Bitcoin as Cyberspace Time Machine

A State Management System and Forward in Time 'Check Valve' for Global Identities, Knowledge, Experience, Action, Work and Value

Nick Land’s unique insight regarding capitalism, starting from a Marxist point of view, is that capital tends towards operating in a closed loop that happens unto itself, absent real human feelings and needs. His idea of a ‘solution’, before Bitcoin, was to participate in this process of capital acceleration unto ‘Meltdown’, whereby ‘Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.’ Land argued, similarly to Nitzan and Bichler, that natural human proto-capital exists precisely to limit the inherently destabilizing effects of Power Capital, and that the best way for proto-capital to re-territorialize itself is to accelerate the processes of capital until capital becomes singular unto itself i.e. ‘Meltdown’.

The problem with this, in my view, as a Buddhist, is that Land’s view rests upon some sort of Cartesian sense of duality, of self and other, whereas according to Buddhism, we are and become our karma. So to participate in ‘Fanged Noumena’ is to become something of a vampire alien, feeding on the externalities that the processes of Power Capital creates. This is why society creates engineers, in order to manage risks according to traditional proto-capital values. In the UK engineering institutions are chartered by the Crown to act on behalf of the Crown, which is also head of the church, to protect fundamental human, environmental and national values.

Maybe humanities academics should try speaking with the STEM academics more often, I thought that’s what campuses were for, but I’m not going to critique academia too much here. Nick Land is a pretty cool guy, even if he did take too many drugs and get into weird occult shit in the absence of knowing any better.

The above video as a ‘cybernetic experience’ intends to frame Land’s essay as the experience of capital deterritorializing our psyche, how we experience cybernetic capital as a loose simulacre of traumatic events happening at scale, a whirlwind of seemingly alien experiences and concepts that force the events at the periphery of our vision under capitalism into full view. The essence of accelerationism is to dive right in and burn up in the flame to be recreated anew as a Nietzschean Ubermensch.

My own contention, and what I believe Nick Land’s current contention is as well, is that we can just skip all that and define basic territory, basic clockwork within cyberspace, using Bitcoin, to better define and navigate the map of service, trade, manufacture and general resource allocation.

This break down in signifiers of the multiplicity of human and technocratic values and has deep psychological effects as what Mark Fisher termed ‘Capitalist Realism’ takes hold. Mark Fisher believed, rightly in my opinion, that markets and governments are inseparable, and that capitalism as a system is reliant upon a ‘smarmy replicant quality’ of sales, PR, and perception management embodied by someone like, say David Cameron, to sell capitalist versions of proto-capitalist and socialist things, things which capitalists, in terms of their value system, have no interest in maintaining at all. David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ agenda would be one good example of that. The result is a Schizophrenic pastiche of concerns and socio-economic signifiers which exist only to suit Power Capital itself and do not provide and sustain truly social and proto-capital concerns. This in turn tears minds and the social fabric apart, while Power Capital shifts blame and responsibility onto the individual further having taken away what existed before.

Given this widespread malaise of Capitalist Realism, we cannot rely upon capitalism itself (as a Scottish Enlightenment broadly liberal process) to produce the goods and services that will create genuine economic recovery. Empirically capital is a power process unto itself, and in an age of cybernetics, of digital platforms, digital money, digital stock trading, digital instantiation of digital assets, it is capable of accelerating that process almost ad infinitum, with regulations left far behind.

Personally I see this as an aspect of both something positive and negative about the 2018 ICO bubble, about $60 000 BTC Bitcoin: more people are realizing that they need to get ‘in on the act’ in some sense, because governments no longer operate under any values others than neoliberal values, Capitalist Realist values: the values of Capital as Power.

I will do an in depth article on the state of Bitcoin, and the wider industry, with respect to the Satoshi Whitepaper in future. For now it is enough to say that a reliable enough version of Bitcoin exists such that Turing Complete Smart Contracts, scale-able low cost transactions and securing of data within a Merkle Tree are available and will persist reliably. This is enough functionality to start using Bitcoin as a Cyber-Space-Time management system and a check valve for data such that it can only be changed forward in time. Xiaohu Liu is much more technically proficient and knowledgeable about Bitcoin than I am, I recommend listening to him: a superstar in the making in my view.

Below is a simple state diagram showing how Project Babbage, another Bitcoin project, manages the state of Bitcoin applications using its Bridgeport tool in order to manage state immutably. Data changes in only one direction in time with the help of the Bitcoin block chain: using its most important feature for engineers and insurers: a time stamp server. Engineers can just think of Bitcoin as a safety check valve for data.

And with this tool, more people can actively mark out their boundaries and existence within cyberspace. This can be done with claims and validations of claims by witnesses, competent authorities, community representatives, advocates and more by staking their reputations in order to build a transaction record of mutually beneficial, directly accountable and trustworthy interactions at scale.

Bitcoin is a tool that everyone can use in order to fight capitalist realism and re-territorialize themselves within the processes of capital in safe and sustainable ways, that value social concerns, cultural concerns, and proto-capital concerns. Bitcoin can act as a basic signification of rights, identity and human experience within Cyber-Space-Time. This is basically no different to what engineers do already professionally, Bitcoin makes it available to all.

Deeper than being a basic safety mechanism to protect Proto-Capital from Capital, what is at stake in an age of cybernetics is the very basis of conscious life and of human agency. This raises deeply spiritual questions about the nature of free will; the nature of consciousness; and how and in what way via what justification does technology enrich or diminish our life. Professor Philip Mirowski explains that Power Capital has an ontology unto itself, its own belief structures that it seeks to impose upon others and will use the state to do so if necessary.

Without basic cybernetic rights established within networks, Power Capital will respect no boundaries, and Bitcoin allows us to really start addressing the concerns that Jaron Lanier began to raise over a decade ago.

And where better to start establishing boundaries, and building reputations via your transaction record than via education and employment? I thought that in 2014 and I still think the same thing eight years later. It’s been a bumpy road, but all the pieces of the jigsaw are coming into place now.

And, upon entering the meatspace once more, Space-Time management for affordable modular autonomous manufacturing is being developed, such that not just Amazon and the Military Industrial Complex that get the benefits of automation, potentially anyone will be able to afford their own factory for the cost of a Tesla: with payback on investment within 18 months. I’d rather have that than Elon Musk’s Neuralink, what about you?

In conclusion, if we view the 21st century thus far as a process of Neoliberal Power Capital hyper-accumulation and meltdown, and recognise the deep paralysis of will and scrambled thought engendered under Capitalist Realism at scale in networks, we can start to see Bitcoin as not a speculative instrument, but rather as a way to re-establish our own sanity, our own will, our own agency and re-establish the past, present and future in a proper and sane order.

Next up is probably a deconstruction of the Bitcoin White Paper according to Bitcoin as an ongoing industrial and legal process, suffice to assume for now that BTC, BCH and BSV are here to stay in some form or other, but I think BSV works best, even if the whole thing is something of a Vampire Castle, hopefully by the next article I’ll have left it for good.

TTFN