Indeed Alan! And thanks all for the positive response.

Alan, your notes spark something I hadn’t quite anticipated as an outcome of 
the project, which is a dialogue around “well if we didn’t have [X] we would 
need to figure out how to [Y],” which is a fruitful conversation to have. Your 
examples are good ones.

-eryk 

> On 16 Dec 2021, at 11:01 am, Alan Sondheim via NetBehaviour 
> <netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> Absolutely love this! Tired of Situationism, but see this opening up 
> Monolectical-Natural Materialism, Earth-Isness, fantastic!
> One thing, at least for the elderly or the homeless, you'd have to create 
> something else, untoward; many people rely on their devices as the urban 
> landscape itself becomes harsher, more violent, more neoliberalist-capitalist 
> in terms of who can be where. As you accumulate, if you brick, you might find 
> yourself increasingly isolated; the neighborhood for many people is a fantasy 
> that for them electronic communication can transcend in part. I'm thinking of 
> Covid isolation for example, which at least where I live is going to get 
> worse, and the benefits of Zoom (I'm tired of hearing about the negatives, we 
> know them already) for example in relation to this.
> 
> - Alan, absurdly -
> 
>> On Thu, Dec 16, 2021 at 12:10 AM 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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>> NetBehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org
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> 
> 
> -- 
> =====================================================
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