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 like a modest language there I know trusted third parties there in a transcendent hops 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 PTP distributed system it's democratic and but it then went on to say and this is a step 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 is 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 of hashing, of computing power, that The votes have to be delegated to computing power because identity is not strong enough any longer to preserve that function. It would simply be lost immediately if individual identity was meant to be the anchor of a democratic
voice, of a democratic vote. And so the vote is moved to computing power. And this is to me now, at this second step, we're immersed in the topic. That's where we are. This is what Bitcoin is about. It's about the fact that hashing power within 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 these essays and materials but what this now means what is doing the fact take what is the unit of democracy and is now being defined by by hashing power by computing power I'm there's a sort of little digression which is which is I think by no means irrelevant which comes up and I think I definitely linked this which was 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 few people on on us a tashi no come out says very short little set of references at the end of the Bitcoin paper Adam back gets a mention have as one of one of the eight is number six for this for this and creation is called hash cash and hash cash 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 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 of the whole information wants to be free mantra that we get out of the very earliest days 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 it's totally useless in fact extremely annoying digital junk so to try and say he's Adam back I think and trusting Brunton on this a little bit and really thought spam could destroy the Internet you know that if it 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 of spamming, which is an attempt to re-consolidate some notion of identity that is secure 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 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 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 and spam
if a spammer needed to prove work if they actually showed that they had put some commitment to their message then spamming becomes impossible obviously is a is that natural defense can span the whole point of spam is its costless 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 up the spam not and I think I'm he Adam back had expected that this which is catch on everyone would be using the system it because it was the natural way he thought to stop spam happening instead people found these other slightly messier ways of just
dealing spam and it's one of many cryptographic innovations that have been much slower to establish themselves as general standards for internet activity then then a lot of these crypto cap people had expected but Adam back recognize as soon as you have a hash cash system why cause it has 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. You 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. 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 like this. This is something we can talk about. But I would say, just off the top of my head, that 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 as 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 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're going to 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. Yeah, go, go.
Which is like, you know, I've had conversations about this with Netsan, right? But their Foucauldianness, the intensity of their Foucauldianness is almost equal to the intensity of their disdain for Foucault. 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 way like I can give reference later in a book where they actually 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 like worth
more than just a little aside I think I'm going to harass you to bring it back in just one minute I just wanted to put the footnote we can get back to it as you wish yeah I think we should I think this is totally fascinating I'll just say one 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 into this was cryptography in the sense that there is a sense in 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 want to say a poorly formalized understanding of cryptographic problems. And this comes in with this whole question of identity, 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 it was always like that, but we can only see it now, is that the self,
an identity that is able to actually operate in this field of power, is a holder of keys. That's what an identity is, it means anything. It's a holder of keys. 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 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 it 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 I'm taking that as their what they think when we move to it understanding power up and an understanding economics what where the fundamental move there is exactly this question of differential accumulation
and that and 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 kind of get a grasp of this differential, differentiality 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. Because even in economic depression, some are still accumulating differentially. Right. Yes. That's very much in keeping with what I'm taking their key point to be on this. Yeah. So that's when I obviously way too hastily was talking about them as pop Foucauldians. that's exactly what I was meaning by that that that 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 enemy is becoming weaker faster than you you're winning in a military context whereas in a
sort of certainly not near classical economic context of course everyone's losing it's not being conceived as a zero-sum game everyone could 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 54 of the 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 reified 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 Nishler, sorry, Bishler and Nitsan stuff, then of course that's something we can spiral into further. I mean it's obviously extremely relevant to this whole question for sure. Mo, I just had a question. 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 the 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're 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 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 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 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 peer are 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. is 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 an attack. and I don't know whether this is a formalism or 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, you know, identity theft, once your identity is insecure, you've gone through a reconstructive gate that is compromised. You know, 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, it's literally the person referenced by this set of keys can be themselves reconstructed psychologically, 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... Yeah, totally, totally. I mean, 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 cypher punk whatever you know these these crypto circles it's just whether or not they feel sad about battle sympathetic is beside the
point I mean it's just not be gone any kind of hope any there's just simply nothing that can be done because because your I your identity is yeah to use this time is just owned you've lost it it's gone and that's over but like I don't know did you when I read a ring blockchain thinking Melanie Swan's book right now and already just like a chapter and a half or a couple of chapters in there have been various points at which you sort of said like oh and the next step is we'll do this and it involves like transferring private keys between people and like some sort of imaginary scheme for fractional reserve distributed Bitcoin lending
that involves passing around private keys. And I'm like, you know, 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 part of this is the fact that you can produce any number of public-private key pass so it's obviously possible to yourself propagate identities for the purpose all various kind of I'm collaborative activities or that transactions you know what I mean it's not that you necessarily are sacrificing the final
the final key. Oh, yeah. The key that is you, yeah. Yeah. But, well, I guess I mean more in the sense, well, I guess once the recipient of a private key that you pass to them, which they should now be worried that you still know, 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, 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 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 when you what what is the the register that it should be discussed or what's the basic terms that people think other most fundamental was fundamental vocabulary for discussing it because yeah as I say I think this
I think it's always been actually very the reason that I introduced this bitch learn something is I think its and the 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 kinda extreme solidity to it absolutely no I 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... I think this is kind of chugging away under your question about surplus value of code, actually, isn't it? 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 finished. 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 orchid 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 in a nutshell, surplus value of flux is Marx's notion of surplus value. And so you have a certain, now we're in a zone that's really where we've been, and
I don't know whether we can get back to this, it's the 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 these certain relatively straightforward arithmetical functions you carve off a surplus that is profit from that. You know, 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 Qatari say surplus value code they're engaging in a dialogue at and it's it's a kind of subversive saying I mean my natural inclination is to see it as quite drastically subversive because they're saying there is a way that these 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 when the 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 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 the 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 calls 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 Luzian 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. So if you actually want to like take side of either like 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. of them that is the most I think the most direct delusion road even though they too like we've seen with this speculative materialism site in the work that doing something that's not very intimately tied up with the kind of things you've just been talked about but I would have thought if we're coming out of this whole question about surplus value of 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 the capitalism does that is releasing surplus value of code is fundamentally technological in nature and so by these just like the orchid needs a this very subtle semiotic innovations to captures this massive energetic resources from from the wasps so these very subtle technological and scientific transitions can suddenly release vast productive capability that Deleuze and Krasnoyev are utterly convinced and I think the whole reason they're using this language are completely irreducible to some notion
of simply increasing the command over labour 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 quantitative 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 and see that was able to do that by just these the semiotic processes essentially all you know written in DNA at a certain point is actually releasing these productive forces from nature that was simply not tapped before and tapping them is the surplus value of code so addressing that that lineage that's very oriented to all these technical and scientific aspects of capitalism is great and then what most looking at now what and this year and it's Anna talking about I'm who what all if this material in a collapse volume is 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 and now that the real articulation between those two different things and not is not to me at least at all clear I mean I don't see I again I'm gonna be straw manning
this learned it's on his own and relying on motor to jump on me hot 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. You know, 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. You know, there's a machine here that is systematic and works without having to cut corners, without having to engage in these these kind of tricks he thinks that if you on if if a business is making more money than another business because it has access to superior kind of scientific or technological knowledge it's just the same in principle as as this kind of fraudulence that science and technology is intrinsically public that 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 and
that it you know 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 you don't make profit in any significant way by having better machines than the next guy does So, you know, 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 absolutely intrinsic. But it doesn't expect 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 is kind of similar like that. If we look at Moh's formula, where is technicity 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. 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 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 exploit it. Or the exploitation, and this is like the humanist, humanism comes through 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. Maybe I'm following you down this line and I apologize if it's getting a little indirect in relation to Bitcoin. But take take this car factory example that you gave me and 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 you know it's fine to say we've got a zero sum play game if it's a game of chess totally clear there's two
two players, one of us is going to win or there will 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 and then your company find you know that analysis works fine is like a chess game we can make sense as differential power like that can we circumscribe the game that clearly you know there's the two car companies then there's those car companies and the rest of the economy
the rest the domestic economy the rest the international economy or maybe you could say class relations and there's the human species against the rest at the biosphere I mean that you know where where to what in titles us to draw this line at the edge of the game because it only when we control that line that we can say it's okay for all going down the hill because I know who my opponents are and I'm know who I'm measuring myself against I know what this difference was 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 gonna restrict ourselves and say okay to talk about 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 egg against car company be is like a chess game you're missing the fact that car company is not any playing game against a car company that playing game against the whole of the economy not only locally but globally and did call collapse at the car industry is a 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 the what even if they even if they can see that themselves zero-sum game the competition in the zero-sum game between them gives rise technology which has a positive some value that either ends up destroying them or at the very least, I mean, what we're seeing is this military competition over time constantly building up the capabilities of each in a way that's not reducible to the initial game that they were playing at any point. But I think that's also... So 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. You know, like if the whole world goes up in flames, at least we have the internet to connect, you know, 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 as the sole basis of strategic decision-making then its easy
to oversimplify the strategic environment I mean that military example 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 two antagonists 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 see 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 a zero-sum competition is a complex strategic issue in itself it's not something that we can be taken as as a Yeah, it's non-trivial. It 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... Yes. Yeah, yes. Yeah, it's just 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 Simon Don'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 way should we before just taking it along for the ride?
Because apparently, as Jake was suggesting, Simone Don 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 Simondon 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 arguably is generalizing that onto, I think
yeah great yes, no it's interesting thing obviously I mean the this obviously would have been a case for us 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 a strategic lines one could take on this and you know that for sure would have been one and others involves is involved in a kind of send type of a negotiation between the vocabulary that comes out a different and
intellectual traditions and you know there's an arbitrary nest about inevitably I I certainly where I have a sort of arbitrary investment in certain packets for vocabulary because of the fact that they come out of lines with sex 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're you know it's just imminent to the to actual blockchain phenomena that you're looking at exactly nor is it something that's being 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 of 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. 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 a a part of the reproductive system of the orchid so that that functionality that completely supplementary functionality of it being part of a vegetable sexual system is the surplus value and I think if you if you set it up that way it seems to me it squares with what you're say or or yeah in a like sets and I could be in go yeah well it just to say of course you know am it's not necessary I mean the wasp could this there's an alternative history with the wasp doesn't enter into that relationship with the
with the vegetable world at all and that surplus 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 and kind of translating instead of accessing a surplus is 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 can 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 for what it does, but it's unimaginable to me that that is the vocabulary that would be would be being used by Tellur's and Qatari if they weren't in this intimate engagement with the Marxian tradition and that's why specifically that vocabulary is there and is being used to do the things they're wanting to do with it yeah, yeah, totally awesome so
and this is just sort of curving it back to the issue of hashing power and 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 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 are 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? No, I think that does make sense. I think so. I think that's basically the way it 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 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 you hashing in this way then I'm then did the the machine that was doing that extraction would a but I'm wondering between because but I think this is an error or ended 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 a to be hashing hashing to help new back it creates we then you would have just like a I the dot company without Bitcoin immediately so the whole thing
its its the function as a kind of proof of work would be gone what what work you got you know you haven't you use you've exploited you've exploited bacteria and excited precisely sort of to lose a quitarium way to actually as a side effect of their activity take over the Bitcoin for you yeah I'll well well
Oh, okay. I can, and it just, it's a whole other language. I have no idea even, I mean I've heard of bitcoins, but their relevance to sort of Marxism to me seem... 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 a cryptocurrency something that can be used by people anonymously without engaging in the third party its third party yet that that's the major sort of element is that the
it doesn't it's not traceable like normal capital not only that but that 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 restriction of an inflated monetary system that keeps doubling and tripling and so 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 shortcut through 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 Satoshi Nakamoto the whole thing is set up very very specifically and rigorously to be the work of computers 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. Yeah. The notion of, I think this is a really good point, the notion of work time is exactly the same in Marx 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 it's sort of like put an almost end to these types of like
capitalist power that sort of like is characterized by what Nitzan and Bichler finally understood capitalism, modern capitalism and modern monetary system kind of like result and kind of like back to some kind of like Marxian labor theory value but machinic labor theory value but machining intelligent labor because machines always were part of the labor, you know what I mean from day one. So saying machining labor theory of value or MLTV is not good because it's a particular type of machining. It's sort of like cognitive machining labor, not like physical machining labor.
Right. Right. Yeah. So in a way, it's very, itself, it's very 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 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 fact that that actual sort of system of rewards in the Bitcoin system is so consonant
with that classic Marxist formulation is to me a really interesting phenomenon that's happening here. 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 systems. It's almost like a weird kind of sim-Marxist political economy that is being put together by it.
from absolutely definitely collapse nine or ten it's a collapse it is like it's like you're moving into like another like territory as she others with respect to love the block chain Bitcoin or like 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 an 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, 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 a 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. These words are all so funny and wonderful and original.
Marxism for computers. It's like awesome. Should we put Amy on spot and ask her to 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 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 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 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 a allocation of all political power in the system to computing power
is vastly problematic you know by almost any normal political reference frame and you know if you were gonna be a I think Marxist in a way that it's kind of crude other 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 I'm so you know in terms of the kind of a in terms of their the preset model a a criticism that would come out of a standard kind of left-wing set of observations on this the picture is 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 going to be the dark
star you know everything was all putting around so I think it's quite interesting that that set of concerns hasn't been something sparking people at all no when you say that Nick the allocation of all political power to computing power when you say that how far are you gonna go with that because Of course, we are still the ones circulating Bitcoin. The computing power is simply the... Securizing... Sorry. But for how long? How long what?
But for how long it's for humans. Well, I mean, until we're eradicated, 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, 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 the 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. You know, 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. control. So we are playing inside a game that the computing power is perpetually deciding to re-authorize as a game and there's no other or transcendent authority that can change that game without mobilizing more computing power on its behalf.
But that which, so if capital is that which organizes the distribution of the ability to buy computing power and to deploy it, you know, 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 who has computing power, by what means have they bought it in the past is sort of like primitive accumulation of land and have this question of sure you're trading around property that is somebody's property but where did you get this property to begin with?
Oh, we wiped out the indigenes. Yeah. 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, and so Amy brought up DAOs. If we just sort of, I mean, and this is for me, maybe 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 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 this question of can smart contracts really be implemented on a fully decentralized system? Can we do that, the necessary computations of state, without having an issue of dedicated hardware? How does quantum computing play into that, which also threatens the security of hashing algorithms? Right, 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.
That's for sure. 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 a one minute I'm and it then back to this sort of me this the main line of your question about this whole relationship to is the PTP a infrastructure actually sustainable in this in this system and how does aetherium play into that because obviously so I've got a really annoying mosquito right on your forehead right now mister
I'm and because the because it's a area miss where we get into this weird zone where you stop having a you stop having a computer proletariat I mean it's like the the hashing machines are just the work horses at this system and and they're designed that nothing interesting can ever come out hash machine the only thing that can ever come out of a hash machine is bitcoins and for bitcoins to become something interesting then requires a completely different type of computational ecology and that's what if they are a is about on a certain level that's not immediate these da
daos which will then be doing something they will be trading its and they will then be getting us into the same so this for instance all these exotic financial structures that we've got in our existing economy while the the the actual hashing power is simply in the most fundamental sense just at just an infrastructure I'm at the so not nothing of any kind of exotic complexity could possibly come as the as these machines if all they're going in the other direction you know you start off that as people say in these kind of
the stores from the early days a pic quite you could do this stuff on your laptop you know if you were in at the right in 2009 or whatever I'm you could have a computer that was actually an interesting she and it could one of the things it could do with was be producing big points so your computer has not actually been turned into a an idiot sap alt at that point by the pic but now all it totally has I mean the you these latest machines that just simply hashing machines a cable of nothing at all but these proof proof-of-work tests
you know its app that they're the at that the the technological phylum and bulkhead is this kind of specialization that turning them from something that you can sort of treat as if it were a brain to something like a kinda computational liver you know you got all the other player in it just does this thing and it makes no sense out of that framework at all and so the complementary side that is there you know and it is this completely inverse and reciprocal evolution thinking about computers where they will be economic agents Turing complete whose what they might end up doing is completely unimaginable
Right, the novelty now has a source inside the network and not just because like previously all of the novelty came from human transactions then announced to the blockchain. We were the source of all the things that the hashing uninterestingly caused to exist made real 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 a 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 yeah years in order to process the state in which the smart contracts can be autonomous right yeah and and the question is obviously what are like we've got a lot of concept now where their 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 end or where they a stop and obviously a contract is exactly this kind of thing like once you've 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 that 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 kinda 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 predict with the exactly index of what you're saying is that you say an autonomous and then you kind of trail off like an autonomous
what? An autonomous... Yeah, because the horizon is then disappearing into this misty zone of absolute digital obscurity that's totally right. Yeah and it just seems to me that it's a really central point where this whole language of you know of the politics of 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 digital 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 you know, do we 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 to kinda you know as if we were gonna have some wonderful cat you know relaxed process of reflection and sort of ethical political debate about and and now we've got dowels you know that
they're already corporate persons they've already got a legal identity that all of these decisions are already over I already made I realize yeah the fact least in 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, you know, 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 might have missed there, but it seems to me that it's just like gone without, you know, there was, 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 has 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,
now your legal representative in cyberspace or something of this kind. You already decided this 100 years ago before you even had networks to begin with. Strauss does this perfectly in Accelerando. The velociraptor in the imaginary bar and the journalist is asking them when the singularity happens and he said it happened in what was his... Right. On 26th, 1987 when ARPANET first came online. Right. Yeah. 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 a I totally agree that you need to talk about power without talking about sovereignty is is also I'm extremely glad that you got a am but can you have can you have a a a sovereignty without discretion
that's partly the question can you have a stop for in non-discretion and because that is the model of algorithmic government actually a or I should say algorithmic governance to generalize it to the maximum and I mean I don't know about that is interesting I mean is it just our romanticism couples those nations together you know when we say to be sovereign is to have discretion is it is that coupling that occurs just because you you know it seems a certain intuitive reasons that that
that the sovereign should have that kind of extreme metaphysical liberty which in a way is what is being called on us whereas obviously what with us it's just come P collapse that in this case am 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, you know, that decoupling is quite dramatic. I don't know, it seems as if... I mean, definitely, you're right that those two have been coupled in critiques
sovereignty and in theory of it, but it seems like if you asked anyone with power, you know, does that give you absolute authority over the reality conditions of that power or the ability to modify it? 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 modification to reality. its ultimate your vulnerability to the vulnerability of that system yeah yeah I think so I mean it's obviously is a romantic trope going back as far as you want is that the notion of the absolute sovereign I mean the bit insane Roman
emperors I think play this role really nicely where it's just that they are treated as being able to explore the absolute absolute horizon about limited discretion and you know which is in sort of convention 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 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 bang on about marks too much marks basically evacuates it almost as radically as as in principle as Bitcoin dozen in 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, the bourgeoisie rule in order to maintain the market economy according to a set of principles that are so preset and so outside their discretion
that they can be described by political and economic philosophy clearly. So it's not, for instance, within the whole of the Marxist tradition, there's almost no romance of sovereignty at all. Yeah. And this seems to be an area, I mean, I think that, maybe this is a biased impression, I think that, maybe this is a biased impression, but it seems as if in a lot of areas 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 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, in the United States especially, 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, you know, your sovereign citizen passport. And actually, my cousin gave up his U.S. citizenship in favor of one of these things. That's like 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's just a complete, that shows it's a complete fantasy. You know, 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. It's not a declaration, metaphysics does not extend to actual discretion in the concrete world. And the comment I made when Ian first brought up sovereignty in the text was that in a real way, if we take sovereignty in this more Marxist sense of being the ability or 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 the will which is obviously not private or personal or whatever is absolutely sovereign in the sense of it creates the universe only only as thing in itself only as something that is radically outside the entire structure of the physical universe you know outside space outside time outside individuation you know so so this which obviously we've talked about before this
way in which the cryptographic relation of your real-life ID versus your avatar rehearses and replays this relationship between the transcendental and empirical ego is also a place where this question of sovereignty is 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 and 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 its only to do with whether or not one edited the fact that one enters or does not enter the system is the axis of sovereignty. And 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, what would be a positively sovereign act, which is to give away my sovereignty by transferring, either accidentally or deliberately, my private key. in the same way that the military's ability in theory to destroy the protocol to mount a 51% attack if they wanted to preserve their sovereignty over
the economy in the sense of being able to collect taxes for funding so that access the entire market is our territory and not terra incognita would seem to support the idea that sovereignty 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's hard to... It would be hard to stay if we're talking about sovereignty and we're not talking about power. And then there's a 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
breaks say with Bishler and Nitzan on this basic definition that you're talking about you're talking about zero-sum relations I mean so I see no reason at all to deny them that or 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 to what is a zero-sum some game but a it's related it 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 you get its own its radically a question about distribution but that is that is used to record with the idea like 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 give away, 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. Right. 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 sacrifice it like you say
you can give it away 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 either are the holder of a key or you're not isn't that right it's like if we're on the chess game example there's the economic dimension you could lose certain pieces you can lose certain bits of territory things 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 it's and that was hacked so that you know white makes a move you try to make a movie 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 to dimensions is this difference it seems to me between this economic and this dimension of sovereignty your 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 you lose control over those pieces and some other some 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 side. Yeah, and that makes sense, definitely. And it seems as if that's sort of guaranteed, or the 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 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, you know, 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 what I'm... I guess the point of view that I was initially looking at it 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. So in your own life, you're not sure who was the agent of certain outcomes happening to you. Do I have sovereignty over the conditions of my own everyday existence?
Then you've got this question of, 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 you know, proofs that 0 equals 1 and therefore anything, you know, whatever position acts I think it's difficult, I think that this gets
us into the heart of all of these complicated questions about empirical identity because coming out of the whole cryptographic world you might want to just restructure this whole sense of identity, so 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 steps time or it takes responsibility for a 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 sp an avatar that must be constituted in order to satisfy these particular these particular I'll 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 internet so there's going to be a black player and a white player and that is coming out of the game itself it's not you can say oh you know I play this game and therefore I am black there I am the white player but on the other coming at it the other way around the game itself the way it's constituted presupposes a 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 kids week is the game itself that actually sets up structures and a lot's a particular position of subjectivity you've been supplied is the player the game calls for yes exactly and that and you know they will that that what the game calls for is completely determinate in the structure of the guy and so how much you know if we went through the narrative that you just gave 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 kind of circles us back to Foucault a little bit as this subject constituted, Deleuze and Foucault, as this sort of constant indirected movement through a series of subject-forming games. Right. Or it being, yeah, like an off-vector through all of these games. And that's sort of, like, that was where I was about to get to with 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 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,
originating in this game space, which is the global state that 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 experienced by humans. Yeah. But I think 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 and 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 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 after are you are you properly cultivated or trained 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. 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. You know, 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 used to be a person and then became a machine I think secretary is absolutely gonna do
this I mean it's like the it's a function that these what applications are 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 I'm losing the cape to do that you know you've got a hundred different passwords you totally lose track of of how to get into a whole bunch of different counts 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 it'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 there 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 click in this secretary to do, 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 is time management, time control, dividing it up, 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 becomes, I 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, destiny's 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 I that was a complete I was a complete probably a win chat if I was going to find as a but so how we doing guys I actually just came to say actually were now up sorry about this beautiful like up 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. we end it and I'll 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. Okay. Yes. So great. Thanks to everybody as usual. All right. Cool. Thanks to everybody. Thanks, Nick. Thanks everybody. Have a good week. All the conversations. So talk to you soon. Okay, great. Have a good week. Bye-bye Nick. Bye. Bye.