Re: <nettime> Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

To state the obvious, what is changing is knowledge (literacy) and its 
distribution - atoms and Standard model particles are pretty much the same.

The acquisition and distribution of knowledge used to be much slower, so 
it was sufficient to control its substrate (culture) and its artifacts 
(gunpowder.) The pace accelerated to the point when that doesn't work 
any more, as the gap between the knowledge and the artefact almost 
disappeared. There's little stopping biohacking enthisuast to synthesize 
race-specific virus in the kitchen (big data, ML, sequencer.) Few years. 
Maybe even ideology-specific?

The current equilibrium is combination of population dumbification and 
seduction of those who escape it. It works, but not perfectly - the 
seduction part deteriorates as there are fewer and fewer artifacts to 
hoard and offer.

It seems that the individual's capability to acquire and apply knowledge 
(amount of the stuff one can do) is outrunning individual's social 
cohesion mechanisms (instincts. morality - the stuff one should do to 
maintain the group.) The disturbing part is that this makes 
anti-intellectualism almost a rational strategy.

On 1/1/18, 08:21, byfield wrote:
> distinction, but I think that's backwards on every level. It assumes
> that things that were seen as benign or beneficial are now being
> misused. But I think the reality is that, for many people, those things
> were never entirely benign or beneficial — they were just the perks that
> one part of the population enjoyed. It's

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: