OK, I thought I was going after Laura, but that's totally... Oh, another Nick, sorry, I apologize. We're drowning in Nick's. Wait a second, we're going to get the sound happening. Thank you. Just give us a second, Nick. I think we can hear you now if you want to try. You're talking to me? Yes, we're talking to you. You're on. Okay, sorry. I'm a bit confused about the schedule here.
So I'm now. OK. No problem. OK. Well, I'd like to, first of all, subscribe to Mo's conviction about the importance of the blockchain. That's a definite title element behind, I think, the reason everyone's here. certainly it's a conviction on my part that makes this a crucial topic to talk about. So I've got two little elements that I've picked up about what's going on here in advance,
which is this title, The Spatial Politics of a Blockchain, and a blurb saying that we're talking here about the triangular relation between decentralized technology, architecture and the office form. So I hope that I don't leave the orbit of these agenda items. I'll probably be approaching them from a somewhat abstracted point of view. and what I really want to talk about is a space-time and succession I'm and leading into it shot with three changed questions I'm
and the first one comes its a them sort of ordered hopefully in a in this a series of descending trivialities so them first one is the most trivial apparently but I think it's a actually has more content than it might seem and when we're asking what is Bitcoin and this is something I don't know how a immersed in this everyone is at this event not probably gonna was certain level of immersion but I'm among I'm sure other people very happy to go into more expository motive if that's helpful at some stage about how this actually works but it's very helpful
that Satoshi Nakamoto's paper is structured as a definition because the paper is called Bitcoin colon a peer-to-peer electronic cash system now I think all those elements extremely a merit extraordinary a excavation and there's a lot going on there I won't be taking into all of those I want to just for this first question to stick with the very first word the indefinite article a peer-to-peer cash system electronic cash system I'm and that weirdly is an element that people might think has dated more than the rest since
2009 I'm because a huge argument a that's racking the world crypto currency in general Bitcoin in particular moment is the extent to which Bitcoin is the blockchain and this is a question that isn't philosophical question in a in a straightforward sense is it it's a historical question is a technical question it's an economic question and it it's a question about whether a the intrinsic dynamics of Bitcoin are such that it will produce the network effects necessarily to to actually produce a definite
article blockchain the blockchain so are we talking about the blockchain or block chains with each one being a blockchain I'm I'm gonna move on immediately to my second question and this one is is becomes acute by the fact that now it's it's almost four o'clock in Shanghai I'm and one of the close synonyms for space-time is obviously time zones and so we're in different time zones and and
if we transfer this question about the definite article into into this particular area or moment it makes a difference between the question what is time a grandiose traditional philosophical question and what is the time which is the which seems to be practical relatively trivial again it's one that where dealing with it's anyone I've had to deal with to make sure I'm here at the right time so just by adding that the death article between between these two phrases between these two little questions I'm
you actually produce the entire a rift of ontological difference the whole of critique is there you know between what is time and what is the time is the difference between time as such the being of time and what is the time a fact moment an empirical element so you this slight modification slight insertion opens actually this gigantic rupture and the element of time that is going to carry on through this the actual
core definition of time is succession and succession we know immediately is relevant to what we're doing because it's a translation almost directly call the chain in blockchain what the chain in the blockchain is is a succession of blocks and my third little question now actually getting now massively grandiose actually before introducing them the space-time question is to ask about the coincidence between
five times and I think the way we order terms and in particular way we think relations of coincidence or succession between these terms is going to structure explicitly or implicitly the kind of political questions and grand theoretical questions about what the blockchain is where we are what it might do what we want it to do so these five terms which as I say I think everyone is going to disagree
about the ordering these things and in that disagreement ordering or as I say particularly coincidence and non coincidence is going to be whole of our political economic space so this first times capitalism globalization modernity critique and throwing in for most Skynet artificial intelligence I'm a huge range options there is available what the one I think whole position is just argue for the extreme coincidence those five terms are basically the same thing being seen from different aspects but then particular political and ideological
projects emerge when people try to I'm I'm de-synchronize them and so one might be tempted to argue from it to T to capitalism a capitalism after modernity post globalization that is still part of modernity a modernity after critique all the whole variation and set permutations that are available there and organizing all the first things I'm at all terminologically fixing them is what we do with the post prefix you know if we want to immediately a fix our agenda and give it some definite
form a form that's kinda particularly susceptible to being carried by by political excitement or by fashion and you attach a post prefix to it post modernity being one that we've already I'm and counter the law implicitly I think also post critique or as we'd be more familiar with that post Cantonism and I'm not going to obsess here on the philosophical issue it's something that I'm very willing to follow up people want to talk about it but the argument that I want to make is the blockchain
makes it impossible to be a post cantium this is a kind of shocking from a philosophical point I think shocking outcome and from a and again from the philosophical point of view it makes the blockchain something a immense importance So let me just try and give some grounds for why I might say that. Kant deals about with space and time in very sort of complicated ways, especially time slips around and does a whole bunch of different things. So this is a nutshell version of it, but I think it's sort of historically relevant to
the way things have developed, which really focuses on what Kant calls the transcendental aesthetic, his basic argument about the two forms of space and time. And he defines space in terms of geometry. That's to say he thinks that geometry formalises the necessary structure of space and shows us in doing that, that space is actually a subjective structure that is imposed upon the world. And similarly, arithmetic, again dominated by succession, is the same in relation to time as geometry is to space. And the difference between geometry and arithmetic is the formal
mathematical definition of the difference between space and time now the reason why I think it's become a general syndrome for people to think that post-Kantianism is not only possible but almost mandatory and something that is so inevitable that it fades into the sort of intellectual background of our culture is the fact that the transcendental aesthetic as Kant set it out comes to seem implausible and it comes to seem implausible first of all because Kant seems to take Euclid's
parallel postulate as if it were an axiom that's to say he he he assumes that the geometry that Euclid laid out was a timeless necessary structure geometrical understanding and obviously in the modern period the parallel posture comes under question people play around with different versions different geometries based on varying the parallel posture and this seems to suggest that Kant simply can't be trusted to tell us what is necessary in these in these basic forms of sensibility but in even more devastating challenge
takes place with the construction of space-time and space-time is as everyone knows huge I mean Einstein is used as an icon of a kind of ultimate modern cultural possibility that that at least reflects if not in this up I'm more fundamental a driving trends towards relativization and a collapse of a certain a modernist optimism maybe as a sort of doorway therefore into post-modernity and there's a reference I'd really like to
introduce here a book that I think is very widely and justifiably respected and and I think is makes a massive contribution to this which is by Peter Gallison it's called Einstein's clocks, Poincaré's maps, empires of time. It's a truly excellent book and what Gallison argues there is that Poincaré was up dealing with exactly the same historical problem the Einstein was dealing with but dealing it with it in a way that was inflected through a certain series of bureaucratic
and administrative practical concerns that were not primary for Einstein but what totally a converging upon the same set a real issues which were inescapable issues all again you have come back to these these five terms they were inescapable issues of of capitalism and globalization and modernity which is to say why he called why he in his title he talks about the empires of time in France where one carry is obviously working there is a of hugely distributed global imperial apparatus that is wanting
to standardize time for it's just purely practical reasons I'm and in doing so it comes across again extremely practical questions if you've got a to clocks in different parts of the empire or widely distributed in space and you're trying to actually establish that they are both synchronized you have an extremely intricate technical question because any signal that you send from one clock to another clock to check whether they're actually keeping time properly is itself going to take time even if obviously in the
electrical age you're sending signals at approximately light speed you still have a time lag and this problem on this extremely just straightforward technical bureaucratic level of making sure that your clocks are telling the same time that you have achieved actual practical time standardization is Einstein's problem seen from another facet Gallison's point is you're not dealing with two different issues here, you're dealing with the same issue exactly and Einstein as the sort of abstract physicist is very happy
to see it as a problem of physics, a problem of speculative theory. Poincaré is never willing to abandon that problem as a practical administrative problem. And Gallison says this is why we know Einstein as the great theorist of space-time and Poincaré is seen as somehow having missed the ball, somehow failed to quite reach the proper level of abstraction on this problem. in failing to reach this level. Sorry, was that? Yeah, I was wondering. I mean, you've been speaking a lot about time, and I was hoping that we need to move on for Laura quite soon. So I was wondering if you might be able to kind of bring this
back to, let's say, to space quite quickly, and then we can move on, and then we can continue this discussion. yeah I'll wrap it up quickly ok the blockchain solves the problem of space-time the problem is space-time is that according to Einstein and the notion of space-time says there is no such thing as absolute success therefore there is not even time in any distinctive sense distinct from a dimension that's why space time is treated as a four-dimensional
structure dimensions are both geometrically treated as a cripple this is in the theorization of the blockchain the problem is approached through something called the Byzantine general problem and the Byzantine general problem is exactly the same as the problem relativistic space time let me just quote from Satoshi Nakamoto responding to a question by James A Donald on the cryptography mailing list where a lot of blockchain here was put together
he says every general in that this is in the Byzantine generals problem just by verifying the difficulty of the proof-of-work chain can estimate how much parallel CPU power per hour was expended on it and see that it must have required the majority of the computers to produce that much proof work in the allotted time then a little ellipsis the proof-of-work chain is how all synchronization distributed database and global view problems you've asked about are solved and these problems
synchronization distributed database and global few problems they are the problems that relativistic space time says are impossible to solve relativistic space time is the theory that these problems are insoluble and instead of them instead of a solution to these problems you have general relativity so so the claim here we probably don't have time I won't try to justify it further than just saying this is the claim being made but the claim being made here is that the blockchain is post space-time and that means we are not post-Kantian
we're not post-Kantian because the Kantian transcendental aesthetic is not disrupted by Einstein Minkowski spacetime instead it is the draft is the blueprint it is a precursor for the spacetime of the blockchain which has now been instantiated by the Bitcoin technology so we we have now artificial absolute time for the first time ever in human history and and this therefore is scrambling these narratives is scrambling our sense of
pre and post and you know what can what is the actual set of successions in the most concrete sense with the so sorry I apologize if I if I over stretched my time limits and I'll stop there.