The DNM

The Return of the Shell Game

This is an excerpt from The DNM, available soon! Enjoy this preview, and stay tuned for more details. Please vote, comment, and lmk how this feels for you. Workshops on the Yoga of Blockchain coming this fall. 

Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful. ― EF Schumacher, Economist

In December 2014, I sat in the audience of a largely bespectacled crowd filling the folding chairs to capacity at the Swiss Institute of Contemporary Art, in lower Manhattan. , tall, young, and awkward in his body, sat in the front of the room. Russian born and Canadian raised, Buterin was gracefully leaping through a landscape of ideas, talking influences on his thinking regarding economics and of course, blockchain. Divided by fate and its borders, the lightly accented voice of Buterin spoke of a more unified future. The speech was simple but thorough, the words were plain and logical.

Questions on the technology ranged from the complicated technical to the philosophically unanswerable, and at first I had no idea why Buterin was up there, but I knew he had answers. The buzz on everyone's lips was the progression of blockchain, its elevation in capacity and what it meant for us all, so apparently this was someone on the forefront. Buterin kept fielding the questions, publicly, intermittently talking at the front with the writer, Sam Frank, who had just published, , for Harper's Magazine.

Buterin was alone in the room, the subject of intense curiosity, but he represented a small pool of "pleasant rationalists" profiled by Frank for Harper's. Buterin was chosen because of awards, because of talent, and because of a launch for a thing called, Ethereum. It was an important step, this platform he helped imagine and create, since it was built to include people like me, the code illiterates.

Ethereum was a developer's package: a complete dream with mining network, handy developer's tools and a crucial, game-changing extra layer. That layer was an interface, an Internet browser style way for the average person to get up close and personal with the blockchain, its contracts, wallets, and all of its other charms. Ethereum, it seemed was a way for someone who doesn't really get code, much less blockchain, to do just about anything with it, from writing a contract, to creating money, the kind we call cryptocurrency.

The technology used to make anonymous, non border driven money, was thoughtfully being offered as a technology for an equally anonymous, autonomous, self-governing life. It was being offered with a friendly user interface, by this pleasant young man who carried himself a bit like a true philosopher, like a person whose love of reason offset his will. Not angsty or feverish in the way of his techno elders, Buterin, represented the flowers that bloom after a storm. He was natural and comfortable, as he talked about spreading the seeds of crypto anarchy.

Imagine, I thought, a system of government that functioned more like a to do list, than a set of commandments. The future of money, the future of identity, of a technology that could actually be used to dissipate imposed borders of authoritarian globalism, of angry, end-state dogmas: Ethereum, its name sung out to me, a self-awareness.

Ethereum, ethereal, real, into ether, ether into the real. The power of money, the power of agreements, the keeping and holding of this cypher called value. We were no longer in the land of passionate ideologies as much as we were in the launch pad, the proto-state of post governments, quantum politics, and crypto economics. The emergent field of a philosophy that would be shaped by wills. I didn't find utopia in the possibilities that flashed in front of me, the many permutations of possible communities. What I saw was the new shell, the belief in a free mobile currency.

A blockchain runs on many computers and it runs on a ledger. It runs on a mutual and synchronized system that verifies itself using each little computer, each registered node. The ledger puts everyone on the same history of transactions. The ledger replaces a central authority. The ledger potentially gives a human better percentages for being valued, for going sovereign, because it sees truth through validation by numbers. Beyond corruption, greed and deceit, come dispassionate rates of fallibility, at least in theory. Blockchain is anarchy, but nobody likes that word, so we won't dwell, since even that word and what it represents, is subject to Remix.

Private while public, transparent while anonymous: this is an androgynous model; a beyond binary way of organizing, of working within systems, and working outside them, but always in relationship. From managing sanitation to empowering refugees, blockchain makes good on ideas, and makes fledgling communities trans tangible, trans real.

I wondered what percentage of the promise of blockchain was dependent on the quality of the nodes, and I wondered how much the nodes depended on us, the humans behind them. I thought about us in the room, about the character of each of these people, and of all the people walking by us, the ones hiding in their studios across the street or taking the town by storm at that very moment. I thought of cryptocurrency manipulations, looked over at one woman's handbag, remembered the guy muttering curses as he walked passed me during lunchtime. What I saw, was a survival technology. I saw buds in the snow, yellow, purple and green.

I saw a vine. A networked system of life.

Blockchain as a technology is more than Bitcoin, or any one branded thing built on its foundations. Blockchain is the potential engine of tamper free elections, of grassroots currencies that can keep commerce afloat after catastrophe, and it is the name for enabling direct democracy at everything from the most micro to the global level. Blockchain is a system that doesn't just plug and play into old hierarchies, patching the bad with the innovative. By its design and execution, blockchain is a paradigm shifter, a tangible expression of systems and code that can change its users at a profound level, because it is native to next level civilization. Blockchain in this sense is one of the names of the apocalypse, a revolutionizing name, a name of anonymity, a magic word full of risk, that makes what was abstract into something tangible. Blockchain is the encrypted identity of value.

As we reduce access to government issued monies, we ignite our survival mechanism, and this in turn incites the migration to cryptocurrencies, barter exchanges, time-banking and other alternative forms of value exchange. This transition will not be the result of an economic conspiracy, nor will it be led by angry crowds pointing towards their neighbors with pitchforks, it will simply be a part of the shift from old structures to new, from death march, to blooming garden.

Material wealth is a resource necessary to dreams, to bodies and ambitions. It is a recompense for society and its realities. The use of blockchain, to marry someone, to leave a trust for a little one, to offer and receive gifts and gratitudes for time well spent, and tasks accomplished, this is the evolution of money, and we can put anything we want on the faces. We can put kings. We can put gods. We can put our hearts. Blockchain is the name for the creeping return of the coin in myriad forms, and it is a reminder that exchange is based on agreement.