Bitcoin and Philosophy (Session 7)

Hello everyone. Welcome to the seventh session of Nick Lanz Bitcoin and Philosophy seminar. Nick, you can start anytime. Okay. Great. I'm just going to access one text. So the topic laid out for this week was going to be expressed as politics, and there's certainly nothing in that huge, vast, sprawling field that is not relevant to what we're going to be talking about at home. But I thought I'd narrow it a little bit right at the start and focus on the word power.

That's why, as Mo was saying, I put up this link to the text which, as I was saying to him, I thought everyone was looking at it. I keep seeing people talking about it a lot, which is this one called Capital as Power by Shimshuan, Bishle and Jonathan Knitsan, who Mo says he's in contact with Knitsan, which is a fantastically interesting thing. Now it's not that I'm particularly wanting to propose that this text is a totally satisfactory framework for this discussion, but it seems to me it's interesting just because people

talking about it, and because the way that they talk about power seems to be one that is probably, to use a sort of reflexive word in this context, kind of hegemonic in this whole discussion at the moment. I think that their definition of what it is to talk about something in terms of power as opposed to talking about it in more conventional economic or even political categories is probably one that would receive wide acceptance certainly in academic circles. So I think we move around, there's a bunch of things that I think it would be disappointing

if we don't touch upon. Ian has asked a particular question about surplus value of code, which is something that I think will definitely come in. And Laura has a point up about the mainstreaming of peer-to-peer systems or peer-to-peer software in terms of large established financial institutions. Both of those seem to me things that should click onto this quite nicely. Certainly, just to take four concepts, very blurry, each of them are blurry and confusing concepts that I think feed into this question of power a lot, is the notion of democracy,

the notion of money, the notion of identity, and the notion of cryptography. And I think a line that kind of runs through all of those, at least loosely, and then opens up the possibility of discussing how they connect. So really the task I'm setting myself as a kind of initial prompt for this week is to sort of think about what do we mean by power as a question that is being raised alongside Bitcoin. And the quote that I think does a lot of work in this, which I'll immediately throw at you, is actually from Lenin in 1920.

He's extremely well known, which is his line from his essay on our foreign and domestic position and party tasks, as I say in 1920, where he says, communism is soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country now i think often that is quoted by people who want to make fun of it and it's not that it's not without its humorous side but the thing that i particularly want to point out is that it actually when you are looking at it in english has a strange doubling of the notion of power in that.

He obviously only, in the English translation, I'm afraid my Russian is not up to a comparison with the original, but he only uses the word power once in this phrase Soviet power. And that is a notion that if expanded in various ways is one that I think we have to think about in this context. really about power as a form of political organization and a political task and its relationship to the question of organization and then in turn to a set of articulations between power and economics. But the shadow notion of power that is in there comes in

with the word electricity. You know, as a colloquial English thing, when we talk about power supplies the power industry it power is used as a very loose colloquial and term that simply means quantitative electrical power and so I think that in this phrase there are these two very different senses of power running up against each other implicitly even if it's not something that is explicitly forced upon people. And as we have seen, when we get to Bitcoin, I think both of these dimensions of the concept of power are still very much in play. If I was going

to very loosely translate them into Bitcoin terms, electrical power has become computing power. That was actually the terms I was going to use for this week's session. And in using it, it was obviously slightly a deliberate play on these two different, on the ambivalence of the notion of power. So computing power has a political economic sense and it obviously has one that is very close to the sense that you find power used in electrification as something that's just a quantitative technical index of computer capability.

I think we could translate it further into something even nicer, which would be hashing power. Hashing power too is something I've sort of been trying to get my thoughts in order for this week as a little expression I've fallen in love with totally. It's partly just because it exacerbates even further the ambivalence in computing power. It's also because the notion of hashing is one that I think is incredibly ripe to burst out of this Bitcoin context and become something that begins to do all kinds of weird semiotic work outside of that narrow technical terrain. And hashing power is exactly what is rewarded on the Bitcoin network.

It is that that's incentivized. It is that, as we'll see, that is given a vote. And in doing so, immediately we have this crossover between these two different terms that it's hard at this point to work out what is being, if anything, is being metaphorised. Is the political economic language being metaphorised in order to be applied to this technical terminology or is the technical terminology in a certain sense acting as a kind of screen or a cloak for a familiar political economic sense of power it becomes extremely intriguing to try

and follow which of these lines is really being pursued more directly or whether we really have some kind of unprecedented convergence taking place here which is forcing us into a radical rethink of both sides of power on both of these different axes. And obviously on the other side, the other side meaning in this sense the political economic side of power, the sense of power that people probably feel is more immediately familiar, And I think that is partly illusory, is the question of algorithmic governance, which is the most direct way of talking about the implications of Bitcoin as it slots most directly

into a familiar political economic problematic. So this crossover to me is something that is definitely happening in Bitcoin and that maybe I'm now sort of resolving a question that I should leave open, but at least tentatively I'll do that, which is to say that this crossover is something real. It's not just effects of sloppy language or metaphorisation from one side to the other. There really is this crossover happening because both the problematic of algorithmic governments and the problematic of computing power as a voting force,

as something that is actually delegated social power within the system, are things that are irreducibly operative in the Bitcoin system. Neither of them is just some kind of figurative substitution, something that is solely happening on the other side. And I think a really interesting way to follow this through So, and this is picking up on something that I just mentioned a little bit last time, is, if I can just repeat, that I saw what was really a promo video for Bitcoin that was in some sense extremely naive. someone approaching it from a kind of situation a position of sophisticated skepticism

would be would have to constrain themselves from just deriding it but I think if you if it's possible to to constrain that way it actually becomes quite interesting and it really began by strongly foregrounding the notion of democracy and as as Bitcoin as a democratization and obviously the context of this is something we've been talking about a lot which is the tendency it seems for the internet as a whole to have become massively centralized and and that the early sort of cypherpunk

ideals of the Internet as a radically decentralized system seems to a lot of people to have been progressively betrayed by a tendency towards these what's often called stacks of people with proprietary systems based on just a massive data accumulation, hubs that have taken a position of massive control over the functioning of the Internet. and in response to those trends towards concentration this democracy language has re-emerged in at least certain factions of the what maybe could be very very preliminarily called a Bitcoin community

and so this piece was typical of this and again apologize for repetition but I I just have to walk through this again this this video I'm starts off by saying exactly the Bitcoin Bitcoin is a democratizing a tendency in the Internet it's not like these other big players it's not its deep it's against the tendency of concentration and I'm it gives everyone using Bitcoin a role in the world under the Bitcoin there are no there are no as we know from Satoshi Nakamoto's language there are no trusted third parties, there are no transcendent hubs controlling the Bitcoin system

and in that sense as an absolutely minimal definition a definition that really identifies this language of democracy with the ideal P2P distributed system, it's democratic. But it then went on to say, and this is a step that I think is massively interesting, that unfortunately I don't think he's that would but that's the implicit that's implicit message unfortunately it call work just by giving every individual person a vote and and it can't do that because identity in this kind of distributed system a system that has to be systematically anonymized and the whole functioning of it

it's a kind of radicalization of the notion of a secret ballot as you get within traditional political institutions. The anonymity of the system makes it impossible to validate individual identities and so there's nothing to stop a particular node within the system manufacturing personal identity I think huge um this is we've now introduced really the notion of identity into the whole

it's our question and what is being said is that in this system in order for it to be flat in order to be a peer to peer system and in order for it to preserve this kind of secrecy that is treated as a kind of civil rights type of issue, that set of realities has meant that the notion of identity as it could function as a guarantor of one's status as an equal democratic individual has been obliterated there is no capacity any longer to preserve that identity and that identity has been subsumed actually into a potential

manufacturing process so you could run this through all kinds of discourses I mean I always but he tend to treat the sort of marxist canon as a kind of uh... a reference point here just because it's so established in these things but if you think of it in these terms it's a hugely weird development that's taken place that the individual identity has actually been completely subsumed into the manufacturing process and therefore if we were going to be strictly Marxian about it would be a complete absorption of the political in a sense that preserves all its liberal

ideals as well as other ideals that would want to distance themselves from that. They've all simply been absorbed purely into a dynamic of capital. And so because anyone with enough computing power can simply manufacture identities because identity, individual identity is a product and therefore all your political voting power is actually now downstream of a production process, that model of democracy which is surely the only commonly held model of democracy is completely defunctionalized, it's obsolesced by the just basic realities in which the system is operating.

So the video then goes on to say, so in order to preserve democracy, which is a term now getting very strained, in order to preserve democracy instead it's necessary to move it into this different domain which is the domain all I'm hashing of computing power that the your that the votes have to be delegated to computing power because because identity is not strong enough any longer to preserve that function up it would simply be it would be lost immediately if if if individual identity was

meant to be the anchor of of a democratic voice of a democratic fight and so the vote is moved to computing power and this is to me now with you know at this second step where in with immersed in the topic that's where we are this is what Bitcoin is is about it's about the fact that hashing power within the the domain of the Bitcoin system has completely absorbed everything that would previously have been conceived as political power so the so we can still use this language and they do use this so that obviously democracy voting all the time

voting languages is hugely present as you will have seen in all of these essays and materials but what this now means what is doing the fact take what is the unit of democracy is now being defined by hashing power, by computing power. There's a sort of little digression which is, I think, by no means irrelevant, which comes up and I think I definitely linked this which is this nyu talk by am I'm

I the guys names print and it was extremely good and and he talks about him as a guy called Adam back he might have a be familiar with because he is one of the few people on on Satoshi Nokomoto's very short little set of references at the end of the Bitcoin paper Adam back gets a mention as one of one of the eight is number six for this for this creation of his called Hashcash and Hashcash and the motivation for that is very very germane to the issues involved in this weird lineage this strange process towards this kind of

fun this hashing power transformation of all of this language of liberal political theory and because his basic starting point was a is a phobia about spam and that phobia about spam comes from the fact that and on the Internet stuff tends to be free I mean this is the sort of dark side the whole information wants to be free mantra that we get out of the very earliest days that internet and its to the political self identification and and in this world obviously spamming

emerges as a kind of spontaneous product because its its cost less effectively cost less just send half a million people a piece of X totally useless in fact extremely annoying digital junk so to try and say heaps Adam back I think and trusting Brunton on this a little bit really thought spam could destroy the Internet you know that if it would if if it was left unchecked this could really just wreck the whole thing and hash cash is a notion that comes is a response to the problem spamming which is an attempt to reconsolidate some notion of identity

that is here against this tendency towards infinite proliferation. And the mechanism he uses is familiar to us because we've already seen it. I mean, Satoshi Nakamoto just takes up the basic hash-cash system for his hash function. It's basically that you demand proof-of-work to actually validate your identity. So proof-of-work comes in at this point and proof-of-work is linking up is associative to a whole lot of things that we've now left on this trail

as kind of hopefully question marks because because this proof-of-work thing it has kind of weird metaphorical associations to things that we're familiar with from the history of political economy but they're not again just purely metaphorical There's a real question of work accountancy in these political discourses in very different ways on the right and the left. And proof of work responds to that implicitly, obviously not as a direct thing. The key point though for this single moment is that Adam Back recognized after innovating

this hash cache system a way of sort of validating identity to defend yourself against spam. If a spammer needed to prove work, if they actually showed that they had put some commitment into their message, then spamming becomes impossible obviously. yes it is that natural defense can span the whole point of spam is its cost last say proof of work is is introducing a cost and that cost is just simply incompatible with the very notion of spam it's a kinda completely secure exterminator of the of the spam not and I think I'm he Adam back had expected that this would just catch on everyone would be using system because it was the natural way he thought to stop spam happening.

Instead people have found these other slightly messier ways of just dealing with spam and it's one of many cryptographic innovations that have been much slower to establish themselves as general standards for Internet activity than a lot of these crypto people had expected. But Adam Beck recognized that as soon as you have a hash cash system, why cause it hash cash, is it works as money. Because you have actually, by proving a commitment, by proving an identity, you have established something of value. That a spam identity is worthless. It has no monetary value. It's nothing because it's completely free.

You can spam a million people basically for the same cost. can spam half a million. There's no scarcity to the spam message. There's nothing that could give it value. But once you demand that an identity is validated, then it's worth something and it can operate as a system of cash. Now, compared to the Bitcoin system, This is very underdeveloped in Adam Back's work. But Satoshi Nakamoto saw immediately that there was this connection between proof of work, identity and the notion of money. And those three elements obviously are then synthesized within the concept of Bitcoin

in a way that is far more coherent. So money clearly comes into this. Now, it's not controversial to say there's a relationship between money and power, but I think it's at the very least highly unresolved what that relationship between money and power is. And I won't get into a big digression about this. This is something we can talk about, but I would say just off the top of my head that But there's two basic directions people can go in on this, which is that either money is seen as a formalization of power and therefore is downstream of power, and this is something

that you obviously see in when Foucault actually simply says what we call money. I mean, it's just implicit in what he's saying that actually this is just a way we we have of talking about power in a particular way. And the other side, sorry, I should just say on that, this is where we, if we can bring Bishler and Nitzan in, this is exactly where, because they are Foucauldian. And if I was going to be really a bit harsh, I'd say pop Foucauldian like this, they really make the Foucauldian point extremely clear and straightforward with this, we'll come

back to them possibly. So that's one way of doing it. I'm just going to drop one sentence. Which is like, you know, I've had conversations about this with Netson, right? But their Foucauldian-ness, the intensity of their Foucauldian-ness is almost equal to the intensity of their disdain for Foucauld. Right. So it's like a paradox because they refuse to understand how and why they're Foucauldian. And they go on to attack the Foucauldian notion of power in a very like… I can give reference later in a book where they actually...

Yeah, yeah. Let's definitely bring this. It's not that I want to... We definitely... Let's get back to this, can we, Mo? Because I think it's worth more than just a little aside. I think... I'm going to harass you to bring it back in just one minute. No, definitely. I just wanted to put the footnote. We can get back to it on the other side, as you wish. Yeah, yeah. No, I think we should. I think this is totally fascinating. I'll just say one, in fact, we'll get back to it in just two minutes. I'll just say one more thing on this stream about power, and then I'll stop, and let's get immediately to this point about those guys. Because just the fourth term that I wanted to bring in to this was cryptography,

in the sense that there is a sense in which which there is a cryptographic position which really maintains that it has the final key to the meaning of power. That what power is, everything that we mean by power and all our ways of talking about power are actually a form of, I shouldn't say a form of because I wanna say a poorly formalized understanding of cryptographic problems and this comes in with this whole question of identity that that ultimately what an identity is in any

robust sense any sense that can survive in the world that we're entering into and actually was always it was always like that but we can only see it now is that this the self an identity that is able to actually operate in this field power is a holder of keys that's that's what an identity is it means anything it's a holder keys as a self that does not have the key to its identity that does not have its identity as a key is simply raw material for these processes, completely unprotected and that therefore cryptographic

identity in this specific sense that the position of an agent that has the access to a private code, a private key, if we're looking at it in the terms we were looking at last term of this public key encryption. Only that is an identity with any meaning. Every other or every other notion of what it is to be a self is badly formalized, open to exploitation, sentimental and theoretically useless and incompetent, radically incompetent in the world that we're entering into. That it's only as a holder of keys that there is any

chance of anybody or any institution, any agent of any kind, coping in the near future that we're using. And that beyond that, there is no meaning at all to power that is not ultimately cryptographic if you you there is a whole language that comes up on these kinda hacker bulletin boards and all the first awards about something being owned you know that again is a sort of interesting cross-over of power language and economic language you know whatever it is you know NASA's mainframe is completely owned by some hacker collective meaning they have the cryptographic keys to

that thing they can do with it as they like they have effective absolutely effective concrete power over that over that intelligence information system and other than that type of power there is only blurry historical residues and various kinds of distracting historical legacy formations of power and ultimately the whole question of power resolves into question of crypto competences and so I'm gonna I'm gonna just leave all of those just hang open as as question marks and immediately get back to most

most point about these guys cuz I wanna hear if I can just prime this a little bit I wanna hear how do they think that they are not Foucaultian, that is a fascinating question. Is Mo still with us actually? Yes, I'm here. I'm just waiting for... Well, to them, it's not that they recognize the shift that takes place from a Marxian understanding of political economy which they also have a huge problem with. But the kind of political direction that Foucault takes this kind of shift away

from Marx and to them it's the wrong direction even though he might be talking about the the right keywords. So whereas for them power can only be understood if built into the same algorithm of accumulation in which economic capital operates. But for Foucault he sets it up as a kind of a dichotomy to how economic power operates. So that to him is a distraction. It's a distraction away from where the conversation should have gone if we were going to move

away from Marxist understanding of political economy. So the difference here is that for Nitzan and Bichler, they provide you a system in which through the notions of risk and hype, The kind of cultural or cultural or social or non purely economic power is built back straight into the brick and mortar dollar and cent sense of political economy. So they think that Foucault underplays capital in his notion of power? Yes, or does not provide a way in which how his notion of power is quantified and accumulated and how does that interact with economic power?

Right. Am I clear? Yeah, no, very clear. It's a fascinating thing. I mean, because I've obviously looked at this paper with great interest, but I don't recall Foucault even coming up in it at all. Is that right? I can just quickly pull it up and actually read the part that they berate Foucault. But I mean, they clearly state what I said. This is out of like reading their attack on Foucault and the people they call postists, postists being like all postmodernists, right? Right. Basically, I mean the accusation is that they provide a weak cybernetic of power and capital.

It's a weak form of cybernetic because it's unable to sort of like build it into the same kind of understanding of capital that includes money, credit and accumulation of power into capital. So for them, power is only power. Power's extent is in its ability to accumulate into capital. So that's why they are still materialists, right? Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess Foucault would say… Capitalism, actually, I pulled up something I wrote. Maybe if I read this paragraph, it will help. Do you mind? Sure. No, that would be great.

Now, I'm presenting on Nitzan and Bichler, which is really weird. I didn't even intend to do this. But, so, this is sort of my understanding. For them, capital, both in its financial and symbolic form, is always the network object of the invisible, indivisible and immeasurable form of power whose actuality can only be realized, measured and therefore accumulated through the hegemonic organization of all possible social relations that include but are not limited to those involving production and labor. Therefore, for Nitzan and Bitschler, capitalism as the technology of the objectification, measurement and accumulation of power, what you call formalization, Nick, is a social machine and not an economic one, and is present

in all aspects of life and not just in what is known as the economy. This broader understanding reveals that despite its historical claims of material objectivity, capitalism is nothing but the forcefully chaotic organization of the chaos of power through the enforcement of a multiplicity of pricing regimes within a univocal value system at all costs. So that's kind of like how I see. So it is not that in capitalism numbers and their logical relations don't matter at all, but like how Foucault basically has no notion of like arithmetics of power, right? But that the quantification of capital also encompasses other kinds of figures that until

the arrival of the digital age were considered to have little to do with the practices involving quantitative measurement. So basically with Nidzhar and Bistra you can see how all forms of like you know like how letters like numbers, sounds, words, claims, texts can be built back straight into the same way we understand capitalism. Very much along the lines that you explaining so so that they're happy with the notion that you can without significant remainder quantify power economically but that that quantification

is differential in the sense that what matters to use that term is differential accumulation not absolute accumulation yeah it's all around this accumulation is always in relation to how much others are accumulating. Right. I mean, I'm taking that as what they're saying. When we move to an understanding of power rather than an understanding of economics, the fundamental move there is exactly this question of differential accumulation, and that it's always actually about relative distribution rather than some absolute consolidation of wealth or whatever.

Although it seems to me Marx is also arguably very close to that. For people to get a grasp of this differential, differential, is that say if Ford shrinks 5% this year and Toyota shrinks 2%, actually Toyota grows 3% even though both shrunk. In that particular coupling, yes. even in depression you in economic depression some are still accumulating differential right yes that that's very much in in keeping with what I can taking their key point to be on this yeah

and then so so that's we have when I obviously way too hastily was talking about them as I'm pop you can't he ends that's exactly what I was meaning by that that that it it's the notion of this zero-sum model of war as fundamental so that if your enemy is if you're becoming weaker but your enemies becoming weaker faster than you you're winning in a military context and whereas in a I sort of a certainly not near classical economic context of course everyone's losing it's it's not being conceived as a zero-sum game, everyone can win or everyone can lose. For them, that's not to think power at all.

It's a battle. And so if you can harm your enemy more than he can harm you, you're still winning even if both sides are actually suffering. Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to read their own text on postmodernism. It's just one paragraph, and it's on page 5054 of the book, book, the chapter called Dilemma of Political Economy. And he actually begins his, they begin their critique with talking about Frankfurt School. So they say the early writings of the Frankfurt School spawned a radical literature that questioned the rarefied nature of the economy, if not its very existence, and that focused instead on the oppressive cultural powers of capitalism. Initially, these questions were addressed as part of a re-examination

of the young Hegel, the young Marx, Lukacs, and Gramsci. But since the 1970s, the inquiry drifted in an entirely different direction, situated somewhere between Foucault and Derrida. This new fashion, originally nourished in France and California, is often based on the cynical plagiarism of Marx, Hegel and particularly Marcuse, using in the guise of original radical thought. The adherents of this fashion pretend to offer an anti- or postmodern examination of capitalism. But unlike the early critical theory of the Frankfurt School, the posture of this literature

is largely anti-socialist and its methods derive often directly and consciously from the intellectual depths of Nazism. So we're just going to leave it at that and let people read the rest of the chapter, page 54 and all that. Go ahead, Nick. I don't know if you can hear us. Well, yes, I can definitely hear you. I mean, this is all very interesting. I mean, maybe we can open up this whole question in all of its dimensions, and if people are gravitating

back to this and miss the its site business and stuff in of course that's that's something we can spiral into her I mean it's I it's obviously extremely she's relevant to this whole question for sure I'm no I just a question Jake oh yeah there it is he's talking okay yeah just a question about your car manufacturer example, and so I guess more broadly the kind of power they're proposing. So is the idea essentially that, you know, they have this sort of stock market shift and a relative increase in the power of, you know, call it Chrysler. So in the first sense, the power that's been gained by Chrysler here is power over pricing.

So the ability to affect the prices of cars, the prices in the market in a way that's advantageous to them relative to... of the stock of itself and others in relation to all this. Right, okay, yeah, that certainly, and then also the prices of what they produce, of cars, you know, in whatever way is more advantageous to them relative to somebody else. And then that secondarily, if we imagine these as all as, you know, car dealers, car manufacturers in Detroit, that there's this secondary, this social web of power that Foucault talks about, which is your ability to affect family life, city life, and so forth. That's sort of the projected shadow of this relative capital accumulation,

which grants a primary power over pricing regimes. Is that kind of the structure that they're building? Yes. But they only concern themselves with numbers. And in their model really what's important is ability to set price and enforce prices. That's what is the central thing is pricing. And the pricing to them is the mechanism of pricing that will then trigger into accumulation of capital has always to do with the ability to project and enforce a stream of income

in the future. So basically you are saying like my stream of income right now which has already happened and I can actually... The stream of income that you already have, which is already materialized, right? Based on that, you kind of like project an expected stream of income, right? This is the logic of accumulation. Yeah, logic of accumulation. So basically, you're saying, my income in this quarter, which is already done and measured, and you can rely on it, was $100. Basically, depending on your resources for risking and then hyping this risk,

you can say, I'm going to have this income raised to $130. Right? And then the mechanism to get there is through taking risks by actually claiming that it's going to be $130 and saying, like, how can you mobilize culture and politics, lobbying, hand wrestling to actually get there, right? Okay, so it's a kind of speculative power, the ability to command the resources and substantiate the client. It's always speculative. Okay. It always happens. Yeah, no, sorry, Mo, go. No, no, go ahead, go ahead. Well, I was just going to say, it's this emphasis they have about its differential character.

So it's always about the pie. you know how it did biting up the pie they don't care or they they they insist that the players don't care about the size of the pie that the pie grows if it grows at all as a side effect of the attempt to get a bigger slice of the pie and if you if you if the pie grows massively on your and you get a little bit of the pie you're losing that guy you know your as I can all make sure doing great as as power you're doing terribly your power position is deteriorating so I mean and from mo can correct me if I'm wrong about this but it seems to me that this is like really axiomatic they want to say this is

the fundamental thing that that you have to assume that these agents are totally in this zero-sum in the sense that you know all they care about is proportional distributive relations of power and that and that that is indexed in these economic forms but that what money or what did what the quantities involve a differential quantity and they could be quantity that just tell you how much better all you are doing relative to someone else and therefore your your power position is completely based upon this and on equal distribution which you want to access to the greatest possible extent is that what you mean by

that they sort of perceived capital entities as being essentially military entities because in the same sense the US military or the US government doesn't really care how much how much Bitcoin is able to increase the efficiency or democratization of the society over which it presides as long as it's decreasing the share of it which is accumulated federal government. Yeah, it's totally again I'm open to correction about it because you know my immersion in these guys is vastly less than the Moe's and so I'm just I'm just going on my sense of what they're saying but that in that sense the military model like when you get you often hear this from

military and strategic thinkers in a way that's very pure and very I I think in an admirable sense from a intellectual point of view extremely cynical where they they say look we don't care about whether the world is getting richer or poorer or going to share all global warming or any of this stuff you know the question where always asking is how does these things affect us differentially that's what we mean by strategically you know if if the world's gonna raise in temperature by 10 10 degrees and it's gonna be hell for everybody but it's gonna be a little bit less hell for us for potential competitors and that is great you know from a strategic point of view what do we we have no worries about that and

and so that that mentality that you know just like the chess examples are obviously extremely crude but it's really helpful you you do not care about what is slaughtered on your side chessboard as long as you're just taking out a more the other guys pieces and you know that's what I think is meant in this discourse by talking about power you know it's to get out of the naive notion that people are give have the slightest concern for absolute quantities except as their contribution to these relative distributions It's kind of interesting, I mean, it seems as if the bold, and this is a complete digression,

but the sort of the boldest work, even bolder than the climate change panel at the UN or any of the science groups associated with it, who have this kind of professional responsibility to be very epistemically conservative in their statements. The US military on the other hand has produced really, really bold, rigorous, speculative reports on what climate shift is going to do and all of its catastrophic consequences. And so you kind of want to say to all of these climate deniers and to everybody in general, look at this, look at this information. But that information is also sort of, in some way, it seems to have to be biased, tainted, dictated by this logic that it doesn't really matter whether this happens or not, as long as we control how it plays out. And it'd be interesting to kind of see how, you know,

what traces of that you could find in the material that they're releasing itself, you know, how to excise them, what kind of impact it's having on what they're releasing to us. Right, sure. Yeah. I mean, I can't help but think they must still be being constrained in the way they talk about these things because they can't be completely immune to the PR significance of coming out with an absolutely raw zero-sum analysis is extremely harsh. I mean, I think it goes beyond what is publicly manageable, you know, but I'm open to contradiction on that.

I'm trying to find this formula in page around 180 in the book. That's why I'm not really saying much. So maybe others, if they want to contribute or if Nick wants to move on. But I would really like to copy-paste this formula they provide. Basically, it's like the formula of capitalization. It's somewhere in like around 180. I'm looking for that. But you guys can continue on. Nick, I was kind of interested by what you pointed out, the double semantics of owned,

as you own property or you own your victim and kind of considering taking ownership as an attack or as intrinsically a form of security breach or of attack. And I don't know whether this is a formalism or an identification that kind of goes beneath the left-right divide in opinions or in language about Bitcoin and whether they both kind of depend on this underlying logic of seeing identity as something expropriated and expropriation as a form of attack, whether it's in a network or whether it's in a peasant revolution or something along those lines. And just like, I don't know, when you were talking about the self as a holder of keys being the only sort of secure

and theoretically rigorous way of looking at self, I was thinking of Glass House. I don't know if you've read that yet, but identity theft, once your identity is insecure, you've gone through a reconstructive gate that is compromised. Someone can sandbox you, can fork infinite copies of you, and can do anything they want to. Right. Can be you. And so you get this sort of, this idea of identity, which at the end of the day is, I mean, is literally, the person referenced by this set of keys can be themselves reconstructed, psychologically, you know, impersonated, recreated, if you have access. And so, identity becomes the other face of the coin of security here. Yeah. Does that make sense? It's something that is sort of... Yeah, totally. Totally. I mean,

And that is the vision, I think, isn't it? That's the vision. If you are not a competent keyholder, you are just totally screwed. And I mean, I think from the kind of cypherpunk, whatever, you know, these crypto circles, it's just whether or not they feel sad about that or sympathetic is beside the point. I mean, it's just you are beyond any kind of hope. There's just simply nothing that can be done. because because your I your identity is yet to reach use this time is just old you've lost it's gone and that's a lot I'm but like edited did you where I read a ring blockchain thinking Melanie Swan's

book right now and already just like a chapter and a half or a couple chapters and there have been various points at which she's sort of said like oh and the next step is will do this. And it involves transferring private keys between people and some sort of imaginary scheme for fractional reserve distributed Bitcoin lending that involves passing around private keys. And I'm like, there's if not no sense of security in this line of thinking, at least less than has been dominant before. Well, I can only think that that part of this is the fact that you can produce any number of public-private key pairs. So it's obviously possible to yourself propagate identities for the purpose of various kind

of collaborative activities or transactions. know what I mean it's not that you necessarily are sacrificing the final the final key or the key that is you yeah yeah but I guess I mean more in the sense well I guess once the was the recipient of a private key that you passed to them which they should now be worried that you still know what once they have that key they can issue a new key that you don't have for the same asset that you just passed them the key for so I guess there I mean there is a you know there's a way to re-secure it there's just a temporal gap or an intrinsic temporal gap I don't know where I'm going with that sorry yeah no

the but the whole question is totally fascinating I mean it's this it's this form of extreme intimacy in the cryptographic eon SNED I mean if you pass ask someone your private key, it is an act of such utter communion that it's almost like from that point of view unprecedented in history that such a thing could happen before. But I'm obviously interested in what people think, you know, what is power? You know, what is the register that it should be discussed or what's the basic terms that

people think are the most fundamental vocabulary for discussing it? Because as I say, I think it's always been actually very... The reason that I introduced this Bichler and Nitz something is I think it's, and I'm courting Moe's antagonism at this point probably by saying this, but I think it's almost like a last gasp to pin the notion of power down to something sort of solid. I mean it's relative as opposed to absolute, but it still has a kind of extreme solidity to it. Absolutely. I agree.

The whole formula I was trying to find which I'm going to try to open it up at the screen and maybe you guys can see it if I screen share. I finally found it. I think I found it. screen share thing is where we go here we go oh yeah yeah it's like they try to like this is how they try to solidify it right now the power formula there's the power formula no but it's actually it's it's it's that's DK is differential

capital right the D is differential K is capital so so this is how the differentiality is is measured you against somebody else and and and he is earning H is hype and then that symbol is risk so basically earning times hype divided by risk is the formula. Wait, then risk is delta or risk is me over delta them? No, risk is your delta versus their delta. OK. Right. Yeah. Can I ask a sort of quick question? Sure. Maybe it's more of a comment, but when Nick, when you say the whole question of power

resolves into questions of cryptography or cryptographic X. You might have said something and I missed what X was. I am totally provoked. I think that's amazing. The reason I think that's amazing, which of course you've already drawn this possible connection and probably have made a lot of... is that again we're coming back to the double spending problem. And one of the most powerful ideas that's come through in all of these seminars is how you've been able to take the double spending problem all the way back to the replication of molecules and really find in it, perhaps as you put it, a kind of condition for the

origin of money. If we can tie power to cryptography, then we can certainly tie power to the double spending problem and really, hopefully not too neatly, put these things together in a way which paints a really compelling picture. So I just wanted to comment that I definitely, I know we're going to elaborate on the notion of power as having to do with cryptography. I think this is kind of chugging away under your question about surplus value of code actually, isn't it, Ian? Is that right? When you say, are we talking about insecurity when we're talking about surplus value of

code? Yeah, I was thinking because this is a... Sorry, go on. No, no, no. I've finished. That's... I just wanted to... Totally. Where that came from partially is I've been in a great seminar with a philosopher named Catherine Malibu. You may be familiar with her work on plasticity. And I actually presented on your work. And she right now is really focused. She thought it was amazing. but she's really focused on kind of trying to question why this language of surplus is in so much semiotic, semiological theory. And as I mentioned, a lot of authors a couple sessions ago, too, that seem to talk about this,

in Deleuze it takes the form of this surplus value code. And it's a strange, and the more I think about it, it is kind of strange. I mean, in the example of the orchid and the wasp, When you think about the ORCID hijacking the WASPs, certain functions of the WASP, is it doing so because there is a quote-unquote surplus value of code? Is that the way we want to talk about it? or is it and I'm not saying it's better to talk about it this way but is it simply a matter of there's a kind of insecure aspect to the code which makes it possible for the ORCID to hijack a particular function in this case the WASP's pattern recognition yeah

I mean it's interesting part of it is obviously that when Deleuze and Guattari use this language they're coming out of a particular lineage and so it's meant to be part of a conversation with the Marxist tradition and they consolidate that further by drawing this distinction which they say between surplus value of flux and surplus value of code. Now this distinction between flux and code is something that is big for them and plays a sort of theoretical role going right through this joint capitalism and schizophrenia project but but in a nutshell surplus value of flux is is Marx's notion of surplus value and so you have a certain

in now we're in a zone that's really where we've been and I I don't know whether we can get back to this, it's electric power, labor power, there's a whole power language in this, which is to do with a certain type of quantification. As we've seen before, it's very tied up also tantalizingly with this hashing and proof of work system, in the sense that it's something that is forced to be crudely quantitative. Marx's whole endeavour here, which is in total continuity with the tradition of earlier liberal political economy, is to produce this quantitative

key to the meaning of profit and so labor power is some kind of quantitative continuum that by the basis of the certain relatively straightforward arithmetical functions you carve off a surplus that is profit from that you know that the pool of labor if you take your whole labor force as a particular kind of collective body with a certain productive vitality which is your which is your labor power capital is a machine for extracting a certain proportion of that labor power the proportion that isn't required for the reproduction of

your labor pool and and so that's the Marxist model and that's the model of surplus value of flux and so when Deleuze and Quattari say surplus value of code, they're engaging in a dialogue with that. And it's a kind of subversive thing. I mean, my natural inclination is to see it as quite drastically subversive, because they're saying there is a way that this economic mechanism extracts surplus that is completely irreducible to this whole attempt at quantification that we see reaching a certain kind of climax in the Marxist tradition.

That when the orchid hacks the wasp, it's not extracting value from the wasp in the sense of surplus value of flux. It's not that there's a quantitative extraction. That what's required is only this extremely delicate exact coding operation that will, because of the way that the original system is coded, will release this energetic resources from the side of the WASP for functionality for the ORCID. So I'm saying with this, it's just like, you know, part of that language is obviously part

of this particular intellectual genealogy and part of this tradition. And so that's locking it to a certain point. And you could say, oh, well, maybe if they hadn't, if they weren't in that conversation, they would have used a completely different vocabulary. I'm not sure what I think about that. One of the main critiques of Marx that Nietzsche and Bichler highlight is the fact that this limited cybernetics of Marx basically kind of creates a fundamental place for the accumulation of labor into capital, right? And then sees the rest of the economy which is sort of like

money, stock, futures, hedging and all that as sort of like a mirror image of the real economy right. And Marx called it like real capital versus fictitious capital right. And then basically this real capital is the basis of value creation and then the financial war is like a mirror that tries to distort it and price it and then kind of like own it. But then what happens is in the moments of crisis the distortion of the mirror goes out of control and then the mirror collapses and then what you end up with is a 1930s style like devaluation. And then value has to be restored back again from the real place of power which is labor

and then for a new image of it to be formed. Whereas in Nitzan and Bichler, this image is actually part and parcel of the, is an imminent political economy. So it's actually kind of the Lusian in a sense because to them everything that happens symbolically in the pricing is actually kind of more important because it sabotages and gives meaning to what labor can be or can do. if you actually want to take side of either base or superstructure, superstructure is more the base than the base is the base for Nissan and Bitcoin. But actually they tried to come up with a formula that put base and superstructure together in the same algorithm. Yeah.

I mean it's interesting what the terms of conversion would be in this because in a way we're going there's a bifurcation happening here between two different lines we can take in terms of code and its economic function one of them that is the most I think the most direct Deleuzean road even though they too like we've seen with this speculative materialism site and the work they're doing something that's very intimately tied up with the kind of things you've just been talked about my but I would have thought if we're coming out of this whole question about surplus value code the most direct line that that's taking is to do with science and technology that that capitalism that

the kind of minute semiotic manipulation that capitalism does that is releasing surplus value of code is fundamentally technological in nature and so by these And just like the ORCID needs these very subtle semiotic innovations to capture these massive energetic resources from the WASPs, so these very subtle technological and scientific transitions can suddenly release vast productive capability that Deleuze and Cotteria are utterly convinced I think the whole reason they're using this language are completely irreducible to some notion of simply increasing the command over labor power in a Marxian sense.

You know, it's like the productive forces released by capital is not just that it's increasing its dominion over labor power and therefore extracting ever more efficiently this surplus from this kind of quantity labor power but instead they're releasing these these forces of nature and you know the most extreme ones would obviously be because they're most simple is like biotechnology you know you have a biotechnological breakthrough that allows you to get bacteria to stop producing vaccines for you or some valuable thing and so you know a capitalist entity that was able to do that by just these

semiotic processes essentially you know written in DNA at a certain point is actually releasing these productive forces from nature that were simply not tapped before and tapping them is the surplus value of code. So I'm just saying there's that lineage that's very oriented to all these technical and scientific aspects of capitalism as a process. And then what Mo's talking about now, what Bishler and Nitsan are talking about, what all of this material in the collapse volume is largely concerned with is then these codes in the financial sector and in terms of these high-level, especially derivative-type financial

operations, they too, obviously, it seems, you know, by extremely delicate semiotic innovations are able to release fast capabilities in terms of at least differential economic power and economic resources. Now the articulation between those two different things is not, to me at least, at all clear. I mean, I don't see… again, I'm going to be straw-manning Bichler and it's on here, so I'm relying on Mo to jump on me hard, but it seems to me that they are almost

as naive as Marx is about science and technology. And what I mean by that specifically is that Marx is never more naively liberal than when he's thinking about science and technology. His notion of it is that any notion of intellectual property or limited, restricted access to technological advantage is actually comparable to fraud. He says, look, just as you're not, you shouldn't, when you're talking about why does capitalism make a profit, you shouldn't be thinking about people putting chalk into bread or various kinds of cheap fraudulent practices.

There's a machine here that is systematic and works without having to cut corners, without having to engage in these kind of tricks. He thinks that if a business is making more money than another business because it has access to a superior kind of scientific or technological knowledge, it's just the same in principle as this kind of fraudulence. That science and technology is intrinsically public, that the whole economic sphere should have equal access to it, that the notion of intellectual property plays no role in his analysis at all, that it should diffuse frictionlessly. If you innovate some new type of machinery,

it should diffuse seamlessly across the economy and everyone can do the same thing, and you don't make profit in any significant way by having better machines than the next guy does. So this is a way of basically discounting that whole question from his analysis of capital and just saying you're just missing the point of what capital is about if you think that it's of course it has an extremely dynamic tendency to technological and scientific innovation because it wants to substitute machines for labor and this is something that is like absolutely intrinsic but it doesn't expect to make differential advantage to have

to gain differential advantage from technical and scientific improvement, except in extremely short term. Now, it seems to me, at least on the surface, Bichlund and Itzhan are kind of similar like that. Like if we look at Moh's formula, where is the technicality in that formula? Is it anywhere? I mean, I can't see it. It seems that formula seems like in exactly this sense, purely Marxian, you know, one that sees kind of techno-cultural differentials as being irrelevant to the political economic

analysis, unworthy of specific notice. I mean, do you think I'm wrong about that, Mo? I don't think you are in a sense that they don't necessarily talk about it but it's easy to collapse that into the formula and also their emphasis that capitalism is a changing algorithm. Capitalism itself is like a very important technological innovation. The idea to seize the future, to sabotage production, to, you know, I would just like going by what you said, like, like to, you know, you said to seize it or something, but they actually

literally think that capitalism is more interested in sabotaging labor and production than to to exploit it. Or the exploitation, and this is like the humanist, humanism comes to this, right? All collectivities are usually productive and productivity will usually be benefiting the collective. So capital always has to, capital power always has to sabotage this collectivity to ensure that it does not become something that would be mutually beneficial to the members of the collective which is sort of like a factory or any other kind of social group.

So by throwing it into crisis and by using whatever it can, it sabotages the actual production of value and then imposes its own pricing mechanism on top of it in order to control it. Yeah. I mean this gets us into a really interesting question and it may be I'm following you down this this line and I apologize it's it's getting a little indirect relation to Bitcoin but but take this car factory example that you gave me and that they also use oil companies and all these kind of examples you know it's a bit arbitrary which one we choose which industry that there's a question here about Who are the players of the game?

It's fine to say we've got a zero-sum game. If it's a game of chess, totally clear, there's two players, one of us is going to win or there'll be a draw, but basically my losses are irrelevant as long as your losses are greater because it is an absolutely simple two-player zero-sum game. And if we had a world in which there were nothing but two car factories, two car companies, and so my car company, we're all in depression, but my car company is surviving that depression better than your company, fine. You know, that analysis works fine. It's like a chess game. We can make sense of it as differential power like that. But can we circumscribe the game that clearly?

know there's the two car companies then there's those car companies and the rest of the economy the rest of the domestic economy the rest of the international economy maybe you could say class relations there's the human species against the rest of the biosphere I mean that you know where where do what entitles us to draw this line at the edge of the game because Because it's only when we can draw that line that we can say it's okay if we're all going down the hill because I know who my opponents are and I know who I'm measuring myself against and I know what this differential is about. But as soon as you've got this open-ended ambivalent field of competition where both

of us could be going down and some third party could be benefiting from our mutual misfortune, then you lose the sense of that analysis. And it seems to me even if we're going to restrict ourselves and say, okay, to talk about a competition between the human species and other species on this planet or something is a step too far, but it surely must be the case that if you simply said car company A against car company B is like a chess game, you're missing the fact that a car company is not only playing game against another car company they're playing game against the whole of the economy not only locally but globally and the whole collapse of the car industry

is a foreseeable outcome that would benefit other parties you know the field of competition is is not easily delimitable right and with that we see really the opposite effect where even if they conceive of it themselves as a zero-sum game, the competition in this zero-sum game between them gives rise to technology which has a positive sum value that either ends up destroying them or at the very least what we're seeing is this military competition over time constantly building up the capabilities of each in a way that's not visible to the initial game that they were playing at any point. But I think that's also... So it's not necessarily...

It's not necessarily possible or desirable to excise the zero-sum game from our analysis because it's following that winner-takes-all logic, which arguably drives the military to produce all of these technologies that it's produced. If the whole world goes up in flames, at least we have the internet to connect NORAD and the underground university facility for developing the next NORAD. you know yeah I mean I take it for sure that there is a crucial role for this level of analysis and that a lot of negative sum games are being played my concern is just if that is treated as the sole basis

of strategic decision making then it's easy to oversimplify the strategic environment I mean that military example is a is a is a is a classic one obviously in the sense that you can have this perfectly rational zero-sum logic as long as the world is neatly divided between to antagonist without remainder but as soon as you have some third party who potentially would benefit from the mutual damage inflicted on those two parties on each other then you're in this more complicated strategic environment and that three party model is obviously in the human strategic

history fast you know the whole I mean been in China this is the huge thing for the three kingdoms is their model of what strategic thinking is about where you don't have to party three parties and your strategic decision is always if a fights be then C will benefit and you know can you get B and C to fight each other or that the hot this this triangular logic which of course is or it is still simplification but it means that you know framing zero-sum competition is a complex strategic issue in itself it's not something that we can be taken as as a sheet is yes non-trivial involves

requires a certain surplus and generates one. OK. Yeah, I'm just sort of responding a little bit to this panel. I hope it didn't sound as if I was saying that quote, Deleuze is just taking the piss out of Marx. It's a nice formulation. Sorry to put it that way. It's one that I would distance myself from just a little, perhaps.

Okay. Yeah. You said subverting as opposed to... Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yeah, it's just, I mean, I'm having a really interesting, oh shoot, I have to plug in my computer here, a really interesting conversation with Jake and Amy on the sidelines here about the evolution from Simondon's language to Deleuze's language. And, you know, I just want to, before just accepting the framework, I mean, we're trying to, in a way, develop a new framework here. So the question is what language do we bring with us

on the way to developing this new framework? Do we want to bring the notion of a primary code and then the surplus? I'm sure that word primary isn't used, I'm using it. And what kinds of questions could we, how could we interrogate it, how could we be critical of that language and what ways should we, before just taking it along for the ride. Because apparently, as Jake was suggesting, Simondon is talking about this in terms of technicality and not talking about a surplus of code. So does he get the same thing in different language? Or has Deleuze added something essential that we need? And perhaps he has because he's engaging Marx.

I mean, there's a broader sense of production at play in Deleuze's version because for Simmenden, like what I was talking about was only the schema of concretization of technical objects. He's not talking about biological individuation. He's not talking about a lot of things that Deleuze's notion, I mean, arguably is generalizing that onto, I think. Yeah. Great, yeah. Yeah, so it's interesting, obviously. I mean, there's obviously would have been a case for just being extremely austere and restricting ourselves to the language of the Bitcoin paper. And that would have been an interesting project for this. So, I mean, I think there's lots of different strategic lines one could take on this.

And, you know, that for sure would have been one. and others involved is involved in a kind of certain type of a negotiation between the vocabulary that comes out of different intellectual traditions and you know there's an arbitrariness to that inevitably I certainly aware that I have a sort of arbitrary investment in certain packets of vocabulary because of the fact that they come out of lines of intellectual inquiry that I'm just happened to be more familiar with that than others and whether there's a this actually some kind of a case for an authoritative

vocabulary that would not fall under either of those categories you know it's neither the vocabulary that you or you know it's just imminent to the to actual blockchain phenomenon that you're looking at exactly nor is it something something that's been adopted in order to relate a particular set of discussions together, but is somehow something that can make a case for itself outside of either of those two choices. I'm open to that as a possibility, but I'm not really seeing what that case would be like. Right. Well, here's one way of phrasing a critical question about the notion of a surplus value code.

It seems to me that the very notion of a surplus means that if you were to remove that aspect, that surplus, that it could still function the same. Because it's a surplus. It's not essential to the instructions that are successfully being carried out. So that's not the case, we're talking about it. Well, I think, let me see whether if we just go through, because the example that D&G always used, so let's stick with this one, is the wasp and the orchid example. Now I'm understanding it, that the surplus value in that case is the potential of the

wasp to be a sexual organ for the orchid. Now, and it's surplus because of course the wasp could completely function as a wasp without that function. So if the orchid was not extracting that surplus value of code from the wasp, the wasp would carry on being a wasp. But what it wouldn't be would be a part of the reproductive system of the orchid. So that functionality, that completely supplementary functionality of it being part of a vegetable sexual system is the surplus value. And I think if you set it up that way, it seems to me it squares with what you're saying.

Yeah, it makes perfect sense and I could, yeah. Go on. Yeah, well just to say, of course, you know, it's not necessary. I mean, the wasp, there's an alternative history where the wasp doesn't enter into that relationship with the vegetable world at all and that's a place is not extracted and all of that was coding is dot is as it was one it can only assume so that you know selected for to do wasp stuff you know and wasp sex stuff in particular with other wasps and not with flowers and so you know that would be

that would be a surplus that just not been extracted and I think it's just but by using the word surplus one is just saying it's been translated into this completely new in their terminology machinic assemblage that is arbitrary in the sense that it's completely heterogeneous, the original purpose of all the machinery that is being involved in that. Yeah, I think that's the key for me is think for example what you just did was use the word translate, kind of translating instead of accessing a surplus. It's just a different, you used a different way of talking about that because it makes perfect sense when we talk about the orchid and the wasp. We can apply this language and concretize it and it absolutely

makes sense. But the question is still, we could use other language and concretize it. So therefore, why use surplus? Because in the circles that I'm in right now, the word surplus just scares people. So this is... Yeah, I think that's a completely legitimate... To me, I'm reading it as a kind of tactical issue, really. But it seems to me a completely legitimate tactical issue. And I think the reason that that vocabulary is being used... It's unimaginable to me. I mean, someone can argue about it, and it's not that I don't think it works extremely well forty does but it's unimaginable to me that that is the vocabulary that would be would be being used by to let's retiree if they weren't

in this intimate engagement with the Marxian tradition and that you know that's why specifically that vocabulary is there and it's being used to do the things that want to keep yeah yeah awesome So, and this is just sort of curving it back to the issue of hashing power, and of sort of identity as a form of security as a restriction of surplus value. So then the fact that with one-way hashes you get, allow for digital signatures in the

in the sense that you can't change the message that produced the hash without changing or corrupting the hash somehow. And so that you get a unique hash value out of everything. Is that... Does that imply that the power... Not the... Well... Okay, yeah, so I guess what I'm saying is that it seems as if cryptographic hashes or one-way hashes or a restriction of surplus value or something that is deliberately designed in the way that Ian was kind of suggesting where no surplus value of code is possible. You can't have multiple messages that correspond to this hash. And so the use of computational power to create one-way hashes and to calculate them

is sort of a conversion of this computational power into something that's restricted against surplus value and then gives that power to identity. Does that make sense? though I think that does make sense I think I think so I think that's basically way articulates for sure I'm the and I think if you sort of run it through all these other examples I know this the one that gets you closer to that computer model to do with virus and various things you know that is the the way you set it up there is is the fundamental picture that we get because because if if the if something was engaged in a kind of activity

that could be extracted as a service could be extracted to do hashing in this way then a then did the the machine that was doing that extraction would a but I'm wondering because but I think this is an error and it absolutely this kind of cypher-punk way we'll just own Bitcoin you know it would you it would have simply captured something that just gave it a backdoor to total power within the back within the pic Bitcoin system and you like say say I that there was some weird stuff that bacteria were doing

and through some kind of a weird biotech computer system you could find that just with a few tweaks you could get this tank of bacteria to be to be hashing hashing to help new back to be clients we then you would have just like a up that that company without Bitcoin immediately so the whole thing its its the the function as a kind of proof of work would be gone what what work you do you know you haven't you you you've exploited you've exploited bacteria excited precisely sort of to lose a guitar and way to actually as a side effect of their activity take over the Bitcoin

for you yeah how I Thank you. Okay.

Yeah, I can hear you for sure, Thomas. I'm sorry, I'm just auditing this class. I don't, I, and I have an understand a single word. I have no idea. Oh, okay. I can and it's a whole other language. I have no idea. I mean, I've heard of bitcoins, but their relevance to sort of Marxism to me seems... I hope I'm not interrupting the discussion too much. No, not at all. No, no, you're reanimating the discussion. What would... I mean, is just the fact that it's a cryptocurrency, something that can be used by people anonymously without engaging in the third party.

It's third party, yeah. That's the major sort of element is that it doesn't, it's not traceable like normal capital. Not only that, but that's definitely part of it and we've been discussing that a lot. But I think another aspect of it which makes it interesting is like a form of restriction of an inflated monetary system that keeps doubling and tripling and sort of like the reduction of, maybe reduction is not the right word, but like the transference of value creation to intellectual labor performed by non-human agents like CPUs and graphic cards.

Now correct me if I'm wrong Nick or others and just like shoot me right here. No I think that's good and I think this notion of intellectual labor is even worth underlining because as we've talked about before and this ties up a lot here, it's there's a deliberate attempt to make this hashing activity incapable or intractable to any kind of any kind of shortcut to clever coding or any advances in artificial intelligence or its its its work when when it's called proof of work by Adam back and by such a sheet that committed the whole thing is set up

very very specifically and rigorously to be the work of computers at and I think it's the work of human we it's not something that ever been specified in this way before I mean computers have done lots of mindless grinding activity before but it's only with this notion of proof of work that that actual labor of a computer as something that has no shortcuts, that is this brute force trial and error test of sheer computing power has actually been formalized. And it's something that connects it to time,

much like the labor time and labor theory of value in Marx. I mean, obviously, clock time, as we see, it varies depending on the strength of the power of the processor. But you get a raw sense of processor cycles as being both work and time. JOHN MUELLER, Yeah. The notion of, I think this is a really good point, the notion of work time is exactly the same in marks to do with labor power and in this field to do with computer power. It's exactly the same notion of time. This is funny, we're getting to it finally in the seventh session, but I've been telling everyone from the first class or the first seminar session that the significance of what Nick's doing with this seminar is that he's like in a way, and I'm being like reductionist

here, that like it's sort of like put an almost end to these types of like capitalist power that is characterized by what Nietzsche and Bichler finally understood modern capitalism and modern monetary system kind of like result and kind of like back to some Marxian labor theory value but machinic labor theory value. But machinic intelligent labor because machines always were part of the labor, you know what I mean from day one. machinic labor theory of value or MLTV is not good because it's a particular type of machinic

it's sort of like cognitive machinic labor not like physical machinic labor. Right. Yeah. So in a way it's very itself it's very like Marxist. It has a lot of extremely interesting resonances for sure, I think so. Resonances with a labor theory of value, but in a new and like crazy way. I put up a kind of slightly, a little tweet actually on this, just because it's something that has been nagging at me about this notion of from each according to its computing power

to each according to its proof of work and the the fact that that actual sort of system of rewards in the in the Bitcoin system is so consonant with that classic Marxist formulation and is to me a really interesting phenomenon that's happening here and it's almost like just as on the one hand as we've talked about a lot Bitcoin is obviously a simulation of gold in fine detail to an extraordinary extent, but it's also in a weird sense a kind of simulation, a computer simulation of a quasi-Marxian notion of labor that is being instantiated in computer system.

It's almost like a weird kind of sim-Marxist political economy that is being put together by it. This is definitely collapse 9 or 10. It's like collapse 8 is like moving into another territory. Oh, from the perspective of the blockchain, Bitcoin, or literally just the issuing of coins themselves, is just a means of incentivizing people to keep up the proof of work and the issuing of blocks, which allows the blockchain to be secure and to have, you know, an immodifiable history and inexorable future.

So from, I mean, the sort of Marxist project interpretation of it kind of makes sense if you view it as just a means of incentivizing people to keep up the public infrastructure and to do so in a way that's maximally distributed. And instead of worrying, you know, the primary worry in that equitable distribution being equitability for its own sake, it's that the more equitably it's distributed, the more secure the system is against control by any one party. So there is, I mean, as far as the infrastructure is concerned, is concerned. There is kind of a Marxist logic to it, but it's in order to enable, I don't know, there's almost kind of like a mixed model, you know, state and market, or public

infrastructure and private market kind of idea going on. Yeah, I mean, it would be easy to really go off the rails with this. I definitely think that's right. I mean, it's a strange series of resonances that's, to me, very thought provoking but for sure it's temptation to go in lots of odd and what would be almost psychotic directions about this. I mean to say, you know, it is a kind of Marxism for computers, yes, you know, but I definitely agree lots of hedging needs to be put around that, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

These words are all so, like, funny and wonderful and original, you know, Marxism for computers. It's, like, awesome. Should we put Amy on spot and make, like, ask her to, like, Amy, it's time for you to say something, or you're just still absorbing? Frankly, I'm completely fucked today. I'm just going to sit here in the background and listen to you guys talk. and those stacks of books are bigger and bigger in the background or maybe I'm just seeing them for the first time that is a huge stack yeah the stacks of books behind Amy oh yeah that's stuff I'm supposed to be reading

they've all got bookmarks in them it's really impressive actually yeah I'm working my way through them can I just say about this actually it's really interesting to me that the thing that I just was I never doubted I was just assuming we would of course be talking about we haven't talked about at all which is just I mean I'm sort of I'm impressed that we haven't talked about it I'm not at all being critical which is obviously that from the most straightforward framework of political observation about Bitcoin this allocation of all political power in the system to computing power is vastly problematic

by almost any normal political reference frame. And if you were going to be, I think, Marxist in a way that is kind of cruder than I think we've been but you know that's not necessarily to criticize it in itself its obviously you are just simply allocating directly all these liberal democratic political principles and rights to capital you're just dumping them straight into capital your your that the the M you know the voting power the political power the decision-making power in the blockchain sister is based upon computing power computing Paris us straightforward function

of capital investment computing equipment am so you know in terms if the kind of a in terms if their the preset model a a criticism that would come out of a standard kind of left-wing set of observations on this the pictures so unspeakably ugly that it like is a mind-blowing you know and so I was actually expecting that when we talk about blockchain and power money and all that stuff that this was gonna be the dark star you know everything was all protected around so I think it's quite interesting that that set of concerns hasn't

been something sparking people at all you know when use when you say that make and allocation of all political power and to computing power when you say that how far you gonna go with that because of course we are still the ones circulating Bitcoin the computing power is simply the... the securizing... Right. But for how long? How long what? But for how long it's for humans. Well, I mean, until we're eradicated, no matter what else

besides humans, there's certainly going to be a political... What I'm suggesting or wondering is, isn't there always a political power or of course beyond the computing power. Well, except that the frame, you know, if we're getting back into the kind of critique language in the Kantian sense, the frame, the transcendental structure is what the computing power is deciding. So as you say, there's all kind of human agents and whatever other kind of agents have crept into the system we can't know because everyone's wearing a mask. We can only assume that the people involved are still at this stage mostly human beings. But the game that they're playing, whatever transactions and commercial interactions they're

playing in the Bitcoin system, the rules of the game are being set by the Nakamoto consensus. And the Nakamoto consensus, which is a final tribunal for the structure of reality as far as the Bitcoin system is concerned is decided by this vote of computing power. And as I say, I don't see how computing power can't be taken as a direct expression of capital. If you want to put computing power into the Bitcoin system, you have to just buy better, more advanced, more powerful computers. There's no other way that you can do it. And there's a whole obviously interesting commercial and technological system now evolving

on the edge of the system to do with the mining industry like that. But it's a proxy for capital of such a direct kind I wouldn't really have thought that that would be controversial. So we are playing inside a game that the computing power is perpetually deciding to reauthorize as a game. And there's no other or transcendent authority that can change that game without mobilizing more computing power on its behalf. So capital is that which organizes the distribution of the ability to buy computing power and

deploy it for the purposes of this game, then capital itself, like pre-Bitcoin capital, is sort of an externality to the economics of the Bitcoin game. I mean, that's like one way of accounting for the fact that we haven't brought it up is that we've stayed so much within the mindset and sort of the internal terms and logic of Bitcoin, for which this whole question of, you know, who has computing power, by what means have they bought it in the past? It's sort of like primitive accumulation of land. And now the question of, okay, yeah, sure, you're trading around property that is somebody's property, but where did you get this property to begin with? Oh, you know, we wiped out the Indigenes. Yeah, yeah. No, it's a great thing, this question of primitive accumulation.

That's exactly right. Yeah, so the investment of computing power into the Bitcoin system is the primitive accumulation of the Bitcoin system. And it works exactly all the debates and all the arguments. I'm overusing this word, but I think, again, it works. They translate across perfectly, you know, in the sense that within the Bitcoin system is the perfect hyper-liberal commercium in the sense that primitive accumulation is unquestionable once you're inside that system. It makes no sense at all. And so, yeah, within the system you're just asking how many Bitcoins would it take to upgrade my ASIC processors to improve my Bitcoin mining capacity.

Right. But so I'm more interested in the question, so Amy brought up DAOs. if we just sort of, I mean, and this is for me, maybe, and I think for the Bitcoin community for the most part, that it's intriguing, this question of, you know, what are the ramifications of certain people getting a bunch of Bitcoins because they had processing power, but it's more interesting what is, at any given moment, the spot distribution of ability to affect, because it's like, yeah, in the Bitcoin context, we're more worried about attack and about integrity than we are about distribution. So with Ethereum, one of the things that people are saying is a problem is that in order to compute this giant-ass global state all the time, you're going to have to give up some of the P2P aspects. And, you know, absent some other protocol-level solution,

you're going to have to have dedicated workhorse nodes that have special hardware to be able to compute this, and you're not going to have a widely distributed, you know, full mining subset of the commercial network. and so the two aspects so it seems as if this issue you know the Marxism for computers, computational labor power so forth is all kind of floating in a vacuum and is just translation until you reach the point where you have a question like well you've got autonomous entities, corporations or you know ways for agents to be autonomous that are dependent upon something which for technical reasons you know may or may not have to be P2P versus concentrated and dedicated nodes, and that's where you get

a real political question of how this computational power is distributed, and not really until that point. But it is also, you know, it's flip side, or the flip side of the distribution of computational power is the level of P2P-ness, if we can use that neologism of the network. and that's sort of, that's where, that's Bitcoin's version of the question of distribution of resources is really the question of whether the network is actually P2P or the protocol is actually P2P. Do you have any comment on that? Because I'm pretty interested in like this question of, you know, can smart contracts really be implemented on a fully decentralized system? You know, can we do that, the necessary computations of state without having an issue of dedicated hardware?

where how does quantum computing play into that, which also threatens the security of hashing algorithms. Right. I mean, that's getting into some really exotic territory, for sure, isn't it? I mean, yeah. I'm not even sure how to begin thinking about the quantum computing thing, which is a problem, because it's not as if it's some distant, unimaginable possibility. Yeah, yesterday they found out how to correct both kinds of errors in a single lattice over at Intel or something, I think. Right. Yeah. But stepping back from quantum computers just practically for one minute, and back to the

mainline of your question about this whole relationship is the P2P infrastructure actually sustainable in this in this system and how does Ethereum play into that because obviously so I've got a really annoying mosquito right on your forehead right now I missed it because Because Ethereum is where we get into this weird zone where you stop having a computer proletariat, don't you? I mean, it's like the hashing machines are just the workhorses of this system, and they're

designed that nothing interesting can ever come out of a hashing machine. The only thing that can ever come out of a hashing machine is Bitcoins. And for bitcoins to become something interesting then requires a completely different type of computational ecology. And that's what Ethereum is about on a certain level, isn't it? These DAOs which will then be doing something, they will be trading bitcoins and they will then be getting us into the same zone as, for instance, all these exotic financial structures that we've got in our existing economy, while the actual hashing power is simply, in the

most fundamental sense, just an infrastructure. So nothing of any kind of exotic complexity could possibly come. As these machines evolve, they're going in the other direction. You start off that, as people say in these stories from the early days of Bitcoin, you could do this stuff on your laptop. If you were in 2009 or whatever, you could have a computer that was actually an interesting machine. And one of the things it could do was be producing bitcoins. So your computer has not actually been turned into an idiot savant at that point by the

bitcoin thing. But now it totally has. These latest machines that are just simply hashing machines are capable of nothing at all but these proof-of-work tests. The technological phylum that they're involved in is this kind of specialization that are turning them from something that you can sort of treat as if it were a brain to something like a kind of computational liver. Yeah, just to the muscle, exactly, right. It just does this thing and it makes no sense out of that framework at all.

And so the complementary side of that is Ethereum. know and it is this completely inverse and reciprocal evolution of thinking about computers where they will be economic agents Turing complete whose what they might end up doing is completely unimaginable right now has a source inside the network and not just like previously all the novelty came from human transactions then announced to the blockchain we were the source of involved the things that the hashing uninterestingly, you know, caused to exist, made real, you know, according to your original formulation. And now inside the reality process itself, we have novelty.

But at the same time, I mean, it doesn't necessarily change this issue of, like, physical CPUs just being infrastructure, because what's really generating the novelty and what's becoming autonomous are these contracts and these programs which are really distributed state across a lot of computers which may be, and this is kind of the argument, it may be necessary that we have these single function workhorse computers in order to process a state in which those smart contracts can be autonomous. Right. Yeah. And the question is obviously what like we've got a lot of concepts now where the boundaries are being the the outer walls of these concepts being pulled apart I pick we just don't know where the stock money with identity with a whole

a whole bunch of previously kinda familiar concepts it's no longer clear where they and away they they stop and obviously a contract is exactly this kind of thing I once you got a smart contract and what you know how confident are we that we have any idea what a contract is at all I mean the notion of it as a contract is just a genealogical description it got built it got put together it got instantiated because it was doing the sort of thing that contracts always been for and from a human point of view yeah it serves as a contract that's that's its kind of justification originally but a smart contract by definition is an autonomous

an autonomous thing it has its own it then has its own sort of evolutionary story to to tell that we cannot even begin to protect with the judge in the index of what you're saying is that you say an autonomous and then you kind of trail off like an autonomous what autonomous because the horizon is and disappearing into this misty zone absolute digital obscurity that's totally right Yeah, and it just seems to me that it's a really, really central point where this whole language of, you know, of the politics of computers, qua like metal boxes with processors inside of them that contribute a certain amount of computing power, that's all off or kind of a dead end.

because the computational entities whose autonomy, whose political relevance we're talking about are not boxes, servers things that can be bent across different structures yes, yes totally and it's interesting to me how much of the there's a whole bunch of things that people expected they were going to have time to talk about and politically discuss about computers and politics that are being preempted. Like, for instance, this whole question about what decision process would we go through to decide whether we're going to treat them as people, to treat them as agents, to give

them legal rights, as if we were going to have some wonderful, relaxed process of reflection and sort of ethical political debate about, and now we've got DAOs. They're already corporate persons. They've already got a legal identity. All of these decisions are already over. Kind of already made, but now realize. Yeah. The fact these things cannot exist without those decisions already having to be totally preempted by the very fact of these things existing. So you're then cast into this weird retrospective mode of there was a missed discussion that maybe we could now have in some weird nostalgic mode about what were we thinking these things were going to be like or how they were going to appear or all of that.

I mean, it seems to be a huge point that this science fiction staple about this crisis sort of moment for human life on Earth, about the moment where we, in a ceremonial fashion, recognize the personhood of an artificial intelligence, has just vaporized without anyone even really commenting on it very much. I mean, I might have missed that, but it seems to me that it's just like gone without, you know, everyone was lined up in their fancy dress ready for this great exciting moment to happen, whether they were going to throw custard pies at this thing or cheer it. and instead the whole celebration's been called off

and instead we're saying this thing is now, you know, going to be managing certain contracts for you or engaging in, you know, it's now your legal representative in cyberspace or something of this kind. Right, like Strauss, you already decided this 100 years ago before you even had networks to begin with. No, like Strauss does this perfectly in Accelerando, you know, the velociraptor in the imaginary bar, and the journalist is asking them when the singularity happens and he said it happened in 1986, 1987 when ARPANET first came online yeah definitely

I was thinking about the concept of sovereignty, and I was wondering if that sovereignty is basically just totally out of the picture as a relevant concept since computing power, political power being computing power, it can't break its own laws. It is what it is univocally. Right. Yes, I don't know, it's interesting. Sovereignty is obviously an extremely important

but also very hazy concept in this, isn't it? I totally agree that to talk about power without talking about sovereignty is is also I'm extremely glad that you put it up but can you have can you have a sovereignty without discretion is that that's partly the question can you have a sovereign non-discretion and because that is the model of algorithmic government actually, or I should say algorithmic governance to generalize it to the maximum. I don't know about that. It's interesting. Is it just our romanticism that couples those notions together?

When we say, to be sovereign is to have discretion, is that a coupling that occurs just because Because it seems for certain intuitive reasons that the sovereign should have that kind of extreme metaphysical liberty, which in a way is what is being called upon, isn't it? Whereas obviously there's just a complete collapse of that in this case. But sovereignty in the sense of being the supreme authority over the fundamental structure

of reality, at least in this domain, is not only preserved but reinforced. So that decoupling is quite dramatic. I don't know. It seems as if... I mean, and definitely, you're right. Those two have been coupled in critiques of sovereignty and in theory of it. But it seems like if you asked anyone with power, does that give you absolute authority over the reality conditions of that power or the ability to modify it? And even if you went back to French monarchs and you said, could you just modify this system of power arbitrarily? Is that what you can do as king? and you got a candid answer from them, it'd be, hell no. Really, having power

is being the one who gets hanged if he makes the wrong modifications. Reality. It's ultimate vulnerability to the vulnerability of that system. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. I mean, it obviously is a romantic trope, going back as far as you want, isn't it? The notion of the absolute sovereign. I mean, the insane Roman emperors that I think play this role really nicely, where it's just that they are treated as being able to explore the absolute, absolute horizon of art and limited discretion, which is in sort of conventional terms just abuse of power, power without any limitations on its abuse whatsoever. And it's a kind of fantasy that is kind of intrinsic to that, and maybe is

intrinsic to a certain kind of humanism, a certain sort of construction of human dignity requires that we have this figure of the pure despot who is capable of infinite abuse. But I would agree with you that in fact it's deeply problematic. And of course, you know, I mean, again, without wanting to just bang on about Marx too much, Marx basically evacuates it almost as radically in principle as Bitcoin does in fact, in the sense that his notion of what bourgeois sovereignty is has almost no more discretion to it than the Bitcoin

protocol. I mean, you know, the bourgeoisie rule in order to maintain the market economy according to a set of principles that are so preset and are so outside their discretion that they can be described by political and economic philosophy clearly. And, you know, so it's not, for instance, within that whole, within the whole of the Marxist tradition there's there's almost no romance of sovereignty at all yeah and this seems to be an area and I mean I think that maybe this is a biased

impression but it seems as if in a lot of areas we we've kind of shown leftist analysis to be inadequate to this situation and to be relatively inadequate versus like civil libertarian, the cypherpunk kind of area. And maybe that's just an artifact of, you know, the cypherpunks having been the first, you know, originated at first to talk about it. But this seems like an area where the leftist analysis has a leg up. Because on the other side, on the right side, you get these, you know, in the United States especially, like individual sovereign, like people who claim to be sovereign citizens. And so they go through this whole rigmarole of like, You can buy these passports online that are like your sovereign citizen passport. And actually, my cousin gave up his U.S. citizenship in favor of one of these things.

That was literally the stupidest thing any person related to me has ever done. Because now we can't come back to the U.S. But anyway, that aside, that shows that it's a complete fantasy. Declaring yourself a sovereign citizen in no way less means the DEA is not going to knock in your front door or that you're going to be able to decide what borders you can and can't cross or anything like that. Right. It's not just, it's not a declaration. It's not, you know, metaphysics does not extend to actual discretion in the concrete world. And, you know, the comment I made when Ian first brought up sovereignty, like in the text, was that, you know, in a real way, if we take sovereignty in this sort of Marxist sense of being, you know, the ability or the being in the position of deploying the protocol,

basically, you know, the bourgeois having custody of the conditions of possibility of the market economy or whatever, then sovereignty is control of territory, which can be in a military sense as well as a bourgeois sense, you know, territory in a Deleuzean sense that covers the physical and the economic. And then we've got key access, the individual, because then the person behind the keys can be turned into anything if the sovereignty of key access is violated. So it's not really discretion so much as the prevention of this sort of infinite surplus invading the vacuum behind the identity representation. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the relation of the owner of the key to the key

is the relation that taps directly into the way that this relation is discussed within the transcendental philosophy tradition. Like Schopenhauer's whole thing is that as a phenomenon, as a phenomenal being, you're completely constrained and determined by the structures of the phenomenal world. and your that the will which is obviously not private or personal or whatever is absolutely software in the sense of it creates the universe only only ass thing in itself only a something that is

radically outside the entire structure of the physical universe you know outside space outside time outside into situation you know so so this which obviously we've talked about before this way in which I'm the cryptographic relation of your real life I D versus your avatar reef rehearses and replays this relationship between the transcendental and empirical ego is also a place where this question of sovereignty it played out and so I mean you are sovereign in theory

to get back to Jake's earlier point to give your private key to another person or I mean I'm trying to think of a single act that would be we comparable to Caligula's most extreme moment than handing over your private key to some random person that you find on the blockchain but that's that's my candidate for it and so in in principle there is still that sovereignty held sovereignty in relation to the blockchain by something outside the blockchain but it doesn't obviously extend to messing with the protocol It's only to do with whether or not one, the fact that one enters or does not enter the

system is the axis of sovereignty. Does that make the language of negative and positive and zero-sum games, in a sense, does that make sovereignty a zero-sum question? In the sense that you can't acquire more sovereignty. You can only lose it and you can only maintain it. There's only this game of incentives for me to attack your sovereignty, to steal your identity, or for me to hold on to my own and not to engage in this one, you know, what would be a positively sovereign act,

which is to give away my sovereignty by transferring either accidentally or deliberately my private key. Yeah. Like in the same way that, you know, the military's ability in theory to destroy the protocol, to mount a 51% attack, you know, if they wanted to preserve their sovereignty over the economy in the sense of being able to collect taxes for funding, so that access, you know, the entire market is our territory and not terra incognita, would seem to support the idea that sovereignty, you know, inside and outside the system, or in a way that crosses the bounds of this one system, is a zero-sum question. Is that maybe the case? Yes, I think so.

I think so. I think so. Because it would be hard to say if we're talking about sovereignty, we're not talking about power. And then there's the question of, well, do we want to talk in a way, do we want to talk about power in a way that just on this level, rates, say with Bishler and Nitzan on this basic definition that you're talking about power if you're talking about zero-sum relations I mean so I see no reason at all to deny them that or you know to deny that language that so I mean there's a whole other sort of strain that I'm

sorta used to at the moment which attached to the to put it in a soundbite sovereignty is conserved that there's a conservation law of sovereignty which I think is very attached it's not quite the same as that is a zero-sum some game but it's related to sort of lock it into a conservation law so it's not economically variable in a naive sense you can't you can't grow or shrink sovereignty it's radically a question about distribution. But that doesn't seem to accord with the idea of key acts,

of key control as sovereignty, or of the porosity of territory as an indirect or inverse measure in relation to sovereignty, because if you just publicize your keys, right? That identity, your sovereignty over that identity has been destroyed. And it's not that no one has gained sovereignty over that, but yours... Oh yeah, isn't it kind of Boolean your key access thing? I mean, you don't, you can't ever have partial, you can't actually ever be a partial holder of keys, except by some, I mean there are complicated arrangements that can share these cryptographic identities. is but I think for the purpose of this argument we can just say you either control your key

or you don't your private key I mean it's like you know your relation in that way is one of indivisible sovereignty you can you can sacrifice it like you say you can give it away you can you can dispense with your private key but you can't you can't increase by some sort of economic value, your level of, you know, you're either the holder of a key or you're not. Isn't that right? It's like, you know, if we're on the chess game example again, there's the economic dimension. You can lose certain pieces, you can lose certain bits of territory, things can go badly or not badly. But if it's like you are the black player in chess and you're in a computer game and

you have access that means that you are making the moves for the black side and that was hacked so that white makes a move, you try to make a move, but you can't. You're blocked from it. Someone else coming in from the side takes over your pieces, whether you're winning or losing and starts playing the black side in your place. The difference between those two dimensions is this difference, it seems to me, between this sort of economic and this dimension of sovereignty. You're sovereign over the black pieces even if you're being wiped out until the point that you lose that game of chess, unless you lose control over those pieces and some other

other player comes in and actually take you know removes your key control from being the person who is actually able to make those moves so it's those two very different things between you know winning or losing the game and actually having the keys so that you are in unquestioned boolean control of one of that of that side yeah and it was that makes sense Definitely. And it seems as if that's sort of guaranteed, or the applicability, unique applicability of that logic is guaranteed by the assumption that you always know and can know immediately on face whether you were the initiator of a certain move. So, like, whether you were actually in control of the game.

And now I want to... I'm tempted to suddenly jump and compare that to, like, verifiability to the other side of the asymmetry where it's easy to confirm that it was actually your private key that was used to sign a message. But I actually think that's almost too facile. I don't know. I guess the point of view that I was initially looking at it in was one that's sort of more quantum, where you don't know, at least maybe not until the end of the game or whatever, whether any particular move, you can't be certain that it was initiated by you. you're not sure, like, so in your own life, you know, you're not sure who was the agent of certain outcomes happening to you. You know, like, do I have sovereignty over the conditions of my own everyday existence, right?

Then you've got this question of, you know, is the government controlling it or corporations controlling it? This is one of these sort of classic, like, everyday politics kind of questions. The state in which I live, a sovereign one. and it would seem that relative to what you were talking about just then where you've got a chess game and you have a determinate fact of the matter as to whether you controlled moves, that is a quantum logic versus a Boolean one, or a paraconsistent logic versus one in which contradiction always leads to explosion. If you're familiar with proof that zero equals one and therefore anything, whatever position X yeah yeah I think it's difficult I think that this gets us into

the heart of all of these complicated questions about empirical identity because you coming out of the whole cryptographic world you might want to just restructure this whole sense of identity rather than the way you sing this question about am I author of my own life or what other forces might be involved or all of these things it's more that given certain given certain games or given certain responsibilities to undertake certain moves an agent is presupposed at certain points there has to be someone who signs a certain piece of paper at a certain time or provides a certain signature or a certain time or

it takes responsibility for certain gesture there are these kinda points where an agent is us well what are you gonna do and that rather than that being some natural self that just simply is going through these points it's rather that there is a there is a an avatar that must be constituted in order to satisfy these particular these particular I'll say responsibilities but I mean responsibility in the sense that you know like say you are you've got a computer chest thing and there's two different people playing who can play this game chess somewhere

and so this going to be a black player and a white I'm that is coming out of the game itself it's not you can say 0 you know I play this game and therefore I am black there I am the white but on the other coming at it the other way around the game itself the way it's constituted presupposes a player must be must be presupposed in order for this game to to go forward and so that at the point that you start playing that game then you have a certain structure subjectivity that you know from your point of view comes from your life and comes from a

whole biographical and biological set of presuppositions but coming from the system that position is something that the game is allotted you know right it's the game itself that actually sets up structures and a lot a particular position of subjectivity you've been supplied as the player the game calls for yes exactly and that and you know there will that that what the game calls for is completely determinate in the structure of the game and so how much you know if we went through the narrative that you just guy how much of that narrative about I'm doing this I'm doing that who's or you know who's responsible for this what is moving through a series of these games that are

actually pre-structured and have a subject position that must be occupied exactly okay which is another because circles us back to go a little bit as this the subject constitute do lose and for cow is this sort of constant on indirected movement through a series of subject forming games throughout or be yeah like an off vector through all these games and that's sort of like those where I was about to get to smart contracts is that with, you know, an unbreakable cryptographic divide between whatever, you know, called for agent, whatever is supplying the decisions, in the context of smart contracts where novelty and decision making that doesn't originate outside, but

you can't tell whether it originates outside or inside or, you know, how far back in the past the originating signal goes or whatever, it seems like you actually have a fundamental inchoateness on the other side of the cryptographic divide. Why? Once you take into account that insecurity is fundamental, like all keys are not going to be securely possessed by particular agents, so you've got both internal novelty that you can't clearly distinguish from external novelty and a fundamental situation of insecurity, there's a certain point at which you must be able to have actions, game actions, you know, originating in this game space, which is the global state that, you know, you almost can't tell ontologically or epistemologically,

just don't have a clear originating agent. You've got a margin of indeterminacy, which is like that of reality, you know, experienced by humans. Yeah. But I think the, because the agent is becoming more and more specifically crystallized as an avatar, then this zone of indeterminacy becomes, it's like, you know, within the system of avatars or the system of masks the mask is is specified with greater and greater exactness and so what can then come and put on that mask that that's where you're going to sort

of have the indeterminacy and it's I mean again in a sort of a good way it's a kind of disciplinary question you know it's a good that there's a responsibility again if if you're going to put on a mask for engaging in in the in the actions required of a certain avatar are you are you properly cultivated or trained you you know, to be able to competently operate that avatar. And all the time these DAOs are going to be implicit in them in a way, is that they're going to be a bit supercilious

about their capacity to do this stuff relative to you, I think. I mean, there's been a lot There's been a lot of recent stuff about, this might be my translation of the language because I think it's just fantastic about secretaries. I think just as a computer, and I apologize if I've already said this, this is premature Alzheimer's, which I apologize for. but just as the word computer it used to be a person and then became a a machine I think secretary is absolutely I mean it's like the its

a function that these what applications art utterly teleologically carry towards that will just do this stuff online consistently efficiently, competently in a way that I don't think I'm talking for myself but I honestly think this is widely shared just losing the capability to do that you know you've got a hundred different passwords you totally lose track of how to get into a whole bunch of different accounts and how one account is relating to another account and what account needs your attention at a particular time this vast amount of avatar management that's just becoming overwhelming is something that is just designed for

a as I say secretary I'm I would be stunned if in a few decades when people say secretary they automatically mean a kind a cyberspace application and the notion that they were once human secretaries just is a kind of funny historical kind of anecdote and so yeah this might seem a little bit of a digression but it seems to me this clicks on a lot to the stuff that you're talking about you know once this thing is just you you click in this secretary to do so to to ensure competence in avatar management then the whole question about your relationship to the avatar is transformed.

Right, because if you combine it, I mean, if you think the full sense of secretary is time management, you know, time control, dividing it up, like who you're going to meet with, when, and so forth, and what's important for you to do. Once you integrate time management into that, then it's sort of like, you know, it becomes, you use the term secretary diamond. The diamond in Greek, that's the division of fates. It's that which shapes you towards your destiny, you know, destines man. So it's something that, you know, a synthetic software agent that's shaping your time and your identity as well back across the divide. And I'm sure will be totally embraced. I mean, you know, if I could get one of these things to run vast chunks of my life now, I would be just reaching for my credit card at this very moment.

I mean, it's like... Sorry. Yeah, no, that was a complete... Probably a whinge, actually, if I was going to define it as a similar term. So, how are we doing, guys? I actually just came to say, actually, we're now... Sorry about this beautiful like Diane Warwick pouring in through if you can hear it. It's like coming from the outside. It's a beautiful sunny day here in New York and somebody's playing like music. But anyways, maybe this is a good time to end because I think because of the time constraint

a lot of people have already left. And they also buy privately or here on the sidebar and we're over time. So I don't know what you guys feel. Can we end it and copy the conversation from the sidebar into the classroom, and then we can continue on there. And yeah, see you guys all next week for the final session of this seminar. JOHN MUELLER, Yes. So great. Thanks to everybody, as usual. Thanks to everybody. Thanks, Nick. Thanks, everybody. Have a good week. JOHN MUELLER, All the conversations. So talk to you soon. OK, great. Have a good week. Bye, Nick. Bye.