Radical Technologies

Just as Bitcoin lowers transaction overhead to the point that micropayments become practical, so too do smart contracts lower the cost of enacting binding agreements between two or more entities, whether they happen to be “machines, companies or people.”

We can inspect the blockchain at any time we please, identify the tokenized signatures of all its voting members. But we have no idea if that token denotes an individual, a group entity, or a chunk of code recursively delegated by some other DAO or autonomous process.

But the main problem with the virtual assistant is that it fosters an approach to the world that is literally thoughtless, leaving users disinclined to sit out any particularly prolonged frustration of desire, and ever less critical about the processes that result in the satisfaction of their needs and wants.

The gaze of the state intensifies—but the state may find, to its surprise, that its subjects command many of the same capabilities, and are gazing right back upon it.

“internet of things,” in which a weave of networked perception wraps every space, every place, every thing and every body on Earth.

The challenge isn’t, at all, to propose the deployment of new fabrication technologies, but to deploy them in modes, configurations and assemblages that might effectively resist capture by existing logics of accumulation and exploitation, and bind them into processes that are generative of lasting and significant shared value.

If the atomic unit of the Bitcoin blockchain is transactions, then, that of the Ethereum blockchain is contracts.

The individual stories of people trapped in the mis-meshing teeth of institutional data-processing systems often have a bitterly Kafkaesque flavor to them, but the commercial impact is surreal, too; one frequently cited 2002 estimate places the annual cost to business of bad data beyond $600 billion, in the US alone.17 All this chaos, confusion and

These latent indicators of biological performance, otherwise so hard to discern, are made legible in order that they may be rendered subject to the exercise of will, and brought under at least some semblance of control.