Bitcoin and Philosophy (Session 4)

Hello everyone. Welcome to the fourth session of Nick Lant Bitcoin and Philosophy seminar. Nick, do you want to take over? Sure, sure. Hi everybody. So week four is a kind of transition isn't it? Because we're crossing from what is in theory a block to another block next week and I think that loose definition of what divides those blocks is the is the first four are really about working through the Satoshi Nakamoto paper so we can assume that's there

in the second four which will be more topic oriented so I'm I'm going to pretend with as much conviction as I can that we've dutifully worked our way through the whole 2008 paper by the end of today. And to help me along with that, I think section 10 of that paper, which is really, can be treated I think as the final substantial section of the paper. It ties up very well with a topic that I think has converged on the classroom this week. I've got three contributions from

Ryan, Laura and Jake and all of them are circling very much I think the same issue which I think at least to start off with is a good thing to hold on to and there's a lot of mileage in it so I would be surprised if it was to peter out or to get supplanted. And that's really questions to do with identity. The name of Section 10 of the paper or the label for it is Privacy which is obviously an incredibly laden term and goes off in itself in all kinds of directions but it's only I think one aspect of this topic and sort of trying to muster a sense of the kind

of threads that converge upon it is it's impressive to me how many different issues all connect up with it. So I thought I'd start off, I'll try and keep this intro relatively short and as always please don't be inhibited about jumping in at any point. But I thought I'd start off with just a bit of philosophical framing to try to legitimate the basic idea of this being a Bitcoin and philosophy course and then pulling at some of these threads that are feeding into this notion of identity in the way that we're across it here. So again, totally standard in terms of what I'm up to here, I will start

off with Kant on this. And the guiding element that he introduces to this, if you're coming to it out of the theoretical side of his philosophy, which I think everyone treats naturally as starting point and as a question of theory and the understanding that the key element is the notion of the empirical ego and the empirical ego ties together a lot of the things we're going to be talking about and I think the way to introduce it first of all just again starting from the theoretical side of cancer work is

that just as when you have, you're dealing with an object, and of course in, you know, the most sort of, the types of modern thinking, very recent contemporary thinking that have got people very excited, this sort of object-oriented approach, very strongly takes the theoretical objective side of the transcendental project and concentrates on the distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal object. And I'm sure that sort of the ways that's developed and the various directions that's taken people are kind of familiar to people.

I think the key thing to hold on to from it is that the phenomenal object is structured transcendentally. Or as we would say, if we're translating all this language into a more electronic media context, it's formatted. So there's a system, there's a transcendental element for Kant, that's the transcendental subject in these electronic media, it's dependent upon the particular protocol and system we're dealing with, but there's a system that is the continuous constant element, whatever particular ingredients one's dealing with, that stamps a format onto all the elements

that are in play in that system. Those elements then being the factual, empirical elements that you're concerned with. But all of them have a structure. They're all within a particular theatre, with a particular structure, and they can play out all kinds of different dramas within that theatre. The structure of the theatre is what you see if you take this transcendental retreat or step back, or what is actually the continuous structure of this performance. we're seeing, whatever the drama and light and distractions of the actual happenings, what is the constant system of representation that we're seeing there. And so once you make that step, you have this distinction automatically between the phenomenal

side of the object, that part of it that is structured in this way, that is on stage for us, and that part of the object that, to use a modern, or when I say modern, I should say, recently recent mode of talking about this is withdrawn or withheld or in some ways beyond our phenomenal apprehension. So that's basically obviously the whole problematic of the first critique, the things that follow from that. But the important thing I think for us, if we're now going to be talking on this question of identity and its specifically subjective aspect and is that you can reflect this back you can first or reflect it back a little bit still at the level of the understanding and theory

into psychology where you get a distinction between an empirical and a transcendental subject and the empirical subject is simply the subject as it appears on the stage of one's transcendental perception of the world. So one stars in one's own play, or at least appears in one's own play. There might be people who are commendably able to keep themselves totally in proportion, but let's just say that typically one takes a prominent role in one's own drama of existence, among a whole bunch of other identities that have relevant parts or cameos or walk on parts or such like

and but obviously as soon as you look at it like this you know transcendentally that one's empirical ego is an appearance it's not the real self necessarily any more than the new man on the the withdrawn thing in itself is the real saying so the empirical ego is not the real self is the self as it appears psychologically it's a secret safe simply the psychological self but if you reflect back further and in fact totally reverse the whole angle of orientation into Kant's practical philosophy into into the question of action and agency

one has this same splitting the same rift or as we call it in Heideggerian vocabulary, the same ontological difference between the empirical and the transcendental and then Kant starts using the vocabulary very consistently of heteronomy and autonomy and that perfectly aligns with what we've just been talking about in pair to run a week is the empirical side but the person is the person has conditioned by anything we could want to name and as being empirical forces in the world and social forces a red t uh... influences a friends social environment you name it

and anything that is actually part of any factual scientific count of the person, and it belongs in this category of heteronomy. Whereas autonomy is the part of the self that is just like the withdrawn side of the object, is the withdrawn side of the subject, it's the part of the subject that is actually running the system of appearances but is not itself apparent. And it's not apparent even on a certain level of practical activity insofar as that practical activity is governed by understandable impulses and motives and incentives drawn from the empirical world.

Now I'm not going to go much further with this on the philosophical level because it's the most fascinating, deepest, endless abyss I think in modern philosophy. All the problems on the objective side are absolutely overwhelmed by the problems that come in on the subjective side and and within decades of of can't work already vastly radical transformations of this structure had been brought into play by people saying well what is assumed by the Kantian model of this of the subject that is not actually in any way guarantee by the principles of Transcendental philosophy itself ie

people were saying can't simply projecting back a lot of structures to do with the individual private volitional person that he has inherited from his sort of sense of empirical self and just projected them where they totally don't belong into this transcendental realm and so the true nature of the transcendental subject becomes this massively problematic engaging question and you know you can go in all directions from sort of Heideggerian, Dasein, to the machine unconscious all of these kind of formations are attempts to say what is really the puppet master

behind the puppetry of the empirical self or the self subjected to heteronymous impulses. But yes, before I'll just say one, I'll just read a little a line of Kant which I think is very helpful to this. He says in the Groundwork to the Metaphysics and Morals, a person is a subject whose actions can be imputed to him, subject to no other laws than those he gives to himself either alone or at least along with others so this is a sort of declaration of the principle of autonomy as something that is actually a defining characteristic of the transcendental subject which is also the moral or practical

subject but if in philosophy we kind of absolutely have to start exploring abysses if we're going to go into this area. In the era of electronic media, I think this very strange and interesting thing happens that provides a much, much more convenient and seductive avenue to these questions, which is rather than stepping back from our naive empirical subject to its conditions to try to get behind the apparent self to what lies behind the apparent self. Instead, we start to see the appearance of virtual selves, avatars of all kinds in games where people obviously

have a fictional character that is related to them as they are, at least by some kind of analogy to the deep or transcendental subject. And so rather than the initial move being this backward step, to step back out of the self, it's instead people step without being asked, they are propelled or stumble into this world of this proliferation of virtual identities, avatars, internet personalities, which when seen with some subsequent reflection, begin to sort of narrativise this relation

back behind the cell. I think that there's a bunch of topics I should really try and run through quickly on this because it's such an incredibly traffic-dense zone. The thing that's stimulated a lot of this on the classroom was talking about the question of online personalities as targets for consumer marketing. So Laura provided a set of links about theirs to do with the way that your profile becomes this extremely valuable marketing

asset to be targeted by companies that are in a position now at a certain point of obviously we're on the Moore's Law, Moore's Curve. And at a certain point, integrating all the information required to make that online personality a productive target for marketing activities is crossed. And you then get this huge wave of activity that I think is quite recent. It's really only sort of fully taken off in the last couple of years. So there's that whole side of it and these questions about privacy that arise very strongly in that. fact that as I say people have stumbled into these identities. When people set up their Facebook accounts and set up their various avatars for their social media activities,

they're not deliberately playing some experiment with identity. They're simply doing something that in the social milieu that we exist in now seems eminently sensible and straightforward and initially unproblematic. And only subsequently do people begin to think, hang on, what is this puppet that ties together so many of my characteristics and tells people so much about me and allows people to extract value in certain ways from the kind of consistencies of behavior and particularly from the point of view we've just been talking, commercial behavior that this avatar has been engaged in. So there's that whole commercial side and there's obviously also a massively important

police and security side to this question. You know, I absolutely adore this term that is used by various security services where they talk about a person of interest, which again is actually a virtual persona. It might be sort of referring to something beyond that, but it's really a bundle, it's nexus of various kinds of communicative and political activities that could all be bundled together into some coherent virtual personality who then can be subjected to some kind of systematic surveillance and put on all kinds of relevant databases and all of these kind of things. So it's a very closely related issue at a sufficiently abstract conceptual level, but

obviously a very different issue, concretely, about whether people are concerned about the profile that is taking place for them on the NSA database or whether they're concerned with the way that Google is bundling and commercializing their Internet presence or something. But the point that I really want to sort of repeat, because I think it's the crucial thing, that these virtual personalities are strictly analogous to empirical egos. That's to say they're formatted by a particular media system and act as the puppet of something that in that case we feel comfortable that we understand.

we think, oh, that's our avatar, that's our particular virtual personality for this particular system. But the relation is extremely similar in principle and actually has the potential to open up a question about what in real life identities are using the actual leveraging tools that Transcendental philosophy has provided us with. Finally, I think in this initial thing is just to then obviously tie into

Bitcoin, in particular with this section 10 of the Bitcoin paper, which contains The discussion is interesting, but I think I find it a little bit elusive, actually a little bit evasive I should say. That it's most clearly, what he's talking about is most clearly shown by a little diagram that is contained in the middle of this section, where he's contrasting the Bitcoin model with what he calls the traditional privacy model. And the distinction is extremely straightforward in the sense that there's a simple thing that happens that he thinks totally transforms the structure of this. And he does it as two flowcharts where on the traditional privacy model there's identities

that then goes to transactions which is then shared with some trusted third party who acts to credentialize your identity to ensure it or guarantee it and then passes through to the counterparty of the transaction who then is confident they know who you are and that someone in authority knows who you are so they can trust you. And that the break then happens with the public in that the whole series of exchanges is kept private in this sense. It's not a totally individuated personal privacy because it's been shared with particular people. But you have a relation, for instance, you engage in a conventional bank transaction, you want to pass money to some particular person, you know about it, the person receiving

the money knows about it, the bank knows about it, and of course, government and tax authorities know about it, but the public does not know about it. That's where the break happens. It's not on a public ledger. It's not a public transaction. So the break takes place where you have privacy on one side, the public on the other side. And that's the way everyone has been used to engaging in these kind of processes. The new model has transactions passing directly across the public domain on this public ledger. Everyone knows what transactions are taking place. There's no secrecy there at all.

wall that was previously built to maintain privacy is gone, just simply obliterated. And you have this public sphere in the form of the blockchain where everyone can see exactly what is happening. So in order for privacy to be maintained, that previous boundary has to be shifted. But it's shifted to a distinction between identity and transactions. So the distinction is now drawn actually in a way that we should be ready for from this question of transcendental philosophy. drawn within the subject between the transcendental and empirical aspects of the self. That's to

say the noumenal self, the in real life self, the identity that you have outside the system, unformatted, not at all subjected to these structures of representation, is now beyond the boundary of publicity and the avatar, the wallet, the account, the Bitcoin agent is completely exposed. And so it's between these two sides of identity that any possibility of privacy now has to

exist within. So this boundary now that takes place between you and your account, between you and your puppet within the Bitcoin system, has now become absolutely critical. It's a kind of gulf of absolute importance to understanding how this question of identity is going to proceed. And obviously it's for that reason hugely invested in all kinds of ways. Everyone's privacy concerns about Bitcoin, people being tracked down, things coming up around the Silk Road and these various sting operations and everything on that level is obviously totally about this difference because if anyone else can actually synthesize

those two sides of the self now then there's no privacy at all. Everything is completely exposed. Similarly, when all the questions about scams and frauds and all of the Mount and all the questions about scams and frauds and all of the about gox issue and all of this whole side about security and bitcoin is also totally tied up around this around this golf because you have people who are handling your online identity and they are what they people say talk about the on and off ramps into bitcoin And that's an extremely interesting language. Because it's easy to simply, the system itself is so neat

that you can just simply spend your time completely intellectually inside the Bitcoin system. But of course, it only works as a commercial system because it's synthesized with a larger socioeconomic system. And that synthesis has to involve off-ramps and on-ramps. you have to be able to convert stuff into bitcoins and out of bitcoins and that has up to this stage involved these exchanges and because those exchanges are precisely in this problematic boundary zone, you know, they're at the edge of the system where it mediating between this completely anonymous or we should be more cautious let's say pseudonymous

Bitcoin identity and your real social identity the person who has a bank account full of dollar bills and wants to convert them into Bitcoin it's this zone of particular enormous vulnerability in the system so all of the sort of very standard discussions about how safe is Bitcoin do people trust bitcoin as a whole are also focused on this particular goal and how it works and how secure it is and the kind of things that happen when it's being negotiated or mediated by various institutions or agents. Oh yeah, there's one more thing, I'd just like to say about this, which is another,

this is also fast, which is Ryan's incredibly fascinating link that he provided, which itself then explodes into 11 more links about decentralized applications. And this is this whole question about DAOs or DACs, digital autonomous entities of various kinds, which connects up with a a much more traditional and slow moving issue that's also been highly controversial about corporate personality. Because one of the things that happens when you draw this boundary between the transactional self within the system and the real self outside the system,

And I think real is an extremely useful word to not let slip by, to pass, because it is very amphibious in a sense. As we've seen, real in the strong Transcendental Self means something incredibly opaque and obscure that requires monstrous efforts of sort of philosophical exploration to get any kind of access in. But it also, in this sense, means something that is misleadingly trivial. Like everyone knows who they really are. It's only when you go onto these systems or play a certain game that there becomes some question about your identity. And I think that those two aspects of the real seem as if they're simply different things

that are kind of, by some historical accident, being designated by the same word. But I think they're not different things. I think that the way this is all working out is showing that they have a really deep conceptual relation to them. Because in both cases, the real is that thing that is outside the system of formatting that is in question in the particular case. And so once you draw the line here, as we've said before, the real self, the real person outside the system could be anything. Again it's a kind of echo, a weird echo of this transcendental problematic.

The virtual identity is formatted. It has to have certain personality, characteristics and personality. It has to be able to engage in contracts, it has to behave as a kind of at least quasi-rational game-playing person, it has to be able to sign, make agreements, stick to them, have some continuous commitment to those agreements across time, all kind of features that are again very conventional ones traditionally. But once you cross the line back out of that, you lose all sense of that. You no longer know. You're passing out of the formatting system.

You don't know at all what applies any longer to what this real identity is. The virtual identity, we know about by definition. We know about transcendentally. Transcendentally, in this case, being the rules of the system. But the real identity, no, it's outside. We don't know what it is. And part of that is to do with individuality and collectivity, which is obviously at stake in this notion of corporate identity. it's it goes beyond the question of individuality and collectivity because it is also on another access to do with what is natural and human and various kinds of

intelligent agents that might be completely synthetic we don't know about that, but the point is because this real identity can be anything all that matters is that when represented within the system, it can maintain a consistent identity. And so a corporation, the Coca-Cola company, can have a Bitcoin wallet and behave as a person just the same as some particular individual can behave. What previously was a contested, complex legal and political question about whether corporations are personal individuals, now is something that's absolutely just baked into the cake of the system. That anything that can run a Bitcoin account can run a Bitcoin account.

And it's no longer possible to even think of setting criteria for that that are not imminent or intrinsic to the actual system itself, to the formatting system of that account. And so I won't spin this out much longer, but just to say, obviously this question of digital autonomous organizations and digital autonomous companies slots perfectly into this. If you can have some kind of software system that is competent to run a Bitcoin account, then it is a person within the terms of that system. There's no superior tribunal with access to the real that can say, oh no, that thing doesn't

count because I can tell that that account is not the same as this other account which belongs to some particular conventionally human person. All you know is that you have an account with a number on it, it's behaving in a certain way, it's engaging in a set of transactions. And it pretty much ensures that those transactions are going to be okay in the sense it can't cheat you in any standard way. And so by moving this line, this break or split into itself, into the distinction between the two sides, the transnational and empirical side of identity, automatically any effective cryptocurrency system is going to open this zone that this area most associated with Ethereum

but it's part of a much wider possibility of these completely synthetic agencies is now introduced. So I think I should pause because I've been rabbiting on and see what people want to do with any of this kind of stuff. I'm not sure where exactly this leads into a question or a topic exactly, but you mostly focused on issues of a one-to-one correspondence between the sort of account holder who does all of these transactions and the real self, whatever the real self happens to be outside of it. But I mean, Nakamoto says,

and this is pretty straightforward, as an additional firewall, a new key pair, which we can pretty much sub for identity here in this context, should be used for each transaction to keep them from being white. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in fact, we're trying to, I mean, you know, for maximum security in the sense of anonymity or privacy, we're trying to split into, you know, a different avatar for every transaction. So it kind of works in the opposite direction from the loop that Kant is trying to impose where you're consolidating the empirical self's behavior you're into an ever more singular and autonomous agent that corresponds with the Numenon's autonomy, just to some extent how I respond, I guess. And then at the same time... Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, no, no, you go, you go, yeah, sorry. Oh, yeah, just the other component of that sort of issue of the real

that I was going to point out here was that the one time when you really have to break Nakamoto's suggestion here, it's with these exchanges, that exchange for things outside the Bitcoin system. Because if you want to exchange a bunch of Bitcoins for dollars or a bunch of dollars for Bitcoins, then since you've got this sort of Bitcoin sent by Bitcoin sent sort of multi-input transaction system is what mediates that, that links a lot of your Bitcoin assets together and at least that one time establishes you as an entity that is linked to all of those coins. And so it's kind of interesting to me that singularity of the pseudonym would be forced in transactions outside the system and at the same time that fragmenting that pseudo would be the means of ensuring the

security of the real self. Right. Yeah. I think the first part of that, I think it falls naturally into two parts. And the first part I think is possible to address much more confidently than the second. not that it ends up somewhere easy, but it ends up somewhere, or it goes through somewhere very familiar, in the sense that these issues about the individuality, fragmentation, unity of the self, are the traditional ways that this Kantian problem has been developed. And the person that I think is really helpful here, because he's so straightforward and clean in the way he thinks about this,

is Schopenhauer, who wrote the best short book on Kant, I think, that's ever been written. And his fundamental objection to Kant is to say, look, the very notion of individuality is part of the formatting. So when you tell me, to use your terms, that you've got a one-to-one correspondence between an empirical ego and a transcendental moral self standing outside of the theatre, but still an individual of some kind, a real individual. He says you've got no basis for that at all. You know, the very notion of individuality is part of the theatrical performance. And for him, he then goes into this undifferentiated cosmic will

that is the outside of the empirical self. now obviously this in a fascinating way this little drama is totally then rehearsed by what you've just said where you have all these different a Bitcoin accounts to try and maintain your security but there's this one integral real being on the outside of the system you know so that someone watching the public ledger and seeing all these myriad of little accounts doing their things is seeing a bunch of what look to be differentiated individual accounts but actually when you

take step back into the real you see that actually there's this integrative process there and there's one real being that just has this multiplicity of avatars and it's obviously the same thing that happens in all kinds of format so I mean I know some not as who seriously have like 12 Twitter accounts no and play all kinds of games about which of these are the same person and which aren't and all this kind of thing or if you're someone who's really into online games or something like that and you you're playing a whole bunch of different characters maybe in the same or different games you know there's a natural tendency as you cross from issue cross this line from the real

into the apparent side itself to undergo fragmentation and you know why is possible for the reverse took her it's more difficult and requires much more complicated procedures to to do that and so I mean on the second side of what you're saying I think it's it's a more difficult thing to say something quick about for sure. I might just kind of, I might just hold fire on that and see whether... I was thinking, really trying to

get a grip on the transcendental empirical distinction with regard to Bitcoin and the way you're making a distinction. And I'm thinking as you're speaking, Nick, are you... I get the impression that you're not trying to collapse the distinction in these completely synthetic agencies as you describe them. But you think, and correct me if I'm wrong, that there remains a distinction. The question is how the distinction works itself out with regard to digitality and in particular cryptocurrencies. And I understand you to be saying that the Bitcoin self, so to speak, the self that's in the public ledger, is the empirical ego.

but then the more complicated assessment is what then is the transcendental self and in this case I take you to be saying that it's outside of that it's when you step back and you're in the real but is that you and I then and everybody else? I think that this is, you know, I'd really like to hold that open as a problem because to me what's fascinating about this is that in the philosophical tradition, it is an absolute extraordinary problem, obviously. I mean, this thing about how can you even think at all about what a transcendental self would be has been something that the greatest geniuses in history

have just burst their blood vessels on, you know and and gone to these extraordinary just mad excesses of thought really trying to do that and yet as you say in this example it seems completely unproblematic you know you seem that you're just returning home that when you return to the real you're just coming back to common sense coming back to something that's already understood and if anything the difficult side up this the rift is on their empirical site now where you know these weird things have with you avatars and it's new and we don't quite know how it's working out and so there seems to be this kind of reversal difficulty happening there but I think that bringing in one more just to

kinda been a waste a broth even more by bringing what seems to be one more extremely pertinent example the way this works. His is the simulation argument. You know, I don't know whether everyone's familiar with this. It's really worth looking. I'll put up a link for the most well-known version of it. It comes from Hans Morfick in the 1980s, but the most famous version is the one done by Nick Bostrom, and it's obviously publicized or promoted as this basic question are we living in a computer simulation and actually I think is structurally absolutely indistinguishable from the issues we're dealing with

because it has exactly the same mood that it's the transcendental philosophical problematic but weirdly altered by the fact that rather than this retrojective movement trying to pull back out of the empirical self unknown dimension of the real self the self in itself, good to speak. Instead you do this forward move, first of all, totally dependent upon the cultural climate of electronic media and say and the whole argument starts, if certain limited conditions are to are maintained then it will definitely be the case that in the future

our species will produce historical simulations of arbitrary accuracy you know so it tracks towards these trends to do with computing power to do with the kind of interests that are already exhibited in in doing simulations of social and historical systems in the greatest possible detail games all of these kind of things and to say you know either either our species is is not or some massive roadblock happens in terms of simulation technologies or by some act of self-abnegation it is decided not to have these simulations take place and all of these

different I mean I don't know how you would wait the probabilities of these various things but it probably looks as if species extinction is the most probable of the three and that all of them can be given a relatively like probability. So in that case, he says, it will definitely be the case that there will be beings existing within computer simulations of extraordinary human scale complexity whose entire function is to participate in a simulation i.e. in an artificial reality and therefore believe in that artificial reality, behave as agents in that artificial reality, etc., etc., etc. And track those processes forward to the final stage of this argument is to say, if that

is true and you find yourself in a world, you find yourself as an empirical ego in some credible world you are overwhelmingly like to actually be inside computer simulation because of all those kinds of beings almost all of them are in computer simulations and only some vanishingly insignificant proportion actually are and we come back to this thing you know the real the real beings and so I introduced that not only to just widen the the scope of this but because I think it directly ties up with your question here which is that so it starts off saying look imagine us creating it enough

in the future our society creating these simulations and having these artificial beings and they get confused about who they are they think they're real inverted commas but actually they're just existing inside a computer simulation and then it obviously does this then recoil move to say well all the probabilistic logic of this argument we ourselves must be those beings and then in turn so we have been simulated by some real beings outside our system now originally those real beings outside the simulation are us they're our you know we're thinking about ourselves simulating stuff in the future but now at this stage in the argument when we see well are we in a simulation

well what are real what are the real beings now I mean are they like just like us but they just happen instead to be real up than computer simulations or is it that once again we drawn this golf now between everything we know is reality and that which is behind reality and and running that reality formatting that reality have we really got back to this deep transcendental question about what is a real self or real agent what are the actual what is the population the outside which we can we've lost access to except by various complicated forms of analogy

I mean sorry that might seem a bit weird as a response to what you said not at all no it's totally clear to me it just deepens sort of you know my thoughts and reflections on the issue as we need to do as much as we can, because as you said, it's incredibly complicated. Of course, Kant 101 is the notion that any experiencing being is already... Their experience is, of course, conditioned by the transcendental realm. And the transcendental amounts partially to the conditions of our possible experience. So I'm just saying that to keep that in my mind for myself

because it doesn't matter how far we go back. We could be sort of virtual world number 110 and keep taking a step back. But as long as it goes back to an experiencing being, we're not at the real. so for me there's no chance that we are that we are the noumena so to speak well when you say we I mean this is exactly where we're on the crux of the issue when you say we are I mean yes if you're saying that which we identify empirically as ourselves cannot be the condition in being absolutely 100% but of course already for Kant and then more strangely for all his successors that conditioning being is really

what we are. You know, like what, that it's only, the empirical ego is only our apparent self, it's only our stage presence and the real you is the conditioning being that is directing the performance. And obviously, Ken thinks we know quite a lot about that because he's being traditional about it. And the analogy is very strong between the sort of thing that is doing the performance and the sort of thing that is directing the performance. It's an individuated agent of a kind that we're sort of relatively confident we understand. in many of the paths that people take off this problem

what is the director becomes extremely arcane question. I don't want to shut down this side of it because it's obviously the side of it that I find most totally gripping, but I mean we can definitely move this in a more empirical

direction to talk about some of these very practical issues about identity and privacy and protection of identity and the way that this new format of identity is actually going to tie up with what has looked like a very different discussion about online privacy an online identity and and obviously and as I say it seems to me this to huge cultural formations in on the other side already which is which is tied up with the whole security surveillance side of it and is tied up with this

to and corporate marketing side of it and both of those have agenda massive amount of discussion and concern in various ways. The advertisers, and this is true of the security complex as well, on sort of a different scale of loops, but in the case of the advertisers in particular, the way in which gathering that data about you then is immediately indistinguishable or part of targeting stuff actually that's supposed to modify your behavior. And often, you know, succeeds in doing so, even for those of us who, you know, are kind of in principle resistant to buying what ads tell us to buy and so forth.

You know, I mean, with sufficiently good targeting in some areas, you're like, oh, shit. I mean, yeah, it's actually kind of a distinct, I'm rambling here, but it's kind of a distinct feeling when after being used to seeing a succession of ads that have, you know, no interest to you, suddenly Facebook hits it one day. You've got three that are just like, you know, that's kind of creepy, actually, that it managed to find those. And so to the extent that there's another side to the loop that's modifying your behavior, it seems as if that is fundamentally different from the model of the transcendental versus empirical ego that at least that Kant brings up, if not necessarily all of his successors. so I mean as soon as the security

and the advertising are part of this area where I guess where the issue of self is different from the sort of absolute abstract divide between a real self and an empirical self that the philosophy is concerned with and becomes like a cybernetic and material issue where what you're talking about is as you said a nexus or bundle of communications that is constituting selves on both sides, a virtual self and the quote-unquote psychological self, a gentle self, whatever, that's puppet mastering it, or allegedly mastering it. Yeah. No, I think there's a really deep political and philosophical side to this, and there's a side that I think is immediately fascinating to talk to, which

I've got to pick up on, because I think there's this thing about targeted advertising, is hugely and fascinatingly paradoxical. I mean, it's right that you say it's meant to modify your behavior, if only in the sense that it's meant to get you to buy something that you wouldn't otherwise buy. I mean, I think everyone would have to accept that's the minimum of why... that's the minimum motivation for any kind of advertising activity. If it's not going to change that behavior... Well, and also just participation. You know, I mean, sites that don't necessarily charge you anything to sign up, but it's still advertised because they got something out of it. To catch you somehow, yeah. Yeah, but if you look, like you say, for instance, these Amazon recommendations,

I mean, there's something extraordinarily interesting about the fact that it has got so inside your hair that it's hard not to see it as a service. You know, when Amazon knows you so well that the books it suggests that you might be interested in are all books that you go, wow, that looks really interesting. How did it know I would want that? I mean, you know, it's easy to be sort of glib in one's stance of critique about this thing. And I'm not saying that those critiques are not interesting at all. But I think it's easy to be distracted from the fact that they really are things that are seductive.

And in most cases, when done well, this kind of targeted advertising, precisely because it is targeted, seems to be non-abusive to the people on the receiving end of it. it seems it is very easy for that kind of advertising to really be seen as if it is doing something for you helping you to know even better than you do yourself what it is you really are interested in um... i would be very surprised overall i mean i think that this is a is going to be a big big problem for formations of left critique about this advertising thing

is that it is winning a kind of tacit popular ideological war by simply being so much more appealing to people. When you're bombarded by advertising of stuff you're not interested in, that is trying to make you interested by some hard sell tactic, it's very easy for someone to come along and say to you, you're being abused, this is annoying you, what's happening here, you're against it it's not a big problem but when advertising is targeted so well that you really are seeing these things and you're saying hey that product is looks great I'm so pleased that I've been told about it then there's not the

same latch for this kind of sense of political alienation or you know a So, except to the extent, except for maybe a libidinal economics perspective, where what's just happened is that you've succumbed to a more surgical, more powerful libidinal attack, or attack on your cognitive security, and so you become more dependent upon the system, and so you've come from a certain perspective, which, I mean, there has to be damages in order for that to be politically relevant, and so you have to kind of imagine that there's some attentional faculty, or deep attention faculty or interest in the things that interest you that's being depleted or flattened out by this kind of thing. Stiegler argues that. And I think there's got to be some truth to that.

I mean, just like interactions with a smartphone over a long period of time will kind of show you that something is being done to your attentional faculties. It's still not entirely sure what or whether it's irremediable, but I don't know, there's still some politics there, I think. Okay, so something's done to something, right? I mean, tests on monkeys show that they did this test. I don't know how many of you have read about it, right? They did this test a couple years ago. Actually, I was reading about it in 2012. 12, so it must be more than a couple of years ago, right?

So basically what they did was they changed, basically they forced the monkey to learn how to break through a window with a hammer to get to the banana, right? Instead of just grabbing the banana. And then they noticed immediately rewiring of neural systems and the shape of brain cells. Within a month or two of using the hammer, literally the memory of holding the hammer and smashing into the glass had started to transform the monkey's brain. God, Heidegger and Stiegler would love that. That's awesome.

Yeah. But it also would be a bit surprising if that wasn't. true I mean sorry sorry Nick were you saying well I was just gonna say what but wouldn't it be surprising if that wasn't true I mean I am assuming everyone thinks that the mind is run on the brain and I mean you know this get if the monkey has learned something isn't that necessarily gonna be that there will be a set of changes in the brain that with sufficient resolution we can detect? Well, yeah, but those are equivalent. I mean, changes that keep perpetuating more changes into the larger system. I mean, there's a big difference between changing the potentiation patterns of synapses to record that one memory. I've used like a muscle memory. I've used the

hammer before and a cascade of changes that's like, I used a tool to get to the thing that I want. Right. And, you know, it involved gestures and this heavy object and that was related to breaking a barrier. I mean, I assume that's what you're talking about, Mo, is that there was a cascade of changes. Yes, but not only that, but also what Nick was saying, which is like we're basically empirically learning things that we could intuitively guess that they were true, right? It's like, OK, so yes, our tools transform our brain. Now, if you get that monkey to not use that tool for a long period, I bet those changes will disappear, and then he'll move into another state, which is sort of like the old one plus the traces of the former new one and now the new

one, right? So it's like, I don't know, it's like every physical or virtual tool we use somehow transforms our sense of who we are and the way, or upsets the balance of our attentional resources, or like the way we use them. yeah for sure how do you determine in that in that particular example though what what the authentic reflexes up I mean everything is conditioned to some degree even the original authentic desires that are then being manipulated by advertising or whatever experiment that you're caught up in yeah totally that's not right back to some kind of no but I'm original almost saying the same

thing but from the other side, right? So it appears like me and Amy are disagreeing, but I completely am trying to say big deal, let's move on from this, right? Because there's no point of origin or you know what I mean, there's no way of authenticating something prior to these tools. Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. That Amazon puts into your… Yeah. Sorry, I missed the last thing you said there. Sorry, I missed that last thing that you said there, Amy. What was that final statement? I don't know. I think I'm lagging.

I don't remember what I said. My brain's... I don't think you're lagging. I can hear you perfectly. I'm sorry. Mo, you said that only when Monkey used armor, it changed her brain, right? Yes. But it's, I mean, it is nothing new in it. If we standing on the position of neurosciences, any hour action will change our brain.

Absolutely any action, any sort and anything. Because all our thoughts, all our actions is chemical reactions and... I'm sorry. Okay, it's chemical reactions and if it's chemical reactions, any reaction will change your brain. It will change the structure of the brain. Maybe it is not a very radical change, but it is change. DR. No, for sure. But I think this is, as much as it's significant,

it's not significant. How are you going to split significant and not significant change? Dr. Well, significant is in a sense significant because it shows that there's nothing concrete about the biology. Because this is not just like some, like the changes that we're talking about in that study wasn't just like some fluid chemical changes, but actual changes to brain cells and to neurons, right? Like changes that are lasting, changes that are in the way the cells are now, the shape of the cells, right?

But at the same time, I mean, so it's significant because we thought you think of biological entities as something fixed and like, you know, like based on heredity, right? But then empirical data tells you that no, actually like certain actions will transform the biology, maybe not enough like you said to leave a lasting impact on the next generation, for this particular biological unit, the changes are significant enough to show on our radar. So that is significant because to that extent, but if you come from a school of thought that

already you kind of speculate that everything is in flux and changing, it just kind of becomes like non-significant. You never know what is significant. I mean talking about, okay, it's some kind of jumped out of the team, but talking about physics, if we, there are fluctuations and you never know what fluctuations can change the system and what fluctuations will have no real

effect on the system. The thing is, the only thing that kind of becomes kind of interesting here in case of the humans as I mean I mean what I'm saying is nothing important I'm just wasting time right but I just like seriously what becomes significant is the fact that is the fact that when when you become aware of the changes that have happened in the way you you well no you still there or am I interrupting you or you just disappeared? Okay, I think he's frozen out. Yeah. Okay, well, I was just going to say that, and this is sort of, this absorbs the becoming aware of

to a certain extent, but more it's saying that the fact that you can't know it in advance doesn't mean there isn't a distinction between the significant and the non-significant. It's that it appears after the fact and where it's sort of like, you know, Deleuze's account of habitus, where it triggers a self-organizing change in the system that it is a change to. So, you know, you have the, like, where the cyclone can be understood as the self-organization that makes the, you know, butterflies flap up its wings, the initial small perturbation, have been significant. So the perturbation isn't significant at the time in itself, but it will have been to the extent that it triggers a self-organizing behavior. And so, I mean, we can view, like, awareness that, you know, my awareness that I have changed, whether it's an awareness that it's on account of this small chemical change or not, as a self-organizing change.

But it's not necessarily the only one either, whereas, like, before, you know, this small change of the addition of a memory of using a hammer can create a self-organizing change in the neocortex's position towards technics or to technical gestures. or, you know, contact with an antigen causes a self-organizing reaction in the immune system, you know, et cetera. So the small changes can get picked out later as significant by the way they affect the system's self-interaction. That's what I'd argue would be, you know, in this context at least, would be the threshold. Can you guys hear me now? Yeah. So, yeah, so I guess I was trying to say the same thing,

when it froze, so I came and connected myself literally to the network so I don't go through these kind of up and downs. But I think I was saying the same thing, right, Jake? Yeah, I think so. I was kind of distracted by the... Once you become aware of traces of these changes, it gets into a different mode. Because then you can kind of think about it. I don't know. But, yeah, Daniel also is saying something on the sidebar that maybe he wants to, like, articulate it himself or... I don't understand what he means by QCT, but... Question concerning technology.

Technology. The later high-degree text. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally, totally, man. I know that. We're off on a sidebar a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. So Nick, do you want to continue? Well, I mean, there was a thread that came to a certain kind of point of criticality with Jake's point about this whole new advertising environment that we're in. I mean, it's slightly off our main beat, but it's an issue that I think is extremely fascinating to do with this whole question about complicity.

And the point Jake was making as a kind of riposte, but this isn't something that I would want to have disagreed with initially, about there's still a kind of politics and there's still a position of critical negativity open in this. And the question I want to raise is, well, what happens to that position? Because I think something really systematic happens to it. You know, it's like, I'm not at all denying that it's there, but I think it undergoes this extraordinary mutation because of the fact that it loses its ground in immediate, sort of immediate sense of abuse and it's therefore driven up into a sort of meta level.

It's like this whole technology, if you were sort of looking at it from, in a way, the very perverse position of sort of quasi-academic political critique, is actually an engine of abstraction because it no longer is actually being fed by this ground level outrage, you as we're saying, people are getting this targeting advertising. It's changing their brains, as we've said. I mean, it's kind of totally invading them at this very intimate level to such an extent that it seems like them. So Amazon, which I'm using that example only because I know it best, it really seems almost that it's like some kind of doppelganger that is so deeply inside your head that it's thinking certain things for you

more authentically than you ever were able to think them yourself and more knowledgeably you're the sort of person who likes this book even though you've never heard about it and you have to say you're right I wish I was the sort of person who already had known that that book had existed thank you my second Amazon self for doing me better than I was doing myself and when you've got people in that position it's obviously deeply complicated to muster a kind of momentum of political critique in traditional ways I mean you can't say you know I know you hate this and we're going to help you get rid of it

because people are absolutely so entangled almost amorously with this thing that's being done to them that the notion that they're being subjected to something abhorrent has to then be carefully produced by extremely elaborate sort of meta discourse sorry I don't know what happened no there's I'm just going to like mute it's just a question of muting I think I'm just going to mute Jake go ahead yes no I'm I think I'm sort of done with that is just to say I think there's a strange systemic relationship between

forms of highly intellectualized political critique and some of these developments that are happening in particularly social media where they're you can't decompose it they're working together as a system however reluctantly in that one undergoes a set of transformations irresistibly because of what is happening at the other at the other level if level is not a good way of talking about it I suspect. Can I add something to this? Yes for sure. Okay, yeah I totally agree with the fact that I mean some of the critiques of micro-targeting

and everything. You get a bit, as you said, abstract, I think. But I think there is another level to data profiling and mining and quantifying, which is precisely the trading of data. I think that is actually the disturbing. I mean, it's funny, it's Amazon, you know, it's recommend me books that I actually may be interested in reading. But the fact is that when Amazon sells my data to banks, financial institutions, whatever, to decide what is my credit, whatever, rate. And I don't know, I think... So are you... Sorry, go ahead, finish what you're saying. No, no, no, I was just saying, yeah, I think that is the very disturbing element.

That's critically important, definitely critically important. And it's obviously, you get back to this split between these two levels of the self. There's the IRL identity, and then there's this burgeoning, developing, rapidly evolving virtual persona that finds itself involved in these commercial processes that are opaque. I mean, there's commercial processes that are engaged in itself, but then, like you you say there are these commercial processes that it only learns about indirectly because someone tells them that did you know that there was a trade in all of this bundled personal well personal data taking place and yeah it's an absolutely fascinating fascinating issue

for sure. It still seems to me though that, and I'm not being critical in saying this, when I talk about this pressure towards a certain type of abstraction, I don't mean that to say dismissively at all. I find all drives towards abstraction extremely interesting. I'm simply saying that in order to even make the point that you've made, which I agree is extremely crucial, you are already still taken up to a certain higher level of abstraction because you're dealing with things that are happening to people's virtual persona. So you're already assuming that they are taking a kind of moral political interest in this

new level of empirical of the empirical self or formatted identity that's a completely new thing I mean no one had these things you know obviously on a philosophical level everyone's all had an empirical ego but no one had virtual posena only a few decades ago and you don't even have to go back that far before they were so crude and deliberate and experimental that there was no comparison so this is something extremely recent that's happened to people where you now have to say you now have these additional selves that have become critical elements of commercial and political reality and you have to start taking it seriously and and this is a challenge I think

rather than in a conventional environment where things are happening to people's real lives and you just say look what's happening to you or you hate being on that production line or these kinda things now you really have to say you have to switch levels in order to start addressing this process well I mean with regards to what Laura specifically said are you having this specific thing that she found disturbing which was you're trading into financial institutions that determine your credit and then sort of equivalent would be like you know insurers and your health care premium that sort of thing I mean it's not that much older but that problematic predates you know virtual like literally virtual selves being the issue so you've got you know like you've still got a

you got an actuarial self or whatever it is that's yeah you smoke or whatever and does that information get communicated to a healthcare you know like which parts of your financial life get communicated to a bank and so it's that interaction with institutions that we already understand this problematic with regard to that kind of concretely problematizes this relatively abstract problem yeah so itself Jake so like your your your credit score was already a virtual cell right early yet to some extent it's at least comparable because you payment on your electricity bill and then somehow it will update itself I'm actually all shed somebody people find out about it

I am and there's also there was always always there were like public records of people who sued you or like if you did stuff that would end up in public like ledgers right like say if somebody like if you were accused of something right and these databases were not available digitally to people because just they were just like there were no internet right but not a lot of them you can actually search and find out about. Yeah, and to some extent the least virtual of those, or the least analogous, would be that, you know, a background check. Like, you know, have you personally stolen from some other person, personally, you know, showed up at court and gotten this charge,

but like, you know, your interaction with healthcare systems or usage of credit cards, it doesn't even almost need to be observed by any particular human or linked up in any really fundamental way with you. You can just have, you know, like lived at this place briefly, rent billed and get paid, or you used a credit card, and no one ever really, you know, took note of you using this credit card in the wrong way, but it percolates into your financial data footprint. And that was true even before that was, you know, a networked entity necessarily. but but if we but if we go back to this to to the section 10 this Satoshi Nakamoto paper and this basic point he's making about the switch

at this at this golf between between private and the public from one that bundles F all participants and everybody involved in the transaction on one side and then breaks with public and then on the other you've got the break happening between your real and virtual persona. I mean, doesn't that impinge on what you're saying there? Like, all this prehistory, where it's to do with your credit scores, criminal records, actuarial factors, all of these kind of things, are all being synthesized on something very close to your, let me say, conventional real identity.

you know what I mean? They're cross media maybe some of them have involved computer systems or just on paper or bureaucracies, different media yes they've all got their own formatting systems but there's no coherent self being implied by that constellation of information other than you in the most conventional sense of that self identification whereas now we're crossing into this I think different difference out where the nexus of constellation the nexus of synthesis is entirely within this new media system and there is room you know like if we go back to Laura's question which I think is it

you know trying to bring these things together more let's just say you were really upset about I'm changing it slightly or specifying it just to say make it more concrete so you're really upset about the way that the information as accumulated on your Facebook I T is being treated by Facebook as a company and it's being with use released other people sold to other people and in some ways you have a problem with the way that that constellation nation is now being manipulated or commercialized and it would be possible to fall back on this same boundary that is drawn between your Bitcoin account and your IRL person to

say I need to make a much stronger and more secure gulf between that Facebook avatar and my real self you know that is the now the bulwark of resistance it's to say it's gone you know that the Facebook identity is lost I can't protected it's like completely all kinds of people fishing what they want from it and using it in any way they want and it's completely beyond protection so the line of protection has to be drawn but within the cell between its virtual apparition and its real existence and it's that you know the problem has been that that gulf wasn't being taken seriously enough it was too new people

didn't understand what they were doing, they naively over identified with their avatars. So your Facebook page, it never occurred to you that this was something that should be strategically performed because your avatar was going to be utterly vulnerable and any security you had had to happen between you and your avatar, not within the avatar itself. Nick, can I say something? Yes, of course. you know this is something that I've been kind of interested in for many years because I actually have an interest in fashion. My mother was a fashion designer and I noticed this shift right around the same time as this whole digital,

like what you just identified in terms of like people's, people's sort of naivety around the notion of like your virtual self and all that. So like already played out in the way fashion was used, say in the 20th century and culminating almost in the last decade of the 20th century. Fashion was something that was a place where you displayed yourself, your subjectivity, your differences, your uniqueness. Whereas as we moved into 21st century, more and more fashion is becoming a kind of a conscious mask in order to market yourself or make yourself or make yourself available to the world in the ways you want. And what you wear no longer is about you displaying who you are to the world, but to sort of cleverly

putting out a version of you for a particular setting. So if you're going to meet with lawyers, you're going to dress this way. And if you're going to go hang out with your friends who are going to smoke pot, you're gonna like dress that way because you want to appeal to these you know what I mean if you have a business meeting you know what I mean and these things are becoming more people become much more conscious of how they use this mask of fashion like not yeah it is happening in the inner in in in in people's relationship with their with their are with their avatars sure yeah I think that's a very good point yeah yeah I think that there's a whole thing about about that the self has an element of puppetry about it that would previously not be unfamiliar

to philosophers, but in ordinary existence would seem like a kind of weird, esoteric suggestion of little practical relevance that is being made utterly practical, in the sense that if you maintain an entire naivety about the actual way you deploy these avatars, like fashion as you say or all of these different sounds then you know you simply are not coping competently with the with the new environments that that we're operating it Nick got a quick question relating to what you said about it you know say coca-cola being flattened to the level of a virtual

identity or a Bitcoin self. I think that mainlining is very interesting but I guess my question is couldn't Coca-Cola then do that same proliferation of avatars and I don't know if Bitcoin is the only data that can distinguish these or how many Bitcoins you have distinguish these identities from one another, how do they, couldn't these companies take advantage of this and couldn't the underserved perhaps not be able to access it, couldn't there be a tipping point so to speak, not to invoke Gladwell, but whereby Bitcoin took off and

these companies jumped in and the homogenous, the same virtual flat identity that we could have couldn't keep up? Or is there some way that the decentralization could keep all of this exchange in check, if that's a legit question? Yes, for sure it is. I mean, it's obviously a difficult one. Sorry. I'm just getting sort of, to have domestic notes being passed around with my children, which beds my children asleep. That's fine.

Think on it. Yeah, yeah. No, I think this is crucial. And to me, it goes to this point. Actually, we were talking about it a bit last week. about this what's already involved in this peer-to-peer you know because I think it's it there's no way it's possible to confidently speculate about the way this kind of things turn out but I think we can definitely see that it has a pedigree with which we're very familiar which is that these very traditional questions about what is involved in the notion of formal equality or peer-to-peer relations is obviously taking this over the coin on Bitcoin and any worries you might have previously had about in the widest sense in this classical sense liberal socio-economic

arrangements is just driven up to this absolutely hysterical situation because its it's not only corporations I mean literally you can you can start slotting anything into this zone of the real South anything you like So if you treat it as a game that is at least partly competitive and even hostile, then you really don't know who you're playing this game against. I mean, all you have are these avatar characters that, as you say, might be fragments of some mega corporation, might be parts of some weird techno-intelligence system that you don't yet understand. I mean you simply cannot know because all you have is the promise of formal equality

between those with deliberately stripped of all substance. So I think there's a huge future for elaborate techno savvy massively paranoid left critiques of the new Bitcoin Internet. I think that will be absolutely huge and fascinating thing to happen. I mean, you know, and I think that in your question you'll sort of have some embryonic growth of that visible. I mean, sorry, I won't babble on about this, but just to say, you know, obviously the reference that is just screaming out to be said is the situation, you know, and the whole thing about

the spectacle and as as a kind of paranoia machine and that it's the thing behind the spectacle that you're not seeing and the spectacle is in control I mean now you know where in an environment where all fact type of systematic political paranoia can just be cranked up to left and difficulty so since it's all visible That's why Gideborg wrote the text that would just keep on giving. It's like that's why that text is never going to go away in a certain type of mindset. It's just that text just keeps giving the same thing. And it's crazy.

Yeah, for sure. Thanks. What about fake accounts, fake profiles? If someone will make a fake profile of me, for example, or maybe profile of some celebrity, is it some kind of a steal of identity, or part of identity, or what is it, Sam? Okay, I mean, now this is something that we really have to partition off from Bitcoin, because it simply cannot happen in Bitcoin. But in all these other zones we've been talking about, for sure,

and it seems to me there's two dimensions of this. One is to do with the relation that's crossing this rift, that someone is able to accumulate information about your real identity and construct an avatar of that in some media system. and have they sort of sucked out and stolen your vampirically stolen your identity and stuck it to cyberspace or there's this horizontal more contagious model where you already have put a whole bunch of material into a virtual identity and that's being cloned or copied or in some way sucked out of your virtual personality and reproduced in some monstrous

form or some double that is horrible to you and I can definitely see that that both of those are my certainly can happen a lot you know in more and more horrific way so I think yeah for sure our name is Legion because we are many yes absolutely I mean this whole as we know from the whole Bitcoin that the baseline of all digital systems is perfect facility at cloning you know it's why the double spending problem is this starting point and so all these problems to do with doubling replication and you know which have always been a staple of horror identity as far back as you want to go

are now operationalized in extremely smooth fashion. And I mean there's a lot of fascinating stuff about Bitcoin is that, you know, again I won't get too lost in this because it's something we'll come back to, it's totally fascinating, is that of course it sort of starts with a double spending problem and it totally addresses that in this focused fashion because it knows that it's in this medium where copying, cloning is completely or effectively free. and and with a certain self-satisfaction I mean I love it so I'm not trying to be cruel in this but with a certain self-satisfaction it's obvious we've solved the double spending problem but that everything in this media is

open to those vulnerabilities show you know people clone Bitcoin websites they clone Bitcoin institutions they clone Bitcoin exchanges they clone the whole Bitcoin system into these various different crypto currencies all the way down whatever level there is this massive process duplication that I do think came as a bit of a surprise in the sense that everyone thought well what if you made you know the whole issue was programmed by the previous financial history with all things what if you if you duplicate this currency unit no one was thinking what if you duplicate these are these entire institutions and so someone who's trying

to go to some part what they think is the trusted bitcoin infrastructure finds themselves on some scam website you know that the bitcoin institution or whatever it is that just fractionally changed and is at and is representing itself to you as being part of this this system designed to eliminate the dub spending problem and the duplicity and the doubling of the sign, and is itself actually a doubling that has been totally produced in order to scam you at this meta level. So, yeah, I think there's no end to the level of appropriate paranoia is beyond anything

that probably is humanly imaginable in this situation. Yeah, I mean, once you start, I was just thinking of, I think it's Mona Lisa Overdrive is the one where most explicitly, I mean, you have these psych profiles mentioned that allow someone to, you know, buy the ability to predict someone's actions better than that person could so that you can come before them and you can see how they're going to react to a certain way of approaching them in advance. and it seems like that's kind of an essential threshold where this doppling of yourself or your data self, yourself into your data self, becomes just essentially problematic is when the doppled data self can literally come before the quote-unquote real self,

you know, is a better predictor of, or, you know, has the power to determine the actions of the real self in advance. Yeah. To some extent. Definitely. Definitely. I mean, that's an aspect of this whole thing about all these worries that people have about what might happen to their virtual avatar, obviously are actually indistinguishable from some kind of cloning. I mean, if someone can traffic your information, it's because everything that has been synthesized as you within a certain virtual format can simply be copied and circulated as something

that can then be poked apart in some software laboratory somewhere by an automatic system. But then, obviously then these DAOs, which we haven't... I've got to make sure we schedule a nice big chunk and everyone gets prepared, because they are just... I think everyone ultimately that's the most interesting thing. And it really is with these things that the whole question of artificial intelligence has just crossed a line automatically and immediately from being wild scientific speculation to being just part of our social environment.

I mean, you know, as soon as you have the model of a DAO being seriously entertained and people working on it, you're basically already saying how are artificial intelligences going to fit into this particular social milieu. And I mean, of course, people can respond that saying, oh, come on, you know, no one is going to get these things to work, as they do in many other parts of the AI debate. But I honestly think it's unlikely that people are saying that. You know, when people read the Vitalik Buterin material, are they really saying to themselves, there's no way you could get one of these things to operate? I mean all it has to do to get started is just have a little not of commercially consistent

activity it just has to earn itself enough bitcoins to cover its own running expenses and obviously on Moore's law those run expenses are heading towards zero and you know it can find anything any service open on the net it can operate in in order to just get some tiny little trickle of what they call the Bitcoin micro fragments, Satoshis, you know, some tiny little trickle of Satoshis, and it's alive there. You know, maybe it's just a bug, but it's there. Buterin, who I adore because of the fact he's such a lunatic in this respect, is saying that we're going to make these things Turing complete, open-ended prospect for them to

improve their performance and then we're going to release them and see what happens. I mean it's just canned cyber apocalypse. You couldn't do more to just totally let everything come howling out of Pandora's box than that. And it's like just happening. I mean we're now that as the cost that is a yes our contemporary reality you did you just say contemporary our the contemporary reality well I thought you couldn't cut it back to the same word

no but that would be nice I have to go I'll pittle around with it on the word processor later. So I think we've got like one significant topic spasm of time left, if anyone has some inspiration and that was bad. Just a general comment, I started thinking about this the other day, Zizek has been in

Los Angeles, I actually asked him what he thought about Bitcoin and he said he couldn't answer me seriously because he doesn't know that much about it, which I thought was interesting. That's so good, I wish you recorded him. Finally, one thing he's not going to blab about. It was strange. He really couldn't. He said, you know, I can't answer you seriously about this, but I will tell you about how this, I forgot what country he was referring to and what governments just started printing money and how this was a big problem and stuff. But I think it is recorded, by the way. Mo, if you want to hear it sometime, I'll pass it to you. But what I wanted to say was that I was thinking about the double spending problem,

And during the past hour, there's been going back and forth between literally the double spending problem with regards to currency and then also the notion of identity. And there's kind of a doubling problem there. Well, this idea of having a fake identity, the one you present versus the one behind the scenes. And Zizek was talking about this idea that he thinks, you know, when we have these people who have these formal identities, that we shouldn't allow them to then show their human side in order to gain favor in the political sphere. That we should just force them into the role. Like the president should just always be the president. He should never show his human side.

But I digress. My point is just that it's fascinating to me that, and maybe I'm going too far here, that the double spending problem and what I'll just call this double identity problem are collapsing in our questioning about Bitcoin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think that collapse is not just us doing it. I think that collapse is massively happening. For sure. I mean what's really interesting if you follow this through just on the cryptographic thread there is an almost complete collapse of the distinction between what is a currency system and what is a system of identity I mean they just you lose the sense of crossing from one to the other almost automatically because you go back to the start of the

of the paper here and of course I'm sorry let me just I think I might I'm just gonna give myself one second to find it if not I'll just I'll just done use my let yeah I'm sorry I'm just gonna gloss it are phrase if I get it totally wrong people can embarrassed about it later that he says we define a calling as a chain signatures so that's really the cryptographic definition of identity and the Bitcoin definition of money are completely conflated.

There's nothing to what the money is that is not made up out of the resolution to a problem of identity and so that you pass you'll see in all the more interesting serious and less scammy altcoin models the first ones in the serious ones tend to be about identity problems to do with credentialization to do with various kind of problems that are they still actually have to operate as if they were a currency to make this system work but what they're really doing is just establishing identity establishing authenticity establishing like one whole model is called just proof of existence you know it simply works to show that something actually

existed actually at a certain time because as we know this sort of time structure is good at the core of what the blockchain does so I think what you're saying is totally right except I don't I don't think where you know confusing these things I think we're simply picking up on the fact that they are being historically massively run together Yeah. Nick, I also wanted to ask a dumb question, if you don't mind. I'd be thrilled. Actually, maybe it's a two-part dumb question or two dumb questions together.

So maybe dumb times dumb makes it smart, like negative times negative, but I doubt it. So the first question is, do you think we can look at movement from social media and online avatar identity into Bitcoin identity, which is much more solid and in which this divide between real and what's virtual is more apparent to the user and the way in which these are used. So basically we're moving from this type of social media identity into a Bitcoin identity,

so it's historical. Right. question. Even though they are going to coexist for a long time. The second one is the way Bitcoin generates value for you, we already know how Bitcoin works. But what if your data footprint in terms of the user of all these multiple social networks can somehow itself be economized in a way that can actually be integrated into Bitcoin or create a sort of like a peer-for-jewian secondary virtual economy, kind of like a cultural capital Bitcoin which

is about sort of like your cloud, the likes you get, how much traffic your posts will generate or like how many friends you have how much influence you have somehow you're going to end up with another another different like real money economy or one that is actually incorporated into a Bitcoin easily so yeah nothing that's both great actually can I take them in this order that you you raised that my Joe I think that because I think the first question And there's lots of ways we could approach it. I mean, my initial crude answer would be just to say yes, but I think that obviously requires more. And I think it's really interesting to fold your question

now back onto the issues that Laura's raising, and turn it into another question, or relate it to another question, which is to say, maybe even ask Laura, is it possible to actually have a defensive position in this virtual environment? let's say that our big worry is these kind of things that have been done to our virtual identities and again you know I'll just take Facebook as an example just say that you've built up some naive person has built up this massive Facebook nucleated virtual identity and then realize it's a shock horror after reading some article that this identity is being subject to a whole bunch of processes of whatever kind you can choose commercial

maybe is the most obvious but as I say I think these policing and security issues that we could bring in as well and you know wants to respond to that and what where Mo is coming from here or what's raised by most things is I'm reading it as saying we just have to give up on that as a possible line of defense like you know it's hopeless it's indefensible and and that that's and the Bitcoin is teaching us you know what the hell were you thinking to have tied up your real identity and this avatar in such a way that this disaster is now befalling you

but but to turn it into a question is to say is it that there is either alongside or even as a superior response a possibility of saying no we can actually take action on the plane of the virtual environment and do something about this you know without falling back across this rift a that is defending you know a suit on a mess online I didn't see far real identity I mean, don't feel like I'm rushing you. You don't have to answer to it at all, or you can simply kick it down the pitch if you want to take it.

No, definitely. It's like what you're suggesting is totally, like, reasonable to consider, to be considered. Yeah. I don't know. First of all, let me apologize. I think I'm starting to fade a bit. It's, like, quite late here. Right, sure. But I think, I don't know, Obviously, BBK is pointing towards a big issue. And also, I think, I just wanted to clarify before when I was saying that the fact that my data can be, I don't know, profiled in different ways and so that didn't mean like disturbing my, I mean, obviously, it's like a disturbing thing perhaps for me, but I meant to say that it's anyway like a radically different way of perhaps profiling entities.

I don't know, in reply to what Jake said before in terms of like what he was saying about the fact that this mode of profiling has existed. Yes, but now I think there are some other kinds of formatting agencies which are obviously like algorithms that create this kind of endless chain of repackaging of data and reprofiling data that are somehow considered anonymous still because supposedly they're not personal. Like, there's not my name on this. But somehow they still end up managing, you know, to bring it back to me or to that virtual identity that somehow represents me. But I think the other point is perhaps the fact that

before Bitcoin pointed to the fact that, you know, I mean to this, to the complex relation between the Perthian pyramid and transcendental identities, I guess, or anyway the formatted and then the, I think there was no other alternative, right? I mean, someone has built a network network the way it is for some kind of reason. I think, I mean, what Bitcoin is pointing towards or is like I guess addressing is a complete reformatting of, you know, of the way in which relations or lines are formed and of our way of thinking about it, I guess.

So, I don't know if this answers the question in any way. Yeah, it's definitely closely connected, for sure. And it's fascinating. I mean, obviously we could spend a whole block of this on Facebook easily. But there's something, I have to admit that I find something deeply malignant about Facebook. And until Bitcoin came along, it had almost ruined all my attachments to the Internet on a certain level. I mean, I just thought, oh my God, they wrecked the internet. You know, there was this amazing thing happening, and then Facebook happened, and oh my God, what is this? Because the whole principle of it is about just uploading your identity

in the most crass possible fashion onto the web. You know, and people were using the internet for all this amazing stuff, and then suddenly they're simply saying, hey, this is me, with as much naivety and narcissism as could conceivably be kind of triggered and mustered from that. And, you know, I mean, it's not really appropriate to react to this thing with just revulsion, but I have to just confess that that was the sort of just visceral response that I had to this happening. so you know I think Facebook does bring up this sort of problem in a really strong way because it really just it really just

sucked people into these virtual avatars in the most helpless pitiful unreflective vulnerable way that it could possibly be done you know and I think that that's traceable back to its history you know as the whole thing about starting off in university as some kind of weird kind of dating type project you know where it's just like if you were gonna say from looking back from the perspective of Bitcoin how could you encourage people in an internet on the internet to behave in the most stupid possible way it would look like Facebook you know it was they would be perfectly designed

to do that so yeah I do think it's a special case this at this problem now I agree as well I'm I get the LFA but I love you have to go I guess with I think the reason and feeling I don't make a rolling there and I can't be much about it but that's true that's very true yeah Nick, I also wanted to like, because you talk about how Facebook started as a dating site, right? I mean, I might be misrepresenting it a little bit. But like, people don't understand. This is like a total line of work that needs to get done by some scholars.

And maybe some of it is actually done, but I doubt it because I would have heard about which is sort of like the idea that like queer people, but particularly homosexual men, were on the forefront of avataring and forefront of particularly developing like a very specific type of avatar for a type of exchange, a sexual exchange, right, that was sort of like involved certain types of personal revealing for certain type of exchanges. And this goes back to prior to HTTP. This goes back to news groups. And we're talking like pre-Netscape time, right? And then the more contemporary incarnation of it is like the gay apps, right?

Which basically kind of like perfect that type of avataring, which is avataring with a particular use of sexual exchange. It's almost like Facebook, but minus all those mindless stupidities, because the user knows why this avatar is made, how the avatar's appearance is supposed to function, and what's going to bring that. Yeah. Yeah. It's very different. It's more like Bitcoin. Yeah, except that, I'm taking it from what you're saying, that the bridge between the two sides of the self is crucial to it functioning. So, you know, if it's designed for some sort

of sexual exchange, then the avatar, the whole point is that however strategically and with whatever kind of paranoia, the avatar has to be linked to the real self in order to kinda concluded my sexual exchanges that right whereas I mean it with Bitcoin like you don't ever want that line to be crossed and you we as we see you have to have these off ramps are not on ramps in order to move money in and out of Bitcoin but though you don't ever want to to set up a bridge between your I'm on-system formatted Bitcoin ID

and your real ID the whole thing has that I mean it's coming out of this totally this culture again I'm sorry to be using paranoia so much better it it its relevant a lot of different contexts and this is another kinda power this is coming out at this whole extreme cypherpunk an arco culture hackers where these questions of absolute identity security are just at the front of their minds all the time you know and say that's wasted totally the anti-facebook there's no way dread pirate Roberts is gonna put a picture of his cat on Bitcoin I mean it just doesn't it just doesn't figure in the horizon of possibilities he's not wanting anyone to find out

anything about him at all and whereas obviously that Facebook is the other extreme where it's all about simply letting it all hang out on the web and them example most giving is this complicated nuanced inter-zone isn't it in the sense that at because it's a problem because it's because there are sources of paranoia there involved it's not a let it all hang out situation but at the same time at the end of the day it's a it's about making a connection that such you can cross this identity split and if if your avatar was such that when it actually came to some kind of contact the response was what the hell you know I

thought I thought you're a cat then the whole thing's failed completely I'm assuming is that right yes but it doesn't but it doesn't necessarily back back on the avatar or in a real world. This is what's interesting about the type of exchange I was talking about because there's no way to reflect back the actual exchange that happens outside of the sex app back into the users in the app. Right. So if someone presents themselves as like something else and then in an actual encounter

it ends up being verified that it wasn't, there's no way for that information to go back into the system. Like there's no review system that somebody comes up and says, oh that guy is not as handsome as he pretends to be, don't date him or like, oh he's a crazy guy, he's a killer, you You know, don't hate him, he's a killer, he's a serial killer. There's no way to put that back. Whereas with Facebook, we all know how it works. It's constantly looping back, right? Right. I mean, actually, because I dropped your second question, Mo, and now you've got a route back to it again. Because, obviously, it doesn't answer your full question, which is which is something I hope we can continually return to about this

thing about economizing these various dimensions all online credit in the widest sense you know like reputational credit yeah everything that's involved in these various kind of stats or measures of of a prestige I guess in various ways but it definitely does seem to be the case in the example that you're just giving now that some system of credentials would have been functionally essential to that system. Like why did any of these avatars have any credibility at all if there's no system of

monitoring feedback a you know that that simply unchecked wild fantasies could be projected out into the system and as that there's no comeback on that at any stage I'm not and not understanding how that could work maybe at an hour and I still win time in here as yeah for sure I'm here I'm here I'm contemplating I'm trying to see if that was a question for me should I say something or... Yeah, I mean well anyone is is open to this I mean if Amy thinks Virginia is is pre-programmed to respond

to this question. Did you catch the whole thing that Mo was talking about here Virginia? You got the whole back story to this. Yeah, I did. I did. I've been just half sleeping and half listening because I've just had a 10-hour drive. But anyway, yes, so I suppose I was thinking about the pre-Netscape avatar constructions and whether or not those were economizable or whatever.

And Facebook and that Facebook is this kind of dumbed down kind of network, I suppose. and also how in the pre-netscape, so for example, for example, Lambda Moo or Moo's and Mudge, that there was a much more of a downloading of... I'm so glad you said that. I was just about to talk about that, but go ahead. Thank you. A downloading of... Oh, whatever. Oh, no, no, no, much more of a making of pornography.

Making and making, but also downloading things that seem to have value at that particular point in terms of its digital worth, right? Like a lot of people, like downloading music, downloading movies, downloading things was like a big part of those pre-Netscape avatars. yeah yeah yeah yeah I'm sorry I'm I'm half asleep I'm just gonna have a thing for a set sure that's good don't think about because I mean that's already I think really interesting is this thing that obviously there's a business title reversal has from a thing where you have some kind of avatar

initially very minimalistic that is just an access point for you to suck stuff off the web and at a certain point that behavior that system acquisitions becomes itself a former identity formation which I think has to involve you know a complex set of technical developments and just simply quantitative increases in capacity for storing and registering and compiling and integrating data but the the present situation is where when you now take things

off the web you're actually defining yourself on the web as the sort of person who takes this off the web down to this fine-grained things to what you looked at what magazine articles what you clicked on all of that all your consumption is now part of your identity formation which is why you get to this whole issue that Laura's been talking about it's because she increasingly that seamlessly integrated and people now know what you looked at what kind of keywords Google search words you're interested in all your modes of online consumption are now actually being synthesized as this virtual so which becomes massively rich because you know it's like it

quite quickly with some up sort of active online life the amount of these decisions and choices options that you've made is huge and gives a very fine-grained picture the kind of things you're interested in, the kind of things that you're definitely not interested in, the kind of things obviously you might want to buy, and all of these forms of orientation, whether it's consumer orientation, sexual orientation, political orientation, in fine-grained detail now, adhered, glued together on this virtual avatar. So, I mean, the distance that's been traveled from these moo and mud type things where it was really very much a theatrical thing, that you create a character who you think you'd like to create

and be represented by. This is automatic, and it's created by what you do, not by your idea of what you would like to be or how you would like people to see you. Yeah, I think Virginia is just kind of confirming some of the stuff you were saying on the sidebar. Anyways, it's 9.20 and we were supposed to basically be done 7.30 to 8.00.

Yeah, we're still 10 minutes from the class to officially end. And since we started actually 10 minutes late, we've got about 20 minutes of time left for the seminar. We went way over time last time so it will be perfectly fine if people feel like they want to finish here, we can. But if there's questions or people think they have something to add, I think officially we can have 20 more minutes before the class ends. I was curious, Nick, that one of the videos you recommended in the classroom was an interview

with an economist, I believe, maybe even the president of Harvard University at some point. It's not the Larry Summers one you're talking about. The Financial Museum. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was Larry Summers. I thought that was a very interesting video. Yeah, I was just curious if maybe we could talk about that for a second. I didn't have a specific question, but I thought he had a very moderate position, for lack of a better way of putting it, where it was kind of like for Bitcoin to take off, it's going to need to be regulated. It was sort of like it's going to have to combine with the current norm.

It's not going to be a revolution, so to speak, but it will have important consequences. Right. sort of my my you know I yeah anyways I'm so I'm interested in what your thoughts on that were yeah well from my sort of readings around the discussions taking place within what for want of a better expression but I hate this one so it really is something being used as a disposable disposable thing, the Bitcoin community, there is one overwhelmingly important argument taking place in it. You know, there's lots of interesting stuff happening around the edge or whatever, but

when you're inside it, there's only one fundamental argument which has different aspects to it. And it's between what I would describe as ultras and mainstreamers. And the ultras are very, very sharp, energized people who you will find concentrated in like the Nakamoto Institute site, which is excellent. And a lot of the sort of dedicated Bitcoin media represent them a lot. I'll provide some names. I mean, I've used them before. Daniel Goldstein, Pierre Rochard, Daniel Kravitz. There's a bunch of these guys. But if you go through the Nakamoto Institute, what's called meme pool, memory pool, all

that stuff is there, and it's a very, very rich source of that stuff. And those guys are the people, I think, that Larry Summers is kind of subtly, or not so subtly dismissing as when he talks about the hyper-libertarian atmosphere around Bitcoin, which is what is traditional. It's come out of a bunch of hackers, anarcho-capitalists, cypherpunks. I mean, all of these people are integrated on these kind of things, like deep suspicion of government, absolute attachment to a sense of unconditional anonymity, and Those are the kind of traits we're talking about.

And on the other side, and more recent, but obviously much better funded for one thing, are the mainstreamer guys. And by far, to my mind, the most interesting of these characters is Marc Andreessen. Again, I lose track of what I've sort of put on various kind of reading lists and stuff, But if I haven't, he did an absolutely superb interview about Bitcoin. I think it was for the Washington Post. I'll definitely link to it. Which was Bitcoin boosting hugely, but from a completely different orientation to the one that these ultras are like. It's Bitcoin boosting in a way that's extremely close to Larry Summers' position.

and he actually says eventually those libertarians are going to realize that the public ledger is the greatest gift to conventional forms of regulation and oversight that could ever be imagined for financial innovation. This thing is totally harmless. Anything that you've heard from those crazy anarchists about this is going to collapse the financial system is ridiculous and we have to create a world in which it's safe to invest large amounts of money in this coming revolution that's in the softest, most gentle friendly form of revolution that is going to come from rolling out this bitcoin

infrastructure. So these people, Mark Andreessen even more than Larry Summers, totally convinced that the blockchain is not going to go away. It's an innovation of primary importance, but it can be mainstreamed. And I think that you can see what Larry Summers was saying completely within that context, that he's saying the establishment, whether the financial establishment, the government can live with this, and they can live with it because all the dangerous, scary stories we've heard about it aren't really true. Are there the establishment is quite competent to manage it and we simply can't let this innovation not occur just because the people on the front end of it were who they were.

Now I mean I can't pretend I'm neutral between these two positions, it's simply the case the ultra's are a lot more exciting guys and they're much more conceptually adventurous than the mainstreamers. But both sides are interesting and the mainstream position also is strongly supported by retrospective look at the history of the internet because all kinds of stages of the internet have been attended by the same way of extreme again quasi anarchistic excitement followed by mainstreaming you know so you look at the guys who were first or putting all this stuff together in

the garage and they too thought this was going to bring down bring down the state that it was going to kind of super empower individuals all kinds and you know we end up with Facebook and so it's hard on the base of that record to dismiss this type of thinking that's for sure and the interesting thing like we were talking about it before you joined the class Nick or you maybe you were before we go live is that the media theory and academic people are mostly follow they mostly follow the mainstreaming and this is what's fascinating to me that like that the lack between

media theory and theorization of all of this and mainstreaming is is so like it's a fascinating and that's why I don't want to self congratulate us for being in this seminar but that's why I think it's kinda crucial that like we're doing the Bitcoin and philosophy right now almost just just a little bit prior to its mainstreaming so you know normally academia enters the picture or human in particular type of academia because Nakamoto is academic but I'm talking about humanities right the picture after you know the serious the serious side of it right because a lot of academic people were thinking and talking about hyperlink and internet but none of them were like half as interesting as CCRU or what you guys were doing,

which is completely underground and, you know, it didn't last long. But, yeah, so the mainstream academia is usually like a step, like there's a lot with them and the mainstreaming. Yeah. I mean, this ties up with this whole thing Ian was saying about Zizek, doesn't it, too? So, I mean, it's kind of interesting that he would so blithely confess to, if not a lack of, well, I mean implicitly to a massive lack of interest, actually, isn't it? So I'm not even really seeing what the narrative behind that is. Is it that he's saying implicitly, this isn't serious? Or is he saying something else? I mean, he's supposed to be a kind of theorist of capitalism.

Right, I know. I just wanted to clarify one thing, not to cut you off, so continue as soon as I finish. I just wanted to say that my impression was that he just didn't know very much about it. Not that he didn't know very much about it because he didn't think it's very serious, though one simply doesn't know. That may be the case, but he didn't say that he doesn't take it seriously. Yeah. So I just want to, yeah. But there's obviously a weird non-linearity there, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, if he simply doesn't know, I mean, it's not so obscure. Right. That's what I... So it at least suggests to me that there's a kind of orientation of awareness that has

to have some strategy behind it, such that it could pass under the radar. I didn't mean like Moses he I'm just using him as a as an example I mean because he's because normally he someone you would think would want to be on the edge of these kind of topics because its seems so close to sort of things that should concern him am but I mean a it's interesting to me that even this topic you know Bitcoin and philosophy you would think is pretty white bread kind of I mean, and yet it doesn't really seem, it really doesn't seem to be much to pull up

at this stage on this topic. I don't know why that is. Yeah, it's, you know, I wonder if it's kind of a, I hate to say this, but it's not being hip to the tech, to how fast technology is moving to some extent. I think it's just so important to be on top of it. But it's in the context of his talk that I asked this question. The context was about high-frequency trading and this idea that there are fiber-optic cables being built. There was apparently already one between Chicago and New York, but now overseas.

so that, for example, if somebody was to buy a stock, in the time it takes after they click the button for that data to be sent to the place which is going to then sell it, let's say it takes seven milliseconds for it to literally travel the cable and be processed over Wi-Fi or however, satellites, that fiber optic cable will allow people to beat that sale, get in the middle of it within a seven-second period to then. Seems like he's been reading the latest issue of Collapse and Nick and Alex's essay on Cunning Automata, right?

Well, this whole high-frequency trading thing is obviously fascinating to people. as one particular way that the these berries easily indexed axis of technological development impinges on on the economy in a really strong way look at any with you saw this story about there are now these laser receptors that have been put up within the around the block of these key financial institutions in New York so that at the speed of light you don't you don't have to be more than one block away from the source of information you know because if

that light beam had to travel a kilometer you would be out of the loop in terms of the response time that is now expected in these trades. I mean it's just hitting these absolute cosmic limits now where light, the speed of light is being perceived as a fundamental barrier to the speed of executing certain trades. What Zizek should have really like, I may have to move to my power, what he should have really thought about was the fact that a lot of these, this speed is accommodated for intelligent

machine trading and not human trading. Yeah, of course. These speeds are not for humans because they are not for the click of the humans actually, it is mostly for machines to be able to run those algorithms and make them by account, right? Yeah, he did take that into account. I mean, he basically said it's all automated. I mean, it's not like a human's making these decisions. Of course, we're talking about less than seven milliseconds. So, yeah. May I? Can I? Oh. I'm trying to ask the question, but you still continue talking. So are you all finished?

Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. Okay. Am I right when I characterize our site that it becomes more sugotic? it becomes more and more shapeless and it finds more and more ways to avoid from any form, any regulation that we want. So, I'm not sure I'm hanging on to what the subject is.

Am I right in the characteristic of our society that it avoids any control, any forms, any shapes, it becomes more shagotic, it becomes always can find a new way to avoid our control, to avoid our plans and our ideas how our society should be structured. Well, I don't know, it's interesting but also complicated that the two subjects are sent is our society

is net like you're saying is nature about our society that is this if days if complicated block and it's a escaping our controls I mean what are I'm not really seeing what the contestants they seem to me to be holding into each other in a slightly and intriguing fashion at this I mean all all we society or I mean what is this society that is not that is escaping us. I'm not quite getting at it. Yeah, I more and more think that this word is almost senseless. It doesn't

have any real meaning. I remember your article on the outside in, it's, I may be pronounced wrong, trihotomocrasi, right? Sorry, I'm sorry to get you to repeat what is obviously a hideous piece of I remember your article, Tree Hotomocracy. Right. And you described the system of how we should structure society.

So how is it correlates to what are you saying today? Um, you know, I think, well... Maybe it's... Yeah, I think that it's slightly complicated. because obviously there's a lot of context that I think is involved in this that is not going to be straightforward to people without some background to it it was part of a sort of tangled internal

debate and I think if I'm remembering the right article, it's a while since I've looked at this post, it was formulated as a kind of science fiction as a kind of science fiction projection, wasn't it? In order to shake up certain positions that were already sort of established. like yeah I think you know that it would that I would have to sort of re-read this thing and then reflect upon what we've talked about today and make the connection

because it's not a connection that is ready to hand for me at the moment I can't I'd have to sort of think about that maybe on the classroom maybe on the classroom page yeah for sure everybody here has access to the classroom page right if you don't just email me or ask me and I'll send you the code that you can are link in the code to have access to it yeah I'm sorry sort of without wanting to bully people try to put one sentence on in the week you know what I mean it can be short it can be here at the ground I can be terrible lot in spelling sticks or fine but just we even if just to say could we perhaps talk about this next week more you know

this seems to be something that we could push into a better you know I mean of course people are very welcome to say more than that but I think it would be just helpful just in terms of people for themselves getting some sense of attack that they want to be taking into into the topic and get inside cannot well I'm babbling I just say I'm got I got a kinda four-week topic organization going ahead this flexibility for that but I will use that as a kinda constraint on for myself on what I'm gonna treat it the next four weeks being about so if people want to do big structural

moving around exercises on that on that topic list then they should get started and levering away because it's like set in stone to a certain extent it's not that I know exactly what is going to be said but it's just that that grid is not relying on personally thank you Nick thanks for the heads up Okay. So are there more questions? Because we're past the, couple of minutes past the time. Are there more questions or people want to continue the discussion or should we end it here? Nothing in the scope of the next few minutes. I just wanted to say one, one, one last thing.

Just following up. We can go all the time as long as Nick doesn't mind, right? Last week we went like 40 minutes over time because the conversation was interesting. I'm still cool, yeah. Okay. I just wanted to go back for one second to that video because I felt when it got into the mainstreamers versus the ultra, and that was really interesting. I wanted to say one thing specifically that one thing I found peculiar about the video was his analogies. And maybe this just ties into why he's a mainstreamer, but in particular, there were two. One was with regards to the FFA and mainstream airline, like the network of airlines in America.

I believe he was just talking about America. And he said that, you know, without the FFA, we wouldn't have this transportation system and the proliferation of it in the way that we do. So that was one metaphor. The other one was he talked about some kind of common law, Law, Commonwealth, corporate. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. And then he says, and I might be mixing up analogies, but basically the idea was these companies that initially didn't want to be taxed, like internet companies, now desperately want to be taxed because it means that what they're doing is legal. So he's kind of saying, like, we need the FFA for Bitcoin. We need the thing that can be taxed.

like the centralized and it seems so antithetical to like you know the philosophical principles of Bitcoin yeah no there were two stages to that I mean it was it was really fascinating the whole thing I totally agree with you the first stage was where he said the biggest step forward for the common law corporation was the ability to be sued oh right right right right and then and then he what with the same kind of logic actually and that that's a very interesting I mean to be honest both are interesting but I think that that point to me is especially crucially interest because it is tied up with a very deep issue at the core of it which is to do with self

binding you know it seems like contradictory on one level that you could be empowered by self restriction you know it's this famous nature thing about an animal with the right to make promises mmm but actually keeps popping up over and over again this issue like obviously on one level Bitcoin you cannot cheat you know you therefore you you cannot double spend it's a actual constriction of your capacity is that allows it to then therefore that a Bitcoin a Bitcoin transaction has the value it does be precisely because it is pre constricted by this system and and the game theory one which I think this blogger Scott Alexander whose really smart

interesting guy makes very clearly where he says look in game theory is self constriction thing happens all the time I don't know with this is the example I'm yeah the example he gives us that is the Doctor Strangelove one about the machine that automates nuclear retaliation. So you cannot, if you are subject to nuclear strike, you cannot choose not to respond and therefore you're constricting and inhibiting your power. But in strict game theoretical terms, it's a very powerful move because people know if they subject you to a nuclear attack, they will be retaliated against and there is no possibility of that not happening. Or the one that I think is even more fun is this thing about the game

of chicken, you know, the two cars racing towards each other and you know the winning move in chicken is not only to be seen knocking back a bottle of vodka before you get in the car but then very conspicuously as you're approaching maximum speed to hurl the steering wheel out the window so that the other vehicle driver knows you cannot you cannot dodge even if you want to you know you have you have it eliminated your possibility of swerving and therefore they are then put in that dilemma that they swerve or die you know that option that if they don't swerve you might is now no longer part of the scenario so they crop up all the time so I

I will I respected him for that point even whatever my disagreements I thought he was understanding something important about that but I think can you find that and G said and these people will be very in tune s you know that and if you seriously want to make money out of Bitcoin they would say then you don't try and avoid the tax man you don't try and you get you this pirates on where the big bucks are the big boxes in building up this massive you know worldwide web whatever we're on to now 5.0 or something on the basis of blockchain you know massive capital investment and all of that

and just play the game nicely and pay your taxes and pay the regulation and try and keep out irritating little players and all that stuff and and that's how you are gonna get rich and I I'm sure back say growing gotcha position yeah I mean of course all the alters absolutely that's all means are the mainstreaming right yeah that is the mainstreaming process I are true sir you know at that this is something that we can digest into our recognizable social structures. Right. Gotcha. Thanks.

More questions or comments or should we end the session? Laura, I heard you were going to say something earlier on but then Igor took over over and then you didn't really finish it. Do you still want to say it? Yeah, but it's okay otherwise I'm just going to post it on the classroom and bring it up next. It just has to do with the double spending thing. I don't know, can we just go on for another ten minutes? Yeah, sure. Go ahead. I already put you on the main screen. So go ahead. Thanks. Yeah, well I had a question about which I guess it ties with all these issues. So basically we started Bitcoin, right, it tries to tackle the problem of the double spending, the doubling

of identity, right, but I was thinking in relation to finance, what about the doubling of risk, I'm thinking about synthetic finance, credit derivatives, CDOs, and so all these financial instruments that basically they don't have any underlying asset, right, so So, obviously people like, I don't know, for instance, Andreessen and other, I guess, mainstreamers, I don't know, but they try to push also the financial side of Bitcoin. So I was thinking, yeah, I don't know, what about the problem of the doubling of risk perhaps? Is it, I don't know.

in in with the doubling of risk you mean how about how can Bitcoin accommodate these credit operations is that yeah well how can you eventually not really accommodating like it be kind it sort of sold the problem double spending and doubling over again you see which is not so maybe I don't know is it doing anything or is there anything in the protocol or is there anything that Bitcoin could do or could have any potential in terms of solving the problem of the doubling of risk that is characteristic of contemporary finance? Oh yeah, I mean Bitcoin in its basic form will eliminate it entirely.

I mean there's all criticism that could be made at that from conventional macroeconomic perspective you know it's deflationary it's complete there is no financial discretion all of these arguments could be made but it simply does not facilitate credit operations at all you know if you if we do a transaction I have to transfer a certain number of bitcoins from my account into your account I can't a promise to pay you bitcoins at some future time has no meaning in the critical I cannot do fractional reserve spending I cannot take some bitcoins from you and Linda eight times that number bitcoins other people like thanks to that conscious all of these basic financial operations

simply cannot occur a bit I don't know I could split I know that there are some some exchanges in which you can trade the derivatives of Bitcoin, of the value of Bitcoin, according to, I don't know, other exchanges. I'm sure, but they are off protocol exchanges. I mean, we could do a deal now, couldn't we? I mean, I could say to you, look, if Bitcoin is worth $500 in two months' time, you give me X amount of money, or I give you X amount of money, or we could have a bet on the value of Bitcoin privately now, nothing's stopping us. that's about Bitcoin but it's only about Bitcoin in the same way that if we were betting on a football match or you're betting on a political election or any

of these things you know it's a completely extraneous side bet that we we're making on it so of course the people involved probably have an interest in making it look as if it's actually more integrated it's you know there's very similar things in the gold market you know you can engage in all kinds with derivative trading about gold price and whatever that is completely paper based and virtual has nothing to do with a piece of gold in your basement and the people doing that want that aura of a piece of gold in your basement to spread onto their stuff you know and make you think that you're in the gold market and the security and solidity and all of that stuff of gold somehow rubs off on these financial operations but they are separate things.

So the essence of that maybe is that these exchanges where you can trade complex derivatives ultimately require escrow and enforcement, right, because the only way to really make it stick is if somebody takes hold, I mean either people get tracked down for welching on their bets or they put money down up front to cover their bets with a bookie who provides escrow services and then gives it back at the end. Is an alternative to that maybe to take one of these blockchain identity schemes? I mean, this seems like, as far as I can imagine, it seems like only loose enforcement. But if you link a derivative trader identity established on an altcoin blockchain to the blockchain recording transactions for the currency you're actually writing

derivatives on again of the image in my head is kind of a double helix but where your your identity is first warren or penalized if you Welsh on bets that you made in the writing of a derivative on your original currency like does that provide an alternative solution that wouldn't you know involves with transcendent enforcement we are I mean I say up in the sense that I am a hundred percent convinced that people are working on that star I mean it it depends where you are on the spectrum like the and recent types because they expect there to be a smooth continuum really between at the end one and dot hard Bitcoin transactions and on the other this whole new Bitcoin economy

with all kinds of financial instruments associated with it and running off side chains like you say and they'd have no problem with that at all and they They would say, look, some smart startup in Silicon Valley is going to work out maybe a coin that will support some kind of derivatives activity on the edge of the blockchain. And they'd think that that was completely straightforward. Obviously, as you move down towards the ultra end, then you get people asking more pointedly, well can you really do this without a third party but if you need a third party you're obviously just as far as they're concerned off the blockchain I mean it's

not even interesting from their point of view it's just confusing people if if you actually have a sort of secondary or power financial system that's kind of just marginal to Bitcoin and supporting a whole sense of Bitcoin related activities but with third party base trust based traditional financial structures there and so I don't know it's a if the question was specifically is could this particular thing be fully automated without transcendent without a third party on some kind of blockchain then you'll I'd have to I'd have to spend hours thinking about that. I mean, it's, like, complicated.

Yeah, I guess that was pretty much it, and, yeah, obviously I need to have a good think about that as well. I guess it was just more if there was a question there. It was just, you know, can we rigorously separate that to the extent that it could exist, you know, at least in principle from transcendent escrow and enforcement, or could be generalized escrow and enforcement as an alternative category to complementary identity chains. I think there's one position that may be a slight diagonal to this where people say anything that involves trust potentially could be moved onto the blockchain with a sufficiently clever solution. And the blockchain has just shown us that

trust can be substituted for this automated protocol and with you know that ultimately then the problem is almost like just topological that we just have to work at how our particular trust problem got now can be twisted and shaped so it can just slot into a blockchain oriented solution and then we've solved it you know and I think that that's it's not clear if we're on this kind of mainstream versus ultra line it's not clear where that would belong I think either could perhaps live with that yeah I mean it'd be pretty extraordinary because that would seems like that would kind of amount to a practical purpose for this transcendental inquiry would be working out like a general formalism or

something or other for converting these trust problems into blockchain solutions which would be well extraordinary is about the best I can do yes I mean a general I mean it tends to be in all these kind of outer edge capitalistic sort of innovations that you have these kind of girdle type problems don't you where there's no final there's no final formalism but there's always the potential for a superior formalism that's going to address those particular inconsistencies that your last formalism missed out on you know and largely through game theoretic things because people are always trying to arbitrage and exploit particularly precisely those untangled edges of the system.

So they're always going to be, you know, people will find those inconsistencies, exploit them, and therefore provide a kind of economic incentive for someone to then address that. So I would expect that sort of dynamic more than a kind of final formula that's just going to deal with that for all time. But I think the principle of a rolling, open-ended potential for formalization for sure is imaginable, yeah. I could just, because I'm keeping everyone up now, but just to say to Igor that it's kind of a bit coming back what he was asking about. And I'm sorry that I was so incompetent at answering that question.

and it was definitely to do with distributed, it was to do with systems of distributed control. So I do think in that way it's relevant, but I think it would be better for me to address it. I'll go and reread the thing again and look at it and respond properly. I don't think this is a good time to ask this question. Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Amy. Yeah, yeah, go, go. No, okay, because it relates to last week's course that I missed, but I didn't want the question to get away too far into the last module, was about this kind of short hand narrative of modernity that you gave towards the middle, about the idea that the negation

of teleology initiates a new kind of modality of engaging with technical and mechanical systems, which then ends up bringing back a new kind of telos in that moment. And I was wondering, because this is a question that I've been trying to think through a lot recently, if this is a way of, like in the long form understanding of what modernity does, of reconciling the two, the problem of modernity's obsession with novelty and the idea of fate. And so this notion that there is a kind of return to fate through novelty in the two intrinsically linked, in a way like how we were talking before about

the horror of the double, in a way. And that if this, the kind of technical question I I had in relation to your piece in the Accelerator was that is this second teleology something that we now need to understand as what you call teleonomy? Is there a distinction between this sort of secondary teleology and the idea of teleonomy, or does it come back as teleonomy because it's active in a different substrate. I think, as you'd expect me to say, that I think it's complicated. I mean, the trouble is that the word teleology was at a certain stage super politicised,

and all politicised language becomes unwieldy very quickly. I mean we know with all our political vocabulary that the words are sleazy and confusing and move around and kind of switch meanings and as soon as there is a kind of politicization of language it becomes extremely difficult to get a grip on it in the way that you can with other terms. because the case against teleology was so intrinsic to the kind of initial, which is also the most violent and fanatical and enthusiastic impetus of modernity, and therefore at the time was a kind of super politicized piece of vocabulary,

the echoes of that I think are still with us. and so I think that you hear people talking about teleonomy precisely because teleology is like still too radioactive you know which I think is both interesting I mean it's a triple thing is it's interesting it tells us something as well that is actually in the way you describe recursively tied up with with actually this exact teleological process and but it's also no I'm us one second said the essay I'm at a good at kinda shredder

or collapse I'm I mean am it it's something that I think require suspicion you know I think a lot of people use tealonomy because a simply don't want to touch tealology but there's no reason for air that could be articulated in a way that isn't ultimately this political negotiation with the word you know it's like obviously biology in particular it's like all the time tries to talk about tealology but will never use that word. It would be an utter death sentence for them to do it.

And they've managed to get teleonomy on, and the trend will be for teleonomy to become the most perfect substitute, an absolute clone in terms of its semantic content of intelligent sense of teleology, because that's what the word is for. But that final step of saying, well, come on, damn it, you know this this big fight was 500 years ago now can we just have this work back isn't gonna isn't gonna happen in my opinion it's just you baked in the cake is that what's behind the necessity to then to coin a new term and to come up with the the name teleoplexy is that what was behind that kind of part of the

Actually, to be honest, I would have to go back to it again, because I don't think if that was, it's a particularly justifiable... it's so purely tactical that it would surprise me that I could be quite so depraved quite so recently. But I mean, it is possible, and I would have to have a look at it to say. All right, cool. Thanks. I mean, on your basic point, though, all I can do is just totally endorse the suggestion. I think it has to be exactly that nexus of innovation.

Innovation dramatized to the point of total historical break and at the same time precisely as a fatality, the introduction of a fatality. So I think I totally agree with what you're saying there. Thank you so much, Nick. OK, everyone. Sorry to keep everyone in this. No, no, no. I'm just saying thank you, particularly not saying like, but just to say thank you for the response and see if other, like for final comments you have something to say or if anybody still has something they want to talk about. This is the last call if this was a bar.

Yeah. is looking to me a little bit like sort of embarrassing recollections of the scenes of rock festivals when I was 17 years old and people have not slept for three nights but I mean maybe I'm just projecting that onto it. No, just projecting though we all are, it's amazing the time zone differences here are incredible and I was up at 6.30 and it must be 3, 4 a.m. coming on. I usually get up at like 5.15 and I start setting up the the procedures in Vancouver 5.15 a.m. But I like that Amy's question kind of took us back. Hmm. Oh, Ian's frozen now, is that right?

Yes. You've got to finish on a loop, right? Yeah, took us back. Okay, I guess Ian is gone. Oh, there he is. Oh, no, he's back. I'm here. I don't know what happened. Yes. We didn't hear a word of what you were trying to say. Oh, shoot. Oh, I just said… Well, we heard the last thing we heard was you said, took us back. Oh, took us back to the first or second class, where you mentioned those really interesting thoughts about teleology and the scholastics and Aristotle and kind of getting over a kind of teleology. I thought all that was really interesting, so I'm great that that's a part of the conversation still.

Grateful that that is. I'm grateful to Amy. Yeah, good. Sorry, I was pirating some sample libraries to make music later. My internet's down now. Okay. Okay, so is it finished? Can we wrap up today? sounds good yeah from my point of view it would be it would be fine I don't know if everyone else okay with that okay thanks as always Mo and your 515 thing is now gonna haunt my dreams don't worry about it I look forward to this and I I have a system of waking up that is really good the way I do it is I make a couple americano coffee

and I leave it next to my bed and then when my alarm rings I just get up, I drink it, and I push snooze. And then I go back to bed, but within two minutes, the coffee just wakes you up. And then you're like, okay, I'm done. So by the time you bring second time, you're already up, and you're kind of like speed up and running. So that's the way I get up. Cool. I'll have to learn from that. Anyways, thank you so much, everyone, for this wonderful session. And looking forward to the second four sessions starting next week. OK, cool, great. OK, everyone. Bye-bye. Yeah, thanks. Have a good week, everybody. Bye-bye.