Hi. I'm good. Thank you. How are you?

Sure. So I found out about Bitcoin from the peer to peer foundation. I've got, like, an entry on my old blog saying, hey. This looks interesting. Then I didn't think anything about it for a while. And then sort of like lots of people, I'm sure I downloaded the Bitcoin software, tried to mine. This is why you passed when you could mine with CPUs, so that didn't work out. And so, again, I lost interest. And then, sort of when it was getting more attention, I'd I bought some I think it was about 50, pounds per coin at the time. No. £25 per coin at the time. So, like, that's relatively late and started trying to construct my own transactions. And I think I lost all of it because I misunderstood how transactions worked and didn't provide a change address. So, yeah, my my first encounters with it was sort of a bit of a disaster. But by by 2011, I I did a blog post saying, the world's first Bitcoin artist. I will draw you a Bitcoin for a Bitcoin. And one person actually got in touch with me and said, how do we do this? And I was I was very worried because I was I I thought, oh, no. What if the price of Bitcoin goes down and it won't pay for the postage on it or something? So I'd I actually didn't follow-up on that. So, yeah, I could have had at least one more Bitcoin. So that's sort of $50,000 currently that I that I gave up on for fear of not being able to make postage. And, like, from an artistic point of view, Coin Fest in Vancouver in 2014 was was great. Eric Seppka curated the show of digital art around sort of currency themes there. And so that really, really drove home to me that there was a community there, that there were some people who sort of really, really, truly believed that sort of Dogecoin was the future and, sort of people who saw this as a continuation of communic of community currencies, you know, like Let's and that kind of thing, and and that there were sort of businesses sniffing around the edges at that time. So that that was sort of, a moment that really crystallized things for me, and I encountered the people from, Decontrol, Vancouver's crypto hackerspace there, and sort of started hanging out in that space and just sort of seeing what people were doing with crypto, seeing how people were thinking about it, and starting to see sort of both some of the strengths of this idea of a currency that, you know, the government or or other people couldn't interfere in and starting to see some of the contradictions of between sort of this this idealism and people who were hoping to get rich off of it and, people who believed in sort of freedom from government censorship for money but seemed curiously relaxed about, other things being interfered in.

Yeah. As I mean, I I I sort of I I had libertarian antibodies from being extremely online. So, libertarianism and and sort of for any libertarians listening, I love you. You you know, your your focus on freedom and personal responsibility and robust individualism is is completely wonderful. As with any political position, any political position at all, there there are contradictions to to, libertarianism. And, sort of, yeah, I eventually dug into this in the essay in artists rethinking the blockchain, which is called blockchain poetics and, yeah, for the kind of lib libertarianism that Bitcoin instantiates the the desire to have, I guess, private property, the the commodity form without the states to maintain it, leaves the question hanging. And and Bitcoin certainly is is one answer to that question. But once you go off chain, the questions start to cascade and yes. So I'm I'm sort of I described myself for a while as a left libertarian because I I do sort of I do feel that personal freedom of and however you conceive of that is very important, but sort of I I I don't feel that that freedom is best secured by, sort of protecting your own particular pay potato patch with as many firearms as you can purchase. But, yeah. So I I was sort of cautiously inspired by the the enthusiasm, of of the libertarian spirit and by its success in sort of creating something that worked in in technology with Bitcoin. But, yeah, I I I didn't get swept up in it. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I've I've got a couple of pieces in there. I've got the essay, Blockchain blockchain poetics, which is very much it's it's a crash course in in the ideology and and resonances and imaginary of the blockchain circa is it 2018? I can't remember when it was now. So, yeah, it's it's it's a snapshot, and it's sort of very much, trying to explain to, the assumed, European left wing art world reader that, you know, digital cash is not simply fascism that you can ignore and run away from and feel very secure in doing so. That there there is there's an imaginary here that there's, you know, there's something that whether it works or not touches onto the current state of the world and that there are possibly useful tools here to take and get on and turn into something useful. And sort of my experience of that was I sort of shouted this from the rooftop for several years. People ignored it. And then 2021, it was the NFT boom, and suddenly everyone has discovered that the blockchain is a thing, and they're starting to ask questions about, hey. What's this like ideologically? What are its affordances for art? And I'm I'm sat here going that that that there's an essay on that. You you can read this. But the the sort of, yeah, the the artist rethinking the blockchain has been amazing. Ruth from Furtherfield, and, the editors from Talk did an amazing job with it. I I don't get any royalties or anything, so I can say without conflict of interest that it's an amazing physical artifact if you can afford a print copy. But, otherwise, the PDF is is, legally and publicly available for download, and I do recommend that. And, yeah, when it came out, I thought, oh, this is great. There'll be, like, you know, 10 books like this in a couple of years, and this will be a really fun snapshot of a particular time. And here we are several years later, and it's still the only one. I I looked on Amazon yesterday to check, you know, to see whether I was gonna be wrong in saying that. And there are lots of little how to guides for, you know, how to make NFTs, how to make NFT art, how to trade NFT art. That's an entire sort of subgenre of self published guides on Amazon. But, no, that there's there's nothing yet that really takes the question of blockchain seriously from a cultural point of view in the same way. So, like, I'm sort of increasingly excited to see something else do that. But in the meantime, yeah, art history thinking the blockchain is, it's got some very interesting stuff in there. It's got, it's got Terra Zero's project to have a cell phone in a forest, which is a really nice example of sort of taking what people, decided earlier this year as this horrible environmentally destructive governance lacking evil technology and use it to try and save the trees. I think it's got Primavera de Filippi's plantoid in there, which is an absolutely wonderful sort of self organizing artwork that sort of takes, tips from people who see it and uses that to commission human beings to make other artworks. My nightmare scenario is that that sort of reaches an inflection point and takes over the entire planet. So the entire planet is covered with plantoids, and the the economy exists purely, purely, purely to service plantoids. Fortunately, that hasn't happened yet, but it's an interesting thought experiment. And, yeah, there's lots of other good stuff in there. Oh, and, yeah, the other the other thing I've got in there is a short story called Bad Shibe, which is, it's set about 2032. You can date it to roughly the day if you assume that it's using Dogecoin because there's a block number in there. And it's a sort of couple of days in the life of a a young true believer in that society who wakes up one morning, sees that someone else has overtaken them in the on the leaderboard for their district for, you know, how many tips they've given to people and and how much crypto they've used and sort of cascades into self doubt from there as in the same time enough enough threats of of everything unraveling to keep the reader interested happen pretty much off page. And that was, I described that as my exasperated love letter to the Vancouver crypto scene. So yeah. That but it's, it's a theory fiction if people like that term. If they don't, I don't know what a theory fiction is. You can't prove anything.

Sadly not. No. No. I was, the the the immediate literary inspirations for it were Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which takes the idea of social currency and runs with it. Lots of William Gibson, particularly there's just one moment in Neuromancer where the protagonist is walking through a space station, and they encounter something they don't recognize. But the reader recognizes from Gibson's description that it's Duchamp's large glass, and that just sort of that confidence in the cultural literacy of the reader really interested me. And then, Michael Moorcock, the the new wave science fiction writer. I'm a massive fan of his Jerry Cornelius stories and the literary style of the early ones, which are very, very cut up. They're sort of very, Burrowsian cut up style and just sort of, again, sort of trusting the reader to even if they don't understand the references, to get the feel of of, of what's going on and, yeah, sort of creating this this world in which the, what I've described as the unlikely libertarian future in which the state has collapsed but the Internet still works, in in a way that, would sort of horrify an imagined left wing art reader by the fact that, actually, the world hadn't imploded and people did have things they liked and things so, you know, education and work and families, continue and horrify the, the sort of the imagined, crypto libertarian, right, I guess, right wing from that point of view, reader, by having the the sort of the world in which everything is owned and paid for and everything. And you still have school. People are still taught stuff by authority figures and thing there's sort of obviously global warming going on in the background. And, yeah. So, yeah, it's an interesting sort of challenge in producing something which would upset everyone, expectations and sort of try and convince sort of the, the the the culture crowd that there's something to the technology, and the technology crowd that there's there's something to the culture.

maybe? Yes. I mean, just to undermine my credentials, NFTs took me by surprise, and I just didn't understand them at all. The, it was the old art on the blockchain, podcast with Cynthia Gates and and Reyes Grella. And sort of I was I was listening to that, and they were talking about using Counterparty, the the, Bitcoin based token system, to make art. And I was like, I don't understand how this works. Why would you do this? And, like, I'd I'd made a little art market script on Ethereum very early on. I I was just beaten to the punch by, by Monograph, by by Kevin McCoy's awesome use of Namecoin. But, yeah, I'd I'd written a little, Ethereum test next. Ethereum wasn't live yet. Smart contract that allows you to register, the hash of an artwork and sort of buy and sell it, with, re with royalties on it because I'm not a that's an entirely personal opinion. I'm not a big fan of resale rights or royalties or those kinds of encumbrances, but I knew that people would want it. So I'd I'd put it in there to see how it would work. And so, like, I'd I'd made the system, but I hadn't conceived of the things in it as tokens. And so seeing people making that extremely obvious and very powerful leap just caught me by surprise and took me a while to get my head around. So, yeah, that's that's my sort of visionary credentials blown out of the water. And, I I was interested by how irregularly I was interested by how things developed at different paces. Because once NFTs were in the mix, NFT marketplaces came very, very, very quickly afterwards. But curation, which I thought would be decentralized very soon, has taken up until now really to catch up. There are some awesome curatorial DAOs now who are sort of collecting art, as a signal of sort of art historical or curatorial interest in it. And, of course, it's done as something which will like, I guess, they're hoping to see a return on the art that they buy, but that's still a, you know, that's a form of critique. You know, it's a way of putting your money where your mouth is. It's revealed preferences rather than stated preferences. It's not people saying, oh, I think this art is wonderful. It's the sort of the would you hang it on your wall question. Would you have it in your portfolio? And that sort of I I know to, most artists the the idea of actually having to think about money as something other than the thing that you need to pay your rent and get materials at the end of each month is is really, regarded as somehow not the done thing. But, you know, our our money comes from somewhere, even if we are exhibiting in state run or state funded spaces, that money has come from somewhere and sort of that there isn't a a economically or financially innocent state that we are in that the blockchain can spoil. And, sort of we might as well lean into that and and sort of critically engage with it in in sort of practice rather than simply in performative language. So, yeah, I'd I'd I'd been really thrilled to see curatorial DAOs becoming a thing, and I'm hoping that sort of commissioning DAOs will become a thing that sort of, you know, these these blobs of capital with with rules attached on the blockchain will start contacting people and saying, hi. Can you can you draw me a fish or or whatever the the current craze for for art will be, and this will be sort of organized, on on chain as well. So, yeah, it's because sort of around the time of artists rethinking the blockchain, I was thinking in terms of blockchain as a medium. I was thinking of a a means of organization, and I was thinking of it as a means of, financing in in the sense of of paying for things rather than looking for returns. And it's interesting how little of those affordances have actually been used. If you look at the original rare Pepes, which is where the sort of the rare parts of NFT art comes from that had the tokens, that had the, you know, the gallery and pretty much the marketplace and the the built in currency. And the the recuperation of that by the the polite art world has sort of taken up most of the last few years. And it's been really interesting seeing this sort of idea of rareness, which was originally deeply ironic in rare Pepes, become a a serious concept which people try to work out what it means and whether something is rare or not and objects that an infinitely copyable digital image is obviously not rare. So what are you talking about? And, yeah, that, you know, that that's the the sort of Simpsons meme of that's the joke. That was the joke.

That's a great piece. Yeah. I I take that as the starting point for an essay I wrote called NFT. That's tokenization and its discontents. So, yeah, I I think I start with, what was it? It's like, you know, collectors like rare items, and there's nothing rarer than something that doesn't actually exist. And so we sort of go on from there.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That that kind of I mean, yeah, sort of, Mackenzie's talking about, effectually positional goods there. It's something that I have and you want, but only I have, and that gives it value because it sort of gives me a status signal, or a negotiable instrument depending on how you look at it. But, yeah, that that the the social dynamics of or or, like, sort of phrase less potentially, the question of the value of art is, like, what why is art worth something? And one possible answer is art in art as a positional good. It's something that I can have that you can't that signals my particular status and that sort of secures my, place in a particular layer of of society. And sort of it's it's possible for something to be more than one thing at the same time, so that certainly doesn't exhaust art. I'm a sort of a massive art and language fan that the bridge the or transatlantic or international even conceptual art group from the sixties and seventies who've still got a couple of members going today. And sort of, one of the people who wrote with them was talking about the fact that, you know, what the person who buys the art sees is probably not different is probably different from what the person who looks at it in the gallery sees, and, you know, that that's okay. But artists gotta wait. You you have to get the money from somewhere, but that doesn't exhaust the the possible meaning or value of the art.

No. No. And and sort of without wishing to be the old timer explaining how difficult it was that the kids these days don't You went uphill both ways to school. I did indeed go uphill both ways on the way to minting a token. Yes. And we didn't even have tokens. We didn't even mint them. No. So, I just sort of latched on to the idea of of Ethereum having sort of handcrafted some Bitcoin transactions for earlier work, and, I I just liked the idea of being able to to program this thing and sort of be able to generally program it. But the the tools at the time were kind of limited. There was a Python like language, and there's a Lisp like language. And, I I'm a programming language nerd. I I love Lisp, and, so I use that some of it. And, I'm also a other people should be able to read your code nerd. So the, sort of various early articles that I did saying, hey. Maybe we can use this for art. I did in the more Python formatted language. I think it was certain or something. I might be confusing the name. Like, Serpent or Viper, I think. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. There's there's just, the Vitalik has a series of, snakily named languages. And it was sort of if if you look at the early stuff, I'm basically copying and pasting from the history of art, particularly conceptual art of the sixties and seventies and net art of the nineties and February. And in some places, sort of software based generative art of the same era as NetArt and saying, okay. How you know, how how do we do this but on the blockchain? You know, it's the meme. It's sort of, you know, cats but on the blockchain, car rental but on the blockchain, Medical records, but on the blockchain. Art, but on the blockchain. And so I I had very definite artistic models, conceptual models, art historical models. I didn't have the code model, so I had to sort of very, very laboriously work through, you know, how do you represent this? How do you store this? How do you secure this? And that that became sort of the form of, the first couple of years of art was sort of, you know, how how do we represent this, and and not as a sort of an empty question of, hey. Let let's play with technology and make it do strange things. Although that kind of tinkering is great fun and does get us new things. It was very much sort of taking, taking from conceptual art the idea of of the, withdrawal from or critique of the existing networks of exchange in art, And from, NetArt, the idea of sort of planting a flag or putting up a a poster or sort of almost holding a protest in this new sort of technological space that was sort of promising great things but also threatening great things as well and sort of saying, hey. Let's, you know, let let let's let's sort of almost misuse it for something which that will give people something other than what it's immediately meant to be used for. And, like, there's always a a heavy layer of irony to it, so something like democratic palette, which is, color put on the blockchain. It's a little distributed application, and you if you have some ether, you can go to it and sort of enter what your favorite color is, and it keeps, a palette of, like, eight or 12 of the most popular colors. And, yay, it's democratic. Anyone can vote for it. But, of course, you have to have the the ether to do that, and you have to have the tech logical knowledge at that time to to do that. And, you know, it's it's it's sort of a democratic shim over sort of the distribution of of sort of intellectual and and financial capital. So,

Yeah. It's it's a sort of, hey, let's democratize something talk from, the sort of, I guess, the, you know, the Californian ideology, that sort of Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron essay from 1995, which I have the disastrous feeling my career in art has been sort of taking that as an instruction manual rather than the terrible warning. But, yeah, the sort of, hey. Let's democratize things. Let's bring it to the people. Let's improve the world talk, which is satirized so beautifully in the Silicon Valley TV show. I mean, that that really is a documentary. It's very easy to to deploy that language to place a curtain in front of other things or if you're the person doing it to, you know, resolve the the contradictions in what you are doing or to to silence your conscience. And, yeah, sort of I I I enjoy sort of conceptually and visually pathetic work where sort of you go to it with these great hopes and it disappoints you in a very careful way, and you you can go on from there. It's it's sort of sort of a lot of my work is taking, I guess, verbal descriptions of of, you know, what art is or or how technology works and sort of producing something that pattern matches that but completely disappoints the spirit of it. And that kind of, sort of disobedience in obedience, does have a history in in art, and it's a useful way of producing, you know, competent work, work where where people can't say, well, you've just broken this. Why have you done this? It's sort of it in the case of software art, in the case of blockchain art, it runs, and it it possibly looks okay. But sort of when you when you get into it, it it sort of it cascades into, no. Hang on. This isn't this isn't what I asked for. What what have you done?

Yeah. I I I sat here thinking I wish I'd made a lot more NFTs. I thought I'd be much richer. Yeah. I mean, sort of the the relationship between art and and money is is fraud. I I love the book Art After Money, Money After Art by Max Haven. It it mentions cryptocurrency, I think, once. And if if I was going to have criticisms of cryptocurrency, then those would probably be similar to the ones that that I would have. But, no, that that's great for sort of looking at, the impact of financialization of of art, sort of where where art ends up as base basically, traded commodities that people purchase without seeing, store in Freeports, and then resell hopefully for a profit some years later. And I've I've sort of written essays and produced work that leans into that, and I'm working on some more of that now. But, the the mythology of art is that it's this this good, bourgeois space free of of of such dirty and inconvenient concerns as as, you know, money and where the money comes from. And, yeah, combining, the the sort of spiritual world of art with the immediate sort of the the immediate sort of purchase and valuation of of it sort of it it looks like putting the cart before the horse. It's like, hey. You know, what art is there that's available for one or for, you know, $3,000. It's like people don't like knowing that that's how people think about art. And, so I I entirely understand the backlash. There's a degree of very literal scapegoating to it. My absolute favorite example of this is someone on Twitter who posted something about how awful, NFT energy usage is, And then the next tweet was them posting about how their three d printer had arrived from China. It's, you know, it's an NFT that that NFTs are at that point where enough people are doing it that you can see them and point to them, but you are probably not doing it, and so you can performatively disavow it and, sort of get some calm from worrying about the the environmental apocalypse that's looming in a year or three. So that that's my very cynical take on it. There was absolutely a degree of moral panic about it. There's also with the best one in the world, a tendency in left or or pseudo left thought to sort of just treat all technology as reducible to the ideology, or the economy that has produced it. It's the the left equivalent of, oh, I see you're taking an iPhone to your anti capitalism protest. It's sort of, oh, you're trying to use this, this anarcho capitalist technology for something other than anarcho capitalism. There's a contradiction right there. What are you gonna do about it? And it's like, I'm gonna learn about it and reap it. So Amen. Yeah. It's sort of, it's the the, what's the book? What's the it's like the accelerationist manifesto for an accelerationist politics, which, to be very clear, was was written as a deliberate provocation very much to frighten the horses. But, yeah, this sort of whole, hey. You remember that when the left used to lean into technology? You know, we've we've gone from sort of we will we will bury you to, hey. You know, maybe we can bake to death in the sun in a slightly more gentle way. It's sort of something of a fall from not grace, but sort of ambition for the left and seeing this sort of technology, which has such obvious ideological determinants, be so successful on its own terms, although it, you know, it's being recuperated at a rate of knots. But seeing it be successful in its own terms, I think, has spooked some people. And it it may be the case that technology itself is is is a problem, is, you know, something that needs practical critique and and restructuring, but, you can't do that verbally. You can't say, I'm not gonna look at this. You you know, you have to it's not sort of you have to change the system from the inside, but, I I believe and I've believed from the start and sort of my mission, if you like, is to convince people that there are useful resources here that you can, if you are careful, take out and use for interesting things. And back sorry. Back to NFTs. So, yeah, I I was sort of I was very, very, very happy to see people getting paid for their art as an artist and someone in those artists, sort of getting money for your art is good. If you cannot get money for your art, then you have to be independently wealthy to make art, and that closes up, not just the the economy of art, but the the the imaginary of art as well. So everyone who wants art to be free of the the distorting effects of money, will probably just be disappointed by the art that results only from people who have sufficient money from other sources to make it. So, yeah, I was deeply relaxed about people getting paid for art, and in particular, I saw so many, queer and trans and sort of other minority artists getting their first ever sale of of digital art from that. So, you know, getting money for for sort of rent, for education, for for medication, for, you know, like peep people who desperately, desperately, desperately within the current system need access to, more operating capital or more living expenses than they have was suddenly getting it. And I it's sort of to a cynical observer, and I am a cynical observer, it looks like the moment at which people got upset about, NFTs was at the moment that people, slightly further down the social status long tail started making money from it. Now the the obvious answer to that is no. They didn't. They started getting upset when people started making $70,000,000 in return for the sort of digital file. And, yeah, I I know that was the driver, but so the collateral damage from that, and I'm not trying to hold up, minorities as a human shield here, but, you know, society is always more complex than, a sound bite. Sort of yeah. The people were starting to to sort of get the benefits of of NFTs distributed more evenly and sort of that being the moment to start worrying about the environmental impact. And and the environment impact considered so incompetently, like, yeah, sort of because I've been following the environmental concerns around blockchain stuff for a few years. And, yeah, the the sort of the person who completely miscalculated the the carbon usage, Like, that's great for the press, but it's not great for actually thinking through this this technology. So I was actually kind of annoyed by that. And sort of some of the big, new chains, including the one that, I'm working on now are sort of proof proof of stake chains. So you only have the sort of the environmental destruction of the environmental impact of technology usage. And what what another thing that frustrated me was seeing people going effortlessly from, oh, no. It's an environmental apocalypse, when they were told it wasn't to, oh, but the governance is terrible with proof of stake. So, you know, it was just sort of, what's in the American it's like a gish gallop of just, like, objections

Yeah. Yeah. And and to be to be absolutely clear, you know, I'd I'd I'd like planet Earth. I'd I enjoy living here. I have kids, so I'd like them to be able to live here, Sort of, yeah, you know, with apologies to any in inhumanist philosophers or anything listening to this. The the the biosphere is kind of important to us, and anything that sort of fucks that up is probably bad. But, yeah, sort of failure to look at the details of where the energy comes from, where the energy is coming from, what the replacements for using energy are is is deeply incurious and sort of, I think it's worth looking at the the the sort of attitude or the spirit that that leads to that. But, yeah, I I sort of I I occasionally sort of sit here and sort of make sure that I'm running the most efficient systems that I can. So yeah. And and just to sort of, again, to lean into the to the governance discussion, the the early the early work I was doing, it's sort of the first couple of years, it was sort of pairings of aesthetic properties with, systems of governance. And I was doing it so long that the RC seven two one standard came out just as I was finishing. So I changed one of the last ones, to be token grid. So it it's a, you know, a modernist painting style grid of horizontal and vertical lines, and you can change it in the contract if you own one of the tokens. And anybody can just ask for one of the tokens, but, and sort of that was tied very much to the number of energy companies I'd heard from who were like, hey. We wanna do something on the blockchain. And so it's sort of the idea of an energy grid on this modernist grid, sort of controlling and capitalizing that. So, yeah, I I sort of it was interesting sort of working on this long enough that, things got standardized, as you said earlier. But, yeah, we we were sort of we, those of us sort of both critically and practically engaged with blockchain. Staff were engaged with questions with questions of governance from the start. And and blockchain, Bitcoin is a governance technology. It's something which removes sort of distorting social intrusion from transactions between individuals and sort of makes it very, very difficult to, to do anything different. So I guess it's maybe anti governance, but, yeah, the question of who gets to say how things work was was embodied there from the start. And sort of another sort of whilst I'm listing my frustrations, another frustration is sort of critics or philosophers suddenly coming up with, the start of debates that were being held very, very richly in the blockchain space from the start, the sort of reproduction of internal critique as external critique. It's like, yeah, I I I know that you could do on chain governance. Have you read all of the work on that and the pros and cons of it? So, yeah, that's that's interesting sort of seeing people from their point of view arrive suddenly and from sort of the blockchain world's point of view, suddenly need to catch up, which sounds arrogant. I'm fed up enough with people sort of saying, hey. Have you thought of this? So the answer being, yes. Yes. I have. Many people have. Would you like to hear about it? But, I mean, you know, that again, that said, sort of the number of fresh eyes, and voices that come into the space over the last year has been spectacular, Getting sort of, sort of more proper art historians actually looking at this and going, hey. There's something here and sort of seeing more, old school, techno culture critics look at it and not just simply reading about it has been absolutely wonderful. And, yeah, to sort of close the, you know, what do I think of the the NFT boom and its, it it's it's it's discontent. It's like I I think it's it's absolutely great. I am deeply, deeply happy that people are getting paid. I'm deeply, deeply happy that people are thinking about curation and and paying for this work and how it interacts with the existing world of off chain rights. Sort of we're seeing really interesting work being done, really interesting questions arising about how this interacts with copyright and moral rights and all the sort of off chain bourgeois state property model things that, blockchain was originally designed to discard almost all of in a libertarian way. And, yeah, sort of people are trying to escape the how do I phrase this? Escape some of the restrictions of that world, but at the same time, keep, some of the sort of reputational and value effects of that world eve even as they seek to flee it. So, yeah, I'd I I must make clear that I'm I'm offering no opinions on this, here because I'm I'm not a lawyer, and I'm involved in industry, and my opinions are are strictly neutral. But just as a, hey. Look over here. Things are interesting kind of thing. Yeah. The way the way that questions of, clashes or contention between off chain and on chain property rights and and the form of that property takes. Seeing those being played out in the the arena of the theater of art is something that I hoped for from the start. Because sort of my my my pitch to the tech people was, hey. Art is this place that you can experiment with people in without it being like people's medical records or a a nation's food supply or anything. And, yeah, sort of, you know, seeing these these difficult and necessary questions being hashed out by, artists and sort of activist lawyers and corporate lawyers in in the art space is brilliant because, you know, it it it is now people's livelihood in the art world as I was saying earlier, but it's, yeah, it's it's a sort of safer space to do that. And so

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. The the oil industry have been very successful in pushing the idea of individual carbon footprints. Yeah. I mean, sort of to to be entirely fair, Bitcoin was designed to solve a specific technical problem, which was, there as part of a specific, financial problem, which was there as part of a specific political problem. So everyone who says Bitcoin is a political technology is absolutely right. It's a fantastically successful, it's a fantastically successful political technology. Unless we fetishize technology in some really interesting ways, that cannot possibly exhaust the value of it. There has to be some surplus value to it. Bitcoin does very, very, very deliberately exclude some avenues for justice as conceived of, by some sectors of the left. You cannot, at the moment of transaction, intervene and, attempt to act in the good of a third party. You cannot attempt to redistribute wealth at that moment. You cannot attempt to protect foolish artists from making bad bad decisions. You can't prevent, transactions being sent to really, really, really horrible people. So as a kind of exclusion of politics at this this chosen moment, it's a very, very definite kind of politics. That kind of politics has been claimed by libertarianism, by right libertarianism. But I I think it's it's an anarchist moment in general. It's the absence of a a state or a functional equivalent of it. And to simply see to that to the right because they've licked it seems like a really bad idea.

Definitely. Definitely. And there is I I I I won't name them because it wouldn't be fair, but there are there are definitely some negative case studies in tweaking the design parameters with the best of intent and then the unintended the unintended consequences of that. To to get back to shilling my own work, Blockchain Poetics has a section warning people sort of if you, you know, if you tweak the parameters, make very, very sure you understand what each one does, because it's very easy to sort of add a feature which we think is great or change things in a way that looks more efficient or more just or or more fun. And the sort of the the Jenga tower of the the the sort of bricolage of of Bitcoin's original assemblage from all these disparate materials falls apart. It just falls apart. So, yeah, it's I think in order to be able to perform that kind of very, very delicate neurosurgery on on Bitcoin, you really, really need to understand both the technology and the ideological motivation and expected results from that and the unintended consequences that have happened since I mean, my Bitcoin mining is the perfect example. It it's a paper clipper, you know, the the thought experiment of the the AI, which is tasked with doing one thing, and that one thing is making paperclips. So it just turns the entire planet into paperclips. And, yeah, Bitcoin's, difficulty targeting algorithm will perfectly happily boil the oceans, if that's what it takes to secure the chain. Sort of that that's not up for debate. Yeah. That, you know, that is, how the game ends if if we don't do something other than mine Bitcoin, and I strongly suspect that we will continue to do something other than mine Bitcoin.

sort of ignoring any any obvious bugs in the code, things like the role of exchanges in centralization, the emergence of mining pools, the perverse incentives of on chain governance when it's structured in the wrong way. The these are all things that sort of Satoshi, whoever they were, whatever they were, wherever they were, just like there's no way that you can foresee these these consequences. But if you're going to try and change the system now, then the the system that the software is embedded in now consists of of these of these concerns. And, I mean, sort of yeah. Bit Bitcoin Bitcoin's an interesting case just in terms of you re you know, anyone really, really, really could mine us at the start. It really did have that that sort of openness that it promised to, but people didn't know it was there. So you have sort of this first move for early adopter advantage where people who started out mining Bitcoin when you can do it on a CPU or a GPU or a milk crate rig of GPUs, For them, Bitcoin is the thing that gave them financial freedom, you know, that they can pursue whatever they want. And that I think that skews their view of the liberatory potential of cryptocurrency because, you know, it's liberated them. Why can't it do it for everyone? And the answer is we can't, yeah, we we can't afford to mine. So, like, our our our world is is kinda different. So, yeah, sort of if everyone who says, you know, Bitcoin is concentrated with early adopters has something going on there. I think if we could solve that problem, then we would be more than a quarter of the way to being able to abolish capitalism in general. But,

they have the shitty end of the stick. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, sort of a a a small, rainy, muddy corner of a continent suddenly inventing better clocks and bigger whips and then going to far more civilized and structured kingdoms and stealing all their their young people and gold is is sort of yeah. You know, you wouldn't be able to do that, if if you weren't the first mover in that space, definitely.

in I know. Right? It's yeah. You know? Why didn't they do that, honestly? Yeah. It's no. It's it's an interesting one because, obviously, Bitcoin is anarcho capitalist. So so they're saying, hey. Let let's use this inherently capitalist dynamic technology to produce a form of socialism. You know, there there's your your opening contradiction right there. But, like, eve even with that as the layer, sort of if we wish to create, you know, the sort of the first blossoming of socialism, I guess, sort of within a currently capitalist society, then blockchain has shaken things up a bit. The you know? At the very opposite. It hasn't been entirely recuperated yet. I I almost had a mental breakdown the first time I saw a, a cryptocurrency credit card. I was like, this this this is these things are opposite. You know? Don't talk about dialectic. It's like I could not have made a more ironic dialectical artwork than someone producing a Bitcoin Visa card.

It is. It is. And I can't get one because I'm in Canada, and you can only get them in America. But yeah. I mean, you know, you you you can we we can start with the world as it is. You know, we we don't have to fall into merely prefigurative, LARPing with that. We we can do sort of more than simply reformist more than simply reformist good and strategy within this sort of it's it's it's no longer a temporary autonomous zone. I mean, it's not this space beyond, the immediate understanding of the existing bourgeois political order, but it there there's remnants that, you know, the background radiation of it is still shining brighter than it will. So, yeah, I think there's definitely things that people either should grab and run with or should take as, like, a a sort of a negative example and say, okay. This is possible, but I don't want to do this. So what should I be doing instead?

Yeah. I mean, it's it's it's it's trivial to coherently reject, cryptocurrency or blockchain politically. I mean, like, if you believe in the sort of the inherent dignity of of of work, then the kind of mining and in human activity of hash hashing of Exceme the blockchain. That's anathema. There's no way you can humanize that. And so, yeah, you you can reject that. You know, there there are so many coherent grounds on which to reject this technology, and that that's great. But if with the best one in the world, things are not always going as well as they could. So, if this isn't the different thing that we want to try, then so let's look at what works about it, what didn't, how it flew under the radar to make itself so successful at the start, you know, who whose egos it flattered, whose balance sheets it appealed to, and see if that can be used in different ways.

Yeah. So if if we take the view of, different kinds of leftism, so like, you know, a a Soviet style state or, you know, a more anarchic view, sort of somewhere along that false dichotomy axis, you find that the sort of memeplex of anarcho syndicalism or of workers' councils or of liberal communism. And I know you're all sort of grabbing your your phones or your earpods and saying, no. That's not right, but, like, work work with me here. So the the sort of kinds of, socialism of of of communism where you're organized around a workplace or a project, and it is democratically controlled. You you you vote on, the direction of the work and on any pricing or any any interactions with the outside world. You vote on a delegate who you send to, like, a, you know, a town assembly, and then the town assembly votes on a delegate who they send to a regional assembly. And then the regional assembly votes on people they send to sort of, you know, if we're really doing communism properly, an international assembly or, you know, some larger scale assembly. And the, the representatives can be recalled at any time. So, you know, if as soon as they start, trying to vote themselves a pay rise or or ultimate power, then the people who who've delegated them can simply recall them, and they have to report back to the sort of lower level, the lower level group. So it's sort of generalized cooperatives in some way. And I I live in a housing cooperative, so I have some trivial experience of of the the joys and woes of of cooperatives. And this this system of organization is great because it's an answer to, oh, so how do you organize things if everybody is just free to do what they want? It's like, well, you get together with other people who are free to do what they want as free individuals, and then sort of if you have common interests, then you organize around it. And once it's no longer two people arguing, you you organize it, you know, as democratically as you can. And that sort of democratic ownership of, the means of production is is socialism from some some very strong descriptions of it. Now, I am, as I may have mentioned earlier, deeply cynical. The absolute worst description I can provide of political economy is the question of what to do with sociopaths. After the revolution, we will still have people for whom it is economically rational to not work within the system. You know, sort of establishing full communism will not resolve human nature, in in any of the ways that's been proposed. So where you have different workers' councils, different workplaces, different regions with competing interests, and they will have competing interests, you then fall immediately back into the requirements of copyright of, sorry, of property law of some kind, of contract law of some kind, and of, the regulation of conflict in a way that doesn't render it structuralist in in the the sense of the old the tyranny of structurelessness essay. And sort of without wishing to be someone who has a hammer, and this looks like a nail, I think some form of cryptographic commitments with a a public record that cannot be falsified or or or added to unilaterally might be a technology that's useful for this. I think that, where the workplace or or the the governance structure is distributed, a DAO like structure might be a good way of distributing that that control and of, for want of a better word, securing it, structuring it, and, sort of governing it in various interesting ways. I could be completely wrong about this. I'd be very happy if someone said you are completely wrong about this. Here is a much better system that would I'm not lying when I say that would make my day. However, at a time when people were sort of saying, oh my you know, oh, wow. This is this horrible antisocialist technology. Oh, why are you doing anything with this? I was like, if we think a few steps ahead, then, you know, this may solve what looked like some problems in in, you know, socialist organization at either at scale or or or over time. And, like, I I know people involved in very seriously in in cooperatives and alternative forms of organization, and I'm absolutely not trying to put down the amazing work that they've done. I want to take that amazing work, run with it, scale it, and give them some time off. And, like, that yeah. That was written either before or around the time of the DAO. The original DAO, Bad Shire was written immediately before the DAO hack and one of the big bads. And that is kind of a DAO hack kind of thing. Seeing things like the the like this was on the Ethereum testnet but like the People's Republic Of DUG or ProDUG which was a very early DAO prototype was amazing and sort of DAOs have bubbled under the surface for a bit but sort of things like, the sort of Moloch DAO a couple of years ago sort of reignited that spark and the work that the Koala Organization, c o a l a, are doing, in terms of their their model law for DAOs so that you can incorporate a DAO into local bourgeois state law, and then your DAO is sort of legal anywhere that's legal is amazing. And then taking some of the existing DAO code and structuring it, to work with that is that's mind blowing to me. That's really amazing. And, I've paged out my DAO knowledge, so, unfortunately, I can't name check any other good projects. But, yeah, seeing seeing DAOs come back, is filling my heart with joy and seeing them, used for for curation and, sort of other forms of organization is great because, again, curation is sort of something that does pay sort of workers who are artists their their wages or the, you know, the money they live on, but, it's a good space to play in and then sort of take the models from there and apply them to sort of health care or or graphic design or or whatever sort of people regard as more important than art.

Yes. Yeah. I mean, because, DAOs were originally decentralized autonomous corporations, but I think, lots of ideology there. The lawyers pointed out that claiming something's a corporation may sort of give you particular liabilities. So they became DAOs, which is which is a more fun fun name. Yeah. I mean, DAOs tend to be organized as joint stock corporations and, like, what whilst we're talking about reclaiming stuff from the right to the left, immense small bugs, patchwork ideas, which will, either horrify whoever you mention them to or cause you to be horrified by the enthusiasm you see when you mention them to people. Is is a thought experiment in, you know, what if we organize the state as a joint stock company? And that that sort of, you know, let's turn this to 11 kind of thinking is so useful, even when the outcome is absolutely antithetical to anything you would want to see. Because, obviously, you know, we have we have forms of organization for states other than a joint stock company. And sort of any but but but sort of any ability to think of this as possible or to think through the consequences of organization in that way that that sort of gives us resources we didn't previously had or that sort of jolts us off of the the sort of the rail that we're on onto the at the very least, a different rail. It is useful, and sort of to be extremely clear, I'm not endorsing neocameralism in any way, shape, or form here. But, yeah, sort of as as with Bitcoin, these these thought experiments can go somewhere, and it's worth digging into them. And, yeah, with like, I think a lot of my work is written in exasperation, I guess, and and the dorks one certainly was. And, yeah, you know, there there's obviously other ways of organizing. And so, yeah, the, you know, the early as I said, the early art was very much different ways of organizing access or allocation of a resource, and, yeah, sort of it it it bemuses me that people aren't willing to, you know, experiment to, like, sketch out different ways of doing things. And you can object that you you're sort of doing this in a playground where, you know, that the hashing power is is centralized around capital or the staking power is centralized around capital, but it is throughout society. You know? Yeah. It we're back to the, oh, you're taking your iPhone to a protest.

Yeah. I mean, if if if you're, you know, if we're not assuming a sudden revolution, sudden violent revolution, then you have to bootstrap somewhere. And this is a current and rapidly shrinking, but current source of difference that we can sort of at least think through. Mhmm.

Yeah. So, I I think docs are possible. Some other people have done work on very similar things, which which with massive apologies. I can't remember the name of, I'm trying I I know that further field have looked at the various different options. So apologies for that. So, yeah, sort of other people are working on it. I think it's absolutely possible. I think that on a merely technological level, as we see more and more DAO toolkits and better and better established case law for DAOs, it'll become an option that you can pick up. It's like you can go to the library and photocopy the flyers for the protest. You can go onto the blockchain and organize a temporary, you know, distribution system for fares to fares to the protest and and so, you know, that kind of thing. So, like, yeah, I I think, though, those those affordances are absolutely there to be taken up and used. And, like, if people try it out and it's not what they want and they come up with something better because of it, then sort of, talks being possible is, you know, it it becomes a relatively small question. I would like to believe that engagement with this imaginary engagement with this technology, engagement with these ideas is still possible. And I'd like to think that it sort of becomes something other than a way of, paying rent not only on your house, but on the cups in your cupboard in your house because that would definitely be the worst possible outcome from something that was originally designed to remove, you know, third parties from from your life. But, no. I'm I'm in in the me in the medium term, I'm very, very optimistic about the technology in terms of seeing people use it for organization and funding. And in in the longer term, sort of, you know, cap capital just recuperates everything, and the state legislates everything, and it will become sort of the in in many ways, the worst outcome would be it just becoming a boring part of our lives that go on as before. Right. But on the way to that, I think there's still there's still some energy there.

Yes. Yeah. And and sort of but, you know, Bad Shibe was an attempt to convince myself that however unlikely that that future is is that imaginary future to steal another Richard Varlberg title is is is possible, however strange it might look. And, yeah, we we we need to be able to imagine a better future. I think that's, like, an excellent slogan for the left and one that needs reclaiming. We need to be able to imagine a better future. We need to be able to make a better future very certainly. But to make it, we need to be able to imagine it.

Yes. So my my website is rhea.art. That's rhea.art. I'm on Twitter as rheaplex. That's r h e a p l e x. And the website has links to, my essays on further field, which is where sort of most of the sustained writing about, blockchain artists, but there's also various essays on the site. And, yeah, if if you don't look at anything else, do please look at artists rethinking the blockchain. It's a great resource.