metonymy4u

Recently I learned of a phenomenon called “bitcoins.” Bitcoins are a form of currency issued not by a bank or government, but by a computer program. Basically how it works is that in order to obtain bitcoins, the requesting agent (computer being operated by a person) has to solve a very complex numerical algorithm. Once the algorithm is solved, bitcoins are issued to the solving computer, which can then be stored and used as currency. Of course, like all currency, it’s only worth what people believe it is worth. That is, it can only be used as a medium of exchange if others will accept it as a medium of exchange. And as with all currencies, including “official” currencies like the dollar or the yen, its value is a direct measure of the perceptions of the world community. And guess what? As perceptions of bitcoin legitimacy have increased, more and more companies are willing to accept bitcoin as payment for goods or services, and the relative value of a bitcoin has increased. At first I was tempted to think about bitcoins as a fundamental paradigm shift brought about by the internet and computing technology. A private individual issuing, through a COMPUTER PROGRAM, perfectly legal currency that can now be used to store real world value? Wow! But then I realized that, functionally speaking, bitcoins have been around for years. We just called them by different names: personal checks, stocks, bonds, bank loans, insurance policies, etc., etc. All of these are instruments of value, issued by no government, often carrying no guarantees, and, as we’ve recently learned, subject to very little regulation or oversight. What I think I find most disturbing about bitcoins, however, is the extent to which the moral bankruptcy of currency is so blatantly displayed. You are exchanging a real world investment of computing power and energy for the solution to a numbers game. World-wide the energy that goes into solving the algorithm that is required to obtain a bitcoin is measured in carbon emissions and human labor. Bitcoin computers are currently eating up about $150,000 per day in energy costs. Is this fundamentally different than the energy that goes into junk bonds, hedge funds, credit card debt, or insecure home mortgages? No probably not. But it does point up for me the degree to which our culture has realized the extreme down side of a market economy: value can be based on something that has absolutely no concrete benefits to any living humans. When value becomes merely and solely a measure of perception, then I think we are all in trouble.

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With each shooting and bombing we ask ourselves, “how could this happen?” And yet it is clear that this is the wrong question. The appropriate question is, “given the conditions under which we live, in which real needs are neglected and in which the system only responds with vigorous and visible actions when something this horrendous happens, why isn’t this sort of thing happening more often?” Our so-called social justice system is so far divorced from the realities of behavior and learning that it is analogous to a bunch of scientists trying to get a rocket into orbit through the use of their collective psychokinetic levitation powers. What we don’t seem to understand is that “outrage” tends draw attention to whatever it is directed at. If outrage follows physical violence, then violence will tend to be reinforced. But what would things be like if we were just as outraged by the daily violence of economic rape, the neglect of education, the poverty of social injustice? What would the world be like if every time a child was found to be suffering from malnutrition and bank fraud, the FBI were called in to investigate, and the mayor of every major city put their staff on high alert to seek out similar crimes in progress in their very own communities? A people are defined by what they find outrageous. What do we find most outrageous?

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in our judgmental world, i admire the courage of speech.

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Much of Foucault’s cultural critique centers on an archeology of form vs. function; as models for understanding human experience. These existential (explanatory) models changed significantly in post-Enlightenment Europe. The industrial revolution, Darwinian biology, the ascendancy of liberal republicanism—-all of these reshuffled the deck on human understanding. Whereas Adam Smith replaced formal economies of need and simple exchanges with a functional analysis of labor and capital, Darwinians replaced aesthetic appreciation of form with a functional genealogy of competition and reductive selection. I think Foucault’s point is simply that this had an effect on our view of ourselves. Perhaps salutary, perhaps not. But the dethroning of human aesthetic exceptionalism had far reaching implications that we have thus far failed to thoroughly interrogate. And perhaps—who knows?—to overcome?

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