The Valuation of Necessity – A Cosmological View of Our Technologies & Culture – Patricia Reed

2022

This event hosted a conversation around a commissioned research paper by the artist and theorist Patricia Reed. “The Valuation of Necessity,” published by 221A in the “Blockchains & Cultural Padlocks Research Report”, takes an in-depth look at the conceptual constraints that, increasingly, are proving lethal to life on this planet. Reed’s two-part paper examines the social constitution of necessity as a normative and epistemic referent, orienting the uses and abuses of technology within this historical moment designated as the planetary. Reed’s paper is illustrated with a series of diagrams drawn by the artist, adding a further conceptual dimension to the cosmology of concepts and ideas that the writer travels through. The conversation around “The Valuation of Necessity” also welcomes the initiative’s Editorial Director, Rosemary Heather; critical geographer Maral Sotoudehnia of the Province of British Columbia’s Climate Action Secretariat; and Wassim Alsindi of 0x Salon, Berlin, who conducts research on the legal and ecological externalities of blockchain networks.

By asking questions about what conditions are needed to cognize worlds that do not yet exist, we will consider the relevance of blockchain technology beyond tech startup orthodoxy. This knowledge reproduction is part of the Blockchains & Cultural Padlocks mandate as a research initiative – discovering how the technology might capture the imagination and what its future applications might be, in an art and design context and beyond.

Bios, Transcript and More Details: https://221a.ca/activity/the-valuatio…This event hosted a conversation around a commissioned research paper by the artist and theorist Patricia Reed. “The Valuation of Necessity,” published by 221A in the “Blockchains & Cultural Padlocks Research Report”, takes an in-depth look at the conceptual constraints that, increasingly, are proving lethal to life on this planet. Reed’s two-part p …

Key moments

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The Hao Shui in Squamish
The Hao Shui in Squamish
9:07

The Hao Shui in Squamish

9:07

Patricia Reed
Patricia Reed
10:40

Patricia Reed

10:40

Research Paper the Valuation of Necessity
Research Paper the Valuation of Necessity
13:59

Research Paper the Valuation of Necessity

13:59

Genres of Being Human
Genres of Being Human
23:14

Genres of Being Human

23:14

Adaptive Truths
Adaptive Truths
24:25

Adaptive Truths

24:25

Naturalization of Necessity
Naturalization of Necessity
25:24

Naturalization of Necessity

25:24

Sociodeny
Sociodeny
25:41

Sociodeny

25:41

Technogeny
Technogeny
32:01

Technogeny

32:01

Autogenerated Transcript from YouTube (if available)

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0:08

hi everyone i just want to introduce nicole kelly westman to qna’s education and learning programmer who will start us off today with a

0:15

territorial acknowledgement hi um i’m nicole kelly westman um

0:22

and uh on the side here we have um a work by wes harmon that’s currently

0:29

installed at the vancouver art gallery and some some links that i’ll i’ll speak about so

0:34

i’ll just get started this morning with um our land acknowledgement

0:41

this is the time uh we need to mourn with our indigenous relatives it’s with great grief that we recognize

0:48

that the land itself is holding within it the loss of love’s equipment children oral stories about the magnitude of this

0:55

loss have been told for generations by survivors of the residential school system

1:00

and only now was it proven through western science with ground

1:05

radar investigations for those of you calling in from outside of canada we’ve included a set of articles to

1:12

contextualize this devastating news the loss these lost children were not able to grow up

1:18

and tend to their communities care for their kin or bring love and delight to those surround to

1:24

those surrounding them rather their absence has left a void of endlessly echoing and ricocheting grief

1:31

the truth of this nation’s history is one of genocide it’s one of greed all guests of this unseated and

1:38

unsurrendered land need to sit with the discomfort of this tragedy and think critically about what to do to

1:44

show up for your indigenous hosts the work of reconciliation should not be left to indigenous folks to sort through

1:51

on their own i tend to write my land acknowledgements as specific celebrations of place

1:56

to remind myself and audience attendees of the significance in the uniqueness of varying ecosystems

2:05

but i can’t think of ways to celebrate the land when i can only think about how long she has been grieving how long she has

2:12

been waiting for restitution or justice please should you have the financial means i would ask you to redirect

2:20

surplus resources you might have to provide support to indigenous folks

2:25

through this harrowing trauma in this slide is a list of resources for you to support the sequemec nation and

2:31

other indigenous groups protecting their territories from ongoing colonization and displacement in act by the

2:38

government of canada and british columbia we’ve also included additional resources

2:43

for you to learn further about the industrial exploitation of old growth forests

2:48

most specifically the fairy creek watershed which is currently being protected by

2:53

frontline activists and many brave indigenous youth and land offenders we’ll paste the links in the chat as

3:00

well and if you’re uh based in vancouver vancouver uh there is um going to be a memorial

3:08

this evening um meeting um out front where wes’s work is um shown up in the slide um at 6 00 pm

3:16

so thank you hi everyone my name is jessica mckee and

3:22

i’m the head of strategy at 221a i lead the organization’s research programming communications and

3:28

advancement thank you nicole for your territory acknowledgement and sharing where we’re at uh in canada this week with a heavy

3:34

heart and a wounded psyche um just allow me to change my slide um the topic of our conversation today

3:42

is around the potential for new arrangements of information value culture and resources for our generation and afterwards

3:48

as we look ahead to meeting the challenge of instituting much needed changes i just wanted to take a minute to recognize the crucial research

3:55

partner of 22na on this overall blockchains and cultural padlocks research um who is uh chinook x um

4:03

and they’ve been uh tremendously important oh i don’t have a slide for them sorry um oh there it is

4:11

um it’s chinook x and they’ve been tremendously important contributor to the values of our strategy um by programming uh culturally informed

4:18

data sovereignty protocols for indigenous communities they’re advancing an incredible vision for reciprocity and territorial

4:24

stewardship relating across communities species and cultures is expressed through the blockchain design for energy and land

4:30

management they provide a compelling glimpse of the emerging importance of the bioregional layer and our planetary scale network

4:36

arrangements so what chinook x is planning to do is to operate data centers for indigenous data sovereignty with a network of

4:42

indigenous utilities green energy and film and gaming and industry partners

4:47

so they’re asking the question how can indigenous values and protocols be expressed through blockchain design

4:53

indigenous nations have the jurisdictional authority and the fortitude to accelerate

4:58

our transformation um towards better energy production and they’re looking to work with smart grid and renewable energy distribution

5:05

to provide a real-time supply and demand of energy within a region which could be really transformational

5:15

um we’re gathered here today for a program that’s part of the launch of 221a’s digital strategy titled blockchains and cultural padlocks

5:22

we’ve just completed our research phase of the initiative and have published a research report of our findings values and recommendations

5:28

we convened a research cluster to investigate the potential of blockchains as an institutional technology and through this collective work a

5:34

freely a freely available 200 page pdf was produced it includes papers that survey our

5:40

culture’s ability to enable a mass collaborative financial turn developed with new models for digital

5:45

cooperativism the urgent strategy is to enable the conditions for recommending land

5:50

data and objects through the development of responsive and resilient asset sharing power

5:56

distributing and value generating networks we’re supported by the canada council for the arts digital strategy fund

6:02

which awarded a multi-year grant to 2 a in the organizational transformation stream of its awards

6:07

this funding program which awarded grants from 2018 to 21 supported strategic initiatives that

6:12

help artists groups and organizations better understand the digital world engage with it and respond to the cultural and social changes it’s

6:18

producing um for those of you who are joining us uh from berlin i think we have a bit of a

6:25

berlin contingent today because of our guests um patricia reed and wasimal cindy i just wanted to give

6:30

you a brief introduction to 221a we were a non-profit organization

6:35

that was initiated as a student club at emily carr university of art and design which is the art and design school

6:42

here in vancouver named after a famous canadian painter and uh we were founded as a non-profit

6:50

society um in 2007 um after the students have graduated and they moved out and

6:56

um our co-founders who are still working with us brian mcbay and michelle who are the respective

7:01

executive director and head of finance and equity they had family connections in vancouver’s

7:07

chinatown which is where they rented space to share studios and provide a small gallery in the front and

7:13

we’ve grown from there our mission is to work with artists and designers to research and develop social

7:18

cultural and ecological infrastructure and we have a vision for all people um to have the means to make an access

7:25

culture so we’re a distributed organization with multiple cultural properties throughout

7:31

the city um it’s about 83 studios in total we work with 150 artists through a cost

7:37

recovery model and that that kind of collective

7:42

model allows us to operate these um cultural facilities at uh below market rates for commercial

7:49

property in our city which is has many many barriers to people who don’t have extraordinary

7:55

revenues so in total we have about um 150 artists uh that work with us

8:02

there are five non-profit and small business retail units in this network um there’s a totaling it totals about

8:08

fifty five thousand five hundred square feet or five 5 200 square meters and then our artistic

8:13

program is comprised of a fellowship program and we work with artists and designers to research and develop social cultural

8:20

and ecological infrastructure um and those what we do in the fellowship is we provide

8:25

the fellows with living wage salaries um for long term projects that can range

8:30

from six months to two years in length um we also have our research initiatives like this

8:35

one the blockchain’s a cultural padlocks initiative and our other research initiative at the moment is a cultural land trust study

8:41

for the city of vancouver and we’re about to move into business planning for that project which is very exciting but we’d like to plan out a different

8:47

future for our organization in our sector here in vancouver and british columbia in the next decade

8:53

and then we also produce education and learning programs which is what nicole kelly westman works with us on

8:58

and finally we produce public art at a site that’s titled semi-public also based in chinatown and we presently

9:05

have a major work there that’s called the hao shui in squamish or sangsang alam

9:11

in cantonese um and it’s a work by toyotanana sis weiss who is a um ethnobotanist and

9:18

artist of squamish stolo hawaiian and swiss heritage and she worked with a group of

9:24

youth to to plant and develop the site with indigenous species to the pacific northwest coast and the

9:31

site continues to be stewarded to this day by a youth cohort who lead us and in how to program and

9:37

how to care for that site and it’s it’s been a very valuable site for us throughout the pandemic and it’s been keeping us

9:43

and hopefully our neighborhood i’m a little bit healthier um today we’re joined by patricia reed

9:49

who is an artist a researcher on the project um and she wrote the paper the valuation of necessity included in our report

9:57

i’d like to thank q2a’s board president am johal for introducing me to patricia’s work in 2015.

10:02

this was before i worked for 221a and before am was on our board um but uh it was through her

10:08

contribution to the acceleration as reader with her text seven prescriptions for accelerationism

10:13

as well we have rosemary heather the initiative’s editorial director and we’re also hania a critical

10:19

geographer who was also a researcher on our blockchains and cultural padlocks project and finally we’re joined by wasim al

10:25

cindy who studies the ecological and social impacts of blockchain technologies of large scales

10:30

please allow me a moment to formally introduce our guest today because our backgrounds and our training and our studies are so varied i think it’ll be a

10:37

very rich conversation but i think it helps to have an idea of where everyone’s coming from um patricia reed is an artist writer and

10:43

designer based in berlin her writings have been published in angelaki 24 making and breaking para platforms

10:50

published by sternberg post meme published by punctum books which is forthcoming

10:55

eflex architecture zeno architecture published by sternberg press cold war cold world published by

11:02

urbanomic and distributed published by open editions uh reed is also part of the

11:07

laboria cubonics a techno-material feminist working group whose xeno-feminist manifesto originally

11:13

authored in 2015 was reissued by verso books in 2018. you can find out more at her website

11:19

aestheticmanagement.com all one word aesthetic management rosemary heather is an art journalist a

11:25

curator and a researcher with a specialization in blockchain she writes about art moving image and digital culture for

11:32

numerous publications artists monographs and related projects internationally from 2003 to 2009 rosemary was the

11:39

editor of c magazine published from toronto since 2015 she’s worked in the blockchain industry as a writer and a

11:44

researcher her clients have included wellpath dot me bitblox technologies

11:50

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

11:56

be found at rose m heather.com morale sodahania

12:01

is a phd candidate in the university of victoria’s department of geography her research investigates the cultural

12:06

politics and commodification of digital and urban spaces shaped by global policies peer-to-peer systems and smart

12:12

technologies equally influence influencing her scholarship are contemporary approaches to critical data

12:18

studies feminist political economy and new materialist scholars that foreground questions surrounding access

12:24

citizenship embodiment financial exclusion social justice and subjectivities in relation to

12:31

multi-scalar decision-making processes her doctoral research project in

12:37

supported by the social sciences and humanities research council traces and ethnography of contemporary life under distributed but rambunctious

12:43

instances of capitalism generated by blockchains and cryptocurrency markets and wasimal cindy is the founder and

12:50

host of xerox salon conducting experiments and post-disciplinary collective knowledge

12:55

practices xerox salon acting as an event series for regular discourse provides an informational space for

13:02

unstructured discussions of unusual topics and collectively authored outputs based on these

13:07

conversations a veteran of the blockchain space austin currently works on conceptual design and

13:12

philosophy of crypto economic systems at block science in addition to writing and editorial responsibilities for various

13:18

publications including the mit computational law report prior to mit

13:24

he was an independent researcher formulating novel approaches to the characterization of cryptographic assets and networks

13:30

such as the regulatory epistemology project token space wassim has also curated avant-garde arts

13:36

events led a creative engineering laboratory and published open source experimental electronic music

13:42

originally with research specializations in the physical science wasim holds a phd in ultra fast super

13:48

molecular photo physics from the university of nottingham in england alongside degrees in chemistry

13:54

astrophysics and finance as i mentioned earlier a conversation today is around patricia’s commissioned

13:59

research paper the valuation of necessity this text takes a deep look at the conceptual constraints that increasingly

14:06

are providing lethal to life on this planet her two-part paper examines the social continuation of necessity

14:12

as a normative and epistemic referent or orienting the uses and abuses of

14:17

technology within this historical moment designated as the planetary the paper is illustrated with a series

14:23

of diagrams drawn by the artist adding a further conceptual dimension to the cosmology of concepts

14:28

and ideas that the writer travels through by asking questions about what conditions are needed to cognize worlds

14:34

that do not yet exist we will consider the relevance of blockchain technology beyond tech startup orthodoxy

14:40

our intentions are to get a view into the ways that this technology might capture the imagination and what its future applications might

14:46

be in an art and design context and beyond and finally um we are working

14:52

with a closed captioner today uh called vitac so you can turn that on for your feed if if you require that

15:00

i’ll hand it over now to patricia to tell us more about her paper thank you

15:05

sure thank you so you can hear me okay now i think yes fantastic um thanks so much for

15:12

organizing this and uh you know it’s just have to put a shout out to 221a for being such a great um

15:19

collaborator on all this and extremely patient and understanding through uh less than ideal working situations i think we were

15:26

all not operating at the same cognitive speed even if we were in a in a privileged place during the

15:32

pandemic sitting at home and in relative security and uh also a big shout out to

15:38

rosemary for her uh you know editing on the fly of the text as it went

15:44

it took a long time and extremely always a lovely great editor to work with so very grateful

15:50

um also to morale for agreeing to join tonight and i encourage all of you to read her her piece i believe you have an event

15:56

coming up as well focusing specifically on i don’t want to scare you but everyone should watch that

16:02

and uh and to assime for agreeing to join it’s also a momentous occasion

16:09

because i think it’s the first time i’m doing a talk uh with another actual human with with

16:15

pants on and um and since like over a year so it’s very we’re we’re starting to feel a little

16:21

bit of optimism here in berlin nature’s healing we hope that i want

16:26

this optimism to travel obviously much further uh and also to trust for

16:32

uh allowing us to use the space uh and you don’t have to stare at my boring uh living room

16:37

uh and to a seam for setting up this kind of fun setup so basically um i’m gonna try to

16:43

summarize my paper uh it is gonna be a bit dense and difficult because it is a long one

16:50

and we don’t want to take all the time because i really want to take this opportunity to enjoy the um discussion with wasim rosemary and

16:58

morale and so basically i’m going to go for

17:04

around 25 30 minutes then we’re going to hear uh responses uh from marel rosemary and wasim

17:11

and then we will wrap up the discussion uh and hopefully be able to take questions online if

17:18

there is a desire for such a thing um so yeah um maybe i can switch into slide

17:25

mode now the screen yes if you don’t mind this is the great thing about having it

17:30

having a colleague right beside you and who knows what he’s doing having a de facto assistant it’s amazing

17:37

i’ll get used to it um so yeah so basically um the the contribution to my research

17:43

product is more of a sort of a general reflection on the techno uh social scene so i will just go to

17:49

here um uh yeah basically sort of like a general

17:55

reflection on the technosocial configuration of worlds in consideration of the human who cannot

18:00

be separated from technical activities um so i’m not going to be able to go into all the details as i mentioned it’s

18:06

quite a long paper but i’m going to do my best to summarize in this kind of condensed time

18:12

but just to say i think the central problem uh that i’m working through in the essay and obviously won’t claim to have answered it um is how does

18:19

the social reasoning of necessity manifest and how can it change in order to establish new um

18:26

valences of ethical operational epistemological uh and axiological orientation for the

18:32

construction of worlds that do not yet maximally exist so hopefully that question will also

18:38

you know some of the terms may not be all that clear right now but hopefully that will become more lucid as we go on so it’s just to say

18:44

that it’s not really like it’s not as specific on blockchain although there is some mention at the end however i think that’s also best left in

18:52

the hands of you know of the esteemed colleagues tonight who have you know spent years uh working and

18:58

thinking on it right it would be disingenuous for me to jump in and think i have something to add to that specific conversation so

19:04

trying to learn alongside um so basically to say that the question is kind of it’s inherently cosmological as the uh

19:11

as a sort of title the event alludes to and when i say cosmological i’m kind of relying on the definition of

19:18

cosmology that bentley allen an international relations scholar

19:23

mapped out where it’s essentially composed between five interwoven factors so ontology epistemology um

19:31

uh temporality so the direction and quality of time uh cosmogony uh and destiny or the role

19:38

or situation of humanity in the cosmos so that’s this kind of five part you know cosmological disposition

19:45

so just to be clear uh the the understanding of necessity that i’m working from here isn’t uh necessarily like it’s not this like

19:51

hyper formalistic one um is what we can think of as non-elitistic necessity so that is an

19:58

artificial necessity that is only a necessity relative uh to certain fabricated conditions

20:04

and so it is not absolute so we’re talking about the social construction of necessity

20:09

here and uh so although non-olympic necessities are

20:15

of course mutable uh the operations of power and organizational reinforcement

20:21

at work in stabilizing social orders can be described as procedures of naturalizing

20:26

necessity right so we want to keep that idea in mind so when non-elite necessities

20:31

become naturalized a shared social sense of what is immutable

20:36

or what is simply not negotiable emerges and that becomes part of the experience of what we

20:43

experience as a total or complete you know unchangeable system

20:48

and of course what we experience is the consequence of an interplay between you know concrete material reality

20:54

and the uh the um uh internalization or the psychic

21:00

evaluation of those externalizations and sort of a feedback dynamic

21:06

so if the naturalization of necessities serves to uphold the social perception of immutability uh

21:12

non-elite necessities can be seen as a conceptual constraint on the possibility space for social

21:19

reconfiguration right they kind of block that that that sense that something other can

21:24

is possible so it’s on this problem of systemic constraint again in material and

21:30

cognitive levels that i’ve been turning to the polymath sylvia winter for for help on this problem who has

21:37

elaborately theorized the historical paths that have led to our present condition um you know beginning notably with the

21:44

birth of european humanism so roughly sort of we’re looking at like renaissance era so as winter describes

21:52

it for the first time in human histories uh what jesse was alluding to with the planetary so for the first time in human

21:58

histories our condition is one of co-existing in an environment in common albeit in

22:05

disparate and in uncommon ways and although winter’s project does not

22:10

address technology specifically right she’s not a thinker we normally associate with the technology uh discourse um

22:18

the historical conditions she’s describing and invested in is inseparable from technological activity so i’ve been finding it very fruitful to

22:26

to think about technologies through her way of understanding systems and and history

22:33

so i’m going to be uh i feel horrible for doing such a short overview of winter because everyone should read her

22:39

but to put it very succinctly for winter all societies no matter their uh

22:45

historical and geographic specificity um they’re governed primarily via the informal

22:51

authority of an idealized human self-image so while these self-idealizations are

22:58

not the same and of course they yield very different types of societies the function

23:03

of these human self-idealizations as a coordinating force is for winter you know universal

23:12

so winter names these idealizations as genres of being human and they kind of serve as a primary

23:18

frame of reference for organizing practices and norms of social life

23:25

so genres of being human operate as a kind of non-alethic necessity in this regard from which you

23:32

know epistemic economic and normative orders cascade that establish both

23:38

markers and conditions of selection and deselection or conformance and non-conformance

23:46

so because this feedback dynamic uh manifests in a kind of formal or

23:51

institutional or informal normative ways a reproductive system of self-reference

23:57

emerges that not only confirms but incentivizes compliance with a particular genre of

24:04

being human so such a reproductive system of self-reference

24:09

bends toward the structuring and evaluation of knowledge systems that confirms the uh the veracity or the

24:18

you know the legitimacy or truth value of said of this human idealization and this is what catherine mckittrick

24:24

has uh very succinctly called adaptive truths

24:30

so because of this consequential force of this self-referential system that winter asserts

24:35

that there can be no paradigmatic social transformation without a corresponding transformation

24:40

in the genre of being human so i think the additional question to that in the context of this program is

24:46

like we can then ask you know um or keep in mind the question you know what role does technology play

24:53

in this process right does it play a role and if so what what kind of role does it play

25:02

try to reactivate it great um so to arrive at this model of

25:08

self-referential the internalizing externalizing feedback dynamics winter has been uh influenced and

25:15

adopted the the model of sociogeny uh developed by franz fanon in order to challenge what she’s feel

25:20

what she sees as the social bio as bio over determination or what we can think of as the naturalization of necessity

25:26

which is basically like using the excuse of nature to say oh humans are

25:31

greedy and this is the best sort of system to organize et cetera it’s it’s it’s legitimizing it based on some

25:37

skewed idea of what a natural fact of the human is so basically sociodeny describes the

25:43

feedback process between social structures and the internalization of them as a necessary category through which to

25:50

account for the asymmetric conditions of being human so these are conditions that cannot be

25:56

captured by evolutionary or biological categories alone so where phylogeny and ontogeny

26:03

may offer explanations of what it is to be human uh sociogeny offers a framework to

26:10

explain what it is like to be human which is very different since every since a human is indivisibly entrenched

26:17

within a socially encoded milieu and obviously completely and equally so

26:23

so basically fandom’s intervention is to reject the possibility of even contemplating the human shorn of

26:29

its social relations so he comes to this drawing from the experience of anti-black racism

26:36

both in himself and through his practice as psychiatrists working with patients in colonial conditions

26:42

so phenol crucially noted that the overcoming of such structural trauma that is not only based on material

26:48

oppressions but also on the interiorization of inferiority on the part of the uh of the oppressed and superiority

26:56

internalization of superiority and they’re part of the oppressor they cannot be premised on adapting to

27:02

given social reality particularly one that is punitive or one that produces harms

27:07

rather than one requires quote an overall social transformation

27:14

so inherent to this cure as it were is a demand for self-conscious non-adaptation in order to rupture the

27:21

perceived closure naturalness or veracity of a self-referential system for ordering

27:26

reality and human relations therein so i just like to emphasize this concept of

27:32

non-adaptation which i think is incredibly powerful uh epidemic consequence that sylvia

27:38

winter is also drawing from phenol but something that is very much uh important for us to think through

27:44

today especially when we you typically describe a structure a monolithic structure such as capitalism

27:49

we tend to think of as a totalizing system so how can we learn to non to think non-adaptively in relation to

27:55

that right and and you could even say that in a way like critique has to even a form of critique can sometimes be

28:01

adaptive because it has to keep pointing to that object it doesn’t necessarily think not adaptively even if

28:08

it’s against it so so through winter’s historical

28:13

account we can come to see our present condition as the global inflation of a once uh

28:19

you know locally specific euro modern genre of being human that’s manifest now uh as the

28:25

naturalization of homo economicus so this has its origins in 19th century european liberalism

28:31

and this figure has been legitimized upon natural grounds with the illusion of demythologizing the human right that

28:37

was the other thing so it’s like the premise of demythologizing the human uh where rampant competition and

28:43

therefore extreme resource inequity is purported to be our natural state

28:50

uh so what what happens when the move is made to defend social orders upon natural or

28:57

bio over determined grounds is not only the risk of instrumentally abusing scientific

29:04

developments to furnish existing biases and structures of domination but it’s also a way to evacuate human

29:11

history insofar as histories are mutable and not determinate

29:16

so winter gives the name homo neurons to this

29:22

to describe this historically constituting praxis of being human with her insistence that it’s

29:27

irreducible to being a noun right it’s wrong to think about humanness as a noun so homo neurons

29:34

describes the activity and the experience of being human as a hybrid of bios mythos or bioslogoy

29:41

and describes the feedback dynamic between the two and this is quite interesting because it’s not unlike the artifactual theory of mind

29:48

that examines how like tool externalizations and their use subsequently leave neurochemical

29:55

imprints on the brain right so that it’s it’s not that your brain is totally in your head even

30:03

so to begin thank you to begin diagnosing our present it can be described as the effect of a euro

30:10

modern modern uh monohuman genre concept that physic figures itself as

30:15

masterfully dominant over and separate from an infinitely plentiful passive ground

30:21

that is merely there to serve the appetites of a human minority

30:26

so this condition as we stated earlier has yielded historical and material path dependencies

30:32

necessitating coordination of coexistence both for and within an environment in common

30:38

which we call the planetary so this critical historical moment denotes a condition where as the

30:44

philosopher yukui notes quote humans are elevated to a causal explanatory category

30:51

in the understanding of human history as a consequence of the culmination of a technological consciousness

30:58

in which the human being starts to realize the decisive role of technology in the destruction of the biosphere and

31:05

in the future of humanity end quote so it is a historical condition driven

31:11

by the proliferation of a technological of technological externalizations that

31:16

you know arise from this particular mono-humanist genre concept which today cannot be held

31:23

apart from any contemporary social diagnostics and so the uh you know and so it must be

31:30

added uh to fandom’s original formulation that besides phylogeny ontogeny and

31:37

sosogeni there also stands technogeny

31:43

oh sorry i’m a bit behind on the slides i’ll leave that for a second while i catch up here so um

31:52

so right so we end up with we’re adding now technogenie to this kind of sequence of that was originally formulated by

31:58

phenyl besides phylogeny ontogeny and sociology stands technogeny

32:04

so what is technogeny so it’s similar to the embedded principles of sociogeny uh insofar as technogenic indexes this

32:12

kind of co-evolutionary intermediaries through which proxies of being human are

32:17

enabled and capacities for activity are transformed in productive or ambivalent or destructive ways

32:25

so the point is to say one cannot speak if technology is a standalone thing removed from its sphere of

32:31

interactions or media and within a computationally complex historical condition

32:40

hang on uh distinctions between sociogeny and technogeny collapse insofar as technology uh can no longer

32:47

be thought of as a mere means to fulfill uh you know sociocultural ends but

32:52

instead has reached a degree of magnitude where to to quote hue machines are no

32:57

longer simply tools or instruments but rather gigantic organisms in which we live end quote

33:06

so this is of course a bit similar to those familiar with benjamin bratton’s concept of the stack or model of the

33:11

stack that also is is about an account of computationally dimension planetary dimension computation

33:18

so this gigantic organismic scale technologies are both a human machinic quote relation to emilio and a

33:25

modification of it with successive modifications transforming the menu

33:31

itself and therefore the conditions of action for those within it end quote and that’s in the words of conor heny

33:40

so given the the previous emphasis on on winter’s human genre concept

33:46

operating as a determining force it would of course be tempting to to conclude that technology as a human

33:53

making is simply an externalization of whatever reference human genre concepts happens to be governing a

33:59

particular social configuration right that would be sort of the logical move

34:05

while this is kind of accurate to a certain degree if we are to commit an absolute sense to this position it would

34:11

entail adopting a view of technology that is totally subsumed by a given cultural context

34:17

where its particular technical material and protological properties are of negligible import or

34:25

consequence so as lagnam winter has noted in such a

34:30

social determination of technology view taken to its logical end quote technical

34:36

things do not matter at all end quote because technology is a result of social

34:42

processes alone right so that way you also get this separation of uh the object from human interaction

34:50

the flip side of that position would be to say that technology unto itself is the determining object

34:58

agent of social configurations including political economy so in this view technology develops

35:04

purely through internal workings and it shapes society in its image

35:10

so while the former picture technology is the effect of a particular social order

35:15

whereas the latter technology is the causal force of a particular social order so while i think both of

35:22

these positions continue to play out uh quite a bit in particular humanities discourses on

35:27

technology influential work which which is not recent by the way um

35:33

his influential work raises a stark warning uh against such binary understanding and

35:40

rather adopts an analysis of techniques operationally so that’s as both cause and effect

35:45

um as structure and process similar to the recursivity at work in sociogeny

35:51

right so there’s a nice analogy in terms of like operations here

36:00

okay for si mondo technics refers to the broad domain of techniques process technologies and

36:06

various practices that are both conceptual and material through which human

36:12

uh humans interact and refresh and then begin along with of course the psychosocial

36:18

effects of uh those interactions

36:23

so we’re gonna move a little quicker here thank you so technics according to catherine hales

36:29

is the quote study of how technical objects emerge solidify disassemble and evolve

36:35

while machines may operate as an intermediary between human and its environment the operations of intermediation that

36:43

flow and shape conditions in both directions place techniques squarely within the domain of ecology

36:49

right so ecology can be broadly understood as a study of coexistence and

36:54

not mere existence it is as hue noted a quote new condition

37:00

of philosophizing with the recognition that our present technosocial condition

37:05

can be described as the quote becoming organic of the inorganic end quote

37:11

and what this means is that it’s increasingly the inorganic that constitutes our environmental condition

37:16

for coexistence

37:22

yeah so while simon distinguishes mere tools from technical objects

37:28

um catherine hales raises a problem for this uh and she sort of bases her reasoning on

37:33

anthropological definitions and she just says uh that tools are

37:38

are part of she suggests that tools are part of technics because a tool stated generally is quote

37:44

an artifact used to make other artifacts so considering the premise that a

37:50

technical object is an artifact used to make other artifacts we can say that a technical object is

37:57

not just the concrete thing unto itself but also includes the not yet concretized possibility

38:03

for its repurposing or retooling into something else

38:11

in this way technical objects must contain the possibility of other use and signification that may not be immediately apparent

38:18

within a given conceptual framework or media that said however falling into a

38:25

delirium of possibility idealism because technical objects always contain within them a degree of indeterminacy

38:33

would be to ignore the concrete and operational constraints also endemic to them that set limits on

38:40

what is realizably possible so as ramo amaro has noted quote we can

38:47

be uh we can be contingent but only within the limits of the protocols that we

38:53

interact with end quote so otherwise said the possible retooling

38:59

of technical objects is not infinitely open right technical objects matter uh so anil the theorist anil bawa

39:08

kavia has in in another context summarized such a premise in logical terms known as the

39:13

barcode formula the possibility of the existence of a

39:19

implies the existence of the possibility of a end quote

39:26

here the possibility of the existence a necessarily requires the existence of the possibility of a

39:32

however on a practical note it must be observed that the existence of possibility a may be

39:38

undetectable or difficult to recognize because of that adaptive normative

39:44

epistemic and cognitive conditions within which humans interact with technology inhabit forming waves

39:50

right so a lot of these possibilities are are obscured for us

39:57

so for wendy habits with regards to communications technology specifically

40:02

new media are described as behaviors and quote things that remain by disappearing from

40:08

consciousness end quote and that which has disappeared from consciousness

40:13

impedes upon the intelligibility of the existence of possibility otherwise right we just don’t see it

40:21

so we can then say that the prerequisite conditions for the transformability of any technical object

40:26

are dependent on the capacity for practical and conceptual uh dehabituation

40:33

in order to construct perspectives that are amenable to making those imminent possibilities

40:39

intelligible right those realizable possibilities how do we learn to see them without falling to the trap of what i

40:45

call possibility idealism right where it’s just infinitely open so can i change thank you

40:54

so the problem of witnessing the existence of the possibility of a traces back to winter’s engagement with

41:00

the question of historical discursive and scientific paradigm shifts she thinks a lot through the work of

41:07

michel foucault and thomas kuhn who are probably familiar for for most of you

41:13

and then the problem of reinforced adaptation or habituation to their operational ordering

41:20

so parse through winter’s framework the possibility of witnessing the existence of the possibility of a

41:25

within a given paradigm that of course obfuscates the perceptibility of possibility a

41:31

is a problem tied to the perception of quote the grammar of regularities end quote

41:37

that institute a boundary condition that enclosed what can be thought of as normalized possibility right possibility

41:42

that is like permitted within a given system without disturbing it and i think a lot of technology that labels itself disruptive

41:49

is completely in that in that genre um

41:55

in contrast to possibility as such so normalized possibility can be translated

42:00

as probability specifically the hegemony of probability calculations that govern much of technosocial reality

42:07

today for which probability operates as quote the entropic tendency

42:13

towards the elimination of the diverse end quote and that’s in the words of bernard stiglia

42:21

so for winter the question of witnessing emerges from the perspectival category of the liminal

42:26

insofar as a structural contradiction can be understood or experienced

42:31

between the representational order that prescribes parameters of behavioral coexistence

42:37

and lived or empirical reality that is unaccounted for within that representational grammar

42:45

so if we map this into stigler the liminal corresponds to the category of the improbable insofar as the improbable

42:52

resist calculation within a given framework which furthermore deals a blow to the concept of information as a mere result

43:00

of calculation so this is going to be a kind of a crucial point because i may have to

43:06

for the sake of time like cut things a bit short

43:14

hang on here where am i here uh so epistemic or paradigm shifts occur not only as the critical recognition of the

43:19

existence of possibility a right acknowledging or pointing to something but the risky realization

43:26

for possibility a driven by this historically constituting figure of homo neurons

43:32

and the term for such transformative shifts in referential frameworks is an other world and it’s coming into

43:40

maximal existence is dependent on the risky process of construction an improbable vantage

43:45

point that is never given in advance and is isomorphic with what can be thought of as

43:50

a non-adaptive perspective how are we doing for time uh jessie

43:57

because i realize we’re getting a bit late here things are running a bit long so should i wrap up and we can move

44:03

on if you just want to give a little sign yeah i think if you feel okay to move on

44:08

at this point um and then maybe the rest of us can just kind of speak to some of the paper

44:13

yeah let’s do that why don’t i why don’t i stop at non-adaptive perspective because i think i’ve been talking for

44:18

too long and it’s quite dense and i really want to make sure that everyone has enough time to with their own

44:24

uh really good contribution so why don’t i stop at that the paper’s online anyways anyone’s free

44:29

to read and of course get in touch if they have any questions or whatever so i’ll stop there and we can move on to uh i believe i’m

44:36

giving the floor over to you merle that’s right

44:42

thanks patricia and yeah i’m sorry that the truncate yeah your paper um i was

44:50

[Laughter] um yeah uh but a mindful time so i’ll try to keep my

44:56

my comments um pretty short so that i can make space for others to to contribute um and uh just before i

45:02

started i wanted to just um thank patricia for for really just such

45:07

an engaging paper and by engaging in me i was able to engage with it um in a way that was really nourishing um you know when

45:15

um reading your paper and and all the contributions um often when you get this kind of

45:23

feeling that you want to sit with something with a text really long um for me that’s that’s pretty special i

45:29

don’t um you know often read a lot and kind of just go through yeah okay this is interesting whatever good concepts um but

45:34

your paper was really tasty it was like a good meal that i wanted to slow down and enjoy and so i went back

45:40

to it quite a bit um and it was really nice to kind of see it come alive um so thank you for for the opportunity to

45:45

be able to kind of um speak to it to some degree though i don’t think i’ll do any service um and uh i also

45:51

want to take a moment and just uh really give a shout out to um to jesse and tao21a in particular and

45:57

rosemary who edited um my paper um and uh yeah i just what a nourishing

46:03

project entirely um i guess you know in terms of kind of starting with so i’ve got a slide but

46:09

i’m mindful of time and that maybe by the time that i figure out how to share it and i was kind of joking but not really before this

46:15

i’ll see if i can actually um that i got a little bit panicked knowing that there would be slides

46:20

with people who are artistic um because i’m certainly not um so i kind of have like an attempt at

46:28

some kind of visual um thing here um just and and really kind of what i’m trying to show you is

46:34

um the the conceptual ballasts that i’m using to kind of frame my discussion today uh this image is of obviously a house

46:41

with a key um and it relates to um the the paper that i wrote for um for this project

46:47

um which deals with fractional real estate applications um and blockchains so i can get to kind of what the connection is there with

46:53

patricia’s work um as well as um this some bit of text to the right um which really uh and

46:58

thanks again to patricia for um really providing kind of a nice prompt i think to think

47:04

about how to start talking about these things and one of the the beauties i think of your of your

47:10

paper and diagrams is that yeah you don’t really focus too much on the tech which is i think really

47:15

a big trap that we run into when we um start talking about digital technologies um in critical ways

47:22

um but you know this notion for instance that um thinking about kind of what do we mean by kind of um evaluation and value

47:29

um when it comes to land is something that that’s been really kind of um forefront for me um in the past few

47:35

years um and so yeah so patricia suggests i frame my response really kind of surrounding kind of this notion of

47:40

evaluation um of land um in proprietary terms and especially i think um as we kind of think of the

47:46

ideological constraints to democratizing state um and so what does that mean the context of of of blockchains

47:53

um and what does it have to do with the silly picture that it perhaps it’s not slowly but i’m perhaps saying my interpretation of it um that

47:59

i’ve put here today um and so you know the the focus of kind of the

48:04

this notion of land evaluation i think is really prominent for everyone no matter where

48:09

you are it’s particularly intensified if you’re in one of these kind of um uh global real estate markets that are

48:15

really illiquid and really hypervalued and extremely exclusive so you know i’m calling in today from the

48:21

cloning territory um which you know relies on the colonial um toponym of victoria british columbia

48:27

um where you know our median house price is over a million dollars

48:32

which is kind of ridiculous i think uh and and i doubt that that’s even um uh the highest median

48:40

uh price for folks on this call today from those of you calling in from vancouver and probably berlin as well

48:45

um and elsewhere so one of the things that you know i was really interested in in kind of looking at your paper and

48:50

also kind of trying to connect the dots with with mine is it i focus on kind of this question of fractional real estate applications with

48:56

blockchains and you know with the blockchain we tend to kind of be obsessed with these questions of value that i think you rightfully kind of interrogate

49:02

um and often they kind of slip into these kind of discussions of you know subjective or objective theories of

49:08

value um specifically relating to cryptocurrencies um to highlight kind of and i think that highlights the

49:13

indeterminacy of technologies in the way that you frame them um but you know and received this notion

49:19

that you take up patricia specifically through uh hale’s framing of technics or this retooling i think and it’s a

49:25

really nice way to put it this retooling of you know technical objects or

49:30

technologies that i think becomes really evident in blockchain discourses and material materiality sorry um and the latter here

49:37

you know really refers to actual projects or platforms protocols um the blockchains enact um and and this is

49:44

specifically around kind of i think the way that blockchains can retool land as something else um and you know they tend to kind of

49:52

enact land as these different um sometimes really evident um assets or

49:57

kind of forms of property um but also in unanticipated ways as kind of a shared a universal

50:03

good um as sacred spaces and so you know when you think about kind of the evaluation

50:09

of land and valuing as a gerund um and particularly in

50:15

relation to kind of the blockchain and some of the concepts you’ve brought up um you know this you kind of think about a variety of

50:23

i think these kind of can collide quite a bit and one of them would be i think anne marie mole and frank hertz call um

50:29

you know the monetary register this is the one that i think we tend to think of when we think of blockchains kind of the general

50:34

normative context of the technology um through kind of uh the the possibility

50:40

of a if you will to riff on your paper a little bit um and and this is where we see kind of um the most slipperiness i think right

50:46

of well obviously we want to be able to use um land and enclose it um so that it becomes kind of these

50:52

first second and third order assets right first is some kind of typical kind of deeds um property

50:59

relations as we know them that are dispossessive extractive and lead to kind of an illiquid accumulation of wealth but then there

51:05

are these second and third orders that i think become evident through the blockchain and are quite seductive to people who are falling into

51:11

that i think you call it um uh the dragon online of schwartz’s work uh the digital medalist

51:16

approach um that is highly individualist that’s a predicate on kind of you know price

51:22

signals in the market and in catalasey i think is the term that you use um and and here this is really where

51:27

it’s really interesting because those second and third orders of kind of

51:32

wealth accumulation become really really um seductive to people who who

51:38

want to be able to gain additional private wealth and maximize it under the guise of

51:44

sovereignty and individualism and by this i mean like in terms of that second order so you’ve got you know the property

51:49

um relations and how it functions essentially is kind of a a monetizable asset in some ways finance

51:55

really um and then you’ve got the second order of kind of the token if you will if it’s related to a blockchain fractional um real estate app which

52:02

really to summarize what those are is essentially kind of taking a piece of property and then partitioning different shares of it

52:08

um and this is kind of often promoted in a way that is seen to kind of provide a lower

52:13

barrier to entry to finance and then the third order might be kind of this question of renteir capitalism

52:19

where blockchain applications that try to partition property and make it kind of more

52:24

available to a wider network of consumers um really kind of rely on this these discourses of

52:31

rentership and remittances where for instance if i participate in this particular platform that is

52:37

redistributing wealth um and democratizing land in some ways because it’s no longer

52:42

extremely exclusive to become a property owner i can have a share then i have the deed and then i also

52:49

have kind of the speculative kind of component that comes with that deed because property provides us with equity

52:55

that can be financialized but then i also have the potential to be able to either rent to own um or you know receive

53:03

remittances from those renters that are essentially kind of inhabiting um

53:08

the the land itself uh that has now been kind of essentially kind of expressed through a token or a share or both um and so that’s a

53:16

really kind of interesting thing that you tap into um because you know it collides with this other side of it and a mindful time here so i’ll wrap

53:22

it up quickly which is kind of um these non-adaptive ways of thinking about

53:28

land and its evaluation that i think often become really challenging to think about

53:34

in the context of these technologies and specifically blockchains which have to do with kind of more of a

53:40

mutualist approach and i think you rely on the term um or you invoke the term sorry um infrastructural mutualism right this is

53:46

this notion that actually we can think or evaluate land as something that is mutual as a shared good

53:51

as collective as these kind of nodal transformations that require care and um you know to paraphrase um

53:57

kenny lee murray um land is something that is not to be rolled up like a mat right it’s something that you tend to

54:03

and weed and and um sacred and his home uh or community

54:09

um and and this becomes really interesting the context of these these blockchain applications because

54:14

um you have these kind of capillary um projects that come up and try to do this and i think um

54:19

one of uh the participants in the blockchains and uh cultural padlocks project doma as an excellent example of this where

54:25

you know they’re trying to essentially kind of um leverage kind of valuing property land as property in the kind of

54:31

normative individualist sense or digital medal of sense if you will um to allow for these non-adaptive

54:37

realities to perhaps or imaginaries to come to fruition where they’re essentially hacking property to

54:43

provide collectivist forms of equity that can then um actually lower the barriers to

54:50

you know using land in a variety of ways um so i don’t know if i’m just i don’t

54:56

know where we’re at for time jesse i can keep going but i also don’t want to just um monopolize the space uh so i’m gonna

55:02

rely on you to tell me to to do like kind of the figurative chain on stage and pull me out

55:07

um one thing can i just add one thing quickly because i just want to give credit where credit is due and so these

55:13

terms like digital um uh digital uh

55:18

mentalism and uh infrastructural mutualism these are from lana schwartz essays so not my terms and i just want

55:24

to make sure that everyone is aware that we’re we’re calling from her

55:30

for our uh thing for our own thoughts so just to be clear the papers are amazing i think they’re

55:35

required reading for everyone in the space especially the ones that are looking at this more the imaginaries and the technosocial side

55:40

yeah yeah thank you for um clarifying that i don’t know if i was particularly clear

55:46

but yes the um your invocation i guess of atlanta sports terms but i think it’s a really useful framing

55:51

because these two kind of um concepts really are always in tension already i think with blockchains and

55:57

particularly when we think about kind of the valuation of land um and you know one of the challenges

56:03

that if because i think we see so much of the the the digital medalist or really

56:08

individualist kind of um capitalism as we understand it today uh

56:14

kind of circulating and a lot of kind of mainstream discourses it becomes really hard i think to um not

56:21

only imagine kind of those alternatives um and those futures that are perhaps more collectivist

56:26

and and perhaps a lot more driven by some of the ideas that i think you’re trying to take up um and it’s really really challenging to

56:34

um to see that but um i think your paper really allows us to kind of think critically about how we can make those

56:40

spaces possible and how we can kind of sit with those projects and not try to kind of always

56:46

bring them back into that space of um uh the kind of more hegemonic approach to

56:52

to evaluating land um and so for me kind of one of the things that i continue to grapple with is you know

56:59

how do we evaluate land uh in the context of i think what you call the global game right

57:04

um and and how do we kind of use the blockchain to hack um some of these more i think normative

57:11

capitalist ways of being um and and maybe kind of allow for those alternative spaces to come about

57:18

um see i i know again i’m mindful of time and i think i might have talked more than my allotted amount

57:25

um so i’m happy to perhaps just be quiet now and then pass it over thank you so much that was

57:32

really great and maybe we’ll jump over to rosemary and uh give her the floor but thank you

57:38

so much are you ready rosemary

57:48

thanks yeah thanks that was great um patricia and morale thanks for this luminous

57:56

thinking around these topics i’m gonna share my screen um

58:08

from beginning is that what that was that’s okay so can you guys see that

58:16

oh yeah

58:23

okay here it is so can you see that

58:31

yep that’s coming through yep okay

58:37

so um i’ll just try to go through this quickly and um

58:44

to it’s it’s really i’m just looking at the one aspect

58:51

of crypto that it does pertain to

58:56

patricia’s essay in the sense that um how do i make this slide get

59:04

bigger let’s go up to the top the top right or sorry top left and i

59:10

should say from beginning just below there there’s a little icon yeah that’s it okay okay um

59:17

about what we the self-compo impose constraints we operate under

59:25

and um you know is there something in

59:31

blockchain technology and i’m going to speak about yeah the the technology contrary to what

59:38

patricia was saying but that enables us that it has something is there something different going on

59:44

there and i’m just going to put in these really simple terms because i the thing that interests me is is i find

59:51

that it’s just there’s something peculiar going on and i sort of struggle to explain it and also trying to get other people kind

59:58

of interested saying like look over here like this is this something’s going on over here

1:00:04

um but it’s sort of a slow process um but so i wrote about staking

1:00:11

um which is the proof of state protocols proposes of alternative to the current protocol

1:00:19

which is very energy intensive um and so what the way it operates is that nodes

1:00:24

you you deposit crypto um and run a node on the network and that

1:00:31

is a way to make the data on the network more secure the more nodes the

1:00:36

there are the more secure the data is so um and then you earn dividends

1:00:43

in exchange for your um deposit uh so there’s another i’ll just skip

1:00:48

this and um so the thing i want to talk about is this feedback loop

1:00:55

and there’s this kind of saying like users of the protocol on the protocol or users of the

1:01:02

network on the network um so it’s this this idea

1:01:08

uh so you have to network native tokens that are used to secure the network

1:01:16

uh the more nodes they are the more security the better the health of the protocol the better

1:01:21

the health of the token um and that feedback loop has made people

1:01:30

a lot of people got a lot richer based on that um

1:01:37

yeah that feedback loop so yeah it’s this is this thing that’s kind

1:01:44

of peculiar because you’re it’s owning the network token you’re investing in the protocol too and

1:01:52

this is an often talk about idea related with the blockchain

1:01:57

networks of decentralization um and i i only recently i think

1:02:04

came to understand what it meant um i think there’s a lot of

1:02:10

misunderstanding um about what decentralization means

1:02:15

uh but at it at the basic level it’s peer-to-peer internet transactions that

1:02:21

are possible so they’re not going through any kind of centralized entity um but the way in which i

1:02:29

have been able to understand it or explain it to other people there’s two ways so like everybody’s

1:02:36

working at scale because this is a massive project um

1:02:42

they’re investing in the token that means they’re investing in the network they’re pursuing their own interest and

1:02:49

then together they’re making value which they can take out it’s a feedback loop

1:02:55

um another way to think of it is it’s another version of creating

1:03:01

user-generated content on the network which is what everybody does on facebook etc um so what all we all

1:03:09

have these behaviors are very um well established now of

1:03:16

giving our labor for free to mark zuckerberg and his ilk

1:03:24

but with the blockchain network the token is the content and the users capture all the value and not the

1:03:31

platform so i don’t know is that something that

1:03:39

like does it create alternative social values possibilities like yes maybe

1:03:48

facebook is a way that millions of people are coordinated daily for good and for bad as as we

1:03:55

found out um and crypto does this as well but it does it really at the speculative level

1:04:01

of the value of tokens at this point although there’s a lot of experimentation happening about what else might be

1:04:08

possible um so i like to think of it as a medium of mass collaboration

1:04:14

um and it up today this net it doesn’t really get talked about in this way and that

1:04:19

might be because of the role that these centralized platforms play in our our lives

1:04:25

um yeah and uh yeah on in this

1:04:32

mass collaboration it’s only in crypto networks do you earn value proportional to your

1:04:39

investment and i realize this is really very like a simplification but that sort of

1:04:45

describes a basic dynamic um so and then i just wanted to bring up

1:04:51

an analogy uh there’s a fellow christina battles at

1:04:58

221a and she’s kind enough to ask me to write a text for her about mesh networks

1:05:04

um and i think that they are looking at establishing a mesh network um

1:05:12

at 221a as part of christina’s project

1:05:17

and what it is it’s community-run wi-fi so all you need is a couple like the

1:05:23

simplest one you just need to put a router up on the roof of your house and so it has a sight line

1:05:29

with another router and make that available to other people who also

1:05:35

when they when they add their routers it keeps the mesh keeps getting uh bigger and the example is the best

1:05:43

example is the guifinet in the catalonia in the valencia and it extends beyond there

1:05:49

they have 36 000 active nodes um so it’s

1:05:55

big and on the website they have uh that phrase you are weak.net

1:06:02

so this is the thing that comes back to this thing is this is you you own the protocol when you buy the

1:06:07

token it’s the same thing and it’s a it’s a feature of network technology

1:06:12

um and blockchain as well um and so just to talk about griefy

1:06:19

that those ideas sort of anarchist ideas or you know these alternative ideas they go

1:06:26

deep um revolutionary catalonia uh during the spanish civil civil war uh

1:06:33

was the largest territory ever to be governed by anarchist ideas um and at that time they

1:06:40

were influenced by the writings of peter krapatkum so

1:06:45

i think that this is really what i’m getting at is this um these

1:06:53

ideas i mean can we break out of of the constraints that are going to kill

1:07:00

us maybe um is that in blockchain i don’t know but i do think there is something

1:07:07

going on in blockchain that’s that’s kind of interesting um yeah that’s i’ll stop there that’s

1:07:14

that’s my presentation thanks rosemary that’s great thanks

1:07:20

rosemary i have questions but will that wasim go [Laughter]

1:07:27

so i just need to share my screen i think rosemary might have to stop sharing first okay do you need me to uh click through

1:07:34

or can you do it yourself i can reach wow well that would be quite a um

1:07:40

quite anecdote to say that i had a feminist uh uh clicking my slides so probably

1:07:49

so i’m probably going to take a bit of a step back like we’ll um look on a kind of a grander scale

1:07:56

so hopefully we can all see the slides and so um yes i spoke with patricia so

1:08:01

first of all thank you very much to jesse and everyone else at 221a and patricia for putting on this event

1:08:07

for inviting me here and give me the chance to to speak a bit about some of the work that i’ve

1:08:12

done in the past and also i’m doing at the moment that that measures into um looking at

1:08:18

how um you know the rubber hit rubber meets the road how blockchains and these you know kind of technical structures that have these economic um

1:08:25

performances and capabilities built in them how these mesh with um society with our

1:08:31

kind of um uh human lives uh with the um social networks of networks

1:08:36

and um and you know i think we’ll see some positives and negatives um and uh you know some unexpected um

1:08:43

uh happenings and and uh consequences so just i’ll start by explaining the picture on the on the slide which is

1:08:49

quite striking so this is a bunch of combustion engines in shipping containers

1:08:54

uh which are um powered by the strand flared fled methane gas

1:09:01

from um which is stranded above fracking wells now you’ll see this all over canada i believe this picture is

1:09:06

actually from um it could be from an alberta saskatchewan um

1:09:11

but i think this one might actually be from the states and so what’s happening in those situations is that there’s a great deal of um so

1:09:18

the fracking world’s all in these kind of basins which are very sparsely populated and um the

1:09:23

gas which comes off as a byproduct of the fracking for oil is just flared off they either burn it or it goes into the atmosphere unburned

1:09:30

and so some enterprising bitcoin miners have decided to put mining rigs in these

1:09:35

shipping containers to use some of this um essentially kind of um you know waste gas

1:09:40

and you can actually argue in this circumstance that you know contrary to what we think about us you know bitcoin mining being this uh

1:09:46

you know uh only damaging uh only uh negative early regenerative negative externalities this

1:09:52

might actually be helping in a strange way uh because unburnt methane going into the atmosphere is far worse from a kind of a greenhouse an emissions

1:10:00

perspective than combusted methane carbon dioxide and so uh but the the point which i

1:10:06

think we’ll keep on coming back to is that proof of work networks the the networks which kind of like a blockchain 1.0 which

1:10:12

things like the staking paradigm which we’ve been hearing about just now um they don’t care these these proof of

1:10:18

work networks don’t care where the energy comes from it could be coming from solar energy it could be coming from hydro dams it could be the cleanest

1:10:25

most beautiful energy or it could be coal and it just doesn’t care and that’s the that’s the the point i

1:10:30

want to to impress and so um we already had a little introduction about the salon so i don’t say too much

1:10:36

uh but just that we’re preparing to do a series of events uh discussing uh bitcoin and and his friends and uh and this um it’s

1:10:43

an inability to reason about its externalities and so uh yeah i will i will slide straight along and um

1:10:50

yeah we’re talking about necessity of value and um and uh we already heard about the challenges of evaluating

1:10:55

value in a specific sense with reference to property but um i wonder if we can generalize this and

1:11:01

this is an old um engraving from abraham bossa i think from the 17th century and it’s kind of this part of this movement of the

1:11:08

perspectivalism i suppose it’s in a way showing the inherent subjectivity and you know path dependence of our own

1:11:15

uh views of our own states of mind and so what i’ve done here is i’ve tried to

1:11:22

lay out some of the various kind of biases and lenses which you know it’s particularly in the blockchain space but you know you know

1:11:28

we’re also humans as patrick recognizing creatures we see things through these um you know we think we’re seeing

1:11:34

objectively sometimes we have biases which you are aware of and we have biases which we aren’t and so we’ll start from the right and

1:11:40

we’ve got our observer here and uh they see everything through their the eye of the beholder and so like we

1:11:45

all have our own um uh uh we come from different uh schools of persuasion we’ve been trained in

1:11:51

different ways we have this kind of epistemic baggage that we carry around and this colors the way we see things

1:11:56

and i think it’s very interesting the blockchain space where um it’s almost like rorschach tests all the way down so people see different

1:12:02

things as we just said about the infrastructure and mutualism the digital metalism and these are kind of mutually incompatible visions that

1:12:09

people were um projecting onto the same technological substrate and we see this this time and again and so the next step

1:12:16

over is wittgenstein’s ruler um which um you know as succinctly i suppose you could say is

1:12:22

if you’re not uh if you can’t if you don’t have complete trust in your ruler and your measuring device then as you’re as much um measuring um

1:12:30

the the measure as you are the um the object and then the next step over is good

1:12:35

heart’s law which is a maxim used quite often economics which um again succinctly put is that

1:12:40

when a measure becomes a metric it ceases to be a good measure and that’s because people will optimize for

1:12:46

a game for this thing and we see this really large in the blockchain space where we have this um you know transparent transparent and

1:12:53

fairly verifiable technical substrate so we have a lot more data a lot more information that we should be able to extract

1:12:59

scrape and learn from um but um the problem is sometimes that we don’t always get

1:13:04

the good information or that people know that everyone can see everything so that there’s a bit of kind of obfuscation or you put on your best face

1:13:11

on the surface and you carry on doing what you were doing and your own interests underneath that and then right at the end on the very

1:13:17

left uh you know first it turns out we live in a society and now it turns out we live in a universe and that universe has

1:13:24

kind of laws um constance and uh this idea that everything is kind of homogenous and applies everywhere

1:13:30

and that you know we’re tending towards steady states and equilibria and the one thing i learned from my ten years in the

1:13:35

in the um institution of science the biggest big s is that these things really seem to be true and so i’ll just

1:13:42

you know i don’t have much time but i’ll just have a very brief anecdote of um the favorite my favorite talk i saw as a

1:13:48

as a physicist which was by johnny pogba iii who won a nobel prize for discovering some of the important equations around

1:13:54

quantum mechanics related to chemistry and his talk was called is chemistry a branch of pure mathematics and

1:14:00

he was just standing at the front with a a sharpie and with an overhead projector and people were shouting out um

1:14:06

different universal constants and laws and equations and he was just dismantling them and showing how much of a fallacy it was

1:14:11

so things like the speed of light had to be redefined so that it was constant it was moving um and so uh you know that’s the bedrock

1:14:19

on which all of this is built and so with that in mind i appreciate that’s not very positive place to start and but i’m hoping that it will give us

1:14:25

some kind of um pause for thought as we go through and so this is something that i think we’re quite well

1:14:30

aware of by now that that bitcoin is a you know it’s a a protocol it’s a piece of software

1:14:36

um and then by computers uh running that they become a node in this network and those computers talk the same language

1:14:42

to each other then they can transact and you know the token the native value it’s also called bitcoin

1:14:47

confusingly enough little b but the reason i mentioned this is that it’s very helpful to have this kind of network

1:14:52

uh level perspective because it helps us to compare and contrast things that are not so obviously networks and so

1:15:00

um you’ve probably heard of metcalf store by now and if you haven’t you’ve certainly heard of moore’s law so netcast law is basically the idea

1:15:06

that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes in it and the example here is with telephones with the

1:15:12

alexander grain bell imagine when he made the first telephone and he installed another one in his mother’s mother’s house i don’t think that many

1:15:18

of us would consider that to be a valuable global network but as the thing scales and then anybody can call anyone we can

1:15:24

see why that might be more valuable but there’s a problem with uh quadratic equations with n squared

1:15:30

which is that it just carries on to infinity so that doesn’t really make sense like eventually this network would

1:15:35

extensively suck all the value out of the universe and so some people do call bitcoin the black hole of money

1:15:40

but i suppose that’s probably not what they’re getting at right now and so um i want to just um propose an

1:15:47

alternative frame of reference where we can think of almost every kind of exchangeable good

1:15:53

as a networked commodity and if we think about that way then then you can think of the the way

1:15:59

the price is determined to be good in the moment of a transaction as the conflation of some objective

1:16:05

and subjective parameters and um three of the key uh things to consider are the redemption utility the network

1:16:12

utility and the speculative utility so redemption utility is like you’re using the thing it’s an example of ethereum

1:16:18

that could be you’re using gas to run contracts issue tokens or what have you and the network utility

1:16:24

this is like the metcalfe thing how what a broad-based this network is who will accept this thing from you and we

1:16:29

might not just be talking about money we might need to be talking about bitcoins or dollars we could be talking about tins of sardines in a prison could be

1:16:36

talking about packets of cigarettes we could be talking about tasty fish you just got out of the sea um and so with the fish the redemption

1:16:42

is you eat it uh the network is who wants to buy that fish you just got out of the sea and the speculative to the i think i

1:16:48

think don’t think we need to um talk about that too much in the blockchain emilia we’ve all seen the markets in the last year

1:16:54

um but the idea that the thing might be worth more tomorrow than it is today that is you know apparently what we’re talking about here and we’ve

1:17:00

spoken a bit about speculation in the blockchain space one of the things i’m extremely interested in is if there are ways that

1:17:05

we can build anti-speculative anti-capitalist practices into these networks and i’ve seen some initial

1:17:12

examples in the non-fundable token space art projects which seem to be doing something along those lines that’s quite

1:17:18

interesting perhaps we have time at the end to discuss those those and so one of the nice things about using this network eye view

1:17:24

is we can and then uh think about temporality as well so in the past like we know what the

1:17:30

value of for example the price of bitcoin was yesterday that’s a fact you know that’s kind of recorded in the history books

1:17:36

in the moment um if i want to make a transaction right now with patricia and that’s an inter-subjective thing we

1:17:41

decide in the moment like like we’ve had to find the number that we agree on to make the transaction

1:17:46

and we can’t really know that until we engage in the future it’s anyone’s into anyone’s guess and so again we’re moving between these

1:17:53

objective and subjective uh domains and um i just want to very quickly mention some some work i was

1:17:58

doing we mentioned earlier this epistemic um uh framework that i built a few years ago well i was getting really fed up during

1:18:05

the last kind of market mania of um this was when the icos were the big thing there wasn’t d5 and nft so

1:18:10

much it was more icos which was like a kind of a way to do kind of permissionless uh capital fundraising for your token

1:18:17

projects and you raise the money up front so you don’t have to build a thing which is like great if you’re raising money

1:18:22

and so um i was getting upset with icos being lumped in with altcoins and bitcoin everyone’s saying

1:18:28

they’re just the same and therefore regulators should see them as the same i did not see that to be the case so i tried to build a toolkit

1:18:34

that um a policy people like regulators and also asset designers could use to like disentangle the differences or

1:18:40

similarities of these things and also to help them design them better and so we could stop making so many

1:18:46

mistakes and i built this kind of vector space visual framework which you’re seeing a mock-up of where we have these three um kind of

1:18:53

overarching characteristics one of which is moneyness how much of a money something is commoditiveness how much of a commodity

1:18:58

something is and securitize which is to do with how securitized an asset looks so something like an apple share

1:19:04

is a securitized asset something that has cash flows you’re expecting profit it’s a speculative vehicle so the

1:19:11

problem in 2017 is people were making up things making projects saying they’re not securities but they kind of were so they’re trying to do

1:19:17

this kind of regulatory arbitrage uh trying to get around like these illegal externalities that these blockchains

1:19:23

were kind of pushing on to uh nation states like suppose you could say i won’t go into this too much and like

1:19:29

so a lot of it is like um tables and things like that so i built a bunch of taxonomies uh to try and understand to try and

1:19:36

characterize these things and attach some scores to the various kind of parameters and outcomes and then those got squashed down with

1:19:42

weighted indexes um using this kind of mixture of subjective and objective um

1:19:48

parameters and views to come up with a kind of a 3d vector space where you could actually output something that you

1:19:53

could show somebody that’s not technical uh like a regulator or or somebody else and this is subjective right so this is

1:19:59

my opinion um and it’s not objective and people complained when i did it saying i want something objective and i was

1:20:05

like well you can’t have that actually if you do you’re lying to yourself that’s the sort of

1:20:10

you’re being a formalist and you’re not acknowledging the the reality or the epistemic gap between where your models

1:20:16

and and how things outside look um and so uh yeah that was um that’s the work that

1:20:21

i did a few years ago that’s that’s coming back now i made some predictions which um which came true and now some some people are looking back at this

1:20:26

work which is um uh always nice to know i spent a long time doing it and nobody read it at the time so that’s that’s

1:20:32

good and so um let’s talk very briefly about um these things as systems like so bitcoin

1:20:37

is a system and it has this hard boundary due to these validation requirements of cryptography

1:20:43

and also the kind of economic validation of um of the longest chain to understand who’s got what balance is

1:20:49

and so on so the graph we’re seeing here is the hash rate this is the amount of thermodynamic energy resource going in to defend the

1:20:55

network and this is one of the only graphs to do

1:21:00

with bitcoin that is increasing faster than the price so that’s very interesting it’s pretty much you know just goes up now what oh

1:21:07

oh yes that’s that’s fine so i’m going to come back to that in a moment i just want to say something this is kind of one of my hot takes about bitcoin that i

1:21:14

would say that the bitcoin and proof of work more generally is essentially an inhuman monetary system this is something that

1:21:20

um does not play well with humans uh the lack of sensitivity of bitcoin to its

1:21:25

environs and its its inability to reason about the energy type of energy it takes in uh means that this thing is um

1:21:33

essentially putting capital an ecology against each other and you know where we are in the in the planet in this you know in the

1:21:39

anthropocene and uh with the the global temperatures rising and co2 rising

1:21:44

um the the danger is that you know bitcoin may not be the thing that uh changes the climate balance by itself

1:21:51

but it could well be a tipping point and i think this is something that needs to be acknowledged um especially within

1:21:57

the bitcoin space and so um in bitcoin we often talk about um so just to say between 2030 and 2020

1:22:05

i was banging the drum for bitcoin i was saying that the cost was worth paying because the benefit of having an uncensorable unseasonable natively

1:22:11

digital form of value transfer was worth it and my family comes from iraq and uh as i’m saying caused a lot of

1:22:17

political and economic problems for them and so when i saw bitcoin in 2013 it immediately spoke to me this this afford

1:22:23

is this possibility this libertarian liberatory and emancipatory uh potential um however the incentives are such

1:22:30

within uh bitcoin especially for the people that hold it um that um i i and the transaction fees

1:22:36

are quite high on many of the major networks now i don’t see so much of this emancipatory potential anymore

1:22:42

i don’t think little ali in the mountains of afghanistan can use bitcoin and that was my hope for it i was hoping that this

1:22:47

could tilt the balance away from oppressive dictatorships and and um domineering corporations and so

1:22:53

i won’t go too much into this but every time the price goes up then the network needs more energy to

1:22:58

defend it because of the way the economics are architected and so we always hear this

1:23:03

about like oh solar solar energy will say bitcoin it’s mostly green energy and what i will say is i know the people

1:23:09

that write all these reports all the bitcoin society they’re all based on self-reporting self-reporting is susceptible to

1:23:15

people um uh discussing their own interests rather than discussing in in the interests of truth and so like

1:23:21

we cannot really know what the energy mix of bitcoin is but what we can have is some clues and so we’re back

1:23:27

to the hashrate graph and we’re going to look at some fluctuations here so these are quite large fluctuations this is like 20 or 30

1:23:33

in a matter of weeks or a week or two weeks now what’s happening here is that bitcoin is in some ways a

1:23:39

nomadic system or at least it has these kind of nomadic externalities so in the

1:23:45

the two seasons of bitcoin mining uh in the winter so as you know greater the mining is

1:23:50

done in china so in the winter a great deal of the china mining in china is done in chiang chang

1:23:56

the oiga region in the west um very controversial region obviously with coal in the winter it’s

1:24:02

very dirty and in the summer the the the mining is done in the south in sichuan with almost free

1:24:08

hydropower from dams and what and the like and so what’s happening these fluctuations are actually the mines

1:24:13

unplugging from the south or the west and moving and so what you actually see are these

1:24:20

great migrations and the picture on the left i just found recently blows my mind it looks like a peasant farmer

1:24:26

you know going through the mountains with a bunch of specialized computing hardware on his back

1:24:31

and so you see that’s why you see these pictures all the time of um crazy floods in these network in these

1:24:37

um in these mining farms because they go to the flood seasons for the free hydro and they just take on too much water so

1:24:42

these are very real uh examples of externalities uh from bitcoin these aren’t even really the first order ones this isn’t like you

1:24:49

know the um boiling the oceans this is more just the kind of crazy fluctuations

1:24:54

because of the um heterogeneity of the energy market and so there’s there’s a lot of things

1:24:59

like that here’s another interesting example of another second order externality this is a welsh fellow uh he says he mined with satoshi in 2009

1:25:06

and 10. he lost his hard drive went to the dump in a poor town in wales and he’s basically trying to buy the

1:25:13

dump so that he can excavate it and find his bitcoins and so like as the value of bitcoin goes

1:25:18

up then this guy like he says he’s going to give the local council 50 million pounds to do it

1:25:23

and so like this is like you know there are people in bitcoin that have a lot of resources and they start to have these kind of

1:25:29

outside influences on the outside world and i call this necro primitivism this is kind of the premise of proof of

1:25:36

work and the belief in the faith in cryptography and in thermodynamics at trump’s all else

1:25:42

uh to the point where um nobody wants to imagine inside bitcoin an alternative to proof of work

1:25:48

uh they would rather see the heat death of the universe in in uh in essence and so i don’t want to go

1:25:53

into this too much so these hot takes were covered in my uh computer club talk the indifference engine six months ago

1:25:59

and um yes in the interest of time i will skip over and so um markets are also systems in a

1:26:05

way and they have externalities of their own and so we’ve all seen the markets go up and go down and that’s something that um

1:26:12

usually affects the um less savvy people than it does the the insiders so

1:26:18

this is another kind of an isotropy another kind of uh source of unfairness and i just want to

1:26:24

say i know that we’re running low on time i just want to say something about the energy costs

1:26:29

related to things like tokenization and fts because it was a very big topic over the last few months of handbringing

1:26:34

on one side about um energy use from the mostly from the left

1:26:40

a lot of people saying you know screw that let the market decide on the right and um what i will say is about a

1:26:46

marginal cost so blockchains are very expensive to keep the lights on especially proof of work ones and so the amount of energy going into

1:26:52

ethereum just to keep the lights on not tokenizing anything it’s quite high and so the marginal cost of putting a token out on ethereum

1:26:59

versus not doing it is actually quite small and then one other thing just to say to relate back to proof of stake

1:27:05

is that proof of work is very high on opex on variable costs operating expenditure uh power and so on whereas uh proof of

1:27:12

stake requires specialized different kind of specialized equipment to generate the randomity which doesn’t come from the

1:27:18

um the mining and so there are like you could argue that proof of stake is shifting the cost back

1:27:24

to capex and capex is also centralized because you need to be able to build these machines um as you as indeed you do with the the

1:27:31

a6 on on bitcoin so there’s kind of there’s complexities and there’s um gotchas uh kind of all the way down

1:27:38

and i’ll just say very briefly before we wrap that um one of the most interesting things to look at in terms of um

1:27:44

uh where this thing might be going or what the change in the armor of something like bitcoin might be as technological paradigms uh change and

1:27:51

so um over the years there were developments of increasingly specialized computing hardware but these things are not um homogenous

1:27:58

so somebody will get this thing first and they’ll have a massive advantage using it that might actually wreck a network it’s happened on other networks

1:28:04

before um and so there’s this anisotropy there everything in bitcoin is probabilistic

1:28:10

and so the cryptography that underpins the security is based on basically like the laws of

1:28:16

large numbers and small probabilities and it’s like an arms race so we have to build new better crypto cryptography to counteract um uh

1:28:24

more computing to code break and then there’s also this idea of the 51 attacking the longest

1:28:30

chain consensus so if somebody puts more energy into the network they can rewrite the history so if i find um you know if i invent

1:28:37

cold fusion tomorrow then bitcoin’s done because i have free energy and nobody else does and so there are all of these kind of um

1:28:43

you know gotchas that are going on and i will just break by taking it to

1:28:48

the limit which is the um you know bitcoin requires a simple majority of all the energy it

1:28:54

can see to know that to be secure it doesn’t know that it’s secure and so essentially because of that

1:29:00

bitcoin is in a competition with natural life for the harvest of energy on this side of the this side of the sun and so this is my

1:29:06

kind of um clarion calling my my challenge to bitcoin is who only ever talk about the energy consumption in the

1:29:12

present and that’s kind of like a non-event we’ve seen that graph that graph is just going up so it doesn’t make sense to talk about

1:29:18

the present we need to talk about the endgame of bitcoin and there is no end game because it will never be stated and so i

1:29:23

will pretty much wrap there and i hope we haven’t run over time

1:29:33

hey thank you yeah that was amazing um all of you and

1:29:39

morale and rosemary and patricia um so i think we’ll have some time now for some discussion and some questions

1:29:46

um so for those of you who are with us please um please post your questions in the q a

1:29:51

window and um you also have the choice of asking your question with a live voice we can bring in your mic

1:29:56

if you’d like to have a bit of a follow-up as well so you can either choose to type or um speak but i’m just wondering if

1:30:02

anybody has any immediate questions from between the speakers to start rosemary

1:30:08

uh uh watson was just uh thanks it was such a fascinating presentation and um

1:30:14

i just wanted to comment it’s actually something jesse shared with me by it’s a tweet thread by

1:30:21

vini renee gupta who was one of the co-founders of ethereum and he has this

1:30:27

proposal to um have energy reparations for all the energy that ethereum was already

1:30:34

um um yeah destroyed or taken out so i i’m not sure if you’re aware of

1:30:39

that idea but he has some kind of interesting ideas about where to how to move ethereum forward i

1:30:45

don’t know what to do about bitcoin it’s very hard because the negro

1:30:50

creative is almost impossible to imagine a change and if there’s a change remember it’s block chains they just fork and there will be like

1:30:56

the necro primitives chain and they’ll be the whatever you know green chain so and when i gave the talk six months ago at ccc

1:31:02

with a bunch of bitcoins watching they were saying we can just pay one percent to green the energy and i was like well that’s fine but who

1:31:09

who who says they did it and how can you prove it and you know we have also problems with kind of carbon markets and offsetting

1:31:15

uh in itself and i suppose this reparations climate justice idea vinnie is kind of like the the extension of

1:31:22

that um so i like the idea um but i don’t know how we would it would be it’s hard to instantiate

1:31:27

reality yeah i mean i think he’s being ambitious and he’s he’s sort of saying

1:31:34

uh this is great but it’s not why i joined the project right and trying to get it beyond i mean

1:31:40

he made a really good comment about the whole unicorn um rainbows things is sort of

1:31:45

like masking a vacuum in in what ethereum stands for at the present which i thought was a

1:31:51

a very good observation yeah but it’s also a problem of the scale social scale so ethereum is now

1:31:56

like this large social network as well as a technological one and the vitality did an interview just the other day

1:32:02

the canadian co-founder of ethereum and he was talking about how the biggest challenge with rolling out the the massive

1:32:07

upgrade ethereum to upgrade to to to eth was that it’s a human coordination

1:32:13

challenge it wasn’t so much to take

1:32:20

sorry there’s a good question here jesse should we um should we take it about the anti-speculative anti-capitalist

1:32:26

mechanisms um so the example i wanted to mention was um so we did a salon on non-fungible

1:32:31

tokens recently and some of our colleagues uh sam heart and billy renikan have a nft project called kutsu named after the

1:32:38

fast-growing japanese vine and this is a project which um you get the nft through your social graph

1:32:44

you don’t like you kind of ask for it but then it arrives in your account and you kind of then it’s infected your it’s like a

1:32:50

virus nft virus infects your account you can’t send it there’s no transfer function um so you can’t set it

1:32:56

you can’t get rid of it so then the question is like what can you do with this thing so it sounds like this is now harder to

1:33:01

speculate with and i think this is opening up an interesting design space but what you could do is you could sell the keys you could sell your account

1:33:08

right because you’ve still got it’s a bit like you’ve got a house and you can’t sell your house but then you they put the house inside a company then

1:33:15

you can sell the company or something like that and so the idea of not being able to

1:33:20

transact or not being able to speculate it’s quite interesting but i don’t think it’s um very well

1:33:26

characterized space at all morale you have your hand up as well

1:33:33

sorry i got to figure out how to un do all the stuff um yeah i think just you know to um add to that discussion um

1:33:40

the kind of anti-capitalist anti-speculative projects that are out there um like one that comes to mind uh that i think is is

1:33:47

really effective um is bail block right um and it’s essential of using blockchains to um

1:33:55

generate uh to mine cryptocurrency on any really computer to help raise bail funds for for people

1:34:02

i think in the bronx um and there are a lot of projects like that that you know don’t necessarily get

1:34:07

the same i mean just by virtue i think of being anti-speculative and anti-capitalist and really rooted in kind of a more of a maybe

1:34:13

anarchist um positioning um and mutual aid just don’t trend the same way that

1:34:19

oh look i had someone give me five bitcoin seven years ago and now i’m i’m gonna go buy a lambo or something um

1:34:26

so i think there’s also kind of this this um the discourses are really interesting to think about in terms of kind of

1:34:32

what projects are out there and how they get taken up um and just kind of to refer back to kind of um you know ethan

1:34:38

and ethereum in particular which has become really widely institutional um that space also

1:34:44

kind of um leaves a little room i think for these types of anti-speculative initiatives

1:34:49

like the one that was seen just mentioned as well because you’re not gonna that’s that’s not what’s gonna get into

1:34:55

a board realm so that’s gonna get into bloomberg nearly as um as much right as something

1:35:00

that’s going to to kind of reproduce the the kind of uh capitalist rules of engagement as we know them

1:35:07

there’s actually two problems i think though there’s the one problem of not being able to generate interest in the project and the second problem of

1:35:12

uh just be able to get your damn transactions on the chain because if you’re a less financial project you’ll have less money to spend on the fees

1:35:18

which is why first it was bitcoin now it’s ethereum financial stuff is just pushing out the non-financial stuff because

1:35:23

financial stuff can pay maybe can i can i raise a question perhaps that is like

1:35:29

because the thing that is really striking and hearing hearing you who i consider to be

1:35:35

fairly having a high degree of competence let’s say i don’t want to use the word expertise but competence

1:35:41

background knowledge is like the one part of the essay i couldn’t get to which morel had briefly mentioned was this uh picture of

1:35:48

uh what anna longo had written about about the global game and so basically she’s she’s addressing

1:35:54

uh the the way that information becomes uh you know based it’s based on a

1:35:59

bioevolutionary model first of all um but second of all it’s the way that it kind of handles information

1:36:05

as and the only sort of function of information is to leverage it for uh the advantage

1:36:12

which manifest as network centralization right and so the when i was trying to

1:36:18

make make analogies in my let’s say analog brain in my simple brain to what you guys were

1:36:24

saying was like uh first is like um in this global game issue there’s a

1:36:31

deliberate uh uh design of asymmetric access to information

1:36:36

right already like i’m not it’s not like i’ve never heard of blockchain or anything and i’ve read about it i’ve

1:36:42

read some of my brilliant colleagues works on it and a lot of what you’re discussing i i would have no idea

1:36:47

tangibly what to do go home tonight and like how would i become active i’m not saying i want to i’m just saying i would still

1:36:53

have the the level of informational entry or accessibility to it it seems highly stacked right um so

1:37:00

there’s that side of it and then the other side that i wanted to know is that again to kind of bring it to analogous

1:37:05

model of this global game which i just found it very helpful um as a kind of uh

1:37:11

structure to keep in my head was uh again the way that that game is designed towards monopoly

1:37:16

clustering which to me links to network effects right and that’s like a huge issue in tech is like you can develop the best thing on the

1:37:22

planet uh if you don’t have enough users then it’s worth nothing right and it seems to

1:37:28

me that um and so i was curious about and maybe this goes to rosemary like to keep that general

1:37:34

observation in mind but then a more pointed question to rosemary to maybe um explain if you think there’s a

1:37:41

difference between what you were talking about uh in terms of the

1:37:47

the okay how should i say it how the token if i understood correctly

1:37:53

the token holders are also involved in the protocol production or they’re they’re endorsing the protocols

1:38:00

do they have governance possibility or are they only allowed to invest in the sense that i could buy a ton of stock it

1:38:07

doesn’t mean that i have like option to decide on uh the company and then what would be the difference

1:38:12

between that type of system and just general network effects which are to me related to the imitative uh

1:38:19

adaptive systemic operation that i was getting at from uh from winter so it may be

1:38:26

and it’s just to kind of more clarify if you see a distinction between them yeah um yeah great question and um

1:38:33

i would go back to something what seems that about uh bitcoin being i don’t know what the

1:38:39

term was you used but um because you had quite a few but

1:38:44

i mean bitcoin itself that’s not not the governance is you

1:38:50

just vote with your your dollars just like any other business right um or or it has governance in terms of

1:38:57

forks and that’s also it’s this it’s meant to operate

1:39:02

on as this autonom tommenton or something so that’s that’s sort of not the point

1:39:09

and that but then ethereum brought in uh smart contracts so that enabled

1:39:14

people to think of yeah the governance but yeah there’s a question of like for good

1:39:21

or bad whether governance is is actually uh the point um

1:39:27

uh yeah and if if bitcoin operates it’s just like hard

1:39:32

hardcore capitalism for sure you know yeah it’s it’s just my observation was just

1:39:39

that it allows new entrants to come in and and and in in a direct way that i’ve that i

1:39:47

find interesting and um uh yeah just just that that feedback loop

1:39:55

of of you can put money into it and take money out

1:40:01

in this very direct way like i just think it’s very it’s very unusual right i think that’s the thing that

1:40:07

bitcoin is going for is its simplicity in all of these ways so proof of work helps it stay simple because a lot of the complexity is outside and that’s why all

1:40:14

these proof of stake systems that being built now are so much more complicated so bitcoin has the kind of

1:40:19

minimized governance surface you could say there’s almost no way to do kind of governance but apart from

1:40:24

signaling inside the network so that relies on people basically gathering outside that’s why we get things like

1:40:30

bitcoin foundations bitcoin associations latest ones michael sailor and elon musk saying they’re going to talk to the

1:40:35

miners to green bitcoin i’m like well great we just got two tech bros that putting themselves leaders of bitcoin

1:40:40

that’s uh decentralized and so um you know we have discussed off-chain governance but then on-chain which is the alter the

1:40:47

alternative which is not quite what ethereum’s doing but newer networks are doing this there’s also problems there because

1:40:53

again like who controls the coins who knows how the protocol works they have this huge advantage and i i

1:40:59

did some research on this a few years ago and i am i found in the masternode networks which are these kind of

1:41:04

multi-tiered hierarchical node networks and i started meeting the developers from them and they started saying to me oh my god

1:41:11

thank god somebody’s looking at this it’s a cartel it’s a dictatorship it’s a you know oligopoly

1:41:16

and nobody can see it and there’s all this voting and there’s dowels and everything’s like looks very you know egalitarian but under the

1:41:23

surface it’s just the same old i think you know right

1:41:31

no i’m just gonna say go ahead all right i’m just gonna um to bring it

1:41:37

back to patricia’s question i think about kind of um and maybe i misread it but or misheard it but you know the kind of level of

1:41:42

obscurantism um kind of wrapped around these types of protocols and like how do you make sense of it in a

1:41:48

tangible way um i think with stephen and rosemary’s points just kind of demonstrated that i think to some extent

1:41:54

of um the fact that uh and to go back to kind of that first decision information asymmetry point

1:41:59

that i think you make in your paper um often it’s you know though bitcoin is extremely elegant and quite

1:42:05

simplistic in some ways to to rosemary’s point um it’s also really complicated and being complicated isn’t

1:42:12

a good thing necessarily and quite challenging like so yeah you could put money in and take it out but um if anyone’s ever done that

1:42:19

um practically speaking depending on how you did that right so if you use kind of a third-party custodial exchange so like

1:42:25

like maybe manages your money okay um or your crypto okay then um that

1:42:32

could be a little bit dicey um or if you do kind of a cold wallet uh that could itself has its own like you have to essentially kind of

1:42:38

uh take the liability of managing your own funds and if you don’t have technical

1:42:43

expertise um if you uh

1:42:48

put wear for instance um or if you like me thought you were being really smart by

1:42:54

like air gapping everything and you know writing your little um mnemonic phrases on post-its that you

1:42:59

locked up in your cabinet and your four-year-old gets the keys and eats it um then you know you’ve just lost all

1:43:07

your friends and so and then yeah just to say very quickly on that point so it’s interrupted i believe that at this point

1:43:13

far more money has been lost in these crypto systems by people losing access to their coins by trying to keep them safe than they

1:43:19

were stolen or whatever yeah precisely right and and you know those information asymmetries in some ways are quite

1:43:24

they’re funny when they don’t happen to you right like this example which was real that i just described um but in other

1:43:30

cases it can be quite damaging and um dispossessing and really bizarre and and um big ways like so for instance your

1:43:36

example would seem of um the fella who uh was trying to buy essentially get into

1:43:41

the landfill to get his his bitcoin um or people who are essentially kind of trying to you know uh continue some form of

1:43:48

financial abuse because oh i’m keeping the keys in my head right um so i think yeah there’s kind of this

1:43:54

interesting contradiction that it really um continues to operate and where that bitcoin in particular seems really

1:43:59

simple it seems like a nice solution and i think that’s why it’s so seductive to a lot of people but at the same time we just start kind

1:44:05

of playing with it um you see kind of all of the risks and and liabilities that come out and all of the yeah the the way that

1:44:11

information is leveraged to um create kind of these coderies or cabals or um cartels to use wisdom’s

1:44:17

term um that just kind of intensify capitalism as we know yeah also there’s

1:44:22

an awesome massive incentive from the people that are you know uh within the network associated with it

1:44:27

to present the thing as being very easy to use and very simple to use now i’ve been using bitcoin since 2013. i’m still terrified every time i make a

1:44:33

transaction and it hasn’t got any better like i do know what i’m doing but like i’m still terrified

1:44:39

uh so the the the difficulty curve is real yeah thanks for that um rosemary and i

1:44:46

were talking to another artist and um crypto developer um sarah friend who’s based in berlin

1:44:52

she’s working on a crypto ubi project but she said yeah one of the biggest barriers to mass adoption is going to be can people remember a key phrase

1:44:59

and how are we going to sort out this very analog problem um for everybody to get on with it and

1:45:05

tao our program producers brought forward examples of people like engraving key phrases and metal and

1:45:10

storing them in safety deposit boxes of banks which doesn’t seem like that horrible of an idea at this point we’re trusting the bank

1:45:16

again i thought the point was we were going to be our own banks it’s not like we have to take our password to the bank

1:45:23

totally um but we have one more question coming in from daniel shindong and he asked any of

1:45:29

the panelists how do you see the research patricia presented which only briefly touches directly on blockchains is relating to

1:45:35

crypto how does it shed light on crypto i’m thinking mostly about crypto’s role in retooling but feel free to take it in any

1:45:41

direction you’d like

1:45:48

i believe that’s addressed to the three of you we should mention that daniel is one of

1:45:53

uh wesim’s co-conspirators at the salon so shout out to him but um i think he

1:46:00

was talking to the people who know about crypto and not to me spoke around it

1:46:07

i mean i’m happy to start um saying some things and i’m sure my wonderful panelists will jump in and

1:46:13

say more eloquent things um give some time to this process um i actually think you know

1:46:19

again like i actually find patricia’s research extremely compelling as someone who has spent a long time in

1:46:25

this space researching and working and using crypto um because it’s not deliberately focused on

1:46:33

the crypto component or even the blockchain component and i think um it’s it’s there’s a lot of um when

1:46:38

you think about kind of what it can do i think it really uh surfaces it cuts past a lot of i think

1:46:44

the kind of more dominant discourses that we hear about so the things that are all about you know total your money and this is

1:46:51

just a speculative engine um or even kind of the a lot of the hype around nfts is a good example where

1:46:56

people are just seeing it as kind of an option for them to you know lower the barrier to entry

1:47:02

for some kind of finance and get theirs um but i think you know patricia’s work really prompts uh people who are working

1:47:08

in this space and and should read it um to think about okay but like what actually does it like what are the

1:47:15

imaginaries that we can kind of enact here um what is possible and i think a lot of people are doing that work some of the

1:47:20

projects that i think folks mentioned including um you know that are there maybe anti-capitalists um and not lose sight of that because

1:47:26

ultimately you know we can we don’t have to be stuck in this path dependency in terms of kind of what

1:47:32

crypto is and i think that some of what i’m hearing from wessie in particular where you know being in the space since 2013 or thereabouts um yeah you can

1:47:39

get in and you get really excited and and that’s one of the things that compelled me as well is like okay like this is something that

1:47:45

might provide an out might provide some alternative maybe you know there’s some hope here um you

1:47:51

know someone who kind of i think i graduated my undergrad today that lehman brothers crash right so for people like me and and probably many

1:47:58

others um are kind of um in place and in flesh positions um really kind of when you see some

1:48:05

opportunity for for change um it’s it’s really compelling and so i think patrice’s work is really important

1:48:10

because it reminds us not to get depressed when we see um the way that that crypto has kind of evolved

1:48:17

and it is in some ways very depressing right to be in those circles with tech bros who um you know just want to

1:48:23

eat steak all day um and are perhaps not the most generative um and that there are alternatives and i

1:48:29

think that’s one of the realities if you work in this space in any capacity is you know it’s a it’s a like any other it’s an industry full

1:48:36

of contradictions and those same dudes who are jerks um and eat steak are also in other ways really generative

1:48:42

sometimes and it’s really confounding and i think patricia’s work really forces us to think about that

1:48:47

um and those other spaces those intimate spaces those nomadic moments i think to rip off of west seems notion

1:48:53

um that that you know as subjectivities and positions we’re not stable um and that if we think

1:48:59

about that maybe maybe we don’t have to be you know carnivorous in cells all the

1:49:06

time hopefully now but i think that

1:49:11

yeah that definitely goes back to some you know back to the tweet that um that rosemary mentioned by vinay gupta

1:49:18

but i think what he was criticizing was like how it’s like wassim was saying that there’s still something beneath ethereum that needs

1:49:24

work like there’s a really great performance and vinay kind of called it um an ideological vacuum which was quite

1:49:31

a private prescription for ethereum so it’s kind of been you know this idea of governance in the

1:49:37

collective is a nice idea but in the protocol yet it’s still not there and it’s just kind of replaced by this optimism on the end

1:49:43

cats and unicorns and so patricia’s work is obviously something more than yeah and cats and

1:49:48

unicorns and i think like working with artists like patricia and thinkers like and yourself morale help us construct a

1:49:55

bit of an idea of what that what we can fill that void with or start building out that void with

1:50:00

and that’s the hope of this project too is to try and help develop civil society around this tech because it’s sorely missing

1:50:06

um and hopefully we’re inspiring other institutions like yeah we’re looking at it as an institutional technology but

1:50:13

not to institutionalize it if you know what i mean so it’s more so like how do you develop like markets are not just de facto

1:50:21

things they don’t just exist because of nature right and i think that’s what patricia’s paper is showing us so

1:50:26

it’s kind of like the markets are outcomes from all of our institutions behaving the way they do so we’re looking for other outcomes

1:50:33

which means retooling institutions which means retooling everybody who works in them and thinking through those it’s different

1:50:39

yeah and for me like um you know having been sort of sitting here watching the space growing you know at a clip and seeing uh

1:50:46

different kinds of people uh coming in and even though the diversity of the people in space has changed a lot i do

1:50:52

still feel like you know we are missing a lot of imagination imagination and brave braver

1:50:57

um uh possibilities and you know we have these amazing substrates for experimentation i believe blockchain’s a

1:51:03

fantastic toy model systems that we can try anything out new economic paradigms new

1:51:09

sociopolitical ones new governance paradigms and so but what we need is the imagination from from the

1:51:14

broader sphere to get away from this markets all the way down uh technical solutionism

1:51:25

yeah that um that’s the thing about blockchains is

1:51:32

kind of this uh the utopianism

1:51:39

um max is is was always kind of so simplistic

1:51:45

but i do think there’s something there that’s that like in this idea of coordinating people

1:51:52

and people can be self-coordinating that that yeah i think there’s something there but

1:51:59

i also am aware of all the ways in which it’s become it gets complicated so quickly and um

1:52:09

which is just normal like that’s just normal it’s like the new utopian thing and when yeah there’s a curves down into

1:52:17

sort of a reality of like human complexity in the complexity of like

1:52:22

human relationships but um i think that patricia’s text if you take

1:52:28

the time in it you it’s really like answering inside a world of this kind of

1:52:35

luminous like dolls of of like revealing um structures of of

1:52:42

that we’re thinking inside um and it can be very helpful in in seeing the contours of that which

1:52:48

is which is like what the best sort of like eat you know philosophical text that’s

1:52:54

what they do so um yeah

1:53:00

great are there any other questions coming from the attendees

1:53:09

any other questions coming from the panelists just because we’re coming up at about two hours now

1:53:18

patricia did you have something yeah um not really a question i just think like i mean i think so many of the things

1:53:24

that were discussed like um they just they have so many points of resonance right like when you

1:53:31

when you’re talking about the kind of inability of the um blockchain networks to kind of reason their externalities i mean to me

1:53:37

that’s just that’s what capitalism is also not the best at reasoning externality so it’s in effect just kind of mirroring

1:53:44

it’s an adaptive uh expression or adaptive artifact of that of that fact as well um but i think uh no i think i don’t i

1:53:53

don’t have any questions i feel like i have a lot to learn on a lot of these um a lot of these

1:53:59

topics i think the last the only thing that i just wanted to kind of pick up a little bit on what rosemary said was the thing that

1:54:05

after i was reading the simondo more closely last summer when i was writing it it

1:54:10

struck me as well that the um i felt it was starting to come to the conclusion that of course like in a

1:54:17

lot of the humanities the utter dismissal of sort of novel novel technology calling it like oh you

1:54:23

know with the solution is claim that you have getting motors off um uh quick which is very helpful to describe a certain culture around

1:54:29

technology right that kind of that’s like more much more i think the californian ideologies are known as the californian ideology but it

1:54:35

struck me as well that is that not a similar impulse when you are if you’re expecting technology to be

1:54:41

the easy quick fix on the other hand if you are immediately dismissive of technology that just

1:54:47

emerges because it doesn’t fulfill all its revolutionary claims or however you want to call it all it’s like

1:54:54

productive disturbance claims then isn’t it also falling into that same uh trap of

1:54:59

immediacy because it seems to me the temporality of that of that chastising via solutionism

1:55:06

again completely legitimate but there’s a temporality there that is similar to the utter dismissal and so

1:55:12

i’m curious about like how we’re going to come to adjudicate this process of of you know legitimate critique like

1:55:19

you know this kind of energy thing is a real problem you know and that needs to be addressed but versus also allowing things like

1:55:26

recognizing the nascent state of something and that it’s also in an early stage of um

1:55:32

development and how can it be you know how how can we come to adjudicate that which may be harmful that which is just

1:55:38

stupid gadgetry that’s what may have you know more uh possibility that we can’t get imagine

1:55:45

you know what i mean like there’s a really delicate threshold there but it struck me that that that that demand that uh that you know the quip

1:55:52

against solutionism as equally with equip that oh this thing just is like fall you know it’s not fulfilling its

1:55:58

province it’s blocked in that same temporality of immediacy and we have to let go of that

1:56:03

we have to ask to have to ask who decides yeah the political question as well

1:56:08

yeah that’s that’s a really good um uh comment and jesse and i did uh

1:56:15

um the launch of the publication with the svetlana matianco who is from sfu

1:56:22

and when we met with her in advance she does work on um

1:56:29

civil society and networks that’s her area of study and she was saying to us well that these

1:56:35

you know before this um it’s sort of the flip side of what you’re saying patricia is that before there was the

1:56:43

utopianism around blockchain there was the utopianism around the internet these

1:56:49

claims get keep get keep being made over and over again like you can you can follow that path

1:56:55

and it’s for some reason they it’s that it’s also like the flip side of what you’re saying they sort of like die this quick death

1:57:01

um then something else comes along and then it gets repeated again so

1:57:06

yeah i could very quickly posit a possible explanation for that which is that we seem to continually try to use

1:57:13

technology to solve human and social problems every time a new technology comes along we’re like oh social problems let’s fix

1:57:18

them with this and then we obviously see get to the other end of that and then we need to find some more technology to try that again with if

1:57:24

we’re solutionists

1:57:30

yeah i think that you just nailed it uh it’s the desire to solve big problems really quickly

1:57:35

um and then feeling that down by it um but it’s it’s definitely i think that notion of um being really critical

1:57:42

um and maybe kind of being dismissive of new technologies um is something that’s real

1:57:49

it’s kind of reproducing itself across a number of sectors and it’s really challenging if you’ve

1:57:54

seen those failures firsthand especially with blockchains to not fall into that i think critical trap all

1:58:01

the time and to say okay how do we thoughtfully experiment um what is like and you know especially

1:58:07

in the context of institutions i think that’s something that a lot of um a lot of governments are really struggling with

1:58:16

but if you go down this institutional route then you have i think you have more of a chance because you’re trying to

1:58:22

in many ways conduct the experiments without um letting them denigrate into investments

1:58:27

which seems to be the problem that these things turn into investments straight away and then they just rip themselves apart because of the incentives yeah

1:58:34

conversely though you have to the liability and risk that like getting a project off the ground

1:58:39

um in an institutional government uh kind of maybe a a liberal government for

1:58:45

so to say in the western context is a lot more challenging because then you end up potentially harm

1:58:51

to your end users who are your constituents and all if you abandon the project or if you run

1:58:57

out of like to point i like the way you frame capital and operational fund in the way that um you

1:59:02

presented that but it’s this big question of like okay you got the funding for three years now what um and if you have an unmaintained repo

1:59:10

and then someone else uses it um but you know it’s associated with a particular institution

1:59:15

that causes its own horror right um yeah it’s a really good question patricia and i think

1:59:20

there’s probably an entire research project someone should do just very quickly we did a salon on

1:59:26

algorithmic realism last year and one of the topics that came up was you know a developer writes some code they put it

1:59:31

on a repo somebody else puts that inside a program and then like goes off and does some harm like where does the liability sit

1:59:38

like developers are terrified that they’ll be held on the hook for something they didn’t even implement so

1:59:44

that’s very problematic there’s such a great article by susan shipley on this problem in a legal context where

1:59:50

uh from from radical philosophy it’s online you can if you’re curious on that legal liability thing i can highly recommend

1:59:56

that essay from susan tripley it’s in the context of like uh

2:00:02

the context is something like ai drone strikes so when there’s nobody operates like

2:00:09

the experiment of like a facial recognition drone strikes so the machine decides on itself

2:00:14

it will for sure produce some uh what’s happening now patricia this week there are unmanned turkish

2:00:20

drones uh hunting half stars troops in yemen the question is like the if it like when

2:00:26

it makes a mistake like when it dro when it’s gonna drone strike a wedding and not a uh so-called terrorist cell like who’s

2:00:33

accountable and when you get into the production chains of these of these uh very multi-authored systems

2:00:40

right um it’s like where does the liability lie because it’s kind of a way that it escapes the conventions of the

2:00:47

way we describe liability in the current legal system uh at least the current like western legal system so it’s a very very

2:00:53

compelling case but um can recommend sure

2:00:59

blockchains are also potentially provenance or liability obfuscation or like

2:01:04

you know degranularization vehicles as well so um i suppose you have to be um attuned to

2:01:10

watching out for people using them in that way

2:01:18

i think tell just put the the articles in the in the chat there thanks

2:01:24

great i’m glad you found it that’ll be hopefully uh yes thank you kyle very kind

2:01:32

great well um if there’s no more questions maybe we

2:01:38

can sign off here so thank you patricia for working together for the past two years really which is

2:01:43

what this text started before the pandemic but this is what this is publishing and writing and thinking time and this is what we’re

2:01:49

here to support so thanks for joining us on that and bringing together this group of folks to kind of work through the paper with us

2:01:55

because it’s a paper that i recommend people send spend some time with like morale said and it’s something that i go back to and helps reorient as

2:02:02

i’m thinking through this because of course this project is something that continues for 221a we still have two more years of funding morale and

2:02:08

institutional context to see what we can do and hopefully build some um some some civil society and bring some partners

2:02:14

along with this which will keep working with us um but on that note i will give a plug

2:02:20

too to some upcoming events um for our series um so we’ve finished uh our work with patricia today

2:02:26

um but morale is gonna join us again on friday june 18th so two weeks from today

2:02:32

and we’ll do a group discussion around housing and platform cooperatives more specifically on

2:02:37

morale’s paper and will be joined as well by dolma who was a research partner of two q as on this and they continue

2:02:43

working with us as a fellow as well we’ll have andy yan who’s the um director of simon fraser

2:02:49

university city program and andy’s doing some incredible research right now on the secondary and

2:02:54

informal rental market in vancouver which he’s estimating to be over 50 of the rental market um and

2:03:00

that’s early research but we want to understand where that’s coming from as we think about what’s possible with housing as well as we’ll have ian spangler who’s

2:03:06

a phd candidate at the university of kentucky and he’s a um he’s a he’s a geographer as well

2:03:12

until he’s been studying um platform real estate since airbnb to now and so he’s got some some advice for us

2:03:18

to share and then finally um on june 25 we’ll release an edited recording of a round table that we just

2:03:25

um held yesterday actually but we’re looking at the development space of social tokens and daos

2:03:31

and that was with new models um albiverse who’s a writer and works as the head of community for super rare

2:03:36

um ce dao which is an amazing quadratic voting open source um kind of blockchain project folia uh

2:03:43

great uh digital nft gallery space um black swan uh which is

2:03:48

a which is a dow operating out of trust um we had neil belufa artist in paris um

2:03:53

as his production company bad manners working on some tokenized projects circles ubi and rosemary heather so um

2:04:00

if you sign up to our newsletter you’ll get a notice of that um of that final event which will be our final act of this

2:04:07

launch series um so you can find out more at our website 221a.ca

2:04:12

so thank you everyone and um i hope you enjoy the rest of your days and uh your evenings thanks everybody

2:04:19

thanks jesse thank you thanks for all the support and collaboration over this long two years yeah

2:04:27

my pleasure have a great weekend everyone bye

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