This was an excellent piece, "Crypto’s Finance Fetish":

The reason crypto-financiers get triggered is because they confuse being with becoming, and because they don’t like to have their assumptions and strategies questioned.

According to the Oxford Dictionary of Finance and Banking (5th ed., 2014), finance is the practice of manipulating and managing money.

The 1st definition is OK, but the 3rd definition is closer to the mark: in today’s usage, finance refers mainly to myriad ways in which money is lent.

The ability to define money and finance is, of course, wildly lucrative. That ability also confers extraordinary power. Like all powers, this power is prized (& jealously guarded).

Among other ways, money-makers guard their money-making power by producing an incredibly complex institutional matrix in which finance games are played — aka, “the financial system.”

The complex institutional matrix that structures “the financial system” is called … Law.

The point here is that centuries of financial and monetary ‘engineering’ have gone hand in hand with ‘legal innovation.’ Both give institutional life to increasingly complex forms of finance and money.

The question isn’t which came first (law or money), or what is more powerful (financial institutions v. legal institutions). In capitalist societies, they are really one and the same; or, to be a bit more precise, they operate in largely symbiotic ways, perhaps because the folks who control legal institutions spend an awful lot of time at brunches with folks who control financial institutions.

This is why, to this day, nobody has faced any real accountability for the 2008–2009 financial crisis.

And yes, financial engineering & applications sounds at the same time like the lowest hanging fruit, somewhat hypocritical and dishonest in a way (given how the whole thing was at first a reaction against financial capital[ism]) and at the same time strangely fitting and appropriate in a way. Appropriate in how finance lends itself to computation just nicely and because it is an abstract form of capital, easily represented digitally and on-chain. Part of the hypocrisy also stems from how some such enterprises supposedly work to "build a better world", to democratize services and access, fix broken institutions, etc., etc. Yet, at the same time, talk about re-constituting the new global financial system and infrastructure and "securing trillions of dollars of value" in their systems and so on. And I sometimes wonder just a bit, how do you square the two? Particularly as finance is to do with value capture and not value creation.

And then there's #DeFi, the "decentralized finance" movement. Or, well, partially a vague movement pioneering some kind of parallel DIY crypto-finance network/ecosystem, independent of the mainstream derivatives techno-finance (as dealing in huge sums, finance has always had the resources to adopt breakthroughs early) and crafting its own low-tech instruments and logic on the basis of a PoW-driven blockchain with a punch cards simple VM as a runtime environment. And, as with all things Ethereum, there's also another group of people within #DeFi, those who don't think it necessary to go that punk, but branch out some to traditional/existing industries, institutions, enterprise, etc. And one continues to wonder still -- aren't financial instruments sharpened for wealth capture, not value creation, as just mentioned? Why so eager to re-implement and re-accommodate existing and legacy models on-chain and what's the point of that? Doesn't it sound sometimes as if some of these folks are busy just re-affirming and reinforcing the existing status quo and making it that much more efficient in being that bad and f*cked up?

Here's a pretty relevant Karl Marx quote I also came across these days:

"At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution."

Yeah, these things do happen very much quite like that. I now realize. 

Instead of having public services and infrastructure, open access and better orientation and judgement and taking advantage of computerized machine learning statistical and data analysis and what have you, we have a "radical behaviorism" inspired regime of data gathering and transformation where technologies invisibly operate on us and put together behavioral prediction products which are then sold off on markets trading in human futures... a subtle kind of algorithmically-driven slavery, but also a well concealed niche temporarily free to exploit (cos capitalism heavily relies on free lunches and stuff for free). Oh, and this, apparently inspired by a field of intellectual endeavor that came to be known as “radical behaviorism" around the 1960's, most notably championed by renown creepy weirdo and Harvard Psychology Professor B. F. Skinner and his dream of a “technology of behavior” (as Shoshana Zuboff has investigated at length in her "Surveillance Capitalism").

This was also good, forgot where I got it from:

"To change the channels that money flows through is to re-distribute social power."

Ain't that right. Only it may not be necessarily money. It could be money-like flows of other value-forms. It could be any among many possible social engineering hacks. Speaking of which, we must remark how "social engineering" has changed, from the art of manipulating/tricking people through talking with them on the phone (impersonating, casually interrogating for information, etc.) in the 90's into ubiquitous social media and social networking platforms, constant aggressive data collection/aggregation and storage/processing, silently performed algorithmic control and discrimination and a whole nascent industry of data and personal information brokers, data-driven electioneering campaign technologists and managers and such data mining specializing political consultancies, PR agencies, advertisement and influencer industries and etc.

Only, when I say "social hacks" what I first and foremost have in mind and envision is Holochain's framework for distributed social applications and all that. And holochain, the data integrity engine, put together in the larger concept of Ceptr -- agent-centric bio-inspired distributed computing and collective intelligence framework, especially geared towards semantics/semiotics, conceptual modeling and ontology engineering in overcoming semantic obstacles and translating between application/validation contexts, etc., etc. but in general/principle, a toolbox for large-scale sense-making and currency design (with currency in the holochain-specific sense of "current-sees" as things and flows of things which exhibit some money-like properties and the making of those social flows visible). Or in other words, it could be said, Holochain equips you with all the techne and episteme, prosthetic sense extensions, lens, record-keeping machinery and auxiliary tools to undertake becoming your own anthropologist, ethnographer and in some ways maybe even evolutionary psychologist, social theorist and economist.

A little bit somewhat in the vein of media studies as approached and practiced by Marshall McLuhan (in the spirit, lineage and tradition of Giambattista Vico and his "Scienza Nuova" some 5 centuries earlier, McLuhan having titled one of his books "Laws of Media: The New Science" precisely in reference to Vico), well captured in the below paragraph:

"Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) itself positioned media studies as an aggressively expansionist branch of anthropology, rather than the humble investigation of communication technologies. McLuhan’s definition of a ‘medium’ as ‘any extension of ourselves’ was abstract enough to group obvious media like print, television, and radio together with an eclectic range of phenomena not normally considered under this rubric – money, clothing, electric light – while his never-clearly-defined concept of ‘sense ratios’ implies that media must be studied as part of an integrated cultural system (McLuhan 1967: 15, 27, 55)."

"The medium is the message" in the sense of how the media or medium as carrier itself embeds into the shape, form, representation and content of the message. The "message" from the evening TV news broadcast, McLuhan says, is as important/substantial as the graffiti on the atom bomb. Our general technical illiteracy and lack of knowledge/understanding of what takes place under the hood, beneath the graphical user-friendly interface standing between the end user and the back-end logic (the operations and complexities of which the front-end is meant to handle in the background and out of sight). Technologies -- especially new technologies, digital technologies and overall circumstances involving increased technological (and/or otherwise) complexity, tend to really enable and make easier the general practice of deception. There's no news other than fake ones and algorithms can be made to optimize for specific behaviors and reactions (e.g., outrage and anger), target concrete biases, etc.

While instead of managed like lab rats and, as Deleuze & Guattari claim:

"The State apparatus needs, at its summit as at its base, pre-disabled people, preexisting amputees, the stillborn, the congenitally infirm, the one-eyed and one-armed."

• D&G, "7000 B.C.: Apparatus of Capture" from "A Thousand Plateaus"

We could instead be leveraging the technologies in developing ourselves as humans and enabling introspective meta-programming:

"Reflexivity allows for systems not just to recognize, but also to perform work on and with themselves, this being the fundamental feature, not just of a calculation, or the difference engine that materializes it, but also of language. The power of a language, like the power of mathematics, consists not principally in its capacity to represent the world, but its capacity to signify itself to itself. This allows it to work on the world by working and reworking its own system of representation."

Again, this is among the things Holochain and Ceptr work on making possible in designing a mass technological medium such that it works its way towards conditioning different kinds of sensitivities, perceptions and reflexes, plugging into or revealing and bringing to the foreground, or instituting, combining or translating social and value flows circulating within and between various kinds of app-specific validation logic/rules, etc. 

Shortly after reading this earlier today:

According to a research paper written by the Political Economy Research Centre at Goldsmiths called Financial Melancholia: Mental Health and Indebtedness, ‘The rise of mental health problems such as depression cannot be understood in narrowly medical terms, but needs to be understood in its political economic context. An economy driven by debt (and prone to problem debt at the level of households) will have a predisposition towards rising rates of depression.’

The following Tweet randomly caught my attention:

Would technologies really prove instrumental in finding a way out and recognizing a viable, working and sustainable path towards creating a world/social reality less broken, disoriented and alienated from itself and its surroundings? Knowledge fuels innovation/invention and the creating of new tools, instruments and technologies, the effects of which are in turn to broaden the “space of the possible”. 

And now, this Paul Feyerabend's "Against Method":

"John Stuart Mill has given a fascinating account of the gradual transformation of revolutionary ideas into obstacles to thought. When a new view is proposed it faces a hostile audience and excellent reasons are needed to gain for it an even moderately fair hearing. The reasons are produced, but they are often disregarded or laughed out of court, and unhappiness is the fate of the bold inventors. But new generations, being interested in new things, become curious; they consider the reasons, pursue them further and groups of researchers initiate detailed studies. The studies may lead to surprising successes (they also raise lots of difficulties). Now nothing succeeds like success, even if it is success surrounded b y difficulties. The theory becomes acceptable as a topic for discussion; it is presented at meetings and large conferences. The die-hards of the status quo feel an obligation to study one paper or another, to make a few grumbling comments, and perhaps to join in its exploration. There comes then a moment when the theory is no longer an esoteric discussion topic for advanced seminars and conferences, but enters the public domain. There are introductory texts, popularizations; examination questions start dealing with problems to be solved in its terms. Scientists from distant fields and philosophers, trying to show off, drop a hint here and there, and this often quite uninformed desire to be on the right side is taken as a further sign of the importance of the theory."

"Unfortunately, this increase in importance is not accompanied by better understanding; the very opposite is the case. Problematic aspects which were originally introduced with the help of carefully constructed arguments now become basic principles; doubtful points tum into slogans; debates with opponents become standardized and also quite unrealistic, for the opponents, having to express themselves in terms which presuppose what they contest, seem to raise quibbles, or to misuse words. Alternatives are still employed but they no longer contain realistic counter-proposals; they only serve as a background for the splendour of the new theory. Thus we do have success - but it is the success of a manoeuvre carried out in a void, overcoming difficulties that were set up in advance for easy solution."

Doesn't the above description sound almost exactly like the Bitcoin/blockchain/crypto case? In many ways. And still today most people actually have no clue WTF. Distributed crypto-ledger networks coordinating around shared protocols and all that is a great and very powerful concept, but its widespread mainstream implementation - i.e., the blockchain + network-wide consensus model, really really obviously sucks in terms of usefulness, usability, practicality, etc. These things cannot really scale and may have never even been designed/meant to. Think about it: a singular monolithic blockchain, massively replicated among peers as a single source of single PoV authoritative truth. Structurally bottleneck'd + consensus by definition does not scale.

We need instead many diverse and different architectures and designs, each conceived of in relation to its idea of what it is supposed to do, achieve or accomplish. Holochain, for instance, makes use of individual DHTs (distributed hash tables), one for each running application and specific to its defined validation rules of record-keeping. Each participating agent also stores a private hashchain keeping records of its interactions with each app-specific DHT. There is no notion of global consensus aside from the validation rules and by establishing connections and relationships between agents, the hApps they make use of, their respective DHTs and the translations and inter-operations between different hApps (as mediated by agents) form a massive DAG (directed acyclic graph) which can be represented and analyzed in myriads of ways (for example, as a knowledge graph - acquiring and integrating information into an ontology, mapping out relationships and correlations and applying machine reasoning to derive new knowledge).

An architecture altogether different from the "blockchain paradigm". IOTA is another replicated non-blockchain data structure, one targeting the parallel domain of IoT assemblages and networks and on-demand machine economies. It represents transactions/events in the form of a stochastic (arrythmic, disordered, random) directed acyclic graph (DAG) which maps out the causal dependency chains of transitions and transformations as they take place, with the arrows/vertices showing the relationships and direction of the flows, while boxes/vortices representing/describing the given transaction/event. This idiosyncratic DAG is called the tangle and is both a crypto-ledger and a data transport layer which mostly deals with probabilities, gradients and weights. And again, there is no universal consensus enforced, but leaves a lot of room for variation and ways to go about the same thing (the DAG as a data structure being especially flexible and lending itself to wide range of algoriths and data analysis techniques).

And, again, neither of these two even remotely resembles a blockchain. Why? For one, because they've thought about their aims and goals and things they're seeking to succeed in accomplishing. And from there follows the reasoning and choices of how to model and build it. While if you have no real clue or purpose and aren't completely sure about the intentions nor have any particular idea of where you want to get, you just might fork off a standard blockchain/UTXO/Ethereum codebase and proceed to cosmetically change, modify or replace whatever, like how the pharmaceutical industry does with re-packaging old formulas and drugs by just changing some minor/irrelevant functional group in the molecule.

Markov Chains, Saussure's Structural Linguistics, Freud's Magic Writing-pad and Turing Machines

The randomness of this genesis leaves its marks on the chains of letters, which can be discerned in Markov’s calculations but which he did not comment on. The findings of the mathematician would have pleased the linguist Saussure, who described language as a “mechanism, which involves interrelations of successive terms,” “like the functioning of a machine in which the components all act upon one another even though they are arranged in one dimension only.”

• David Link, "Archaeology of Algorithmic Artefacts"

 And this below, same source:

Reasons for the mathematical limitation of variance can also be found in Saussure’s lectures. He not only described the ceaseless proliferation of signifiers through the modification of sounds, but also phenomena that, in turn, constrained this:

“For the entire linguistic system is founded upon the irrational principle that the sign is arbitrary. Applied without restriction, this principle would lead to utter chaos. But the mind succeeds in introducing a principle of order and regularity into certain areas of the mass of signs. That is the role of relative motivation.”

Saussure differentiated between a lexicological and a grammatical pole between which the process of formation moved. Different languages exhibited different trends. Chinese, for example, embodied the lexicological pole, and Indo-Germanic languages and Sanskrit the grammatical. Concerning the production of grammaticality, he stated: When a single modification of sound entered general usage, alternation and analogy produced a series of similar sounding phenomena and in this way created subsequent regularity. Similar to Freudian rationalization, these processes inscribed a spontaneous, non-purposive, yet collective mutation with an apparent regularization through first creating examples. However, one cannot see how these phenomena might give rise to a more regular distribution of vowels.

Saussure demanded strict mathematization, similar to that which Markov carried out a few years later:

“To account for what happens in these combinations, we need a science which treats combinations rather like algebraic equations. A binary group will imply a certain number of articulatory and auditory features imposing conditions upon each other, in such a way that when one of them varies there will be a necessary alteration of the others which can be calculated.”

“The fact that his [Turing’s] Universal Machine had materialized mathematics allowed the reverse, to mathematize matter.”

With the transformation of signals into signs of nothing, however, precisely this operation is necessary. Meaning can only be given to the “mad dance” of the storage spots on the Mark I and all the computers that came afterwards from outside. Without the projection that endows meaning, the computer itself merely separates and unites, writes and deletes – dots.

The enigmatic quality of artifacts increased even more when these components were in turn integrated into bigger, more complex devices like radio receivers. They encapsulated functionality into single elements that served distinct purposes, but created the desired effect through their interplay. Similar to a rebus, where the meanings of pictures of objects and letters have to be combined in order to guess at the sentence represented, when confronted with complex idealized machinery, the observer first has to find out the sense of the different components, and then combine them to derive the overall purpose.

In a close parallel to Turing’s experience when constructing his Universal machine, Freud turns to the medium that he uses for writing notes: the sheet of paper. This material offers him the possibility of jotting down his thoughts, but not to delete or change the symbols, except if he uses an eraser. As with Turing, the mistrust of the memory or forgetfulness makes it plausible to export the mental functions entirely. Because Freud is unable to erase the symbols already written down, he is obliged to continue recording his thoughts on a new page when the first is full. He can turn back through the notes, which are possibly interdependent, to re-read the contents. The process of writing, however, is step-wise and only moves forward, limited like a Markov chain.

Freud discovers in this magical toy a procedure that records in a radically different way. A single area is filled with symbols and then erased, over and over again. “If we imagine one hand writing upon the surface of the Magic Writing-Pad while another periodically raises its covering-sheet from the wax slab, we shall have a concrete representation of the way in which I tried to picture the functioning of the perceptual apparatus of our mind.”

Interesting, fascinating almost, relationships and associations. Almost as if saying that Markov chains, language expression and structure, the productive/hyperactive/cartoon-like unconscious of the Freudian Id and the two serialized tapes within Turing machines (input and sets of instructions operating on it) all share some common underlying principle or mechanism across their different domains and applications.

Mathematics is not formally or strictly a science (and there's no Nobel Prize for Mathematics), but a precise language of articulation for the abstraction/extraction of ideal Platonic forms and generality from the concrete multi-colored mess of bounded circumstance and context. Mathematical approach and thinking seeks to validly simplify and reduce down to simple first propositions and methodically/progressively build from there, on the solid fallback basis of each previous step or layer. Isolating the general/basic formal model of something from its particular embodiment/instance helps reason about it from a broader (more general) perspective and way of looking at what is possible or correct.

Cardano is highly mathematical, technical, rigorous, scientific, etc., but what slightly bothers me about it is how on one hand it appears to be about addressing problems and issues in developed countries like Ethiopia or Cambodia and so on, with the ambition of re-constituting global financial highways and institutions and becoming a reliable fail proof system "securing trillions of dollars of value" and... basically, is Charles re-building and re-designing status quo institutions or reproducing and reinforcing them, improving their efficiency at doing the wrong things in the wrong ways and basically essentially being more or less the same thing it had supposedly been a statement against.

But it's true that almost all projects and enterprises in the space really have no clearly defined vision and lack in much ideas or imagination about things non-technical and external to the operation of the system. So, some focus on the exclusively engineering practice and channel their efforts there. It also very much depends on one's background and baggage, because the guys over at Holochain/Ceptr, for example, are really versed and erudite in the general field of humanities, as well as having had practical experience in the designing and implementation of currency designs. And perhaps this is one of the problems endemic to other crypto-systems and projects -- the lack of multi-disciplinarity and how the vast majority of community members and such come either from programming and computer science, applied mathematics or cryptography (and a large number of them with background in finance/fintech as well).

Well, end of rant, note to self with these last few marked citations/quotations:

At the root of both vice and inspiration lies one and the same thing. At their root lies genuine interest.Genuine interest is the most important thing in our lives.A man with no interest in anything will quickly An overly perish.one-sided and powerful interest increases the stress on life exponentially: just one more little push and a man goes out of his mind.A man cannot fulfi ll his duty if he lacks true interest in it.If a man’s true interest coincides with his duty, he will become great.

• Daniil Kharms, "Notebooks, diaries and letters"

"The dilemma faced by Ibn Khaldun's vision was more tragic but equally insoluble. Political, social, civic virtues were in his view fostered not by religious pluralism as such, but by tribal life. (Tribal life may itself in turn favour religious pluralism, but that is another matter which he did not consider.) The virtues of civilization and refinement, on the other hand, were fostered by urban life, which, however, was incompatible with civic virtues. You could have communal, civic spirit, or you could have civilization - but not both. This is the tragic dilemma which is at the very base of social life."

• Ernest Gellner, "Muslim Society"

What else? Oh, Bloomberg with "A Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Surge, Study Finds":

“This pattern is only present in periods following printing of Tether, driven by a single large account holder, and not observed by other exchanges,” they wrote in their new peer-reviewed paper, set to be published in a forthcoming Journal of Finance. “Simulations show that these patterns are highly unlikely to be due to chance. This one large player or entity either exhibited clairvoyant market timing or exerted an extremely large price impact on Bitcoin that is not observed in aggregate flows from other smaller traders.”

May I be excused for the somewhat chaotic post and lack of structure, to come back to and edit a little later.

Meanwhile, commentaries appreciated (even though this is more of a note-to-self kind of post).