Suitably hilarious (we're so fucked).
Nice work Eryk!
Season's Greets to all,
J
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Thursday, December 16th, 2021 at 05:08, Eryk Salvaggio via NetBehaviour
<netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Wanted to share a new piece of work created for an art & research residency,
> “Excavations: Governance Archeology for the Future of the Internet,” created
> by UCBoulder and King’s College, London:
>
> https://excavations.digital/
>
> The goal was to research pre-digital forms of governance and imagine adapting
> them to contemporary online governance structures.
>
> Our proposal was to study the Situationist International and attempt to
> reconcile the anarchic stance with protocols and ideologies around
> cryptocurrencies. The result is The Situationist Blockchain, or LutteCoin:
>
> http://LutteCoin.com
>
> ++++
>
> From the exhibition website:
>
> ++++
>
> We propose a decentralized peer-to-peer Situationist blockchain. The
> Situationist International was a French anarchist movement inspired by
> surrealism, Dada, and libertarian Marxism. They proposed that we navigate the
> world through a "mystifying illusion" of spectacles present in advertising,
> films -- even vacations and leisure -- that consolidates control in the name
> of economic productivity. This is true on its face: we spend hours of "free"
> time on social networks, for example, turning that leisure into data which is
> collected and sold by those providing us with "leisure." This is,
> fundamentally, an employee relationship being given freely to corporations.
> UX interfaces and digital interactions extend the spectacle, rewarding users
> with illusions in exchange for distracting them from the ways they wish to
> actually live.
>
> Abandoning the spectacle of economic productivity, our “Proof of Non-Work
> Consensus Protocol” turns devices into an otherwise useless object, or
> “brick.” Users, liberated from the spectacle of electronic interfaces, pursue
> other dreams. Meanwhile, the devices mine and create cryptocurrencies only to
> be immediately burned. The devices are essentially frozen and interfaces made
> inaccessible. The CPU power processes at full capacity, and cannot be turned
> off. Eventually, they burn out, and with it, so does any currency it has
> produced. This perfects the process of automating human leisure, mining and
> destroying wealth in an endless parody of economics.
>
> ++++
>
> There is also a write up of the research, included as a white paper for the
> “cryptocurrency” we’re pitching, which explores the relationship we’ve
> identified between financialization, the seductive allure of “liberatory”
> cryptocurrencies, and the spectacle of user interfaces under surveillance
> capitalism:
>
> https://static1.squarespace.com/static/615ba1842a6b1371238ebc60/t/6196a151193b52305fabe677/1637261649657/LutteCoin.pdf
>
> I welcome any feedback from the NetBehavior community on this project!
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