Previous | Contents3.3. Prepare for landingThe superficial contradictions of Web3 discourse, with which we concluded the first part of this book, might be represented in the form of a ghastly diptych. On the one hand there would be its ostentatiously utopian facet, extolling the virtuous brotherhood of renewed pioneering, smooth-skinned entrepreneurs breaking loose from time-worn structural constraints, smug in the prospect of technological solutions paving the way for unlimited expansion: sa...

Previous | Next | Contents2.2. Back to ideologyIn sum, the tech giants are by no means outside of Web3, nor the other way round (and I’ve barely mentioned the question of venture funding, equity and partnerships as yet); the platforms of the Internet oligopoly-and-fringes are omnipresent where Web3 players are busy solving problems. Computer scientist and arch-crypto-skeptic Pablo Rauzy would say that the only problems blockchains solve are the ones that they devise in the first place. Yet be...

Previous | Next | Contents3. Flight, grounded‘Mind, he began again, lifting one arm from the elbow, the palm of the hand outwards, so that, with his legs folded before him, he had the pose of a Buddha preaching in European clothes and without a lotus-flower – ‘Mind, none of us would feel exactly like this. What saves us is efficiency – the devotion to efficiency. But these chaps were not much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more,...

Previous | Next | Contents2.4. Power – and its tokensThese theoretical stepping stones allow us to grasp the profound consequences that historically situated evolutions in material relations of production have had upon human consciousness, in particular the invention and spread of a tangible representation of abstractness in the form of coins – and moreover the representation of identity that they enact by practically ‘ensuring’ that X amount of coins is equal to X measures of flour, X limbs ...

Previous | Next | ContentsPrologueActually bearing such recall, or burdened with the stupefying impression that web always was, some living beings now sense how digital technologies open up a precipice of uncertainty, as yet rimmed with thin and rickety fences, which we may straddle. You also may remember, the days when web became two point zero. From a pack of theorists, agitators, their indistinguishable service, some twenty years back, we became aware that we’d witnessed the first era of t...

Previous | Next | Contents2.5. Gassy argumentsInvoking the geomorphological study of evolving landforms may come as a slightly outlandish metaphor, yet it’s one that opens up several alluring leads. Solar energy is ultimately determinant for Earth surface processes, evaporating water and raising into the atmosphere the vapour which then condenses and falls as precipitation – meteoric water thus being transformed into kinetic energy. However, so short an extract omits the role of greenhouse ga...

Previous | Next | ContentsKelsier: What should we do? How do we make money cleanly? Is it even possible? I think every crypto project, whether it’s VC backed or a memecoin, is value extractive. Coffeezilla: Hang on, I think there’s a difference between a utility, something that does something, a tool that purports to do something, and things that literally have no intrinsic value at all. Kelsier: But it’s still value extractive, it doesn’t matter if it has utility. Coffeezilla: Not exactly. T...

Previous | Next | Contents3.2. AmaranthineFor the while, such falsehoods are held up high like gleaming trophies, and as the spell of commodity always commands the cult of abstract numbers, they’re often accompanied by the hackneyed millions of victims, those accounts of cherry-picked mass murder that pass for the conclusions of historical research. Like Robert Kurz’s black book – and in sharp contrast to the courteous ferret’s best-seller, translated in over twenty-five languages¹ – this cha...

Previous | Next | Contents3.1. Slave tokensAlso known as stigmatising, branding consists of burning a symbol or a decorative pattern into the skin of a living being, with the aim of producing a permanent scar. Human branding was used in Ancient Greece and possibly earlier still¹, to mark the bodies of specific groups – servants, soldiers, convicted criminals and of course slaves – although by most accounts it wasn’t a widespread practice (Dauge-Roth & Koslofsky, 2023: 7; Ray, 2016). It is gen...