Sure. I'm a visual artist and a writer. And in my writing work and lectures in the public, I've also produced, theory. And by that, I just mean, looking at familiar things very closely and in unfamiliar ways. I've also been interested in the limits of knowledge, comparative philology of security, extractive economies, and, we can talk about what each of those means. And as you mentioned, I'm currently, making art and research at the nexus of oil and data and human extractivism in the twenty first century. The basic premise, which you might call Marxian, but I think is, you know, fairly factual is that capital is dead labor, that like a vampire, it lives only by sucking living labor, and the more it lives, the more it extracts. I think that some people say that capital is ownership over the means of production. And while that's true, those the means of production relies on extraction so that the owner or the the landlord or, the factory, CEO or whatever are victors because workers are living labor. And, you know, you need to have a victor to have a vanquished. And a lot of the work that I'm making is considering that premise as its starting point.

For sure. I wish I could say I'm an early Bitcoin adopter going way back to the mid two thousands, but that's not true. And it's probably not gonna make a lot of people happy, especially in Bitcoin. But I did come to Bitcoin through NFTs, primarily because friends of mine were minting NFTs way before they had entered the dominant discourse. I'm talking, like, you know, 2013. And, I wasn't, you know, an early adopter of that either, but it and it wasn't until this year, until 2021, particularly, on platforms like Clubhouse and, especially prior to the vaccine being available where a lot of the discussions and discourses and debates were happening online that I delve much further into NFTs and then, and then especially Bitcoin where to the point that Bitcoin is definitely a part of my work in ORG, oil research group. I think I was less interested in NFTs as a bubble or a trend or even necessarily as an artist, like, minting my own, but coming to understand their lineage and what their lineage has to do with the history of art itself. One of those things is the question of authenticity, and I'll put, you know, air quotes around that word, and the value of a work. So for example, one artist I can think of would be Felix Gonzalez Torres, whose works were often accompanied by a certificate of occupants I'm sorry, not occupancy, authenticity that not only gave descriptions and dimensions for the works, but what kind of obligations the owners had to the work. And this is something that as the NFT conversations were happening, I kept going back to over and over. The other thing about NFTs that kind of inadvertently led me to Bitcoin was this finger or index pointing at post capitalism. We might put air quotes around that as well, but this question of value in rarity. So in the alienation of the worker from the work, there's this gulf, a lack, a suture. And if we're being poetic, we might even say there's a loss of love. I remember someone in the NFT community, I wish I could remember who because I love this quote so much, said something like, money is the friction from the love we have wanted to have together. And this this this idea or even ideal was that this rare commodity could then restore love through its rarity. And prior to our, you know, historical moment, you typically saw that in the hand of the artist as that rarity. But then what does that look like in the digital age, where you have to either promote scarcity or create, like, a faux or false scarcity in the work. And also, I should say I'm trained as a video and film artist, and it's always been difficult to commercialize or sell that kind of work, like moving image and digital work, because the art world is still, even in 2021, is still quite entrenched in its preset ways. I was just at the Armory Show this month in New York City, and I think I counted one work that might be called glitch art and exactly one video. And it was a video made in New York City, and, I think I spent eight hours at that fair. Maybe there was more. But just to say that there's still this kind of cleavage between, works using, I don't know, like an m p four or digital creations and, the the fine art world. And then getting more close to Bitcoin, you know, this idea of a decentralized monetary system in which you're reaching for something beyond just money, beyond just the monetary, was appealing. I consider myself a mentee and a student of David Graeber, who, tragically died a year ago this month. But in his book Debt, David writes about endless money as the cause for endless war. And that idea was, you know, brought to brought forward for me in the Bitcoin community, which sees Bitcoin as a limited asset class that is transferable across space and time. And, there was, you know, a lot for me to dig into there too.

as an artist or something. And the reason I say that people in the Bitcoin community might not love to hear it, it was it was a gateway. Yeah. Especially thinking about the fact that, you know, the Bitcoin community, maybe communities is a better word with yourself, you know, in it. This idea of all the other coins are sort of altcoins or they're even, quote, shitcoins. And so it really made me question, whether or not I even wanted to put a work on the Ethereum network or what would that look like in terms of, like, what if the startup or this this, like, OpenSea or some other platform, what if they tanked? Like, what would happen to the work of art? And I couldn't get a lot of answers to some of those questions, but, fortunately, it did lead me to, as you say, go to the root, go to the the radical, you know, radical in the sense of the origin, the root of it, which was, you know, Bitcoin and, you know, read the white paper. Basically, do my homework, do my research, and, involve myself in some of those conversations. And then also on the other end of it, which we can talk about, I was also steeped in oil research since at least 2019, and there's also ways in which oil or energy, oil and gas, and energy also have a way of intersecting with Bitcoin in usual and unusual ways. So everything was pointing toward Bitcoin. And, yeah, opening a lot of, opening a lot of things for me to think about further. Mhmm.

Yeah. For sure. Maybe I can talk about it in, like, three ways, kind of, like, what it what the ideals of Oil Research Group are or what I hope to, create, and then maybe some of the false or failed starts. And then, you know, onto onto something, more concrete. But I think, I I I was trained as a comparatist, which means, just to quote Spivak, Gayatri Spivak, who's defined it as placing heterogeneous elements in a homogeneous ground. So I thought about how to place oil in data, which are diverse things, how to put them in a homogeneous ground or a contiguous line with each other. And we can talk about Clive Humby as well, the originator of the line that, data is the new oil, Clive Humby, who is, he's a living person. You can look up his LinkedIn. It's a lot of fun. He is a British mathematician and inventor of the customer loyalty card. So if you ever use your CVS card here in The United States at a pharmacy, that's where that idea comes from. So I was thinking about that, you know, nexus. Another another thing I'm doing is I'm producing a book called Exhaust. I'm also looking to make a digital artwork in collaboration, and, the name might be familiar to blockchain socialist. Sam Levine is my collaborator. I think Sam came up in the conversation you had with Grayson Earl on bail block. Mhmm. And then finally to produce artworks that explore the life of petroleum and data. So I think something about the name and then maybe some of the false starts. I was just really, looking to look at oil, petroleum, gas, from the point of view of capitalism and colonialism, where I kept finding people were looking at those things almost entirely from a climate justice perspective. And not to diminish that. I think there's really, extremely important ways in which that work is being done. It just wasn't necessarily at the forefront of what I wanted to do. And the first thing I wanted to get my hands on was just research, books, other things where I could, you know, from from, you know, from scratch, teach myself about petroleum. And I couldn't get a lot of other people to read it with me. I think this is, like, fall twenty nineteen where the first commission, which I'll talk about, to create something, based on this infrastructure of oil that I was looking at. And I couldn't get anyone to read it read the stuff with me or form some kind of loose collective or, collaborative book club or something. So instead I thought, well, what if I just do a one woman thing, a one person collective that tongue in cheek is called Oil Research Group, and also has the benefit of having the acronym ORG, which points to this afterlife or contiguous life of petroleum that is data. The failed part is that, well, there was a couple of false starts. One is that the initial project was going to be debuting at Eshkad Alwan in Lebanon, on 10/17/2019. This was where I was gonna, like, debut this work and talk about, oil as much more than a commodity in the current global marketplace. And again, talk about it in terms of a colonial and capitalist infrastructure that underwrites everything we take for granted, including the stock index. But, of course, as I flew from New York to Istanbul, on 10/16/2019, overnight, Lebanon had the October seventeenth revolution, and Uh-huh. Which which intersects also with, with what's going on right now in terms of the extreme shortage of, diesel and, and fuel. And so I got sent right back to New York, and then, I had a residency, at Brooklyn Public Library and debuted, you know, I think that fall, the project at Brooklyn Public Library. But then as we headed into the rest of my residency and we were gonna have an exhibition in 2020, COVID happened. And it's really amazing how one of the first things that happened during COVID was seeing this complex extractive infrastructure globally and also hyper locally affected, whether that's, you know, from work and our working lives to housing to, of course, oil. That was one of the, the the major shifts or shakeups in the global landscape was, oil companies freaking out about the COVID pandemic, reducing their profits. And then later, of course, the election of Joe Biden. And I think one of the first things he did was, in his board of, you know, board of advisers, they included people from, like, JPMorgan and, you know, the data companies, but also a lot of a substantial amount of oil company oil and gas companies and CEOs as part of that or former people who were formerly connected to that world as part of his advising company advising board. And then the final kind of cancellation, you could say happened this year. I was gonna do an hour and a half artist talk on ORG, at the Jordanian based, art center called Darat Al Funun on May 11. And I went to bed on May 10 in May 10 and woke up on May 11 ready to do, you know, the Zoom artist lecture. And, the latest crisis in Palestine happened on May 11. And so out of solidarity, Darat Al Funun, like many other art centers in the region, went on a cultural strike. And so at each step of the way, whenever there's been like a public introduction, it has somehow some way intersected with a major climate or political, disaster. And, I guess more, specifically or more personally to sort of, like, why do this or why, why involve myself with oil and extractive economies? I think I talked a little bit about how oil relations, in a in a Marxian sense, take us back to the question of material production, but also in my own biography and in my own historical reality, namely being born in Iran in the eighties and, asking the question now of would I even have would my family have even immigrated to The United States in the late eighties were it not for the history of Iranian oil and neocolonialism and so on. And also even connecting that to the first oil well that was drilled in The United States in Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859, where the modern oil industry begins, making Titusville the most, the richest city in America for about forty years. I think it's still home to some more mansions than almost any other place. So thinking about this lineage between Tehran, where I was born, and Titusville. And then bringing it to Bitcoin, there's a quote by, Bertolt Brecht that I really like. Petroleum resists the five act structure, and exhaust, the book that I'm writing, has five acts. I'm tracing oil and oil, I guess, again, in air quotes, the life the material and social life of oil along five points, dirt. So where it comes from debt, that Graberian, David Graeber esque, set of relations that oil has the complex web that it has engendered, death and the finitude of fossil fuels, for example, and also not to discount the hundreds of millions of lives that have been lost in, due to some of the industries around fossil fuels, data, of course. And then lastly, lately, I've added the word desire and thinking, along desire, not just for our incessant desire for this form of energy, but also desire in the sense of gendered relations in oil and data. And in terms of Bitcoin mining, one of the things I'm really obsessed by is language and metaphor. And, you know, even when you when you talk about Bitcoin, you can't help but also talk about Bitcoin mining and or even these this idea of digital gold or digital oil. Like, I'm I'm putting my fingers together right now. Like, you can almost, like, feel that slipperiness of the oil or this movement of energy across, both time and space, proof of work, extraction, value, ecological arguments. All of these things around Bitcoin had so much to do with my project that, I I feel really compelled and excited to include it.

I'd like to think so. Okay.

Yeah. For sure. That's it's actually a really important question to me to think about precedent and lineage. And I tend to be the kind of researcher or person that looks at what's come before me with some degree of critique, but also humility. I think there there have been, particularly on oil itself. I was really wondering what kind of works have been made on or about oil. I came to this exhibition at Jameel Arts Centre. I think the first in, you know, the Greater Middle East, North Africa region, called CRUDE. It was curated by Martezza Valli, who I've enfolded into this project of ORG. I think there's gonna be a video in which he appears, with other people that I brought together to talk specifically about oil and data, on the sonic acts website. I think it would be like sonicacts.com shortly. There's also an area of research called the energy humanities, and I've noticed that some of its founding members and scholars tend to be around from Alberta, Canada, which would make sense given the tar sands. And there's been volumes of research about that. My favorite part of that research is about Pixar and the world of cartoons. I think the founder of Pixar said, you know, break open one of my veins and from one side, cartoons fall out and, from the other side, oil comes out. And you kind of see the socialization of oil and, petroleum and, like, animations for children.

Well, I mean, there's I think, he has, like, a personal history, of, like, automobiles, of being obsessed with automobiles. And also Okay. So has nephews who are really obsessed with cars. There's a question asked of, like, why do children, particularly boys or people socialized as boys? Why is it that they're so obsessed with cars? And one argument that energy humanities, I think, has made, in this brilliant essay I read, I couldn't I can't remember who wrote it, is that there there is a kind of socialization that happens around fossil fuels. And particularly, like, the head of Pixar has just always been obsessed by both making animation and cars. Mhmm. And so you could say, pardon the pun, but it's, like, grease the wheels for the acceptance, the wide acceptance socially that we are just for forever and ever dependent on fossil fuels. I'm also I guess I'm I am interested in the material reality of oil, certainly Bitcoin. It would be it would be tremendously exciting to read more, I guess, philosophy about that. But one thing I'm trying not to do is just to sort of restage the iconography of oil that is familiar to us. So I'm hoping to maybe not necessarily make, I don't know, an installation where there's just a lot of oil in it, like, physically oil. I'm trying to, like, think about what this might what ORG or the work I make within ORG, what might what might what that might look like. As far as other precedents, you know, these are a little bit unusual, but there's a short story by the great writer Italo Calvino, that I think everyone should read. I think the PDF is online, and it's very short. I think it's under four pages. It's called the petrol pump. And in it, Calvino's character narrator, it just takes place in one scene in which the narrator his car runs out of oil. And, you know, this is Italy. Things close quite early, so he's basically hurrying to get oil at the gas station. And the the story, I I used to teach this a lot when I was teaching college, but there's, this fascinating way that the story reminded me so much of data because, you know, he's physically interacting with the gas pump. He's, like, thinking his his his character defamiliarizes this extremely familiar experience of picking up the pump, you know, placing it in the car. But then meanwhile, as he's doing these rote actions, he's also thinking about the global con connectedness and, what has had to happen, how many hands and how much labor have had to sacrifice in order to get this oil to him, through what he calls the subterranean worlds. And I think he even thinks about the sheikhs in Qatar or elsewhere and all of the laborers that have had to, you know, again, sacrifice something for this oil to get to him. And he even you know, as he's putting in a thousand lira to pay for the gas, he's also thinking about this, the friction between oil and money. And it's just such a it's such an interesting and amazing, encapsulation even if in its brevity. And if I could do something, you know, even remotely as as powerful as the petrol pump, I I would. I guess in I wanna say two more examples. One is from painting. And in, you know, again, in teaching, surveillance technologies and other kind of media technologies at NYU, I came across this painting by, Joseph Wright. His last name is, like, spelled with a w, w r I g h t. And he created a painting of Richard Arkwright's cotton mills. Richard Arkwright is sort of, to me, the Jeff Bezos of his time. And these cotton mills, were, often employed children. I think two thirds of their workers were children in the workforce. But what I love about this painting is it's a night scene, and it's like the the factory's lights are illuminating the sky, but the painting is created at night. So it's one of the first times in painting that I've ever seen electricity depicted, without so much, like, showing you the exploitative factory conditions and so on. But it's really allowed me to think about, well, one, Jonathan Creary's book twenty four seven, and, you know, this idea of sleep as the last refuge, from capital or make money while you sleep, etcetera, etcetera. But it also made me think about Amazon and Amazon's fulfillment centers. Amazon, famously calls its workers industrial athletes, and there was a leaked pamphlet this year in which workers were told to monitor their urine color, and alter their lifestyle so they don't get injured on the job. But then very publicly, Amazon was, you know, showing off these new, I call them porta potties, but they're called Zen booths and it's a space for their workers to, like, rest from their, you know, round the clock Yeah. I saw that. Yeah. I mean, their their injuries were, spectacularly the the rate of injury in in a fulfillment center is spectacularly high. And so when I think the for the opening scene in in the work that I'm writing, Exhaust, is considering these fulfillment centers in comparison to, Joseph Wright's painting of the cotton mills in Britain. And then I guess the other, this is more like a theory space, but one of the theories that has really helped me think about oil and data, as well as Bitcoin a lot, is this concept called frictionlessness. And I first read about it in the work of two marks, Mark Andrejevich and Mark Burden, who write together and they've written work, on what they call the sensor society. So this proliferation of sensors, that increase passivity or pacification in our world. So for example, rather than turning on a button, right, like the twentieth century was about a button that you can turn on and off to put it crudely. But the 20 century in the digital age, there's this purposeful, always on, ubiquitous, and I you know, they would say opportunistic forms of data capture usually marked by sensors. And what friction has to do with it, I think I I I was thinking that in NFTs as well, but with something that's high friction is what's it's hard to do, and low friction is something that's easy to do. So when you think about watching some you know, watching, an episode of a show on Netflix and it says play the next episode, or YouTube's autoplay, If you just have autoplay on, you don't even need to interact. It's such a passive form of of interaction that it just automatically frictionlessly with very low friction moves on to the next episode. Or when you're shopping on amazon.com and it says, add this to your shopping order, you know, it's it's quite easy, to just add something that you weren't there to shop for. Or even maybe in the case of, like, McDonald's, would you like fries with that? It lowers the friction, in terms of human behavior. My least favorite form of this is like an Uber driver. As soon as an Uber driver or Lyft driver drops off the passenger, the app automatically offers them a new ride. So before they can even think, do I need a restroom break? Do I need to collect myself? Instead, automatically, this form of labor is produced for them. I think in terms of oil, there's there's an obvious kind of stickiness. Like, we think of frictionlessness as something that's sticky, almost liquid. But these forms of frictionlessness that Andrea, Bich, and Burden, have defined, really helped me think critically about, the world of data.

but I also would like, you know, certain things of my life to be automated as well. I can give an example of that. I think I think it's important to talk about, you know, why why Bitcoin could benefit me, for example, me myself personally as an artist. Yeah. Often, you're in the position as an artist to invoice, an exhibition, a publication house, what have you, in order to be paid. And it's really amazing to me how ineffective, outdated, and dinosaur like the banking world really is. One of the world's most highly regulated industries is, like, stuck in the late nineteenth century practically with a little bit of, you know, Internet added onto it. But I'll give you a worst case example. I think in one instance, when I was looking to get paid by a major museum, it took them and and a lot of my work is interpolated overseas, so things that are exhibited or published. And so I have to go through, you know, wire transfers, for example. It took a year and a half for me to be paid, and I'm not even talking about great deals of money. I think, like, these aren't huge sums, but it took a year and a half to be paid for a work I did. And then the the payment ended up getting stuck at the treasury department for review. I think it was from Europe. It wasn't even, you know, say, from from somewhere on a on a list or something. And it really, coming to Bitcoin as an artist, that was one of the first, like, primary points of frictionlessness that I want to have, which is that I want that amount, the invoice amount, to be able to, you know, without friction, be moved from one person's Bitcoin wallet to mine. And and I'm actually gonna be stipulating this from in, you know, probably 2022 work going forward that I will be open to being paid in Bitcoin, specifically because of this. It's not even because, like, sure, there's there's an economic incentive maybe to being be paid in Bitcoin. But for me, it really is about the lack of, convenience or even any sense of regulation and and regularity when it comes to being remunerated for work that I've done. So I don't wanna paint all friction frictionlessness as, like you said, the device of billionaires. I think that for those of us who are living in a world that's, like, not quite in the future and not quite in the past, it can be so clunky that we are looking for, a way out.

Well, you know, the thing that goes with regulation like, regulation is such a an an umbrella term. We have seat belts, and that's regulated. But, like, when you're putting a seat belt on for your for the sake of your own safety, you're not going, wow. I'm really being controlled by a top down machinery that hates my individualism. I think one leftist critique, pro Bitcoin would also be just centralization and monopoly. And and the case of Iran is a good example. I mean, the treasury department forbids me from, say, I don't know, taking or selling a laptop or, I don't know, doing any point of sale of of something above a certain amount in my own, you know, in my own country of birth. And, of course, you know, and we can we can talk about Iran later, but that's absolutely the case globally. But even as someone based in The United States currently, that you can be you can be regulated and still centralized and monopolized. You can also be something like the art world, which is not regulated. I think I think I read that the modeling world is the least regulated industry, and the art world is only second to that. But you also have centralized power. You have gatekeepers, to an absurd degree. We can argue the merits of gatekeeping pro and con some other time, but I think there's a lot to be said for, you know, a decentralized platform that can supersede these monopolizations, forms of colonialism, and other regulations that have really out they've outlasted their use.

Yeah. And in those and in the context that you're talking about, often the analogy between data and oil is also in terms of, quote, big data and big oil. So where the twentieth century was underwritten by, quote, big oil, then our moment is, you know, if you wanna get your foot in the door or if you want to be highly employable, you know, make sure that you're some Learn data science. Big data. Yeah. Learn how to code, learn data science, and all of those other things. I think, like, the the central, central concern for me is, like, how can I overturn my own assumptions about these things? I have assumptions about oil. I'm sure, you know, we have assumptions about data. I first came to that phrase in James Bridle's work, the British artist and theorist, and he was quoting Clive Humby. And, I was really surprised to learn this year that, like, Humby is basically a data marketer and really kinda like what you just mentioned, looking to, have the most highly lucrative extractive principle in marketing, you know, marketing and harvesting data, basically, and data mining. I guess on a more conceptual framework, what appealed to me about this this questioning my assumptions were, okay, we have this assumption about oil that it's finite, you know, whether fossil fuels or diesel or or sorry, fossil fuels or gas or coal, that there's a finitude there. And on the other hand, there's an assumption that data is infinite, that as long as there's human beings allowed to alive to create it, that datum or data will just metadata even, you know, like the information about file size that's connected to your JPEG will just be infinitely created. And there's not a problem with that. It's not that I think that that prop that, you know, I wanna fundamentally overthrow that, you know, assumption. It's that the conclusion then is that oil and fossil fuels and gas are precious, and that data is somehow non precious because infinitude, you know, makes you think, well, there's always gonna be more. But that's not true. And we just talked about, you know, the mark the data marketing. If it were true, you wouldn't have, you know, a Mark Zuckerberg in the world. You wouldn't have, the so called big data companies. You know, Google wouldn't be what it is, without the idea that your data actually I guess the premise I'm working on is your data is actually very, precious. Footnote, I just it just occurred to me this morning that the, Keanu Reeves stars in the two best films ever made in my view about oil and data, and they are can you think of what they are? The Matrix? Definitely The Matrix, and I would say also Speed, which I saw. I never got to saw that one. I think I saw Speed in the theater, believe it or not. And, it was really again, going back to, like, the creator of Pixar and, you know, Cut My Vein and and Petroleum or and cartoons come out. You know, you can't ever stop driving the bus. Keanu Reeves can't stop driving the bus because it will implode. So anyway, I that was just like a it just occurred to me spontaneously that he's been in in those two films that, have taught me a lot about this. But I guess further more assumptions. I I guess I wanna take apart some of these assumptions and, like, really even down to, like, making a chart and analogizing, you know, oil energy versus data and AI. For example, as we were talking about with, Calvino's story, petrol pump, the work, quote, the work or labor, human hands tend to disappear in oil at the moment of its consumption. So when you are pumping gas, or diesel, you're maybe, you know, not necessarily thinking about, the work and the labor and the midstream, upstream, downstream economy of extraction that got that oil to you. There's a kind of, invisible there's a triple distance from consumption, labor, and product. And I've been thinking a lot about what that what that has to do with automation and data. Obviously, automation and data are huge parts of the oil industry. My new favorite point of research is, like, these critters, these little, like, bots, like, robots that the oil industry uses, that are, like, automated little robots that test or give data about the oil. So, like, these as you said, it's a very, annoying and kind of overused cliche, but the more you ask questions about them, the the weirder and stranger histories that you unfold. For example, you know, there's, there's this idea that fossil fuels replace the labor of enslaved people. I don't think that David Graeber writes about this, but I but I I know that I've read this in multiple histories of of enslavement. And we might think about how automation also promises to do the same thing to replace the work of workers. But we know that AI is not in fact that intelligent. AI actually is quite dumb. It has to be somewhat dumb. So, you know, it's it's designed or it's it's designer created machines. And if the designer lives in a world of racialized capitalism or one where the stock index is, you know, gone from being underwritten by oil companies to now being underwritten by tech companies, there are some endemic features of postmodernity, I guess you could say, sorry for that annoying word, in both oil and data. And, again, I I know we I I know I keep mentioning Marxian. I just really think that Marx is a really brilliant, almost poetic writer. But I think the the the person or thinker that has most been helpful for me in this analogy is actually Engels, who writes, about, you know, kind of like the Arkwright Cotton Mill. He's He's writing about these factories. He's visiting the steam factory, and he says the worst thing in the world, worse than a despot, worse than, you know, the worst despot in history that you can think of, is automation. And that started really like, I I I started thinking, like, what did Ingle see that automation was worse than the worst king historically? And when you get into the oil and gas world, when you get into the world of data and data analytics and data marketing, Google and Amazon, etcetera, etcetera, you those questions kind of come into focus. And I'm really also interested to discover further what that might look like when I extend this analogy even further into Bitcoin.

Don't I don't want people coming after me in my in my DMs and email. But let's I think the promise of cryptocurrency, especially the profit profitable the profit principle is that you can, through this, like, frictionlessness or automation, just by simply purchasing more coming into more and more cryptocurrency, that we can escape this world of enslavement either to the man, quote, unquote, enslavement to our jobs and, even in turn even, like like, liberate ourselves, from this, from this nexus. And that's that's it. As as I understand it, I think that's the promise. I mean, ultimately, maybe not in the next year, five years, ten years. But as far as the idealization of of what it can do as a as a limited asset class is that it can somehow liberate us. I'll give you an example. Like, when you go to CVS, you have a you have a machine now that greets you. Right? You don't necessarily have, like, cashiers. You have these machines, and the promise is that the machine is going to, care for you. And it's not just, you know, like, that the scare is it's gonna take the place to take people's jobs. But the thing is CVS isn't not hiring people. In fact, there's a hiring shortage all over the world, particularly in North America. Instead, what it does is when you go into, like, especially in New York City, when you go to a CVS, the cashiers are the ones caring for the machines. There's more workers than ever, but you as a shopper become like a checkout worker because you have to kind of check out your own stuff. And then inevitably, there's a glitch, something goes wrong, and the cashier has to, like, run the CVS worker has to run over and help you. So I think the reason I'm saying automation is dumb is that, I I don't mean that pejoratively. It literally still requires human care and human productive or even reproductive labor. And, I think maybe the promise of a world in which we're liberated from both the world of machines that require human care as well as the old world, the world world of the fossil fuel industry. I think that's what the promise is.

That's a really great question.

in 2020, I took a course, at a major let's just say a major, and in part a major energy industry offers, like, courses on oil for people within the industry. And I took it very legitimately, but, like, for my own artistic purposes and learned a lot. I learned a ton that I didn't know about oil and recovery and, again, midstream, upstream, downstream. But I'll make an analogy. So in the oil industry, probability is really, really high. And what I mean by that is you can contract a project to drill for oil or start an oil rig on something like 10% chance that you will yield something profitable. And that seems crazy small. If I told you, hey. Invest millions of dollars, multiple millions in this project, and you may have around a 10% chance of yielding something from it, you would tell me that I'm nuts. But, and the way I think it's like the three p's if I remember it, possibility, probability, and provability. And if you can say that you have 10% chance of recovery, it's it's like p 10, so possible 10, and that's good enough, for for the project to continue. And I say all that to say that with Bitcoin, I think the promise and idealization and, like, my my my interest in it as well is that it's it's there is a high level of probability, probability, and provability. But, well, first, you know, trust don't trust, verify, like, that idea. So, like, provability, probability and possibility in the sense that there's a finite amount. Right? 21,000,000, and then, you know, divide it up into sats or what have you. But that's a to me, it seems like Bitcoin's promise, as an analogy of oil, as an analogy of downstream, upstream, midstream, is that there's a much, much higher promise for people looking to, quote, invest. And you don't invest because you actually have to buy it. I have to use real American currency, US dollars, in order to purchase Bitcoin for myself and put it in a wallet. But the idea, is that it's a much, much higher rate a much higher possible rate of return on my investment than 10%. And it's really amazing that we you know, the fossil fuel industry is still so expansive and so large and so, unrelenting given that it really has such a small probability. So that's something that comes to mind that, you know, in a world in which, you know, a lot of people feel disenfranchised, fleeced, they're working I think I just read a statistic that we're working more hours than ever after the COVID pandemic than before, and I know for me that's certainly true, and I have it pretty good. You know, in that kind of world where people are feeling, you know, that sense of nonliberation, specifically to their jobs and to, capitalistic, extractive economies, the promise of Bitcoin, I think, is even more formidable.

I do. And I think before I say much further, I do wanna, you know, also be thankful to all of the the Bitcoin miners and CEOs of and start up of different start up companies that are, you know, introducing, cryptocurrency to the masses. Like, I wanna I feel gratitude to them for letting me interview them and talk to them extensively for my project. But I do think that it is important to claim my own space within it and find coconspirators. I've been largely disappointed by what I can also what I can call, like, the lack of political imagination in that community. And I what I mean is, like, there's a recreation of or restaging of certain capitalistic ideals without necessarily a lot of thought. And and I know, you know, people might push back against this, but, of, like, how can we get past the extractive logic of capital? Sometimes I feel a little bit bored by that lack of interrogation and critique. And I've already talked a little bit about, you know, how can Bitcoin make my life easier as an artist whose, you know, money is held up, for almost two years in the treasury department. So I say that as an adopter. I say that as someone who who owns Bitcoin, or Satoshi. But I guess looking a bit further and looking a bit deeper, the question I the questions I would like to see asked and even responded to, is like, how can Bitcoin improve the lives of or, you know, cryptocurrency just, you know, do the substitutions you need to do? How can it improve the lives of people on the victim end of economic policies, not limited to, but including neoliberalism and imperialism, major sanctions, etcetera. And interestingly, in terms of discomfort, you know, I've I've been in, like, oil and gas conversations, particularly on Clubhouse. That was, like, February, March, and April, of this year in which, the Bitcoin and finance communities do really cross over into oil and gas as well. And I think it's partly due to the belief that cryptocurrency mining is having a destructive planetary effect, and that's a debate for another day. But, you know, just specifically speaking to this, you know, the shortage of fuel, I think I talked about that a little bit earlier, the shortage of fuel, diesel, medicine, and food is absolutely life threatening for millions of people, including I think I was reading an article today about the Lebanese parliament was interrupted by a power cut so severe that it forced the Lebanese it forced the government to beg the Lebanese resistance movement, Hezbollah, to provide power to the building so that the parliament could continue to discuss what is to be done in the Lebanese, per current colossal disaster. And then, you know, I think it was, like, this month that Nature magazine published a report, the credible report that fossil fuel, producers should really leave fossil fuels on the ground because, if we touch the remaining coal and oil and gas reserves, even further that by 2050, we're going to have global temperatures rise to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. Just to put that in perspective of what that means, since the late eighteen hundreds, there's been two degree Fahrenheit rise in temperatures that has made calamities and disasters much worse and more extreme. And I'm not tying that to cryptocurrency mining. I think there's so many other industries, and there's a plenty of other people that can talk about this in greater detail and and and thought with greater thoughtfulness of how huge global industries are the cause of, are the primary, culprits for the reasons why we're taking so much fossil fuels out of the ground and or forcing them breaking them open in from shale reserves. But, overall, I would like these conversations, in cryptocurrency or Bitcoin communities to include what does it what would life look like? What can look life look like? How can betterment come to the lives of those who are on the victim ends of such disastrous policies, whether they be economic, whether they be, war or, climate related.

One of the ways that I came to form Oil Research Group was actually this very question, particular to Iran and, my growing up knowing about, say, you know, the discovery of oil in Iran having shifted, our history forever to the 1953 murder of, Prime Minister Mossadegh by Central Intelligence Agency and then, you know, to Bitcoin, which I can talk about in a minute. But one of the discoveries so I I decided to look at this a little bit more closely, and I discovered that the first Westerner, to discover oil in Iran is a British speculator, at the time a millionaire. I can only imagine what he would be now, named William Knox D'Arcy. And he entered into an agreement, with the Shah then to excavate Iranian territory looking for oil, and I think the contract was for seven years. And so there would be a very small remuneration return to the then king of Persia. And so, I think for the first six and a half years, this yielded nothing. So it was just a money drain, like, probability not 10, probably less than 1010%. And finally, Darcy's mercenaries came to find oil underneath the Suleyman Mosque, master the Suleyman in nineteen o eight. And it was also in nineteen o eight when the Anglo Persian Oil Company is founded, and, of course, that company preceded what is now known as British Petroleum BP. And I always grew up kind of anecdotally hearing that, you know, 97% of our Iran's oil profits went to Britain, something like one or 2% went to The United States, and then the Iranian, people, you know, held about 1% of them. And and something similar, I've had some extensive life experience, work experience in Brazil, and Petrobras as a nationalized oil company, while it may not have had the same exact kind of neo colonial story, is always kind of in the news and and quite controversial, for its dealings with either foreign governments or, like, corruption scandals within Brazil. So it's not just Iran, but for me personally, again, kind of like at the beginning, I was saying I I was asking this existential question of, would I even be here in The United States had oil not been discovered or at least not by a British speculator that, you know, essentially, you know, collaborates with the Shah to to enrich himself and his, his cohort. But one thing that I thought was super fascinating in doing research and talking to Bitcoin miners, thanks to Instagram DMs in Iran because they're very secretive, but we do, like, voice memos with me, is that the pry one of the primary places where Bitcoin miners in Iran have used have set up their mining operations are also the mosque because mosques are a religious institution that are exempt from paying, like, electricity bills. And so, you know, there's pictures that you can Google it. There's, like, leaked pictures of these Bitcoin mining farms set up in the mosques or masjids, all around Iran. And then on any given week, you hear, like, you know, Iran has banned Bitcoin mining or whatever whatever the case may be on any given week or month in terms of regulations. Like, not on not dissimilar to China, but for other kind of political or economic reasons. I think that, you know, this dependence on I think oil has been such a, like, a a promise and apparel in Iranian history. It's, Iranians, I find, are very proud that our country and its three three thousand five hundred year history has never been directly colonized. And while that's true, I think it's really difficult to overlook the neocolonization of our central commodity. And arguably, maybe the one when I said promise and peril, I guess the promise of which is that Iran is still somewhat has some levels of stability compared to other countries in the region. And I I think a history professor of mine once took, his finger and put it on the map. And if you put your finger on The United States and move your finger all the way to the right, almost every country where your finger is has somehow been torn apart, touched, or, you know, destabilized majorly by American, war and colonial intervention. And Iran still, it's very delicate, precarious, but it's still quote stands. But I found it really interesting that the mosque and I guess maybe religion is the thing that most what most Westerners associate with Iran, for largely, I think, unfair reasons, but some fair. The mosque has been the like the in underneath the Soleiman Mosque in 1908. And then also, you know, in the mid two thousands or maybe even earlier I'm sorry, later, inside these Bitcoin, farms. It's so interesting that the the mosque has been, like, the site where, this kind of extraction happens, whether it was, like, by the British or some lone Bitcoin miner, you know, who puts his cowboy hat on and, like, goes and goes the distance in Bitcoin mining. But I also really like Marshall McLuhan's famous, line, every technology necessitates a new war. So it would be very, very hard, I think, to look at the MENA or Middle East, North Africa region and not see, for example, this idea of stability in the region as being a euphemism for the stability in the price of oil and the advancement of geopolitical warfare. Just take a look at Saudi Aramco, which is, I think, partly owned by the government, partly, private, partly public company. But this idea that, you know, when you have a stable regime or stable country, what does that stability really mean? And my and during my lifetime, I've never known, Iran to be, stable in any sense of the word. And maybe the promise of Bitcoin and the government's, like, somewhat reticent, but somewhat promising attitude to cryptocurrency is that since the sanctions have been so in the past thirty, forty years have been so utterly devastating, and they continue, of course, with this new, American president that perhaps there are other, points of contact to be made in other, markets that are not necessarily based on the US dollar. And I will also say this this is a little bit weird, but my own, quote, petro literacy doesn't just come from the fact that I was born in Iran, it also comes from a childhood, largely, you know, what's the word? Like, what's the binging, binging on American cartoons, and I remember one of the big cartoons of my childhood was Captain Planet and the Planeteers. And, a lot of the Captain Planet app I was, like, looking at I was looking up old Captain Planet episodes at the NYU library, and it's amazing how many of the episodes are marked by oil spills and gas leaks. And as a child, I was, like, very concerned, you know, about the environment in this very kind of elementary way. But looking at them as an adult, as someone who is a descendant of of, you know, from from The Middle East, it's so interesting how thinly veiled the racism of the show was. Like, all of the cool villains in Captain Planet are dressed in Arab clothing and have these, like, Semitic noses, and they're pockmarked, and they have rat tails. I mean, it was really crazy. Even though, like, the planeteers are, like, famously like, it was this, like, Benetton ad of racial diversity and, they're very ingenious and positive. So I think it's always really a good idea to question our own assumptions about, you know, these extracted economies, but also, the cultural geographies from which they come about.

That's a great question. For reasons I won't get too deeply into, I had a Twitter account for ten years, and, that got deleted by twitter.com in 2018. So I've largely stayed off of the socials. But I have a new website coming, and the acronym is we can neither confirm nor deny. So at some point in the next few months, wcncnd.com. I also write at, an open text blog called South South, and you can find that on the newinquiry.com. And for now, at least, my Instagram DMs are open. My Instagram is at, we can neither confirm nor deny, wcncnd.

where where did you get that from? I got that from what's called the Glomar response. Central Intelligence Agency's famous dictum is they won't, if they won't, confirm or deny that they've been involved with anything. So in the nineteen seventies, I think there was a USSR ship that was downed called the glomer. And so ever since then, whenever you say can neither confirm nor confirm nor deny, it's called the glomer response. So I decided to, to borrow it. There will be an oil research group website also in the next couple of months.