that’s hopefully compelling to to new users and

50:20

to welcome you into the space and to give you a bit of foothold on kind of maybe where you can go with this technology now um so with that

50:26

um i’ll pass it over the zoom window over to rosemary heather tell us a little bit about the staking

50:31

internet and then we’ll have a conversation all together with atlanta before opening it up to a wider

50:37

conversation with you all in the audience

50:46

thank you jesse that was great um how could you put it on the slide where the staking internet slide um i don’t

50:54

know because i’m not sure i have access to that um yeah so thanks jesse for that

51:02

overview um it shows the breadth of this project uh

51:11

many big ideas and um many diverse projects

51:19

and i think the the common denominator is networks um in

51:26

self-organizing communities um so this is something that already exists

51:33

on a very very broad scale and that’s called web 2

51:39

which is the facebook etc and there are

51:46

all kinds of daily activities um that happen on the

51:52

web in communities that have self-organized together courtesy of these platforms um

52:00

uh but there’s lots of problems with that which everybody’s familiar with um

52:06

and there those problems are connected to the business model of the web too which is that um

52:15

more clicks equals more money so people like mark zuckerberg doesn’t care

52:21

how how he gets the clicks and in fact he actively encourages

52:26

uh all manner of you know conspiracy theory etc to to thrive um

52:34

because it brings traffic to the platform it makes the platform a really uh huge

52:41

viable 2.2 plus billion uh daily active user

52:48

uh platform and the other big platforms that operate in according to similar economic models

52:56

so uh with the blockchains and cultural

53:01

padlocks project uh what we’re doing is

53:07

building a narrative of web three of the next web um that is underpinned by blockchains um

53:14

in looking at does bloc do blockchains have the solution to some

53:20

of these problems and uh

53:25

i don’t think it’s this web 3 narrative is that well known but it’s been accelerated by

53:32

the pandemic so um yeah popular awareness of this

53:37

whole crypto space has really uh yeah broadened

53:43

um nfts are the latest thing that really got people’s attention

53:48

because this artwork by people it was like the third highest

53:57

price page i think for any artwork um and that’s ridiculous by any any

54:02

standards just doesn’t really make any sense um especially because it appeared to be

54:08

like a jpeg so um that’s sort of a another conversation but it is these big

54:14

kind of news items these real outliers that do get popular attention and get people

54:20

interested um and there there will be uh more

54:28

like i think nfts have much broader use than than just as a form of art

54:35

internet art and that’s that will be rolling out you know as we move forward um

54:42

so my focus my research is on staking um as an integral part of

54:49

web3 and not just there’s this uh explanation here

54:55

also just sort of run it down um it to me this is just a simple story

55:01

staking you have taken your router and making it earn some passive income for you

55:08

that’s kind of in broad strokes what staking is um so

55:15

on the web 3 the router helps manage the internet so it’s

55:21

another node on the network in exchange for um dividends

55:27

um but uh so and if this is an important point of

55:35

web 3 is that the more nodes there are on the network the more secure the data it manages is

55:42

um and the reason for that is that the data is replicated across the

55:48

network and um it’s also reconciled at regular intervals

55:54

and it makes it very secure it makes it so secure you can have money in them and the money is proved to

56:01

be yeah it’s worth it’s generated billions of dollars of value

56:06

um so the idea of staking uh yeah which is this new internet

56:14

protocol that is proposed as a solution to a

56:19

first generation blockchain protocol which is called proof of work

56:26

which as this is another popular narrative that’s really gain traction

56:31

basically all the nodes on the network um or the miners excuse me which is sort

56:37

of a misnomer because they’re not really miners but it’s just these banks of uh

56:43

computer uh computers competing to solve uh very complex problems

56:51

and if you win you win a block of uh bitcoin or another crypto but the problem is

56:58

this is massively energy intensive um it’s not as energy intensive as

57:06

there’s many arguments to sort of uh contrast this this popular narrative about other

57:13

things that are much more um energy intensive uh

57:18

like the us military uh for instance um in the the dollar that’s that’s

57:24

connected to that the u.s has its dominance globally because of the oil is dominated in in us dollars

57:33

and all kinds of geopolitical uh ramifications just play out from that

57:40

fact um so and uh yeah the us military is the biggest use

57:45

user of oil in the world so and and there is this argument that blockchains because it does have this

57:51

energy problem um it incentivizes green energy solutions because miners

57:57

want uh to earn profits and if all their uh pro they don’t want

58:03

their profits eaten up by energy costs so they do do things like they do use green energy solutions and

58:11

that’s constantly being developed but proof of stake is also proposes a solution to this because

58:18

that’s where staking comes from you deposit your coins you buy some coins

58:26

deposit them and then you earn revenue

58:34

in exchange for your node helping to manage the network and make it more secure

58:40

um because by adding to the number of nodes that there are on the network um

58:48

so there’s problems with this narrative that’s a that’s a very popular narrative in the or it’s like a foundational narrative in

58:54

the crypto world about decentralization why that’s important

59:00

uh the truth is something it’s less pure than that because uh they’re um

59:07

in a lot of ways the current blockchains are not decentralized they’re miners who are really um

59:15

dominant for instance uh you know in other ways they’re with

59:20

so-called whales they own them so much crypto they can move the market um

59:26

this whole narrative about elon musk moving the market it’s i mean he did have some effect

59:33

by his sort of antics but um uh whales have much bigger

59:39

possibility to to move the market because they own so much crypto so these are all problems

59:47

that are just a little bit different than the narrative but the narrative itself is is interesting and what that interests me is is that

59:55

it takes already established behavior

1:00:00

and but it gives users more benefit to their daily in internet

1:00:07

use and by that i mean it means that i earn some passive income

1:00:15

and instead of my internet activity making uh

1:00:22

mark zuckerberg rich and he doesn’t need to be any richer than he

1:00:27

already is um that so this is a solution that uh that

1:00:32

appeals to me um it’s like a simple step to uh onboarding people

1:00:40

into this to this new web 3 ecosystem um yeah and as i said it’s

1:00:47

just an extension of what we do every day when we make content for the web

1:00:52

on you know that’s very popular it’s not going away these online communities um

1:01:00

yeah and so we’re also building this uh this narrative of mass collaboration

1:01:05

of the internet being a tool of mass collaboration um and

1:01:11

that’s not a way that i typically see the internet uh talked about and i’m not sure why

1:01:19

because it seems kind of obvious to me um but maybe the reason is is that this

1:01:26

mass collaboration is going through these centralized proprietary entities like facebook

1:01:31

um and the web3 brings the potential for uh this mass collaboration to be

1:01:39

peer-to-peer um that’s what that’s what the whole blockchain thing uh blockchain technology enables is that

1:01:47

i can send an nft or i can send cryptocurrency

1:01:52

to um to another user or to another platform uh to an exchange

1:02:00

without their it going through any kind of central entity um

1:02:06

and the huge industry has popped up like massive global industries

1:02:11

popped up to to try and understand the implications of this um yeah and

1:02:24

yeah the global industry is moves very quickly and i’ve been researching this space for

1:02:30

a while and it does take me some effort to keep up with what’s going

1:02:35

on and that’s actually a kind of uh an effect of this peer-to-peer and open

1:02:42

source uh uh yeah circumstances on which the web 3

1:02:49

is being built um is and it has a properties of an emergent entity which

1:02:55

is which is what a lot of what’s already happened on the web um also is that where

1:03:01

yeah just the parts are much bigger than or the whole is much bigger than the

1:03:06

parts that’s the the definition of the entity or the you know or no it’s actually

1:03:11

the parts working together make something that’s entirely new like another level entity um

1:03:19

yeah that’s what an origin entity is that’s what the web is and web 3 is

1:03:24

is at a another level and i guess as people know in the

1:03:29

popular narrative there’s lots of highs and lows to that um there’s everything’s quite

1:03:35

volatile they’re big hacks stuff like that and uh if you sort of are involved in

1:03:43

the space you kind of become subject to these these kind of uh

1:03:48

yeah events where uh everything falls apart sort of like sort

1:03:55

of part of the price of admission like for instance i have a like i have only a small amount of cryptocurrency because i never was very

1:04:03

i don’t know i just never really took it that seriously and so if i got paid i got paid a couple times in

1:04:09

bitcoin i would just sell it but i have a little bit of crypto in a in a cold wall so keeps it

1:04:16

offline and then all of all the users got their information dumped on the open internet

1:04:24

that happened last fall that was very disconcerting but that was i mean i mean i changed a lot of my

1:04:30

internet presence as a result of that hack

1:04:36

but yeah i see it as kind of you know it’s a very experimental space

1:04:42

and you uh you are subject to these kind of uh very eventful

1:04:49

things happening um yeah so the staking internet is

1:04:54

my the paper i wrote uh kind of addresses the steep learning curve

1:05:00

just by starting with staking um and it’s just a simple thing where

1:05:07

uh if you get a wallet which you can have on your phone you

1:05:12

have a bit of crypto you could stake that and uh earn some passive income

1:05:18

and i think that’s a good way to start onboarding into into the crypto ecosystem as a whole and

1:05:26

there are also staking pools which actually is probably more uh the reality for most people who don’t

1:05:33

have huge amounts of crypto like myself is that you would deposit your crypto in a staking pool

1:05:40

um and that’s what we’re exploring as a next step at the 221a is

1:05:46

we want to look at uh what if this is possible for non-profits uh

1:05:53

we want to research um what the legal the

1:05:58

fiduciary other other implications are of of having a non-profit be involved in a

1:06:05

staking pool um and we don’t know the answers yet but

1:06:13

um i would say that like the legacy finance industry understands what the the potential

1:06:19

staking is there’s a project in toronto called

1:06:25

tokens.com and that’s a legacy finance project

1:06:30

they raised 25 million dollars recently to just take

1:06:37

their clients money and this is a private offering

1:06:45

so that means me because i don’t have a million dollars i can’t i can’t join that i can’t buy shares and

1:06:52

tokens.com um so i find that annoying

1:06:57

that this and this is how legacy finance operates is that small players are kept out of the system

1:07:04

um so that’s one reason why i’m interested in in crypto

1:07:10

yeah so i’ll just close off by saying um as i mentioned before the ideas the

1:07:17

big ideas i mentioned um like decentralization they’re a lot

1:07:22

of it’s a lot more complicated in reality and i think that leads into uh some of

1:07:29

the questions svetlana has that we can maybe talk about more in more detail so yeah thanks

1:07:44

okay i guess this is my turn and i want to thank you for their

1:07:50

presentations and i also would like to thank the whole team of 21k

1:07:56

for inviting me to join this implement in this conversation so i also want to congratulate you on

1:08:03

the publication of this fantastic report which is quite an achievement uh this collective

1:08:11

research undertaken by artists curators activists designers and interpreters

1:08:19

which actually shows this multidisciplinary kind of like approaching

1:08:24

on this topic which is so so important what is especially important and

1:08:30

interesting to me is that this investigative initiative

1:08:36

has been undertaken with the help of a variety of projects of different nature some exploring the

1:08:44

technological application of blockchain others subverting and challenging

1:08:52

each of them has offered a lens and the lens onto this technology

1:08:59

and as i ask some questions as we discuss some ideas and notions related to

1:09:05

i actually want to invite both rosemary and jesse to refer to this project

1:09:13

if you see it’s a helpful way to kind of like to rehearse as projects

1:09:19

as lenses to kind of like think through certain emotions and certain ideas

1:09:26

so i really appreciate and i always say i really appreciate what research

1:09:34

based art gives us but even more so i appreciate what art based

1:09:41

research could give and i think this investigative report

1:09:48

actually combines the best of both research based art and

1:09:54

art based research all right so in the following 20 minutes or so

1:10:00

i’d like to organize so i propose to organize this conversation

1:10:05

about at least two topics and they are infrastructure and

1:10:12

ideology so we’ll see if they have enough problem and how far we can go

1:10:17

with ideology but at least infrastructure i think is an important notion here

1:10:23

and it’s specifically kind of like important india too because i consider myself as a critical

1:10:29

infrastructure school so i see blockchain within this framework

1:10:35

all right so i’ll just want to read a couple of things a couple of instances that i uh prepared

1:10:43

and then i want to invite those in the images to respond to them and probably

1:10:51

in our qr name everyone else if you see them engaging so it would be

1:11:01

so i would like to begin by mentioning something that

1:11:06

we heard already ingest this presentation but i’d like to again to reiterate one

1:11:13

important point and it is the fault that in the mind of me

1:11:20

blockchain is firmly connected to bitcoin and they are often understood

1:11:27

as one thing which of course they are not bitcoin is a cryptocurrency

1:11:35

uh systems that disdain the central authority for

1:11:41

issuing currency transferring ownership and confirming transactions blockchain

1:11:48

is its distributed database a peer-to-peer network that has

1:11:56

interview that was introduced back in 2008 just when bitcoin was introduced

1:12:03

as part of a proposal for bitcoin bitcoin is powered by blockchain

1:12:12

and it has been the first application of blockchain technology in this sense

1:12:21

blockchain is bitcoin’s infrastructure

1:12:26

today we open here that bitcoin is absolute we also

1:12:32

hear critical concerns about the ethics and politics of this technology like in this question

1:12:40

from yesterday’s twitter from meredith vitterker faculty director of the ai now

1:12:48

institute and she wrote if now the time we collectively

1:12:54

acknowledge that bitcoin is a scam what else are we waiting for

1:13:03

if bitcoin is vanishing from the technological landscape

1:13:09

blockchain slides and it has already found

1:13:14

many musics outside of bitcoin in this blockchain again reviews itself

1:13:23

as infrastructure one of the key features of which is permanency

1:13:31

its lasting nature regardless of what it came support

1:13:38

uh initially and the purpose for which it was designed

1:13:44

and we can think of many examples of exactly kind of like the same logic

1:13:54

in the essay it written back in 1999

1:14:00

the ethnography of infrastructure which was foundational for

1:14:06

infrastructure studies and it was written by susan erie starr

1:14:12

she listed the defining properties of the infrastructure and she means embeddedness

1:14:22

among them and the first in fact it names it first as a one of the

1:14:28

most important features

1:14:33

it means that infrastructure sinks into and inside

1:14:40

other structures social arrangements and technologies

1:14:48

and it happens in a so subtle way that it might be hard to

1:14:53

distinguish between separate elements of its complex

1:14:58

architecture and by its i mean the infrastructural complex architecture

1:15:06

all with overlooking in betterness we tend to see some technologies as

1:15:13

transgressive disruptive or revolutionary but what media archaeology teaches

1:15:21

us is that the revolution in nature of technologies should be understood in terms

1:15:29

of its original astronomical meaning of the word revolution

1:15:35

which is a circular rotation of heavenly bodies and in our context

1:15:43

it means the return of the same the revolution is a gravitation

1:15:55

to complicate this idea in the most recent essay from a newly published

1:16:02

collection with a telling title your computer is on fire another theorist of

1:16:10

infrastructure called evidence distinguishes between different temporalities within

1:16:18

an infrastructural establishment he introduces the notion of

1:16:24

second order infrastructures and he uses this notion to describe the

1:16:32

infrastructural um position of software problem platforms

1:16:38

specifically he thinks of like all different platforms from facebook the apps as new

1:16:46

and relatively quick to build pieces of infrastructures layered on the top

1:16:52

of older slow to build more capital intensive infrastructures

1:16:59

which shows to us that the whole thing that we think of an infrastructure is kind of like has

1:17:07

different temporalities embedded in it it has its own complexities so some

1:17:14

things are more visible to us other things are less transparent some of things

1:17:21

kind of draw our attention immediately especially if they’re quote unquote and called new and other

1:17:29

things kind of tend to be on the background however all of them constitute this

1:17:34

complexity of looking for infrastructural assembly and he writes i call higher level

1:17:42

applications are built on the top of lower level software such as networking

1:17:49

data transport and operating system each level of the stack requires

1:17:57

the capability of those below it yeah each appears to its programmers

1:18:04

as an independent self-campaigning

1:18:10

system so infrastructure accommodates various temporalities within its layered

1:18:19

structure and nearly any definition of blockchain tells us the

1:18:25

blockchain sits on the top of the internet

1:18:33

is the internet and this is my question for discussion

1:18:38

is blockchain’s direct foundation do you see it

1:18:46

useful and if so how and why to describe blockchain as a second

1:18:54

order infrastructure set within the network of networks which is

1:19:01

a name usually kind of reference used to refer to the internet

1:19:08

rather than opposing blockchain to the internet as

1:19:14

entirely different technology so maybe we are at the stage of

1:19:20

rethinking this relation of blockchain to the internet right

1:19:26

its place within a complex infrastructural assembly

1:19:31

if the internet is blockchain’s material past all the legacies

1:19:37

it carries and today we in the media studies we

1:19:44

are naming many of them right we can speak about exploited of production

1:19:52

you can think of cold war militarism and rosemary also mentions some of its

1:19:58

history in her essay of course we can also think about imperial

1:20:04

and colonial pasts as certain layers materialized in some infrastructural

1:20:11

arrangements right that were also included with this very complex

1:20:19

assemblage of the internet infrastructure so in this case

1:20:27

all of this is that legacy that blockchain also inherits

1:20:35

and i think it would be an interesting question to think about maybe visit help of these

1:20:40

projects that i included that are part of your very interesting investigative project

1:20:49

if any of them allow us to see or review any kind of this

1:20:56

legacies embedded in this infrastructural past inscribed

1:21:04

in what blockchain seems to me than when it sits on the top

1:21:11

of the internet

1:21:25

how much time you left so there is enough probably ideality but we’ll see

1:21:31

when how long

1:21:39

great thanks svetlana that’s a great question and yeah that’s exactly why we kind of asked you to join us to think through these

1:21:46

issues but i think your research really does illustrate this too that infrastructure is never

1:21:54

a radical break you can’t just develop a brand new infrastructure and build out a whole new world with it it’s it’s

1:21:59

something that you you bring your biases and you bring your challenges of the past with you

1:22:05

into the future and i agree with you that there’s like you know i think this is why the the top end of the of the cryptocurrency

1:22:12

news spectrum is really weighted towards token value towards uh major players connected to

1:22:18

kind of white male figures like uh elon musk or metallic buterin or um

1:22:25

dogecoin and these sorts of things so it’s kind of like all of these things from the past that we’re still wrestling with are still leading this

1:22:32

conversation at a popular level into the future so i think what we need to do is like this is something our project is trying

1:22:39

to do is try to look beneath that mainstream narrative which is very easy to port

1:22:44

those those issues and challenges and bias from the past and the future they maintain the headlines

1:22:50

they maintain the kind of narrative momentum um you know i think the the way that kind of the crypto

1:22:56

space in the mainstream is developing right now is very much akin to the gold rush in in in some ways

1:23:02

in north america it’s a form of kind of swarm colonialism um they’re kind of seeing this space as

1:23:08

digital land they want to get as much kind of power and extract as much resources from it

1:23:13

early on um to be able to kind of then become a power player in in the next phase and so that’s still

1:23:20

very much a challenge that we’re dealing with but i don’t think we have the option to completely ignore it either but i don’t

1:23:25

think we have to behave completely like them at the same time um so i think again it’s just being

1:23:31

cognizant of those challenges and and moving with it um you know i think it’s funny that

1:23:37

one of the people who are joining us for a round table albiverse um you know there was a crypto dip in the past week

1:23:42

i think like there was some pretty crazy evaluations going on since earlier this winter and then

1:23:49

finally about a 40 dip hit the market i’m not sure if that’s the right number maybe rosemary can update us

1:23:54

um but yeah there was a big dip this last week but alby versus in our dow round table later in june

1:24:01

kind of tweeted out hey isn’t it nice to feel the crowded feeling full of fresh air all of a

1:24:07

sudden um and so i think that these moments they have in flow um and uh yeah i think we have our work

1:24:14

cut out for us to try and think through which which things we take forward with us and maybe which things we leave

1:24:19

behind but again i would just go back to using something like stephanie wakefield’s lens of being in the back loop and thinking

1:24:27

through like yeah i still need to have a firm foot to step forward um but at the same time maybe we can

1:24:33

acquiesce and leave behind the things that are weighing us down and not letting me take as much of a step as i’d like to

1:24:39

with the footing and with the energy i’m able to gain from this moment

1:24:51

rosemary you’re still muted on my end

1:25:09

hi zapper okay bam thank you jesse

1:25:16

lana and and um yeah i think that that’s what we’re trying to do is is is think through

1:25:24

uh add a counterbalance to a lot of the main narratives about blockchain uh that have been developed

1:25:31

from its early early years um by yeah bringing in kind of

1:25:36

humanistic thought um and to answer your question

1:25:42

like this idea is the blockchain a separate technology or is it um

1:25:48

just another layer on this network of networks um i think that some people associated

1:25:55

with the early days of blockchain would like to think of it that way and i think there have been efforts to

1:26:01

create um software that allows everybody to be their own uh kind

1:26:07

of um like what is it javascript server or something which is the the javascript

1:26:14

is the basis of the legacy internet so um this would be a

1:26:19

way to cut out the legacy net internet altogether is to create a blockchain version of that

1:26:25

um but that’s sort of based in in this

1:26:31

libertarian ideology um and it’s so funny that you talk about uh the this um

1:26:39

idea of the infrastructure that’s not acknowledged because that’s that’s libertarianism all over it that

1:26:46

doesn’t acknowledge seems to acknowledge anything that that enables you know daily life to

1:26:52

function um because there’s this narrative of being liberated from that um because you can be your own bank and

1:27:00

you can be your own government etc etc so it’s kind of a simplistic narrative and i think that that other narratives

1:27:06

are are building that um that have a little more subtlety uh to them

1:27:14

and um to answer your question about artworks it’s funny

1:27:20

because i know of a work that um that shows all just all the network

1:27:25

connections any visualization that was that was in the early 2000s i remember that work that

1:27:31

that showed all the strands of connection in the network uh that visualized that i can’t remember

1:27:38

what it’s called i’m afraid but i find any of these visualizations useful

1:27:44

um i’m not so sure that artworks uh i mean you would have artworks like

1:27:51

people where you’re having people making um illustrations

1:27:57

uh and i have nothing against that i think it’s great when artists can make money from their art so that’s that’s

1:28:04

been very profitable for some people because of the nfts so there’s that and then

1:28:10

i think in the art world the other direction things are training is more

1:28:15

towards creating online communities that um uh yeah self-organized online

1:28:22

communities that are on a discord jesse mentioned this um yeah or a telegram channel

1:28:30

so that is moving away from the big platforms like facebook um correct me if i’m wrong jesse but

1:28:37

those are the two tendencies less than the kind of investigation of like infrastructure per se um although that’s

1:28:45

always been a tendency in art in modernism to try and show the show the conditions

1:28:51

of the of the representation um but yeah maybe jesse could pick up

1:28:57

yeah i mean for me um you know an exhibition has always been just a still life of a network

1:29:04

in a lot of ways and it’s for someone like me who reads an exhibition or reads like a cultural project

1:29:10

i’m just seeing who’s involved what ideas are involved how they’re reacting and communicating those ideas between

1:29:15

each other and so how i see some of these projects coming out

1:29:20

you know like the discord server is a potential future for it we’re looking at something

1:29:26

called friends with benefits which is an interesting online community that was started by the music producer trevor mcfederies

1:29:32

um that’s that’s an interesting community that’s developing it’s having its own social token it’s having its own

1:29:38

culture form um it’s looking at financing its members projects in certain ways

1:29:43

um there is a threshold to get in with a cryptocurrency but there’s also other ways to get in

1:29:48

kind of like scholarships or kind of through social verification or maybe what you can offer to the

1:29:55

community which is really interesting so i think those kind of projects are really progressive forms of cultural

1:30:01

practice with kind of within the blockchain space within the crypto space

1:30:07

um but within our project too i mean i think julian howe even like the way that he’s trying to deal with

1:30:12

not just the internet as it’s as a legacy that he’s trying to contend with but also like a legacy of the art

1:30:17

world right like so the legacy of the art world um didn’t really even meet the internet

1:30:23

and so it’s going through a double growing spur right now as it tries to kind of encounter blockchain like yeah you saw our work

1:30:29

online but the experiencing artwork and trading artwork never really became like an online thing it was still very much a

1:30:35

legacy world kind of tradition the power players who had the power in the 50s post war probably probably still

1:30:43

have the power now um it’s not that long ago and so you know his ideas are on how to analytic

1:30:49

tokenization are one dealing with the legacy problems of the way uh art exists and then the way art

1:30:54

got the internet wrong and then you know how can you then kind of reset these kind of conditions for the

1:31:01

community that you want to work with and develop and not just get bogged down by them so

1:31:06

i mean i think there’s still room to work with the legacy art world in some ways but it just doesn’t feel like it has the

1:31:11

same um the same

1:31:17

gravity to it or the same kind of weight to it and maybe it never did maybe the the framing around it just changed

1:31:23

um at this moment so i think it’s still a space of action but i still see what’s happening outside of it

1:31:29

kind of way more way more interesting and way more progressive in terms of propelling this tech and resolving this tech’s um issues with the

1:31:36

previous layer of tech that we are still kind of embattled with

1:31:42

um yeah i would just save it to the form uh of community tokens and social

1:31:48

um yeah social tokens and these online communities

1:31:53

maybe we can understand that form as an expression of these these conditions

1:31:59

even expression of this infrastructure that um yes speaks to

1:32:04

something of the modern condition and and often in with these historical

1:32:10

changes you know art is where i’m most familiar with um these uh legacies and and um

1:32:19

and evolutions of practices and in styles etc and um i’m always interested

1:32:26

in the way it’s not it’s not recognized when when the new form appears it’s not recognized by the

1:32:32

legacy uh uh world is being valid or

1:32:37

or um yeah even being art so uh yeah but

1:32:44

i don’t know if you have anything to add or i’ve got a question for lana you can add yeah good

1:32:50

i think we add actually to this as well because i think um here is another again like

1:32:57

in this whole discussion of the infrastructure studies there are so many ways to think

1:33:03

infrastructure and one of them is another quite interesting and important notion in our context i think which is

1:33:10

infrastructural policies which implies that all the layers

1:33:16

either over the top of another do affect other layers or at least

1:33:22

impact or kind of foster some really configuration right so but like the notion of

1:33:29

infrastructural policies which maybe even in some cases

1:33:34

indeed has to do with certain erasure of something previous right

1:33:41

but the erasure is also a type of a record which we need to recognize as a negative

1:33:48

record and i think it’s an important gesture here when we think about certain newness a certain

1:33:54

impact or something like that right so and in this case you know like whether you actually kind

1:34:02

of you know belong to it’s a group that really believes in the newness of certain

1:34:08

technology or others who do not believe in any universe i think with this notion of the infrastructure

1:34:16

police can actually join these two conversations and create

1:34:21

some other real world thinking about this relationship between these

1:34:27

different components of the layers of infrastructure so

1:34:32

okay and from things i know if we have much time left but i probably would like

1:34:39

to offer maybe just a simple question not a simple question but just one question in relation to ideology

1:34:47

right because it’s so much already in conversation with all motion infrastructure right because

1:34:53

all these rules or beliefs about certain histories and the relations really kind of

1:35:00

you know have to do with some kind of general framework that

1:35:06

helps you to produce certain vision of what this assemblage

1:35:11

is right and if we take ideology in this classic kind of like

1:35:16

understanding right so it would be something uh some system of beliefs that

1:35:23

kind of like puts the relation like i kind of like puts you in a

1:35:29

certain relation with you know the thing that you’re looking at right and usually this

1:35:36

humiliation is imaginary right it very often forecloses

1:35:42

or helps you to make sense of something that is quite difficult to understand

1:35:48

right and in this case i mean without a certain ideology without a set of metaphors you could

1:35:56

have done nothing right with such a complexity

1:36:01

as blockchain so in this case you know like whatever you want to see whatever you

1:36:07

added whatever you don’t like ideology it’s very much present and in a sense even useful for

1:36:15

kind of like working with this technology right so and ideology of course is a

1:36:20

super broad framework and that et cetera and so many different topics can come up

1:36:26

and talk about ideology right so we can address the narratives that circulate all over again

1:36:33

we can think about so many different things but one of uh kind of like one of the things

1:36:39

that maybe i want to mention in this discussion with this kind of like uh uh something that i find quite

1:36:46

interesting right so those who are critical of blockchain and you know like many would say that

1:36:52

you live in a sort of post-ideological world because everything is kind of connected because everything is

1:36:58

fabulous right so that when you generally identify what kind of economic system

1:37:04

you belong or something else right so and here about blockchain maybe i don’t suggest maybe

1:37:11

provocatively blockchain is a sort of symptomatic of this particular

1:37:16

kind of you know state of things in the sense that myself i would actually agree with those

1:37:23

critics of blockchain as being a certain materialization

1:37:30

of maybe even fighting ideology right so which is cost nation state transgressing

1:37:38

borders no regulation and stuff like that right uh which allows privacy which allows the

1:37:46

security for conducting such populations etc etc but at the same time

1:37:53

it’s always intriguing how much and how powerfully it also attracts also the black groups

1:38:00

and they wonder what do you make of it right so why is it so so what is your

1:38:07

reading of this situation what is blockchain

1:38:13

um yeah i was listening to a talk from ben cerveny over the weekend and he’s from

1:38:18

the foundation of public code in amsterdam um but he’s also into critical

1:38:23

infrastructure studies and was kind of looking at the way like the 20th century and early 21st century

1:38:29

you kind of something’s a technology for about 30 years and then it’s acculturation and how it’s

1:38:35

used and how it’s traded and traffic through by people then kind of calcifies it as a form of an infrastructure

1:38:42

so i think that’s what we’re looking at right now with blockchain is that we’re in that nascent kind of technology phase it’s

1:38:47

maybe 10 years old um it’s still very a technical the technology even those kind of who are well-versed

1:38:54

in understanding it and developing it you still have regular issues and making it operate sometimes

1:39:00

but for the most part it does operate um and so with that in mind i think it’s also a

1:39:06

cultural moment and for however much this is true kind of um in the past couple of years and

1:39:12

especially throughout the pandemic um but it’s also interesting to see this not just blockchain that’s doing this

1:39:17

sort of thing so that you have kind of far right actors and maybe you have far left actors and

1:39:22

maybe they’re having similar thoughts all of a sudden and this is kind of a political condition that’s been called horseshoeing so essentially

1:39:30

the political spectrum gets kind of arced and the center is down here

1:39:35

but then the left and the right usually we’re in opposing polls are now closer to themselves than they are to the center

1:39:42

um so i think that’s the situation that we’re dealing with in the way that we have seen um

1:39:49

you know market economies develop in places in the former soviet union for the past 35

1:39:54

years or so um and how that has taken place has not been nice it’s not been

1:40:00

equitable it’s not been easy but the conditions have been bumpy throughout and um

1:40:05

it’s a constant renegotiation to figure out where you are and i don’t think that having these polls of far left and

1:40:11

far right are going to help us out in climate change scenarios much either because i think we’re going to need to

1:40:17

work and work with the borders and work with the legacy institutions to evolve them to deal with the challenges

1:40:23

that they are because i think from the pandemic we’ve seen things stagnate and we’ve seen things

1:40:28

fail and we’ve seen the center try to hyper normalize this failure um so i think you know living through

1:40:35

the cognitive dissonance of the pandemic and in the global west and especially here in vancouver you

1:40:40

live in a hyper normalized state of failed public health you live in a hyper normalized state of a failed state

1:40:46

um essentially that can no longer function as its ideals function but yet the business sector is operating as if

1:40:52

those ideals still existed but the population is kind of cut out from that operation so um

1:41:01

yeah i don’t believe the technology is either or and i think looking at someone like patricia reed’s

1:41:06

paper um kind of gets us to this this voice and that if we are saying that um blockchain is

1:41:13

inherent someone is saying blockchain is inherently right-wing well what do you mean by that and what do you mean

1:41:18

right now in terms of where that’s at because i wouldn’t call it that i don’t think it’s being designed to i mean sure it’s being

1:41:24

used to trade money sometimes um but that fiat money is also being used to

1:41:30

to finance far more right-wing behavior than crypto is um from what i know um and on the same

1:41:36

way the far left isn’t using it that much as much as as much as the far right so i think it’s a much

1:41:42

different group of people who are developing this technology who are looking at maybe like a post-left

1:41:47

scenario um in terms of where it could go and i think what we’re looking at is in like

1:41:52

in a climate change scenario and in a post-pandemic scenario we are looking

1:41:58

for things that attach more to the fundamentals of the material world that we live in and so i think that people who’ve been

1:42:04

believing in the things that they thought the state was supposed to be providing in terms of first services

1:42:09

for the past 30 years i’ve seen those services decline and they will continue to decline

1:42:15

i don’t see especially in canada a huge ideological shift to change the state to

1:42:20

provide services once again in the way that they promise to um so

1:42:25

i think it’s a group of people who are just working to try and reconnect our digital culture our culture and our economy to the fundamentals of

1:42:32

what we’re dealing with um and how to sustain ourselves as a as a population to be as healthy as

1:42:38

possible and to to to to be as as communicative and equitable

1:42:44

kind of as possible kind of um within that space so [Music]

1:42:51

i’ll just just follow up on that that’s excellent answer um jesse and great questions atlanta and

1:42:58

and it kind of brings me back to the question for you uh celana’s just

1:43:03

like maybe speaking of these kind of um legacy infrastructures is this is this

1:43:10

paradigm of left right right useful um uh jessie mentioned this idea of a

1:43:17

post left um i mean i know in ontario

1:43:22

we have this the worst possible government uh during the pandemic um and

1:43:29

uh they’re very far right and they don’t they just they epitomize this

1:43:36

this idea that that you know the modern conservative movement has no

1:43:41

ideas um except to try and attack uh and divide and conquer and use

1:43:48

xenophobia etc so that’s that’s my question to you is about what about this whole construct of

1:43:53

left and right maybe that’s an infrastructure that needs to evolve and this is a really

1:44:00

great point in the question because i think we can also think of it with the help of the notion

1:44:07

of infrastructure or at least with the help of some of these frameworks that i

1:44:12

introduced earlier because if we consider infrastructure

1:44:18

for this long lasting complex thing right so in the sense i always

1:44:25

i would like to suggest that in in a sense it’s kind of like it outlives certain

1:44:31

ideologies and maybe with all this its complexity and different layers and objects and

1:44:39

systems embedded in it maybe ideology kind of concerns all these elements rather than

1:44:46

infrastructure in general but in our reading how things work

1:44:51

and where they are embedded and what they are related to and what they are connected to when they

1:44:57

are mobilized it’s very interesting to engage in fact left and right

1:45:03

and see what kind of systems at what point we’re conditioning right so that they’re

1:45:09

impacting certain technologies and of what ideologies these technologies became

1:45:16

again a materialization and in this sense as i already mentioned in our

1:45:21

conversation because i think that china is a very interesting example right

1:45:27

if you think about it so the system that still refers to itself as like some

1:45:34

communist right so but at the same time it participates in neoliberal economy and in fact today

1:45:41

becomes one of the most powerful players of this economy right but also i don’t know if you are in

1:45:50

closing in relation to this particular topic of our conversation and you know what you encountered this wonderful book

1:45:58

which is called blocked blockchain chicken farm

1:46:04

it’s a fantastic book and i don’t want to read how much of what it speaks about but i

1:46:11

really encourage everyone to look at it it’s written by shellwaywang

1:46:17

and it’s her investigation in some kind of

1:46:24

you know local businesses in deep remote chinese villages

1:46:30

of some you know healthy chicken production and in order to prove

1:46:37

to the world that these are chickens that are well fed and not really kind of like

1:46:44

industrialized etc so blockchain technology is used to trace the heartbeat

1:46:51

of this chicken in fact you know like and when you think of this it’s quite quite fantastic

1:46:59

quite unbelievable right so but what’s most interesting that the writer discovered kind of

1:47:04

trick is that none of the workers of this firm really knows what

1:47:10

blockchain is right and then i again

1:47:15

think about transparency and capacity of certain technologies that are so strongly participate already

1:47:23

you know in some situations but still remain you know unknown to the extent

1:47:31

that you know like yeah that put some responsibility on us

1:47:38

who conducts such investigations how do we communicate this complexity right so how

1:47:44

do we uh educate how do we produce a about the meaning and function of this

1:47:51

technology the general public uh in order to in fact

1:47:57

you know yeah inform better solutions and things like that yeah so but anyway

1:48:03

so it’s a fantastic case in fact of this rural chinese

1:48:08

economy which is at the center of high tech cake

1:48:13

a high high tech uh kind of like scenario right so

1:48:27

yeah that’s a that’s a that’s an interesting kind of challenge to it but i think you know i think that’s an instance of

1:48:32

what you’re bringing forward is like legacy culture being translated into the blockchain and so this isn’t like a

1:48:38

like i don’t know when i’ve been in china and i’ve gone out to restaurants and stuff like you go

1:48:43

to a restaurant and it’s um maybe dedicated to the duck but for instance at the end of the meal

1:48:48

i would get a card telling me about the farm where these ducks would grow up and this was over a decade ago so there

1:48:54

was something you know there was a certain class of people who had access to kind of organically grown meats or

1:48:59

these sorts of things and so i think this is just a way to kind of like code that into the future um the other question

1:49:05

around like food security is like this organic farming is probably going to be for a certain class of people

1:49:11

whereas the scope issues of feeding the seven billion and plus people we have in the future are going to be much

1:49:17

more complicated so than just kind of nice farms for chickens um it’s going to be a much more processed

1:49:24

kind of nutritious this future and therefore sustained

1:49:31

certain classes yeah yeah it can sustain it and you can

1:49:37

give it verifiable kind of rights and it can kind of like tell people in the world that this is this is our practice and this is how we

1:49:43

stay true to it and we stay true to our values and then you could trace that piece of meat back to kind of you know its

1:49:49

infants and its heartbeat like you were saying which is interesting but yeah i think it’s interesting too just in thinking

1:49:55

through that in terms of like what’s developing here and maybe it’s not so much like a

1:50:00

right-wing left-wing approach but maybe it’s more of a this you know as sigmund bowman says you’re constantly on this

1:50:07

pendulum that swings between freedom and security and that’s what people are looking for kind of as they’re developing these networks and trying to

1:50:13

find that balance of the two um but i think on that notion of balance one of the artists that we

1:50:18

work with daniel keller and i think he’s quoting someone else so i have to understand who he was quoting but he was speaking a while ago in one

1:50:24

of the podcasts they do with new models but kind of seeing this kind of like crypto economy or this crypto finance that’s um

1:50:30

establishing itself as a counter balance to uh neoliberal capital and chinese

1:50:36

communist party capital so even though the chinese communist party participates in the neoliberal

1:50:43

economy you can say that their economy is still very much separate there is a form of

1:50:48

participation in the general kind of global economy but there is an exclusion at the same

1:50:53

time and it’s about pouring in in that side of the country um and so what he’s what he was saying

1:51:00

daniel was saying was that crypto’s kind of developing as this counterbalance between neoliberal capital and chinese communist

1:51:07

party capital and we might see this start to emerge kind of on the global scale within the next five ten uh 15 years as well as an economic

1:51:15

counter power yeah i would just add that i mean the

1:51:21

whole gamestop thing that happened earlier this year sort of an example of that um because you had the people

1:51:28

collaborating yeah they’re in a reddit form uh

1:51:34

deciding together on which stock to pump um and so this is mass collaboration but

1:51:39

it’s also uh something that was looked upon aghast with a gas but

1:51:45

the legacy finance even though they have various forms of collusion that that

1:51:50

they use daily to keep themselves rich and etc so

1:51:55

yeah i think that these um these narratives are emerging that the

1:52:01

the tools are available to yeah to collaborate in in a different way and in

1:52:06

in a way that provides people with an alternative to that system

1:52:12

maybe we should just uh open it up now um so questions to folks in the audience so

1:52:18

um thanks for sticking with us um to get through the strategy and our conversation with friends fedlana so if

1:52:23

you have questions for us about what we’ve spoken about or at general about the technology or kind

1:52:28

of where the strategy is going please use the q a window and ask them away and you can we can bring you in

1:52:34

with a live voice or if you prefer to just type it out then we can just read it from the screen as well

1:52:48

[Music] um but maybe just a question for svetlana too as well as someone who’s

1:52:55

studying communications and digital democracy um where you’re at now what has been the fields kind of like um understanding of

1:53:01

this technology and how are they engaging with it kind of critically or how are they getting involved in the

1:53:06

civil society around it to start to influence it in certain ways

1:53:15

[Music] yeah how has it come up or what are the attitudes that you’ve been kind of seeing kind of within within your work

1:53:22

within within your sectors i guess some of the things that i over the middle so i do

1:53:28

see this kind of like debate about the ideology ideology this is not very kind of like

1:53:35

powerful thing maybe the media studies to understand what this technology really represents

1:53:43

what what’s the narrative uh around that kind of like four clauses right so

1:53:50

and where it actually reinforces some practices and strategies

1:53:58

that are not so obvious when you think about working for revolutionary nature

1:54:04

as technology so that is one of the major concerns but also there are some others there is

1:54:10

also other time a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of uh kind of desire to experiment

1:54:17

with this technology quite quite similar to what your project also indicates right

1:54:24

so something about um all possible questions and possibilities

1:54:31

so we are very much aligned here

1:54:43

yes midland i liked when you were talking about the eurasia being a kind of record

1:54:48

um and uh yeah the ratio within the pal problems

1:54:55

being a kind of record um and it’s these are not typically

1:55:03

thought of in in in everyday life but are there instances where

1:55:09

i mean i guess people really think about infrastructure when it fails mostly right yeah i mean i don’t maybe have

1:55:16

more to right that that’s when it becomes visible that’s kind of like the most typical assumption

1:55:22

about infrastructure so it’s supposed to be opaque it’s supposed to be

1:55:28

invisible it only reveals itself at failing yeah

1:55:41

yeah um and i mean yeah well right now it’s a theme in the

1:55:46

in the us because of biden’s infrastructure project um

1:55:52

so and they need to invest in infrastructure they didn’t invest in infrastructure and then you know bridges collapsed et cetera so

1:55:58

they had to do that but um yeah that’s that’s an old narrative

1:56:03

that got revived as a way to yeah bring a new deal to the states again

1:56:11

right so i’m not seeing any immediate questions come through so there’s a lot to kind of grapple with

1:56:16

with the publication it is weighty um we want it to be that way because it’s something that we’re going to be working with and working through for the

1:56:23

next um 10 years so please do give us an email if you have any questions that come up

1:56:29

you can reach us at hello at 221a.ca and we’d be happy to kind of have a conversation with you likewise if

1:56:35

this conversation and the strategy is sparked any um ideas for use cases or partnerships or

1:56:43

um potential applications of blockchain for you and your work um get in touch and let us know we’re curious to

1:56:49

to learn about that and make as many partners as we can as we move forward um just to say that you know we’re

1:56:56

looking at this as an institutional technology so how do we develop institutions and organizations out there

1:57:01

that can just really better help you organize yourselves and organize your communities and

1:57:07

move your resources around with that in mind we’ll leave it there and hope that you

1:57:12

can join us for some of the other events in june um coming up again the first one is on june 4th friday with patricia reed so

1:57:20

again go on to our website 221a.ca and you can find a link to that and you’ll be able to

1:57:25

register there later on in the month we’ll have a talk around doma’s work on june 18th and then

1:57:30

we’ll release the recording and edited recording of our round table with a bunch of a couple of groups

1:57:35

developing dows and social tokens on january 25th so please sign up to our newsletter and you’ll get that video

1:57:41

in your inbox when it comes out so thank you so much svetlana and rosemary for joining us

1:57:48

today to kind of debut the strategy thanks to the canada council for the arts for their support of our digital strategy work and

1:57:54

the digital democracies institute at simon fraser university which is a quickly growing

1:57:59

and very urgent um institute we look forward to learning more about your work and working with you

1:58:05

in the coming years thank you very much jesse and rosemary and the team of 22

1:58:14

yes thank you thanks everyone yeah ciao bye-bye

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