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The myths and legends of king Satoshi and the knights of blockchain
Abstract
In this paper, we present an ethnographic account of the quasi-religious romanticism of the crypto-community towards blockchain technologies. To do so, we explore the cultural significance of phenomena such as myth, faith, and ritual, without excluding both the realms of technological practices and techno-scientific narrative. Drawing on a comparison with the legend of King Arthur, we analyse how the legendary creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, translates contemporary anxieties resulting from the financial crisis and the centralisation of power. By analysing white papers, we further explore the persuasive narratives which convey how ethics and virtue can be encoded into software, and, finally, we describe the secular rituals that reinforce cohesion among the community – in moments which are often guided by charismatic preachers and specialists. We argue that blockchain technologies have had a symbolic impact in re-invigorating enchantment and material romanticism towards finance and technology, which has had a wider impact on the social perception and acceptance of the transition to a digital society.
... Contrarily, smaller, more rigid cryptocommunities are typically less fluid in their formation, organization and development, often occurring blockchain-adjacent in other online spaces (such as Reddit) or perhaps with a hybrid geocyberspace presence (as did the Bitcoin 2022 conference, happening simultaneously in Miami, Florida, and on YouTube). However, they are typically convergent on utopian ideals of decentralization and trustlessness (see Faustino et al. 2021;Swartz 2018). Hence, their formation is driven, at least partly, by the transindividuation of blockchain peers. ...
... As Faustino et al. (2021: 74) For instance, 'Bitcoin Halving Day' is another cyclical commemoration, this time marking the point when the mining reward for the Bitcoin network halves in value. 7 This event happens roughly every four years (or, more precisely, every 210,000 blocks) and is met by the cryptocommunity with a 'festive spirit' (Faustino et al. 2021: 74 (Faustino et al. 2021). Again, this celebration is predicated upon a fundamental aspect of the blockchain's decentralizing operation -the halving of the proof-of-work reward -thereby conflating the formation of communities with the utopian thinking emerging out of the P2P network. ...
... These groups of people are another example of community production that converges around principles and philosophies expressed by the transindividuating machine, also known as the blockchain network. 7. On 12 May 2020, the reward for mining bitcoins was halved from 12.5 Bitcoins to 6.25 Bitcoins (Faustino et al. 2021). ...
... Additionally, these references, when depicted onscreen, demonstrate particular popular beliefs. By adapting and incorporating these urban legends, the show or movie, by expanded distribution, serves as a vehicle to propagate the legends beyond their historical roots [29,30]. ...
Urban legends serve as modern folklore, encapsulating societal fears, values, and behavioral norms within contemporary settings. These narratives, often rooted in oral traditions, shape cultural identity and reinforce collective consciousness. Through historical evolution, urban legends have adapted to technological advancements and globalization, influencing social interactions and perceptions. Psychological and sociological perspectives highlight their role in shaping societal behavior, while their representation in popular culture particularly in film and television demonstrates their persistent influence on collective belief systems. This paper examines the complicated functions of urban legends, tracing their origins, transformations, and continuing significance in urban society.
... Furthermore, it outlines the principles of peer-to-peer transactions and cryptographic techniques. The white paper is believed to have laid the groundwork for a paradigm shift in the field of finance and technology (Faustino et al., 2022). ...
There has been an upsurge in the research and analysis of blockchain-enabled central bank digital currencies. This increased interest can be observed across academic institutions, financial entities, and government bodies. Consequently, numerous literature reviews have been conducted to consolidate and present the development of studies on blockchain-enabled central bank digital currencies. Nevertheless, most studies have depended on only one database for their analysis and/or adopted a broader approach encompassing various aspects. This study aimed to address the limitations of existing literature review studies by adopting a more targeted approach while utilizing extensive databases and contemporary analysis methods. Using a bibliometric analysis the study maps the literature on blockchain-enabled central bank digital currencies from 2017 to 2024, sourced from the Scopus and Web of Science databases. It identifies influential authors, active journals, countries, and documents in the field. Moreover, this study outlines the thematic structure and recent advances in the field through co-word analysis. It also highlights gaps in the literature and proposes six key directions for future research.
... Other scholars briefly mention the term in sociological frameworks, such as ethnography [67] or universal basic income [68]. ...
Decentralized finance (DeFi) is gaining momentum in the world of banking, finance, and beyond. Yet, there remains a notable lack of scholarly research addressing the foundational principles and concepts underlying DeFi. In response to this gap, this study undertakes an extensive investigation into DeFi, drawing upon existing academic literature and insights from industry experts to develop a taxonomy of DeFi's attributes, operational models, and associated risks. This classification sharpens the definition of DeFi and yields critical insights for scholars and industry professionals keen on advancing DeFi's technological applications. By pinpointing essential characteristics of DeFi, mapping out its diverse business models, and highlighting the risks for DeFi users, this research contributes to the academic dialogue. It lays down a comprehensive framework for understanding DeFi, paving the way for subsequent studies and practical implementations in this dynamic area.
... Hence, using this technology, transactions could be conducted without a central intermediary, such as a bank, and they were also more resistant to manipulation and fraud. After Bitcoin's success, blockchain concepts also spread to other fields [11]. Ethereum, introduced in 2015 by Vitalik Buterin, is a blockchain platform that enables the execution of smart contracts. ...
In recent years, blockchain technology has been recognized as a transformative innovation in the tech world, and it has quickly become the core infrastructure of digital currencies such as Bitcoin and an important tool in various industries. This technology facilitates the recording and tracking of transactions across a vast network of computers by providing a distributed and decentralized ledger. Blockchain's decentralized structure significantly enhances security and transparency and prevents a single entity from dominating the network. This chapter examines blockchain's advantages, disadvantages, and applications in various industries and analyzes the implementation environments and reasons for using this technology. Also, this chapter discusses challenges such as scalability and high energy consumption that inhibit the expansion of this technology and examines blockchain technology's role in increasing efficiency and security in economic and social interactions. Finally, a comprehensive conclusion of blockchain applications and challenges has been presented by comparing blockchain applications in various industries and analyzing future trends.
... The cornerstone of blockchain was laid forth in a snowy paper produced in 2008 by Nakamoto (Faustino et al., 2022). A blockchain is a numerical transaction record that remains copied besides distributed ended the blockchain network. ...
Abstract
In recent years, significant technology breakthroughs have greatly enhanced healthcare systems, providing a wide range of intelligent services that improve overall lining standards. The metaverse, usually characterized as a forthcoming advancement of accessing Internet, facilitates user interaction and engagement with other users and the surrounding environment, providing a cohesive linkage between the virtual and physical domains. Moreover, the metaverse can potentially revolutionize other vertical areas, including the healthcare industry, by incorporating innovative technologies namely artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing (CC), blockchain, quantum computing, etc. The healthcare metaverse can significantly reshape the development of intelligent healthcare systems, opening new avenues for major advances in healthcare delivery, individualized healthcare experiences, medical training and education, collaborative study, and other related fields. Moreover, implementing the healthcare metaverse is accompanied by various challenges accomplished namely data privacy, interoperability, data storage management, and other security aspects. This study extensively reviews the use of metaverse technology within the healthcare industry. In this paper, we introduce the key principles of Internet of Things (IoT)- assisted healthcare recommendations, existing enabled medical practices, and integration of metaverse towards to the healthcare domain. Moreover, this paper examines the importance of incorporating the metaverse into the healthcare sector. Later, we explore several metaverse applications, including medical diagnosis system, remote patient monitoring, VR assisted medical education, and drug development. Overall, we emphasize the salient challenges and possible ways to pursue implementing the metaverse within the healthcare sector.
Keywords: Metaverse, Healthcare, Applications, Challenges, Privacy.
... The selfie of Earth thus represented the planet-humanity as a multiplicity that is singular, a monad containing life while simultaneously also being a basic substance of life forms or systems (Latour et al. 2012). In the context of blockchain-mediated sociality, the strength of this image and its iconic status allude to the cyclical pluralization of the idiomatic mythology of 'freedom' (Faustino et al. 2022), which cryptocurrency adopters enhance both at the level of the individual (the exclusive ability to control funds) and the level of the collective (decentralizing institutions). In short, the monism of 1960s communalists gradually became integral to digitalization, a fact that inspired crypto adopters decades later to pluralize the experience of alterity as a property of encapsulated individuals. ...
... BG technologijos įvertino praktiškai visus informacijos ir komunikacijos skaitmeninių technologijų aspektus, jų naudojimas labai greitai plečiasi. BG pagrindus padėjo Satoshi Nakamoto 2008 m., kurdamas elektroninių pinigų sistemą [125]. ...
Straipsnyje apžvelgiama pastarojo dešimtmečio mokslinė literatūra, nagrinėjanti išmaniųjų sveikatos priežiūros technologijų (SPT) vystymąsi. Apžvelgiama kompiuterizacija ir procesų skaitmenizavimas, išmanieji įrenginiai, neribotų duomenų bazės (NDB) bei debesų technologijos, dirbtinis intelektas (DI), procesų robotizacija, blokų grandinės, nanotechnologijos, žmogaus genomo tyrimai ir jų taikymas sveikatos priežiūrai. Analizuota išmaniųjų technologijų pritaikymo sveikatos priežiūrai nauda bei iššūkiai. Pateiktos sveikatos priežiūros paradigmos pokyčių gairės.
... A large number of studies has investigated the motivations, values and beliefs of blockchain community members. These have mainly focussed on such aspects as political affiliation (Brody and Couture 2021), trust (Dodd 2018;de Filippi et al. 2020) and the sharing of collective narratives (Faustino 2022). In contrast, Caliskan (2021) adopted a social network analysis approach to study the social structure of the Electra project, a global group of developers and supporters. ...
Over the last fifteen years, the development of blockchain technologies has attracted a large volume of professional expertise, capital investment and media attention. This burgeoning sector of technology practices has coalesced around a few major initiatives (Bitcoin, Ethereum), but it is still moving at a fast pace and its configuration is evolving. If this sector is marked by a variety of technological protocols, financial arrangements and organizational forms, it is also, we would argue, a site of social effervescence. Parties, meet-ups, and the sorts of informal socializing which gather around events and networks of all kinds function to endow the blockchain sector with the characteristics of what, in cultural analysis, are often called “scenes”. The aim of this special issue is to examine the interest of the notion of scene for the analysis of blockchain practices. We argue that the notion of scene may be mobilized as a useful analytical framework not only for the study of blockchain practices, but for that of technology practices more generally. In this introductory article, we ask the following questions: how can the notion of scene contribute to the understanding of blockchain practices? And what sort of research agenda does the notion point to? In the following sections we first identify some “scenic” components in blockchain phenomena. Then we review how media discourses and academic scholarship have framed these phenomena to show that the scene perspective is undertheorized in the context of technology-related social groupings. Finally, we propose a framework to analyse the main dimensions of blockchain scenes, before presenting the contributions to the special issue. With this special issue, we aim to establish a research agenda around technology scenes at the junction of STS and cultural analysis.
... Paradojas del destino. Algunos autores no han dudado en señalar las relaciones de la narrativa crypto con una vuelta pseudo-romántica y pseudo-religiosa a la reutilización de estructuras míticas y legendarias (Faustino, Fâria & Marques, 2021). En ellas el carácter mágico de la obra intangible parece encajar a la perfección. ...
En el entorno de una nueva economía post-fordista, el capitalismo cultural ha encontrado en la irrupción de la cultura blockchain y el llamado cryptoarte un importante aliado. Los precursores de esta nueva vertiente artística plantean la llegada de los NFTs como un elemento disruptor, capaz de solucionar los problemas que ha tenido el arte digital hasta nuestros días. Mientras tanto, los críticos afirman que, en el entorno blockchain, el arte sería poco más que mero mecanismo de alimentación del juego especulativo de la economía financiera post-capitalista. Este texto trata de abordar algunos de los resortes que permiten entrever las causas del porqué de la fuerte irrupción del llamado cryptoarte en el sistema artístico tradicional y el mercado del arte. En esa línea se abordarán preguntas sobre la utilidad y valor del arte en la cultura digital, su papel en la economía blockchain, así como el rol del trabajador artístico y sus condiciones en el nuevo entorno de producción, distribución y venta de arte.
In the environment of a new post-fordist economy, cultural capitalism has found in the irruption of blockchain culture and the so-called cryptoart an important ally. The forerunners of this new artistic aspect pose the arrival of NFTs as a disruptive element, capable of solving the problems that digital art has had up to the present day. Meanwhile, critics claim that, in the blockchain environment, art would be little more than a mere feeding mechanism for the speculative game of the post-capitalist financial economy. This text tries to address some of the springs that allow us to glimpse the causes of the strong irruption of the so-called crypto-art in the traditional art system and the art market. Accordingly, questions about the usefulness and value of art in digital culture, the role of art within the blockchain economy or the role of the art worker and his or her conditions in the new environment of production, distribution and sale of art will be addressed.
... 263). As Faustino et al. (2022) point out in their ethnographic research with blockchain firms, the 'white paper' -a document that lays out a particular blockchain service in often future-leaning terms -is deemed practically essential in 'proving' the legitimacy (to users and investors) of new blockchain projects. For Swartz (2016), imaginaries of blockchains tend to operate as 'radical' (visions of transformative change, upending social and technical norms) or 'incorporative' (more modest visions of blockchains as integrated into currently existing social and technical norms). ...
Videogames are an increasingly prominent use case for blockchain technology (what has been termed ‘cryptogaming’). Drawing on documents, such as industry presentations, social media posts, interviews and white papers, this article analyses discourses surrounding cryptogames, focusing on the claims made by cryptogame developers and investors. We ask two related research questions: What are the dominant visions of a cryptogaming future, imagined by and for various constituencies? And what sorts of values get realised in such an imagined future of game development and use? We argue that cryptogames imagine players and developers as financialised subjects, adopting attitudes and practices of risk and investment as salves to both microeconomic problems in the games industry as well as broader macroeconomic issues.
... The foundation of blockchain emerged in a 2008 white paper written by Nakamoto [103]. A blockchain is a digital database of transactions that is duplicated and dispersed over the entire blockchain network. ...
The rapid progress in digitalization and automation have led to an accelerated growth in healthcare, generating novel models that are creating new channels for rendering treatment at reduced cost. The Metaverse is an emerging technology in the digital space which has huge potential in healthcare, enabling realistic experiences to the patients as well as the medical practitioners. The Metaverse is a confluence of multiple enabling technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, internet of medical devices, robotics, quantum computing, etc. through which new directions for providing quality healthcare treatment and services can be explored. The amalgamation of these technologies ensures immersive, intimate and personalized patient care. It also provides adaptive intelligent solutions that eliminates the barriers between healthcare providers and receivers. This article provides a comprehensive review of the Metaverse for healthcare, emphasizing on the state of the art, the enabling technologies to adopt the Metaverse for healthcare, the potential applications, and the related projects. The issues in the adaptation of the Metaverse for healthcare applications are also identified and the plausible solutions are highlighted as part of future research directions.
... The foundation of blockchain emerged in a 2008 white paper written by Satoshi Nakamoto [82]. A blockchain is a digital database of transactions that is duplicated and dispersed over the entire blockchain network. ...
The rapid progress in digitalization and automation have led to an accelerated growth in healthcare, generating novel models that are creating new channels for rendering treatment with reduced cost. The Metaverse is an emerging technology in the digital space which has huge potential in healthcare, enabling realistic experiences to the patients as well as the medical practitioners. The Metaverse is a confluence of multiple enabling technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, internet of medical devices, robotics, quantum computing, etc. through which new directions for providing quality healthcare treatment and services can be explored. The amalgamation of these technologies ensures immersive, intimate and personalized patient care. It also provides adaptive intelligent solutions that eliminates the barriers between healthcare providers and receivers. This article provides a comprehensive review of the Metaverse for healthcare, emphasizing on the state of the art, the enabling technologies for adopting the Metaverse for healthcare, the potential applications and the related projects. The issues in the adaptation of the Metaverse for healthcare applications are also identified and the plausible solutions are highlighted as part of future research directions.
... Communities (Kaczynski and Kominers, 2021), i.e., individuals and collectives who share a passion or interest (e.g., in games, technology, and arts), are central to NFTE as they commit resources to participating and supporting it. A key feature of an NFT community is a decentralization ethos (of data, services, and wealth), which is a philosophy first advocated by "geeks" in response to the 2008 global financial crisis (Faustino et al., 2022) and creative individuals who have contested the changing economic worth of their work as determined by intermediaries and Big Tech (Negus, 2019). Gaming culture is also a key feature of the NFT community, in which NFT is a symbol of ludic affordances (Serada et al., 2021) (e.g., Crypto Kitties, one of the earliest forms of "money game" NFTs). ...
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have taken the world by storm. Initially started as an art/game experiment, the NFT has given rise to a new form of entrepreneurship in the virtual world with massive opportunities and affordances. However, research into the entrepreneurial aspect of NFTs and the role of agency in the process is limited. In this article, I examine the concept of NFT-enabled Entrepreneurship (or NFTE). I first identify the main characteristics of NFTs, then define NFTE and discuss the related assumptions, and finally propose a conceptual framework for NFTE and investigate its enablers. I conclude by proposing NFTE as a novel domain of entrepreneurship theory and practice with extensive new research opportunities, and the plausibility of using NFT as an alternative mode of knowledge production in which scholars become “NFT creators.”
This chapter introduces ‘cultural economy of finance’ as a framework that guides the book and its analysis and offers a preliminary introduction to blockchain and cryptogaming—the book’s primary focus. It also introduces the book’s key argument—that cryptogames embody logics of financialisation, specifically, logics of speculation, assetization, and arbitrage. The chapter concludes with an outline of the book’s approach, scope, and chapters that follow.
This chapter presents the applications of blockchain technology within workplace settings and guides future research and organizational adoption. This is achieved through a bibliometric analysis of literature sourced from Scopus and Web of Science between the years 2017-2024. The findings indicate a significant increase in publications on blockchain applications in workplaces since 2019, indicating the technology's rising relevance and potential in workplace contexts. The thematic analysis identifies key areas where blockchain technology is expected to have a substantial impact, including knowledge management, smart workstations, human resource management, confidential information sharing and storage, and optimized workplace communication. This study proposes five key areas for future research: testing existing prototypes in various workplace applications, evaluating regulatory and ethical compliance, and investigating the social and environmental impacts of blockchain technology in the workplace.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are novel techno-economic configurations underpinned by cryptocurrency ledgers that transform digital files like graphic art, music, videos, etc. into digital assets. NFTs are often framed as a way for artists and other creators to profit from their activities, transforming ‘experiences’ into something for sale. As such, NFTs raise some questions pertinent to science and technology studies and political economy. We focus on analysing how NFTs are constructed as digital assets by unpacking the practices, devices, relations, and rights implicated in their construction. We use the concept of ‘assetization’ to examine the contingencies, problematics, and implications of NFTs and the claims, practices, and entitlements that configure them as a new type of asset. We undertake this analysis through a research-creation process by summarizing and discussing the process of creating and submitting an NFT to a specialized marketplace.
In the last decades, the digital image has moved between the thin line that separates its exponential multiplication and its continuous danger of invisibility and loss. Despite the fact of being constantly used on the internet or social network interactions, the difficulties in filtering, gathering, authenticating and preserving new media images have led them to be a type of art barely collected by contemporary art museums. Even more, the huge amount of material produced not only by artists or creatives but also by citizens makes it impossible for cultural institutions to tackle the task of preserving a significant percentage of it. Museums seem to be unable to distinguish what might be considered art or heritage among the massive amount of images that fed popular culture. Nevertheless, the irruption of blockchain culture has focused on the importance of digital images as an identity, social and economic asset. NFTs seem to attempt to remedy the weaknesses of the digital image by associating it with a verifiable and supposedly incorruptible contract. This study tries to analyse the precariousness of the digital image as a key element in the emergence and sudden rise and fall of the so-called “crypto-art”. To this end, the idea of the “poor image” outlined by Steyerl is followed. The aim is to clarify whether the digital images associated with blockchain transactions solve the problematic obsolescent and unstable condition of the works, or if, on the contrary, these are used as fuel for a new ultra-liberal financial machine being quickly consumed and discarded.
Durante 2020 y 2021 asistimos al boom de un nuevo mercado artístico de la mano de los de NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens), con ventas millonarias, así como la aparición de un enorme número de plataformas y un debate mediático en torno al arte digital nunca antes visto. Este estudio trata de analizar la situación de las imágenes y los creadores asociados a la nueva tecnología blockchain. Para ello se pretende retomar y adaptar a la situación cultural y artística actual las ideas de Byung Chul Han sobre la sociedad del cansancio y la sociedad de la transparencia. El objetivo final es aclarar si el llamado como cryptoarte es la consecuencia cultural de las características de ese tipo de sociedad radiografíada por Han. Si así fuera, podría hablarse de un tipo de arte como reflejo de la propia aceleración y automatización de los procesos de producción, distribución y consumo de bienes. También de la conformación de una “estética del cansancio” derivada en gran parte del hiperempleo sufrido por los creativos y por la inflación de la imagen mediática y artística. En las nuevas circunstancias ultraliberales de la cultura, las obras de arte terminan por reducir su impacto a lo económico, convertidas en activo financiero de rápida digestión y que conlleva la anulación de toda posibilidad de una experiencia estética pausada, reflexiva y/o crítica.
One of the most intriguing discussions concerning blockchain technology revolves around its potential to ‘do good’. Consequently, numerous projects and institutions are showing interest in the capacity of blockchain to impact the social sphere positively. However, so far, very little literature has addressed the fundamental notion of ‘good’ that underlies its implementation or explores its connection to social justice theories. This article aims to analyse the narratives that surround the use of blockchain for social good and to compare them with traditional concepts that are significant in social justice theories, such as distribution and recognition. Results show that the selected informants involved in the blockchain scene tend to frame social good in rational, mathematical, and often competitive terms. This tendency contributes to the reinforcement of a neoliberal imaginary that neglects to address structural inequalities as relevant issues. Instead, it envisions social justice as an avenue for generating value, enhancing meritocracy, and ensuring technical accountability, echoing Silicon Valley's aspirations to ‘change the world’.
There are spells in the world: incantations that can transform reality through the power of procedural utterances. The marriage vow, the courtroom sentence, the shaman’s curse: these words are codes that change reality. (Finn 90) Introduction As a child, stories on magic were “opportunities to escape from reality” (Brugué and Llompart 1), or what Rosengren and Hickling describe as being part of a set of “causal belief systems” (77). As an adult, magic is typically seen as being “pure fantasy” (Rosengren and Hickling 75), while Bever argues that magic is something lost to time and materialism, and alternatively a skill that Yeats believed that anyone could develop with practice. The etymology of the word magic originates from magein, a Greek word used to describe “the science and religion of the priests of Zoroaster”, or, according to philologist Skeat, from Greek megas (great), thus signifying "the great science” (Melton 956). Not to be confused with sleight of hand or illusion, magic is traditionally associated with learned people, held in high esteem, who use supernatural or unseen forces to cause change in people and affect events. To use magic these people perform rituals and ceremonies associated with religion and spirituality and include people who may identify as Priests, Witches, Magicians, Wiccans, and Druids (Otto and Stausberg). Magic as Technology and Technology as Magic Although written accounts of the rituals and ceremonies performed by the Druids are rare, because they followed an oral tradition and didn’t record knowledge in a written form (Aldhouse-Green 19), they are believed to have considered magic as a practical technology to be used for such purposes as repelling enemies and divining lost items. They curse and blight humans and districts, raise storms and fogs, cause glamour and delusion, confer invisibility, inflict thirst and confusion on enemy warriors, transform people into animal shape or into stone, subdue and bind them with incantations, and raise magical barriers to halt attackers. (Hutton 33) Similarly, a common theme in The History of Magic by Chris Gosden is that magic is akin to science or mathematics—something to be utilised as a tool when there is a need, as well as being used to perform important rituals and ceremonies. In TechGnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information, Davis discusses ideas on Technomysticism, and Thacker says that “the history of technology—from hieroglyphics to computer code—is itself inseparable from the often ambiguous exchanges with something nonhuman, something otherworldly, something divine. Technology, it seems, is religion by other means, then as now” (159). Written language, communication, speech, and instruction has always been used to transform the ordinary in people’s lives. In TechGnosis, Davis (32) cites Couliano (104): historians have been wrong in concluding that magic disappeared with the advent of 'quantitative science.’ The latter has simply substituted itself for a part of magic while extending its dreams and its goals by means of technology. Electricity, rapid transport, radio and television, the airplane, and the computer have merely carried into effect the promises first formulated by magic, resulting from the supernatural processes of the magician: to produce light, to move instantaneously from one point in space to another, to communicate with faraway regions of space, to fly through the air, and to have an infallible memory at one’s disposal. Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) In early 2021, at the height of the pandemic meta-crisis, blockchain and NFTs became well known (Umar et al. 1) and Crypto Art became the hot new money-making scheme for a small percentage of ‘artists’ and tech-bros alike. The popularity of Crypto Art continued until initial interest waned and Ether (ETH) started disappearing in the manner of a classic disappearing coin magic trick. In short, ETH is a type of cryptocurrency similar to Bitcoin. NFT is an acronym for Non-Fungible Token. An NFT is “a cryptographic digital asset that can be uniquely identified within its smart contract” (Myers, Proof of Work 316). The word Non-Fungible indicates that this token is unique and therefore cannot be substituted for a similar token. An example of something being fungible is being able to swap coins of the same denomination. The coins are different tokens but can be easily swapped and are worth the same as each other. Hackl, Lueth, and Bartolo define an NFT as “a digital asset that is unique and singular, backed by blockchain technology to ensure authenticity and ownership. An NFT can be bought, sold, traded, or collected” (7). Blockchain For the newcomer, blockchain can seem impenetrable and based on a type of esoterica or secret knowledge known only to an initiate of a certain type of programming (Cassino 22). The origins of blockchain can be found in the research article “How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document”, published by the Journal of Cryptology in 1991 by Haber, a cryptographer, and Stornetta, a physicist. They were attempting to answer “epistemological problems of how we trust what we believe to be true in a digital age” (Franceschet 310). Subsequently, in 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote The White Paper, a document that describes the radical idea of Bitcoin or “Magic Internet Money” (Droitcour). As defined by Myers (Proof of Work 314), a blockchain is “a series of blocks of validated transactions, each linked to its predecessor by its cryptographic hash”. They go on to say that “Bitcoin’s innovation was not to produce a blockchain, which is essentially just a Merkle list, it was to produce a blockchain in a securely decentralised way”. In other words, blockchain is essentially a permanent record and secure database of information. The secure and permanent nature of blockchain is comparable to a chapter of the Akashic records: a metaphysical idea described as an infinite database where information on everything that has ever happened is stored. It is a mental plane where information is recorded and immutable for all time (Nash). The information stored in this infinite database is available to people who are familiar with the correct rituals and spells to access this knowledge. Blockchain Smart Contracts Blockchain smart contracts are written by a developer and stored on the blockchain. They contain the metadata required to set out the terms of the contract. IBM describes a smart contract as “programs stored on a blockchain that run when predetermined conditions are met”. There are several advantages of using a smart contract. Blockchain is a permanent and transparent record, archived using decentralised peer-to-peer Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). This technology safeguards the security of a decentralised digital database because it eliminates the intermediary and reduces the chance of fraud, gives hackers fewer opportunities to access the information, and increases the stability of the system (Srivastava). They go on to say that “it is an emerging and revolutionary technology that is attracting a lot of public attention due to its capability to reduce risks and fraud in a scalable manner”. Despite being a dry subject, blockchain is frequently associated with magic. One example is Faustino, Maria, and Marques describing a “quasi-religious romanticism of the crypto-community towards blockchain technologies” (67), with Satoshi represented as King Arthur. The set of instructions that make up the blockchain smart contracts and NFTs tell the program, database, or computer what needs to happen. These instructions are similar to a recipe or spell. This “sourcery” is what Chun (19) describes when talking about the technological magic that mere mortals are unable to comprehend. “We believe in the power of code as a set of magical symbols linking the invisible and visible, echoing our long cultural tradition of logos, or language as an underlying system of order and reason, and its power as a kind of sourcery” (Finn 714). NFTs as a Conceptual Medium In a “massively distributed electronic ritual” (Myers, Proof of Work 100), NFTs became better-known with the sale of Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days by Christie’s for US$69,346,250. Because of the “thousandfold return” (Wang et al. 1) on the rapidly expanding market in October 2021, most people at that time viewed NFTs and cryptocurrencies as the latest cash cow; some artists saw them as a method to become financially independent, cut out the gallery intermediary, and be compensated on resales (Belk 5). In addition to the financial considerations, a small number of artists saw the conceptual potential of NFTs. Rhea Myers, a conceptual artist, has been using the blockchain as a conceptual medium for over 10 years. Myers describes themselves as “an artist, hacker and writer” (Myers, Bio). A recent work by Myers, titled Is Art (Token), made in 2023 as an Ethereum ERC-721 Token (NFT), is made using a digital image with text that says “this token is art”. The word ‘is’ is emphasised in a maroon colour that differentiates it from the rest in dark grey. The following is the didactic for the artwork. Own the creative power of a crypto artist. Is Art (Token) takes the artist’s power of nomination, of naming something as art, and delegates it to the artwork’s owner. Their assertion of its art or non-art status is secured and guaranteed by the power of the blockchain. Based on a common and understandable misunderstanding of how Is Art (2014) works, this is the first in a series of editions that inscribe ongoing and contemporary concerns onto this exemplar of a past or perhaps not yet realized blockchain artworld. (Myers, is art editions). This is a simple example of their work. A lot of Myers’s work appears to be uncomplicated but hides subtle levels of sophistication that use all the tools available to conceptual artists by questioning the notion of what art is—a hallmark of conceptual art (Goldie and Schellekens 22). Sol LeWitt, in Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, was the first to use the term, and described it by saying “the idea itself, even if not made visual, is as much a work of art as any finished product”. According to Bailey, the most influential American conceptual artists of the 1960s were Lucy Lippard, Sol LeWitt, and Joseph Kosuth, “despite deriving from radically diverse insights about the reason for calling it ‘Conceptual Art’” (8). Instruction-Based Art Artist Claudia Hart employs the instructions used to create an NFT as a medium and artwork in Digital Combines, a new genre the artist has proposed, that joins physical, digital, and virtual media together. The NFT, in a digital combine, functions as a type of glue that holds different elements of the work together. New media rely on digital technology to communicate with the viewer. Digital combines take this one step further—the media are held together by an invisible instruction linked to the object or installation with a QR code that magically takes the viewer to the NFT via a “portal to the cloud” (Hart, Digital Combine Paintings). QR codes are something we all became familiar with during the on-and-off lockdown phase of the pandemic (Morrison et al. 1). Denso Wave Inc., the inventor of the Quick Response Code or QR Code, describes them as being a scannable graphic that is “capable of handling several dozen to several hundred times more information than a conventional bar code that can only store up to 20 digits”. QR Codes were made available to the public in 1994, are easily detected by readers at nearly any size, and can be reconfigured to fit a variety of different shapes. A “QR Code is capable of handling all types of data, such as numeric and alphabetic characters, Kanji, Kana, Hiragana, symbols, binary, and control codes. Up to 7,089 characters can be encoded in one symbol” (Denso Wave). Similar to ideas used by the American conceptual artists of the 1960s, QR codes and NFTs are used in digital combines as conceptual tools. Analogous to Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings, the instruction is the medium and part of the artwork. An example of a Wall Drawing made by Sol LeWitt is as follows: Wall Drawing 11A wall divided horizontally and vertically into four equal parts. Within each part, three of the four kinds of lines are superimposed.(Sol LeWitt, May 1969; MASS MoCA, 2023) The act or intention of using an NFT as a medium in art-making transforms it from being solely a financial contract, which NFTs are widely known for, to an artistic medium or a standalone artwork. The interdisciplinary artist Sue Beyer uses Machine Learning and NFTs as conceptual media in her digital combines. Beyer’s use of machine learning corresponds to the automatic writing that André Breton and Philippe Soupault of the Surrealists were exploring from 1918 to 1924 when they wrote Les Champs Magnétiques (Magnetic Fields) (Bohn 7). Automatic writing was popular amongst the spiritualist movement that evolved from the 1840s to the early 1900s in Europe and the United States (Gosden 399). Michael Riffaterre (221; in Bohn 8) talks about how automatic writing differs from ordinary texts. Automatic writing takes a “total departure from logic, temporality, and referentiality”, in addition to violating “the rules of verisimilitude and the representation of the real”. Bohn adds that although “normal syntax is respected, they make only limited sense”. An artificial intelligence (AI) hallucination, or what Chintapali (1) describes as “distorted reality”, can be seen in the following paragraph that Deep Story provided after entering the prompt ‘Sue Beyer’ in March 2022. None of these sentences have any basis in truth about the person Sue Beyer from Melbourne, Australia. Suddenly runs to Jen from the bedroom window, her face smoking, her glasses shattering. Michaels (30) stands on the bed, pale and irritated. Dear Mister Shut Up! Sue’s loft – later – Sue is on the phone, looking upset. There is a new bruise on her face. There is a distinction between AI and machine learning. According to ChatGPT 3.5, “Machine Learning is a subset of AI that focuses on enabling computers to learn and make predictions or decisions without being explicitly programmed. It involves the development of algorithms and statistical models that allow machines to automatically learn from data, identify patterns, and make informed decisions or predictions”. Using the story generator Deep Story, Beyer uses the element of chance inherent in Machine Learning to create a biography on herself written by the alien other of AI. The paragraphs that Deep Story produces are nonsensical statements and made-up fantasies of what Beyer suspects AI wants the artist to hear. Like a psychic medium or oracle, providing wisdom and advice to a petitioner, the words tumble out of the story generator like a chaotic prediction meant to be deciphered at a later time. This element of chance might be a short-lived occurrence as machine learning is evolving and getting smarter exponentially, the potential of which is becoming very evident just from empirical observation. Something that originated in early modernist science fiction is quickly becoming a reality in our time. A Metamodern Spell Casting Metamodernism is an evolving term that emerged from a series of global catastrophes that occurred from the mid-1990s onwards. The term tolerates the concurrent use of ideas that arise in modernism and postmodernism without discord. It uses oppositional aspects or concepts in art-making and other cultural production that form what Dember calls a “complicated feeling” (Dember). These ideas in oscillation allow metamodernism to move beyond these fixed terms and encompass a wide range of cultural tendencies that reflect what is known collectively as a structure of feeling (van den Akker et al.). The oppositional media used in a digital combine oscillate with each other and also form meaning between each other, relating to material and immaterial concepts. These amalgamations place “technology and culture in mutual interrogation to produce new ways of seeing the world as it unfolds around us” (Myers Studio Ltd.). The use of the oppositional aspects of technology and culture indicates that Myers’s work can also be firmly placed within the domain of metamodernism. Advancements in AI over the years since the pandemic are overwhelming. In episode 23 of the MIT podcast Business Lab, Justice stated that “Covid-19 has accelerated the pace of digital in many ways, across many types of technologies.” They go on to say that “this is where we are starting to experience such a rapid pace of exponential change that it’s very difficult for most people to understand the progress” (MIT Technology Review Insights). Similarly, in 2021 NFTs burst forth in popularity in reaction to various conditions arising from the pandemic meta-crisis. A similar effect was seen around cryptocurrencies after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2007-2008 (Aliber and Zoega). “The popularity of cryptocurrencies represents in no small part a reaction to the financial crisis and austerity. That reaction takes the form of a retreat from conventional economic and political action and represents at least an economic occult” (Myers, Proof of Work 100). When a traumatic event occurs, like a pandemic, people turn to God, spirituality (Tumminio Hansen), or possibly the occult to look for answers. NFTs took on the role of precursor, promising access to untold riches, esoteric knowledge, and the comforting feeling of being part of the NFT cult. Similar to the effect of what Sutcliffe (15) calls spiritual “occultures” like “long-standing occult societies or New Age healers”, people can be lured by “the promise of secret knowledge”, which “can assist the deceptions of false gurus and create opportunities for cultic exploitation”. Conclusion NFTs are a metamodern spell casting, their popularity borne by the meta-crisis of the pandemic; they are made using magical instruction that oscillates between finance and conceptual abstraction, materialism and socialist idealism, financial ledger, and artistic medium. The metadata in the smart contract of the NFT provide instruction that combines the tangible and intangible. This oscillation, present in metamodern artmaking, creates and maintains a liminal space between these ideas, objects, and media. The in-between space allows for the perpetual transmutation of one thing to another. These ideas are a work in progress and additional exploration is necessary. An NFT is a new medium available to artists that does not physically exist but can be used to create meaning or to glue or hold objects together in a digital combine. Further investigation into the ontological aspects of this medium is required. The smart contract can be viewed as a recipe for the spell or incantation that, like instruction-based art, transforms an object from one thing to another. The blockchain that the NFT is housed in is a liminal space. The contract is stored on the threshold waiting for someone to view or purchase the NFT and turn the objects displayed in the gallery space into a digital combine. 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This article discusses the entrepreneurial imaginary and the role of Web3 in the narratives of industry actors at the 2022 Lisbon Web Summit. This imaginary does not address the qualitative aspects of current crises but rather their potential for regenerating capital flows in the spirit of never letting a good crisis go to waste. The article argues that the wealth‐tech nexus is symptomatic of the broader process of financialization of the economy and, in particular, of the growing role of private investment in the form of Venture Capital (VC), particularly illustrated by ‘unicorns’. While capital allocation in the digital economy, both from private and public sources, currently exceeds its realization, this entrepreneurial imaginary builds expectations towards Web3 and effectively drives the valuation process and investors’ returns, regardless of its future implementation.
This special issue addresses a series of post-2008 financial developments by mobilising the concept of the tale, understood as a discursive artefact composed of a meaningful story or script that serves to separate good from evil, make sense of historical situations, stimulate action, and prefigure scenarios. Unlike standard workplace narratives, which are useful for practical decision-making, tales have strong collective and political connotations. As such, they assume two distinct forms: tales of ‘experiment,’ stemming from innovative projects that seek to transform the financial system from within, and tales of ‘defiance,’ which deal with the more ample changes that horizontal and disobedient practices prefigure. Several analytical coordinates are proposed in order to capture the semiotic and pragmatic natures of the tale. Regarding semiotics, tales involve not only themes and motifs but also polysemic metaphors and what are here defined as processes of characterisation, through which persons or institutions are positioned as characters and assume specific roles within a story. As for the pragmatic dimension, tales mobilise people toward specific functions and address audiences while also relying on material infrastructure to embed some of the content they convey.
This paper is based on research among blockchain communities in the Netherlands and online terrains. Through an empirical example, it explores tales produced by projects based on the blockchain protocol and on the premise that cryptocurrencies are money and that money has generative potential for social and economic change. By unpacking the pragmatics of a particular project – Bitnation and Pangea – I argue that despite tales of decentralisation through the moneyness of cryptocurrencies, and the distributed and automated character of the blockchain protocol, these currencies, and projects, are deeply entangled with fiat and mainstream economies and markets. This is visible by looking at the ups and downs of cryptocurrency pricing and on the effects this volatility has on (certain) projects. The lack of a sustainable community of trust in cryptocurrencies as money – particularly visible in initiatives following more libertarian and utopian tales, detached from everyday life realities – and the way these retain attention mainly due to speculation, have very real effects for blockchain based projects. No matter how radical their tales for decentralisation and socioeconomic revolution are, utterances for these tales to become real have to be there, and seem absent.
This article presents a socio-anthropological analysis of the formation of a business ecosystem around blockchain technology in the Netherlands, within the broader context of the European Union and the digital single market. I argue that while reproducing widespread global models of business group and network formation, the relations created by these networks also reveal particularities of local business and governance cultures. Such particularities emerge from the pragmatics of collaboration and competitive market relationships, as well as legal heterogeneity and plans for legal harmonisation in digital innovation and governance in Europe. They also emerge from the challenges and transformations that current experimentation cultures for digital innovation bring to the interactions between market players, regulators, and government. These challenges and transformations materialise in increasingly informal connections and strategies for experimental legitimisation, which occur in parallel to more formal and traditional forms of regulatory and governmental interaction. The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Netherlands and in online terrains, including observation periods and 32 interviews with entrepreneurial project teams, as well as with individuals involved in financial incumbents’ innovation labs.
In this text, the origin of blockchain technology is explained and put into the context of three waves of digitalization: digitalization of information represented by the internet, digitalization of communities and community building tools represented by social media and digitalization of value represented by blockchain. The text will show that blockchain can bring back promised features of digitalization of the first two waves, features that were lost with centralization tendencies created by business models that are independent of the underlying technology. After a short introduction to the terminology, a map of the potential blockchain has for society is sketched. The text also debates the decentralization aspects of the technology and the challenges it poses for individuals and organizations. Later, the storytelling aspects, as well as some religious aspects within and around the blockchain community are analyzed. Finally, some thoughts about adoption scenarios are laid out, and some ideas why blockchains have become very important in Switzerland are formulated. The focus of this text is on the opportunities and strengths of the technology. It deliberately oversimplifies the technological aspects in order to focus on the implication of the technology on society.
As the distributed architecture underpinning the initial Bitcoin anarcho-capitalist, libertarian project, "blockchain" entered wider public imagination and vocabulary only very recently. Yet in a short space of time it has become more mainstream and synonymous with a spectacular variety of commercial and civic "problem"/"solution" concepts and ideals. From commodity provenance, to electoral fraud prevention, to a wholesale decentralization of power and the banishing of the exploitative practices of "middlemen", blockchain stakeholders are nothing short of evangelical in their belief that it is a force for good. For these reasons and more the technology has captured the attention of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, global corporations and governments the world over.
This chapter describes an emerging form of algorithmic governance, using the case study of " The DAO, " a short-lived attempt to create a decentralized autonomous organization on the Ethereum blockchain platform. In June, 2016, The DAO launched and raised an unprecedented $250m USD in investment. Within days of its launch, however, The DAO was exploited and drained of nearly 3.7m Ethereum tokens. This study traces the rise and fall of this emerging technology, and details the governance structures that were promised and hoped for, and those that were actually observed in its discourses. Through 2016-2017, these discourses were collected from online discussions and subsequently analysed. Using computer-assisted, qualitative analysis and coding, I traced the discursive strategies of the developers and the community of investors, identifying: 1) questions of legal authority, 2) tensions in practical govern-ance, and 3) admissions of the inherent complexity of bringing to life an algorithmic and experimental organizational model. This chapter describes a short-lived experiment in organizational governance that attempted to utilize algorithmic authority through cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies to create a social and political world quite unlike anything we have seen before. According to the visionaries behind the project, by encoding the rules of governance for organizations and governments in a set of " smart contracts " running on an immutable, decentralized, and potentially unstoppable and public blockchain, new forms of social interactions and order would emerge. This experiment was an example of a new form of organization , called a " Decentralized Autonomous Organization , " or DAO. The forms of sociality that would emerge—they promised—would be transparent, efficient , fair, and democratic. While the idea of decentralized autonomous organizations had been mooted since the early days of cryptocurrencies, the launch of sophisticated block-chain platforms with built-in programming interfaces gave enthusiasts a practical, technical apparatus to realize their vision. Foremost among these emerging blockchain platforms was Ethereum, a so-called distributed " Turing-complete " computer. The Ethereum platform is new and expanded version of the Bitcoin system in that it adds a layer of software on top of a blockchain. Like Bitcoin, Ethereum is
Anthropology has a critical, practical role to play in contemporary debates about futures. This game-changing new book presents new ways of conceptualising how to engage with a future-oriented research agenda, demonstrating how anthropologists can approach futures both theoretically and practically, and introducing a set of innovative research methods to tackle this field of research.
Anthropology and Futures brings together a group of leading scholars from across the world, including Sarah Pink, Rayna Rapp, Faye Ginsburg and Paul Stoller. Firmly grounded in ethnographic fieldwork experience, the book's fifteen chapters traverse ethnographies with people living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda, disability activists in the U.S., young Muslim women in Copenhagen, refugees in Milan, future-makers in Barcelona, planning and land futures in the UK, the design of workspaces in Melbourne, rewilding in the French Pyrenees, and speculative ethnographies among emerging communities in Antarctica.
Taking a strong interdisciplinary approach, the authors respond to growing interest in the topic of futures in anthropology and beyond. This ground-breaking text is a call for more engaged, interventional and applied anthropologies. It is essential reading for students and researchers in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, design and research methods.
Algorithms, or rather algorithmic actions, are seen as problematic because they are inscrutable, automatic, and subsumed in the flow of daily practices. Yet, they are also seen to be playing an important role in organizing opportunities, enacting certain categories, and doing what David Lyon calls “social sorting.” Thus, there is a general concern that this increasingly prevalent mode of ordering and organizing should be governed more explicitly. Some have argued for more transparency and openness, others have argued for more democratic or value-centered design of such actors. In this article, we argue that governing practices—of, and through algorithmic actors—are best understood in terms of what Foucault calls governmentality. Governmentality allows us to consider the performative nature of these governing practices. They allow us to show how practice becomes problematized, how calculative practices are enacted as technologies of governance, how such calculative practices produce domains of knowledge and expertise, and finally, how such domains of knowledge become internalized in order to enact self-governing subjects. In other words, it allows us to show the mutually constitutive nature of problems, domains of knowledge, and subjectivities enacted through governing practices. In order to demonstrate this, we present attempts to govern academic writing with a specific focus on the algorithmic action of Turnitin.
This article examines the modalities of belief on the basis of an ethnographic study of French Catholics. The author distinguishes the nature of religious statements, the modes of discourse people use to express their beliefs, and the personal modalities of acts of believing, which are isolated moments followed by various shifts into other activities, characterised by irony, doubt or detachment with regard to beliefs. The article concludes with a depiction of religious activity as a displacement, a hesitation, a perpetual oscillation between fiction and reality, believing and not believing, presence and absence.
Moral entrepreneurship is the fine art of recycling evil into good by taking advantage of situations given or constructed as crises. It should be seen as the ultimate generalisation of the entrepreneurial spirit, whose peculiar excesses have always sat uneasily with homo oeconomicus as the constrained utility maximiser, an image that itself has come to be universalised. A task of this essay is to reconcile the two images in terms of what by the end I call ‘superutilitarianism’, which draws on the lore of both superheroes and utilitarianism. After briefly surveying the careers of three exemplars of the moral entrepreneur (Robert McNamara, George Soros and Jeffrey Sachs), I explore the motives of moral entrepreneurs in terms of their standing debt to society for having already caused unnecessary harm but which also now equips him with the skill set needed to do significant good. Such a mindset involves imagining oneself a vehicle of divine will, which would be a scary proposition had it not been long presumed by Christians touched by Calvin. In conclusion, I argue that moral entrepreneurship looks most palatable – and perhaps even attractive – if the world is ‘reversible’, in the sense that every crisis, however clumsily handled by the moral entrepreneur, causes people to distinguish more clearly the necessary from contingent features of their existence. This leads them to reconceptualise past damages as new opportunities to assert what really matters; hence, a ‘superutilitarian’ ethic that treats all suffering as less cost than investment in a greater sense of the good.
Cities are charismatic entities. Both in and of themselves by virtue of their history and their mythologies, but also as sites where charismatic figures emerge on the basis of their capacity to interpret, manage and master the opacity of the city. The specificity of the urban can neither be understood through the city's functions nor the dynamics of its social networks. The urban is also a way of being in the world and must be understood as a dense and complex cultural repertoire of imagination, fear and desire. We propose to understand the urban and its charismatic potential through three registers: the sensory regimes of the city; the specific forms of urban knowledge and intelligibility; and the specific forms of power, connectivity and possibility which we call urban infra-power.
This collection of essays on anthropological approaches to art and aesthetics is the first in its field to be published for some time. In recent years a number of new galleries of non-Western art have been opened, many exhibitions of non-Western art held, and new courses in the anthropology of art established. This collection is both part of and complements these developments, contributing to the general resurgence of interest in what has been until recently a comparatively neglected field of academic study and intellectual debate. Unlike some previous volumes on `primitive art' this collection is resolutely anthropological. The contributors draw on contemporary anthropological theory as well as on analyses of classic anthropological topics such as myth, ritual, and exchange, to deepen our understanding of particular aesthetic traditions in their socio-cultural and historical contexts. In addition, the cross-cultural applicability of the very concepts `art' and `aesthetics' is assessed. Each essay illustrates a specific approach and develops a particular argument. Many present new ethnography based on recent field research among Australian Aborigines, in New Guinea, Indonesia, Mexico and elsewhere. Others draw on classic anthropological accounts of, for example, the Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia and the Nuer of the Southern Sudan, putting this material to new uses. Sir Raymond Firth's introductory overview of the history of the anthropological study of art makes this volume particularly useful for the non-specialist interested in learning what anthropology has to contribute to our understanding of art and aesthetics in general. With its wide geographical and cultural coverage and plentiful illustrations, many of which are in colour, Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics will be a valuable resource for all serious students of the subject.
Simians, Cyborgs and Women is a powerful collection of ten essays written between 1978 and 1989. Although on the surface, simians, cyborgs and women may seem an odd threesome, Haraway describes their profound link as "creatures" which have had a great destabilizing place in Western evolutionary technology and biology. Throughout this book, Haraway analyzes accounts, narratives, and stories of the creation of nature, living organisms, and cyborgs. At once a social reality and a science fiction, the cyborg--a hybrid of organism and machine--represents transgressed boundaries and intense fusions of the nature/culture split. By providing an escape from rigid dualisms, the cyborg exists in a post-gender world, and as such holds immense possibilities for modern feminists. Haraway's recent book, Primate Visions, has been called "outstanding," "original," and "brilliant," by leading scholars in the field. (First published in 1991.).
Most people assume that technology and romanticism are opposed. They share this assumption with many contemporary philosophers of technology, who tend to reduce romanticism to nostalgia. This book questions these assumptions and shows that the relation between romanticism and technology is much more complex. For this purpose it delves into the history of technology and thinking about technology, from the early Romantics to hippie computing and today’s romantic cyborgs. The book updates the literature on technoromanticism, but also raises a new question: it seems that as machines become more human-like and informational, they disappear from view or merge with the human. Do we witness the end of the machine? The author then discusses criticisms of romanticism and of “the end of the machine” vision he constructed. Yet the author avoids a simplistic rejection or defence of technoromantic visions; when it comes to understanding technology, the romantic tradition is more ambiguous and also more resourceful that we might suppose. The book ends with the question if and how we could ever move beyond romanticism and beyond machine thinking. It turns out that, given the persistence of our modern-romantic form of life including language and technologies, the end of the machine is not even in sight. In the meantime, we have to live with our romantic machines, with our new cyborgs. That is, we have to live with ourselves as cyborgs: living meetings, mergers, and hybrids of romanticism and technology.
This paper explores the role of metaphors in the production of re-descriptions of the world within the framework of technological design processes. Drawing on a collaborative ethnography with the Economic Space Agency (ECSA), a start-up developing post-blockchain technology, this paper illustrates how metaphors mimic the toponymy of decentralized material infrastructures, while simultaneously pushing forward ‘posthuman’ values that are expected to become fixated through software. Through an analysis of a ‘collection’ of metaphors produced by ECSA, this paper sheds light on the work performed by specific vocabularies, within technological communities, in shaping a symbiotic relationship between futuristic politics and material culture.
This article departs from the post 2008 financial crisis context, from its intersection with technological developments, and from the socio-technical arrangements configured by this conjuncture. It explores plans and actions – of mainstream financial institutions, and of a community seeking for alternatives to centralised economy and governance – for the use of digital platforms supported by blockchain infrastructure. In particular, it explores how such plans and actions relate to conceptions of public and peer trust and how they appear to produce, or reinforce, reputational imaginaries and quantification practices within added value philosophies. By illuminating a tension between the two identified case examples, I seek to render alternative communities’ and financial institutions’ conceptions, imaginaries and practices (more) visible and to analyse their organisational marketing strategies – where there is a pragmatic and discursive operationalisation of technology as well as of trust as means to gain more self-sovereignty in action, while navigating markets and regulated actual world contexts.
Purpose: In this paper, we focus on the mythic nature of the anonymous Bitcoin creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Drawing on ideas from Foucault and Barthes on authorship, we analyze the notion of the absence of the author and how that sustains the brand. Design/methodology/approach: Based on interview data, participant observation, archival data, and a netnography, we examine the discourses that emerge in the wake of multiple Satoshi Nakamoto exposés that serve as both stabilizing and destabilizing forces in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Findings: We analyze the different interpretations of Satoshi Nakamoto through his own text and how his readers interpret him. We identify how consumers employ motifs of myth and religiosity in trying to find meaning in Satoshi’s disappearance. His absence allows for multiple interpretations of how the Bitcoin brand is viewed and adopted by a diverse community of enthusiasts. Implications: Our findings provide a richer understanding of how, in a period of celebrity brands, Satoshi Nakamoto’s anti-celebrity stance helps sustain the Bitcoin ecosystem. Originality/value: Our analysis examines the nature of anonymity in our hyper-celebrity culture and the mystique of the anonymous creator that fuels modern-day myths for brands without owners.
In its first decade, Bitcoin has not proven to be a practical money form for most circumstances, but it has become a staging ground for debate around the cultural role of money in society. This debate is poised between two related but ultimately incompatible techno-economic imaginaries: infrastructural mutualism and digital metallism. Each offers a theory not just of money, but also of relations, identities, and the larger imaginaries we call ‘society’ and ‘the economy’. In particular, they offer distinct visions of what it means to be a ‘peer’ in a peer-to-peer money system, and perhaps, a peer-to-peer society. This article traces the pre-history of Bitcoin, as well as more recent developments, to inquire about its future, as well as the future of money more broadly.
The iconoclastic Brazilian anthropologist and theoretician Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, well known in his discipline for helping initiate its "ontological turn," offers a vision of anthropology as "the practice of the permanent decolonization of thought." After showing that Amazonian and other Amerindian groups inhabit a radically different conceptual universe than ours-in which nature and culture, human and nonhuman, subject and object are conceived in terms that reverse our own-he presents the case for anthropology as the study of such "other" metaphysical schemes, and as the corresponding critique of the concepts imposed on them by the human sciences. Along the way, he spells out the consequences of this anthropology for thinking in general via a major reassessment of the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, arguments for the continued relevance of Deleuze and Guattari, dialogues with the work of Philippe Descola, Bruno Latour, and Marilyn Strathern, and inventive treatments of problems of ontology, translation, and transformation. Bold, unexpected, and profound, Cannibal Metaphysics is one of the chief works marking anthropology's current return to the theoretical center stage.
The payments industry – the business of transferring value through public and corporate infrastructures – is undergoing rapid transformation. New business models and regulatory environments disrupt more traditional fee-based strategies, and new entrants seek to displace legacy players by leveraging new mobile platforms and new sources of data. In this increasingly diversified industry landscape, start-ups and established players are attempting to embed payment in ‘social’ experience through novel technologies of accounting for trust. This imagination of the social, however, is being materialized in gated platforms for payment, accounting, and exchange. This paper explores the ambiguous politics of such experiments, specifically those, like Bitcoin or the on-demand sharing economy, that delineate an economic imaginary of ‘just us’ – a closed and closely guarded community of peers operating under the illusion that there are no mediating institutions undergirding that community. This provokes questions about the intersection of payment and publics. Payment innovators’ attenuated understanding of the social may, we suggest, evacuate the nitty-gritty of politics.
Although various types of documents are called white papers, in technical marketing communication the white paper is usually a document that describes a new or improved technology in order to generate interest in—and promote sales of—that technology. Most sources discussing the history of the white paper assume that marketing white papers evolved from government white papers. They conflate genre history with etymology. At some point in the mid-20th century, the term white paper—denoting a type of government policy document—began being applied to other types of documents, including eventually a particular form of technical marketing communication. This article proposes a revised history of the marketing white paper as a genre. By examining the formal features and characteristic substance of white papers through the lens of their pragmatic value as social action, we show that the marketing white paper of today has much in common with documents from the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.
Using examples from film, literature and photography, this book analyzes how the Global Financial Crisis is portrayed in contemporary popular culture. In particular, the book explores why particular urban spaces, infrastructures and aesthetics – such as skyline shots in the opening credits of financial crisis films – recur in contemporary crisis narratives. Why are cities and finance connected in the cultural imaginary? Which ideologies do urban crisis imaginaries communicate? And, how do these imaginaries relate to the notion of crisis?
To consider these questions, the book reads crisis narratives through the lens of myth. It combines perspectives from cultural, media and communication studies, anthropology, philosophy, geography and political economy to argue that the concept of myth can offer new and nuanced insights into the structure and politics of popular financial crisis imaginaries.
In so doing, the book also asks if, how and under what conditions urban crisis imaginaries open up or foreclose systematic and political understandings of the Global Financial Crisis as a symptom of the broader process of financialization.
Claims blockchain is more than just ICT innovation, but facilitates new types of economic organization and governance. Suggests two approaches to economics of blockchain: innovation-centred and governance-centred. Argues that the governance approach — based in new institutional economics and public choice economics — is most promising, because it models blockchain as a new technology for creating spontaneous organizations, i.e. new types of economies. Illustrates this with a case study of the Ethereum-based infrastructure protocol and platform Backfeed.
The Rhetoric of Religious Cults takes as its departure point the notion that 'cults' have a distinctive language and way of recruiting members. First outlining a rhetorical framework, which encompasses contemporary discourse analysis, the persuasive texts of three movements - Scientology, Jehovah's Witnesses and Children of God - are analysed in detail and their discourse compared with other kinds of recruitment literature. Cults' distinctive negative profile in society is not matched by a linguistic typology. Indeed, this negative profile seems to rest on the semantics and application of the term 'cult' itself.
This paper challenges the notion that Bitcoin is ‘trust-free’ money by highlighting the social practices, organizational structures and utopian ambitions that sustain it. At the paper’s heart is the paradox that if Bitcoin succeeds in its own terms as an ideology, it will fail in practical terms as a form of money. The main reason for this is that the new currency is premised on the idea of money as a ‘thing’ that must be abstracted from social life in order for to be protected from manipulation by bank intermediaries and political authorities. The image is of a fully mechanized currency that operates over and above social life. In practice, however, the currency has generated a thriving community around its political ideals, relies on a high degree of social organization in order to be produced, has a discernible social structure, and is characterized by asymmetries of wealth and power that not dissimilar from the mainstream financial system. Unwittingly, then, Bitcoin serves as a powerful demonstration of the relational character of money.
Contemporary financial technology (“fintech”) efforts to enhance the clearance and settlement of transactions may reopen of long-settled questions about accounting, its role in the development of capitalism, its theological undertones, and its practical efficacy. This essay considers distributed ledger technology, the database systems underlying Bitcoin and similar digital currency experiments. Distributed ledgers do more than record transactions. They can also verify them without apparent human intercession, and they can execute more complicated tasks that take on the appearance of and have some of the same practical effects as contracts. If double-entry bookkeeping animated the modern constitution of subjects and objects of property, what do distributed ledgers herald?
Every economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems—to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market. The problem with this version of history? There’s not a shred of evidence to support it.
Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that 5,000 years ago, during the beginning of the agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems. It is in this era, Graeber shows, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.
With the passage of time, however, virtual credit money was replaced by gold and silver coins—and the system as a whole began to decline. Interest rates spiked and the indebted became slaves. And the system perpetuated itself with tremendously violent consequences, with only the rare intervention of kings and churches keeping the system from spiraling out of control. Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history—as well as how it has defined human history, and what it means for the credit crisis of the present day and the future of our economy.
In Myth, Ritual and the Oral Jack Goody, one of the world's most distinguished anthropologists, returns to the related themes of myth, orality and literacy, subjects that have long been a touchstone in anthropological thinking. Combining classic papers with recent unpublished work, this volume brings together some of the most important essays written on these themes in the past half century, representative of a lifetime of critical engagement and research. In characteristically clear and accessible style, Jack Goody addresses fundamental conceptual schemes underpinning modern anthropology, providing potent critiques of current theoretical trends. Drawing upon his highly influential work on the LoDagaa myth of the Bagre, Goody challenges structuralist and functionalist interpretations of oral ‘literature', stressing the issues of variation, imagination and creativity, and the problems of methodology and analysis. These insightful, and at times provocative, essays will stimulate fresh debate and prove invaluable to students and teachers of social anthropology.
This paper takes the appearance of the figure of the ‘zombie bank’ during the recent financial crisis as a starting point to think about how to historicize crisis. A zombie bank is an undercapitalized financial institution that continues to operate due to the support extended to it by the government; it emerged in 2009 as a vivid representation of contemporary capitalism in crisis. By tracing the intertwined histories of zombies and representations of capitalism, I argue for the importance of historical persistence when considering anxieties about the ‘magic’ of finance provoked by the recent crisis. Fears of zombie banks, I suggest, recapitulate capitalism's whitewashed origins in credit and in the Caribbean. The crisis, therefore, represents an opportunity not only to reflect on current engagements with capitalism through an investigation of the figure of the zombie bank, but also to interrogate our models of historical continuity.
This paper investigates the semiotics of Bitcoin, an electronic cash system that uses decentralized networking to enable irreversible payments. For enthusiasts, Bitcoin provides an alternative to currencies and payment systems that are seen to threaten users' privacy, limit personal liberty, and undermine the value of money through state and corporate oversight. Bitcoin's promise lies in its apparent capacity to resolve these concerns not through regulatory institutions or interpersonal trust, but through its cryptographic protocols. We characterize this semiotics as a “practical materialism” and suggest it replays debates about privacy, labor, and value.
exist? There is reason to believe that he was a real person, not a euhemerized god, probably of Romano-British origin, like many others who figure in early British history. His name is in all likelihood a Roman gens name. Such a one is Lucius Artorius Castus who played a conspicuous military part in Britain during the second century A.D. and led an expedition to Armorica (later called Brittany), taking the VI legion. (This may possibly have given rise to Arthur's expedition and conquest of the Continent, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain.) It may be objected that from the second to the sixth century Arthur was born about A.D. 465 - is a long period during which to preserve the name, but we do find at least six men christened Arthur during the sixth and seventh centuries. (i) Aedan mac Gabraiin, king of Scottish Dalriada, who had British connections, had a son Arthur and perhaps a grandson. He flourished around A.D. 570 and headed what was meant to be a massive attempt to drive the English out of Northumbria. (2) Another named Arturius is found in Adamnan's Vita Columbae (Life of St Columba): he was a prince of the ScotoIrish kingdom of Dalriada who fell in battle in 596.
In most standard accounts, modern money depends on its function as the general equivalent. Equivalence, in turn, rotates around a specific numerological metaphysics, including the concept of zero and the algebraic function. Yet, rarely are the mathematics of equivalence subject to critical scrutiny. In this paper I explore contemporary alternative numerologies of money and finance. The alternatives that I consider are a US local scrip currency and transnational Islamic finance experiments. My data come from fieldwork in Ithaca, New York, and from research among Islamic finance specialists devising new financial products. I am interested in how these alternatives make explicit the moral form of the mathematics of the general equivalent.
From the Publisher:
In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" Star Trek-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age.
Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the liberal humanist "subject" in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the "posthuman."
Ranging widely across the history of technology, cultural studies, and literary criticism, Hayles shows what had to be erased, forgotten, and elided to conceive of information as a disembodied entity. Thus she moves from the post-World War II Macy Conferences on cybernetics to the 1952 novel Limbo by cybernetics aficionado Bernard Wolfe; from the concept of self-making to Philip K. Dick's literary explorations of hallucination and reality; and from artificial life to postmodern novels exploring the implications of seeing humans as cybernetic systems.
Although becoming posthuman can be nightmarish, Hayles shows how it can also be liberating. From the birth of cybernetics to artificial life, How We Became Posthuman provides an indispensable account of how we arrived in our virtual age, and of where we might go from here.
This paper argues that the new economy was a rhetorical fabrication, which, through the ability of stakeholders like the cultural circuit of capital, was able to define what the facts consisted of and to train up bodies that bent to those facts. This fabrication could therefore produce regularities in the world. In the first instance, the chief beneficiary was the financial sector, which was able to use the new economy rhetoric to engineer a financial bubble. But, even after the inevitable financial crash, the new economy has left a legacy which should not be scoffed at.
Benjamin's fragment 'Capitalism as Religion', written in 1921, was only published several decades after his death. Its aim is to show that capitalism is a cultic religion, without mercy or truce, leading humanity to the 'house of despair'. It is an astonishing document, directly based on Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, but - in ways akin to Ernst Bloch or Erich Fromm - transforming Weber's 'value-free' analysis into a ferocious anticapitalist argument, probably inspired by Gustav Landauer's romantic and libertarian socialism. This article analyses Benjamin's fragment and explores its relationship to Weber's thesis, as well as to the tradition of romantic anticapitalism.
Can a technological culture accommodate spiritual experience and spiritual thinking? If so, what kind of spirituality? I explore the relation between technology and spirituality by constructing and discussing several models for spirituality in a technological culture. I show that although gnostic and animistic interpretations and responses to technology are popular challenges to secularization and disenchantment claims, both the Christian tradition and contemporary posthumanist theory provide interesting alternatives to guide our spiritual experiences and thinking in a technological culture. I analyze how creational, network, and cyborg metaphors defy suggestions of (individual) animation or alienation and instead offer different ways of conceptualizing and experiencing communion between the material and the spiritual.
Technology is a mirror that reflects human nature and intentions: (1) we want certain things done and we want tools to do those things; (2) we are finite, frail, and mortal; (3) we create technology in order to bring alternative worlds into being; (4) we do not know why we create or what values should guide us. Imagination is central to technology. Human nature and human freedom are brought into focus when we reflect on the central role of imagination in technology. © 2002 by the Joint Publication Board of Zygon. ISSN 0591-2385.