On 22/07/16 23:26, Rob Myers wrote:
On Fri, 22 Jul 2016, at 08:28 AM, ruth catlow wrote:
Another informative blog here from Max.
http://networkcultures.org/moneylab/2016/07/12/%C2%ADblockchain-bureaucracy/
It certainly reflects many of my encounters with blockchain-engaged
types in London so far.
It's hard to overstate the extremities and contradictions that we've
encountered in this area
Yes there's a gulf between the world-changing rhetoric and the
money-grubbing behaviour that is sadly familiar from past developments
in tech.
WOW that's a thought!
When I remember the utopian verve with which I embraced the early
development of the WWW...
I had thought that the skepticism that Blockchain arouses within me was
to do with the fact that it converts every exchange into a transaction
as part of a global market. But you are probably correct- this is pretty
much business as usual.
Possibly a cognitively necessary one.
What, really, why?
What's new this time around is the full-stack entitlement to passive
income and return-on-investment.
Yes!
The threat of this....
"The inability to imagine alternative use cases for p2p distributed
networks to enable greater financial inclusion, citizen empowerment
or civil organization will lead to the inevitable commercialization
and privatization of blockchain, and bankers will fondly remember
Bitcoin as the greatest gift the hackers ever made."
is a strong motivation for Furtherfield's work in this territory.
"Financial inclusion" is a strong driver in conventional
cryptocurrency - won't someone think of the unbanked?
Brett Scott wrote about this here http://www.unrisd.org/brett-scott
Recuperation is the fate of any technology under capitalism. What's
extraordinary about this particular technology is that it turns so
many of its critics into technological determinists.
I think that this is a function of its inaccessibility too. Unlike the
early WWW we (the mass of amateur experimental tech adventurers- of many
ages and values) can't so easily get our hands on the code. In the early
90s I could take a piece of simple html, upload it to a computer and
then share it around the world.... we can't mess with BC software in the
same way...
OR CAN WE?!
Rob- perhaps you know of some cut-and-paste DIY resources that we could
play with together.
cheers!
Ruth
That's fortunately not the case here.
- Rob.
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