Proof of Perception
The double-spend problem seems harmless enough that one would think an ontological commitment to a global ledger would be a mark of a disastrous solution we've already tried rather than a successful one. Combine the fact of said ledger's monstrocity with an address system of public transactions marching to the tyranny of one clock, one is invariably made an audience to a spectacle. Remember the old Brick-And-Mortar? Have you synced up with your Block-And-Chain yet?
What was the solution? Prices. But small ones sufficiently obeying the boundaries of our categories such that risk is shared by brands along the isles of creditor phenomenological indexing. The prices are as real as the boxes that stretch beyond the front row, adjacent to each placard. The conformity of number indicates the normalization of the real — take one, any one, but as an agent your act is immersed within a sea of indifferent presentations which could not possibly lose radiance, as a being shorn of novelty, products are but feathers of the art of the product. An item — it-em— being nothing more than the measurement of being, yet one's presence of data, of facticity codifies universality-without-collectivity, as side by side, or side-unto-another, they present force with goal, manifest impulse without value, engender action without power (to purchase), momentum without authority (of epiphenomenal capitalism).
Proof-of-Work? Price-checking? We must hurriedly automate more machines at the behest of our own history. Is mathematics about what we say about the world, or about the world? A history of hashes speaks a language of the few, necessarily, then what good is the price itself? What world can we check against, if every possible one is "shorn of its agency", its real value, everywhere a shadow of its dominate form within the monstrocity itself. I wanted a banana, and now I have an entire forest of dead transactions.
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Why do you not lift at grocery stores? Well, because you've done your homework. Why are bad things not done? because presumably someone calculated that you would do it. Through rights to price is, axiomata to an ideology, government does not invent the crime, but names the crime to which some segmentarity of society is grounded, "pegged to power," or bound to one's feet, as it were by an accounting system predicated on systemic misdocumentation.
Prices are part and parcel to a psychological framework of a philosophy of action, a system of communicative praxis. Brian Cantwell Smith might argue that the computer scientist has turned the grocery store into the laboratory, and the kitchen into the market, as the semiotic alchemist weaves poetry and price before the unconscious spectacle that is commodified as we unlet our agencies into the inner plane of immanence.
In a word, blockchains à la proof-of-work are capitulations capital, not liberations from it. The next time someone tries to convince you that blockchains are about “transparency” and that Bitcoin is not government, have them check out Control and Freedom:
According to Avital Ronell, the early twentieth-century schizophrenic had telephone receivers and electric currents running along its body; the early twenty-first-century paranoid views these receivers as data jacks and concentrates on voltage signifiers rather than running current.3 According to Friedrich Kittler, writers simulated madness in 1900; in 2003, reality simulates madness, and everyone — especially Kittler — seems to conflate fact with fiction.4 In 2003, all those with female (computer) plugs are encouraged to change gender and publish their secrets via live journals/blogs in order to become authors/objects for observation, if there is a difference between the two. This explosion of online confessions, which can be understood as the democratization of the talking cure (no money is exchanged and no expertise is necessary), compensates for the increasing localization and medication of mental anguish. This ‘‘democratization’’ of the analysand- analyst relation denotes both the triumph and the failure of psychoanalysis. Although medical psychiatry now predominates and, according to Zizek, the talk- ing cure is no longer effective in analysis, people still talk and still use their body to signify.5 Sex is still a secret that needs at least two people to decipher. Psycho- analysis has become diffused throughout society: it has become co-opted in a do-it- yourself craze.
Importantly, in 1903 Schreber’s vision was singular, and paranoia para- normal — Schreber lost his civil rights and was incarcerated in an insane asylum; Schreber also considered himself singular, a messiah. In the age of computerization, as Intel CEO Andy Grove so eloquently put it, ‘‘only the paranoid survive.’’6 Also, whereas Schreber fought to be released from tutelage (and thus freed from his wife’s financial decisions), we are now all encouraged to be free — to wander about and believe that we are beyond tutelage (that is, as long as we take our medication). This difference, this freedom of movement — a freedom akin to the freedom of a commodity in the so-called free market — is the key difference between our situation and Schreber’s. Marx once contended that bourgeois freedom was in essence the freedom of capital and that the relations between humans were perceived as the relations between commodities. Now, we not only fetishize commodities but also actively emulate them — and this emulation or transparency, which arguably rends the veil of ideology, has not made commodity fetishism, or ideology, any less powerful.
— Control and Freedom. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong.
