Erik Davis :: Radici e cavi (Forti dell'avvenire/Rizosfera, SF014) / Roots and Wires (English text)

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Orit Gat: Unbound: The Politics of Scannig @ Rhizome, 9Oct2014

Ori Gat: Unbound: The Politics of Scannig @ Rhizome, 9Oct2014

There's a great scene in the first episode of House of Cards where the ambitious young journalist Zoe Barnes is sitting on the floor of her rented apartment's living room scanning the half-shredded documents of an education bill that was forwarded to her by her source/lover Frank Underwood, the Majority Whip. She's drinking wine, taking notes on her laptop, and scanning on her small all-in-one desktop printer/scanner. The next day she shows up at the office of the newspaper where she works with a 3000-word text and the 300-page document scanned, prompting her editors that "We should get this online right away."

Barnes's character is young and ambitious. Later in the season she moves on to work for a site called "Slugline," an early-Politico-like newswire, where "journalists post news directly from their phones." Her obsession with technology is used as a narrative device in the series to set her apart from her older, more conservative editors at the newspaper. And her ambition to upload information to the newspaper's site as soon as possible, to give the public the raw data before it can be filtered or analyzed, stands for her idealism.

The romanticized image of the scanner is based on the assumption that by scanning and uploading we make information available, and that that is somehow an invariably democratic act. Scanning has become synonymous with transparency and access. But does the document dump generate meaningful analysis, or make it seem insignificant? Does the internet enable widespread distribution, or does it more commonly facilitate centralized access? And does the scanner make things transparent, or does it transform them? The contemporary political imaginary links the scanner with democracy, and so we should explore further the political possibilities, values, and limitations associated with the process of scanning documents to be uploaded to the internet.

What are the political possibilities of making information available? A thing that is scanned was already downloaded, in a sense. It circulated on paper, as widely as newspapers or as little as classified documents. And interfering with its further circulation is a time-honored method of keeping a population in check. Documents are kept private; printing presses shut down. Scanning printed material for internet circulation has the potential to circumvent some of these issues. Scanning means turning the document into an image, one that is marked by glitches and bearing the traces of editorial choices on the part of the scanner. Although certain services remain centralized and vulnerable to political manipulation, such as the DNS addressing system, and government monitoring of online behavior is commonplace, there is still political possibility in the aggregate, geographically dispersed nature of the internet. If the same document is scanned, uploaded, and then shared across a number of different hosts, it becomes much more difficult to suppress. And it gains traction by circulation.

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Adam Rothstein: Bitcoin and the Speculative Anarchist @ Rhizome mag, 18feb2014

When I tell my close friends—who know of, and share, my anti-capitalist anarchist views—that I own some cryptocurrency (my current holdings equal something under 10 USD) I get the same sort of looks that I did when I told them in 2009 that I used Twitter. "How can you support that libertarian bullshit?"

BTC is not entirely straightforward, and falls into a new category of the economic uncanny. But basically, it is a peer-to-peer database that lists a number of units of value, or coins, by unique addresses, and assigns them to personal owners by more unique addresses. The database makes sure that only the right coins are assigned to the right owners by keeping a single list of who owns what, called the blockchain. It also makes sure that the blockchain cannot be falsified, by placing the transactions between pieces of a complicated code, which are called the proof of work. Since every computer on the network is simultaneously generating the proof of work (and is rewarded for doing so by being given a fraction of new BTC according to the amount of work they are doing, in what is called mining), it would take a computer that is more powerful than all the others combined to mess  up the record. So, through this peer-to-peer verification system, the record stays legit, without needing the need for a centralized bank to be in charge.

It may sound arcane, but if Bitcoin was a commercial beta release, it would be a runaway success. Even with recent fluctuations, the total value of the cryptocurrency is still over eight billion USD, it has spawned many third-party startup firms attempting to offer products to use with Bitcoin, and there have been more copycat cryptocurrencies, "altcoins," than anyone can count. And at least we know why Bitcoin is valuable, unlike most social media startups: People pay money for it. It's as simple and old fashioned as that.

But bitcoin is supposed to be about something more than just money. There is an ideology that is part of the Bitcoin service; one can not help but download it along with the electronic wallet. However, this ideology is not exactly what it is often made out to be. Bitcoin is supposed to be the killer app of a libertarian dream—it is purportedly 1) a digital currency, 2) a means for conducting anonymous transactions, and 3) an egalitarian, peer-to-peer economic system that will render obsolete the need for fiat currencies, cash, wire transfers, bank accounts, and any other current financial framework that happens to be unpopular. And it fails to live up to all these promises.

Bitcoin isn't quite a currency; it's a wholly new sort of financial instrument, functioning differently than anything with which we are familiar. A currency is a tool for the circulation of value, which through the force of the market becomes the only way that the vast majority of people can offer their labor in exchange for the necessities of life. If businesses start paying their employees in BTC then it might be a currency; until that time it is more like day trading, or stamp collecting. At the same time, it is entirely intertwined with conventional currencies, banks, and legal structures. Cryptocurrencies rely on the ubiquity of expensive graphics processing cards produced by capitalist companies under state-negotiated international trade laws.  Thus, they simply cannot be the lynchpin of anti-government sentiment they are made out to be.

Even in the blackest markets of the internet, there are many early-adopters, but no fully-adopteds, no one who can claim to have entirely disengaged from fiat currencies and infrastructures, or from mainstream capitalism. Bitcoin might have benefits, but currency still has other benefits. People like their financial transactions to have authorities to whom they can appeal in times of crisis. They may buy pizzas with Bitcoin or stake disposable amounts on arcane, high-risk investments, but their 401k is in dollars. 

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