On 30 Dec 2017, at 16:51, Morlock Elloi wrote:
Let's assume, for the sake of argument, deep conspiracy and that
Bitcoin creator(s) actually did bother to read "Austrian economics"
(neither of which I think is probable - looks like a parallel
construction), and chose a hard limit instead of exponential backoff
or any other of dozen possible strategies. Let's also assume that
there were no other (dozens) of competing ideas which simply could not
get any traction at the time (and this is a patently false
assumption.) Invention of Bitcoin was therefore not a random event, it
was intentional dark design having roots in nearly hundred year old
ideology, and there were no alternatives to it.
No need for talk about 'deep conspiracies,' just look at the archives:
https://cypherpunks.venona.com/raw/
There are lots of theories about who Satoshi is, but no credible theory
proposes s/he/they didn't at least read the cypherpunks list in the
mid/late '90s. That list was *awash* in Austrian economics, so much so
that it's easy to misinterpret explicit mentions of Hayek and Mises,
along with their American spoor like Murray Rothbard: they were the
floor, not the ceiling, and it was the rule, not the exception, embraced
and expounded by the alphaest alphas on the list, like May. You could
probably quantify some off this by correlating traffic with other
mailing lists devoted to Mises ([email protected]) and Hayek
([email protected]), if you're into that kind of thing. (A
nice tidbit I just found: ca. '98, Ryan Lackey's computer was called
'mises.systemics.ai' — I wonder if that's the laptop he dropped in the
ocean while he was being hoisted to/fro the SeaLand platform? 😹)
This is where, as Florian pointed out, your overly pat distinction
between ~technology and ~political agency breaks down. If Bitcoin's
designer(s) had a dozen dozen possible strategies at their disposal, did
they happen to choose one that would mesh neatly with Austrian theory?
Your answer is that the decision came from from /dev/rand, more or less,
but every good cryptohead knows you should never trust an easy source of
randomness because it isn't truly random. If you understand how it
works, you can find the patterns. The pattern here is Austrian: Bitcoin
is Austrian theory made digital flesh. The first waves of adopters
outside of those circles came from techie circles that were steeped like
forgotten tea bags in 'libertarianism' — which by that point, as Nancy
McLean has shown, was a cynical misnomer for free-market extremism. And
you could probably quantify some off that by correlating early Bitcoin
adoption with, say, conservative clubs at universities — some of this
history is recent enough that it hasn't crossed Google's event horizon
yet.
Also, contrary to what you said earlier, from the list's beginning in
'92 there were debates — extensive, explicit, and sustained — about
what currencies are/n't and how various digital payment systems relate
to them, practically and theoretically. And when you follow those
threads (literally hundreds of them), you'll see most of Bitcoin's basic
ideals and problems spelled out just in a few words within the first
year or so, say, by early '94. It's pretty astounding. Here's one
example, from Miron Cuperman on 20 Nov 92:
- Charge for the mix services with crypto-money. The crypto-money
could be some networking service. It could be even mix transmission.
For example, the basic currency could be the transmission of 10K
through a mix. One would have to create a mix and let the bank
route some traffic through it thereby putting credits in your
account. Once you have credits, you could spend them anywhere.
One might want to fiddle with the definition of the currency so
that it does not depreciate with time.
But your following point is interesting, if I may: a technology may be
designed to implement an ideology, but as its adoption expands, the
results are paradoxical — OT1H, it continues to carry or even amplify
that ideology, OT0H later adopters don't realize it. You can make this
point without cartoons about about supervillains and badly aimed rants
about 'political correctness.' But when you follow that full circle,
you'll quickly see how and why your claim that $TECHNOLOGY is $RANDOM
breaks down: everyone designing, implementing, funding, promoting,
adopting, and abusing new technologies does so *in a world that's always
already totally pwned by ideologies.*
Hapless adopters, unable to see Hayek's ghost in the algorithm, just
continued to use it until it was too late.
What does this mean?
It means that technology has became effective carrier device for the
ideology, amplifying it as everything else it touches, and if ordinary
people cannot see through it ("out of the question") as they could see
through Nazism and similar, well, then the ordinary people are going
to get fu*ked in perpetuity, and there is absolutely nothing one can
do about it (bitching notwithstanding.) All Dr. Evil has to do is
carefully design a shiny object, and cretins will unconditionally
descend on it. Easier than organizing rallies.
It's a worldview that goes exactly nowhere. It doesn't even have
afterlife.
Try coding instead.
This relates to the 'magnificent bribe' thread, specifically to remarks
about the roles that intelligence agencies may have in promoting certain
technologies. I like the political realism in those discussions, but
some of it makes me nuts — for example, the idea of 'dual-use'
technologies, which is mostly a clerical distinction. The fact that some
actors explicitly aspire to omniscience isn't God writ small, it's the
psychotic Dr. Schreber writ large. As Deleuze put it:
Judge Schreber has sunbeams in his ass. A solar anus. And rest
assured that it works: Judge Schreber feels something, produces
something, and is capable of explaining the process theoretically.
Something is produced: the effects of a machine, not mere metaphors.
So these actors explicitly aspire to know everything about everyone, and
are even in a position to promote technologies and services that may
move them closer to that goal — so what? Subjectivity and sociability
can and will respond, and they'll move the goalposts. I'm not being
glib: that generic observation doesn't do much to help people in the
Khmer Rouge killing fields. But the shrill apocalypticism about the
shifting bounds of privacy is, basically, middle-class Anglo-American
anxiety.
Cheers,
Ted
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