"The Bitcoin Paradox: Why cryptocurrency will always be political."
From Nautil.us:
You are an inmate in a luxury hotel. [no, your name is not Al-Waleed] Locked in your soundproof suite,
you hear nothing and see nothing. Liveried butlers bring you meals on
silver carts. You have plenty of time to read, think, and listen to
music. All the riches of culture can be called down at your whim. But
you are trapped, too, and desperate to talk.
One day, you look
under your dinner service and discover a note. ARE YOU THERE? You write
back, tucking your reply under the plate. YES, WHO ARE YOU, WRITE SOON.
In the morning you find replies. It doesn’t take long before you realize
that notes are being shared, passed, and shuffled, among perhaps dozens
of inmates being held in dozens of rooms.
Communication is easy, but it’s hard to tell who knows what. Messages
pass one another in corridors; conversations fragment. When A replied
to B, had she received your message yet, or was she reading C’s? Did she
ignore what you said because she didn’t like it, or because it had yet
to be delivered? When D proposes a simultaneous attack on the wardens as
they deliver dinner, how many people received it? When A confirms to D
that she’s in, will D see the message in time? Will D know that B saw
it?
Here’s one solution, if a strange one. Write a message
with a very difficult mathematical problem on it—a problem so hard that
it would take a month of concentration to solve. Now wait.
Perhaps nothing happens. But perhaps, just perhaps, you find the answer under breakfast one morning.
There’s a room sunk into the ground at the Bandelier National
Monument, a few miles from Los Alamos, New Mexico. In plain view for
seven centuries, among the ruins left behind by the native peoples who
lived there, the circular room, about the size of a high-school
classroom, is called a Kiva. A bench formed out of straw and mud used to
run around the perimeter.
One thing Kivas were used for is
politics. The circular floorplan made it possible not just for everyone
to be heard, but to be seen. When someone spoke in the Kiva, he could
see his fellows and his fellows could see him. The circle also meant
that his fellows could see each other seeing him; at a glance they could
take in not only the speaker, but the faces of their colleagues doing
the same.
That matters because politics is not just what you think and believe.
If I’m trying to do something that requires your cooperation I need to
do more than say I’m willing. I need to know that you know I’m willing.
In
cognitive science, we call this common knowledge. To know something is
one thing; but to know it with others, know that others know it, and
know that they know that you know it, and all the way up the tower—this
is another thing altogether. It’s what you need for costly cooperation.
What teammates on the field and business partners in the boardroom
signal when they look each other in the eye is a mental moment at the
origin of society
Common knowledge is power. It is not enough to dislike a government;
you need to know that others do too. When you’ve built that common
knowledge in secret meetings and basement cafes you might go out into
the street. In a crowd, common knowledge is obtained without needing to
look: The roar of a crowd is the roar an entire crowd can hear.
Totalitarian
societies know the power of common knowledge very well. When Gary
King’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science reverse-engineered the
Internet censorship practiced by the Chinese government, they found that
the government cared less about insults and criticisms than one might
expect. What it censored aggressively were social media posts making
plans to meet in person. Online, talk is cheap: but face-to-face people
can build common knowledge.
Back in your luxury hotel prison, the moment comes:...
....
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