Merry Merkle Magic – Andy Tudhope
What is it that makes internet money magical?
This question has been at the heart of my work for 5 years. It has led me down some revolutionary roads and some needlessly windy cul-de-sacs, but I am glad to have walked them all. I’ve slept in chapels, and in brothels; I’ve met the nicest folks.
I’ve walked to the top of many mountains, climbed many dangerous rocks barefoot, body-surfed massive waves beneath sun halos, and dived as deeply into awareness as this limited self can currently manage. Though I have seen many beautiful views, traveled to many majestic places, met many brilliant minds; the only magic I have ever truly found is within another human being’s eyes. Look there with care and you’ll find the only spell worth casting. Be wary though, because it comes at the cost of your concept of self and other.
The truth is that there is nothing inherently magical about internet money. What is magical is the possibility for new and valuable kinds of relationship between people. Such relationship, which we call ubuntu where I come from, is made possible because Bitcoin solved the age-old problem of coordinated communication (i.e. the Byzantine’s General Problem). No longer do the victors write history: it is something we all come to consensus on constantly. No longer do we trust the media by which we create and move value, nor the institutions who control it: rather, we verify the mathematics and open source code on which it is built, and experiment with new kinds of trust between people as the relational points at which value is created and distributed.
In this sense, Bitcoin is an historical moment on a par with the invention of the printing press. One allowed for the distribution of the “Word of God” to ordinary people in the common tongue and so radically shifted social, political, and economic power. It meant people like you and I were given direct access to divine authority, without needing a priest to intercede on our behalf. The other allows for the creation and distribution of value in this world without recourse to bankers or bureaucrats. Seeing as we live in this world, there is a strong argument to be made that the shifts in power and consciousness currently underway will be more stark this time around.
Of course, the printing press was also used to create vast amounts of propaganda, and the priests did not go gently into their dying light (cf. The Inquisition). Any sufficiently powerful technology will always get used for both sincere and manipulative purposes, and social upheaval is never a comfortable process. The two go together just like sin and redemption, debt and forgiveness, birth and death (though life is everlasting).
To earn my right to such lofty metaphor, I actually found a hand-press printing machine once: they’re magnificent and ungainly and awesome and frustrating all at once. I set a poem I wrote, which was purposefully very short, and it took no less than 4 hours of painstaking work. You have to dig through a massive box of letters set on the end of long metal pins, and then place these letters individually. You have to find the correct spaces and dashes, and the letters are constantly falling over so that you’re using one hand to keep them upright while searching frantically with the other for the next letter; all the while trying to keep the big picture in mind, as well as not break this old machine which some poor collector has let you use for the afternoon. It’s a mess. Your fingers are covered in ink, and you inevitably make spelling mistakes and then have to reset whole lines, and you end the afternoon crying in a strange mix of pure rage and gritty admiration for the people who set whole books like this.
The same is true for “blockchain” — most people don’t have the diligence to dig through the jumble of ideas currently being pushed to find the most simple letters which really matter as we craft consensus-based history for the first time; most people don’t like getting their fingers really inky in the pursuit of genuine understanding; and most people do not appreciate the importance of a well-spaced line and what setting poetry has to teach us about patience.
For some years now, I have known that we don’t necessarily need better technology. We certainly don’t need unregulated and ramped-up financial tools which mimic the same ones that led to the crash to which Bitcoin was positioned — in it’s Genesis Block! — as a response.
What we need are more people who understand what it means to create and distribute value through relationship and who are willing to relate our being-in-the-world differently; rather than extracting value on the basis on unjust assumptions about labour or natural resources.
This, finally, brings me to:
In it’s first year, we raised 201,000 CAD for a children’s home in Toronto. Last year, we raised 113,000 ZAR for a school in rural South Africa, as well as building their first high school class, just in time for 2019. This year, we’re helping vulnerable pregnant women in Cape Town, the Favelas Education project being run in Brazil by Blockchain Academy, and UNICEF’s Global Cryptocurrency Fund. Our on-the-ground practice this year involved building a new roof to shade pregnant women at The Zoe Project, and painting a massive butterfly mural. Women will have their photo taken in front of the wings they have been given as a token reminder of what they have learnt through the counseling and education provided by the project:
Published at Tue, 24 Dec 2019 14:30:00 +0000
{flickr|100|campaign}
