SalonCast - 0xSalon Audio Reports

We held three 0xSalon conversations under Chatham House Rule on 'Sensing The Unseeable'. This is an audio conversation recollecting and extending those discussions. With Wassim Alsindi, Martina Cavalot, Jaya Klara Brekke, Habib William Kherbek, Kathryn Lawrence & Max Haiven.

Topic page: 0xsalon.pubpub.org/pub/fx5jb34y/
Arena Channel: www.are.na/0x-salon/sensing-the-unseeable
Image from the Voynich Manuscript, author and date unknown.

“How does science represent the world? What do our models teach us about ourselves, and our relationship to the Universe we inhabit? The scientific image – the world picture established by centuries of methodical and formalised discovery – shatters and recomposes the manifest image – how humankind conceives of itself – at rapid pace. With technological capacity reaching a new, vertiginous apex, the complexity of scientific discovery ambiguates our understanding of the environments we observe and inhabit instead of illuminating them. Being able to build a shared idea of ‘reality’ is the single most important task of sapience; one that is only possible through the bringing together of the scientific with the manifest. During a historical moment seemingly unable to find its centre, can art and philosophy build the epistemic scaffolds necessary to protocolize sense-making in the sciences?"

We held two 0xSalon conversations under Chatham House Rule on 'Prophet Motives'. This is an audio conversation recollecting and extending those discussions. With Wassim Alsindi, Martina Cavalot, Jasmine Erkan, Ellie Hain, Kei Kreutler, Alessandro Longo & Karin Valis.

Topic page: https://0xsalon.pubpub.org/pub/oczjk65o/release/2?readingCollection=17bb1dac
Arena Channel: www.are.na/0x-salon/prophet-motives
Image generated with Craiyon and Stable Diffusion, 2022.

Prophet Motives explores imbrications of capital, technology, and divinity, with attention paid to the reshaping of the world map by would-be empires and their messianic figureheads. For as long as there has been financial capital, risk and speculation have orbited, manipulated and harvested from it. As narrative feedback machines, simultaneously reading and rewriting realities, markets exist as a distributed conversation amongst speculators driven by profit motives and an appetite for divination and prophecy. Despite the ostensible ‘neutrality’ afforded by technology advances, recognisable human characteristics and archetypes appear again and again.

Today, new strains of techno-colonialism are emerging, which are the latest of a series of echoes throughout Western history. An ascendant cabal of technology elites are attempting to reshape the world in their favour, whilst hiding in plain sight behind the faceless technologies that have enriched them. Theirs is a Promethean zealotry without faith: affecting an aura of ‘divine sanction’ for the purposes of elevating the ego, enriching the ‘chosen ones’, and creating empires of varying stripes. Was it not always so? History is littered with examples of the unintended consequences that are risked when the self-righteous set the agenda. Can foreknowledge of a prophet’s motives help us prepare for and be organised against the ‘captains of industry’ and their masculine (demi)urges?

We held a 0x Salon conversation under Chatham House Rule on the history, politics, philosophy and technology of Web3 and DAOs. This is an audio report based on that discussion. With Wassim Alsindi, Alice Yuan Zhang, Laura Lotti, and Ricardo Saavedra.

In the six years between the notorious exploit of “The DAO” in 2016 to today, more than 4,000 groups and over $8 billion in treasuries bear witness to a feverish rise to prominence of “decentralised autonomous organisations”. As on-chain treasuries typically operated via member token voting mechanisms and centralised group-chats, this nascent organizational model has been rapidly adopted to power a wide range of projects from NFT creator and collector clubs, to lending pools and carbon asset markets. The burgeoning DAO landscape is determined to generate and share value at scale, while proliferating the worthy ideals of transparency, security, interoperability, and community ownership.

Are these experiments in distributed coordination really as “decentralised” and “autonomous” as the moniker suggests? What should we make of the sheer weight of attention and capital being invested into (and around) DAOs, and how does this model compare to off-chain alternatives like DisCOs and traditional co-op models? How can DAOs translate their optimism into impactful action, as opposed to that which merely resides in the cultural imaginary? Who is able to understand, participate in, plan and engineer such technologically-complex scaffolds, and what inequities may linger as long-term features rather than early-day faults? Will DAOs bring us toward the next age of an Internet befit to address Earth’s urgent contemporary issues, or will this new development further exacerbate the colonialist legacy of digital divides and ecological extraction?

Despite many controversies, the frenzied quest to experiment with automated governance, trustless accounting, and mass coordination beyond borders has cracked open timely inquiries against an increasingly hopeless status quo of centralized financial, political, and cultural institutions that have proven their resolute inadequacies amidst a global pandemic. Almost seven years into the era of Turing-complete blockchain networks, will the gaping chasm between the naivete and hubris of optimistic “BUIDLers” and the stark realities of daily economic, technical, and governance attacks ever close?

Topic page: https://0xsalon.pubpub.org/pub/7r8vq3qs/release/1?readingCollection=17bb1dac

We held a 0x Salon conversation under Chatham House Rule on the history, politics, philosophy and technology of timekeeping. This is an audio report based on that discussion.

Hosts: Wassim Alsindi, Martina Cavalot, Max Hampshire and Paul Seidler.

with Wassim Alsindi, Sarah Friend, Valentin Golev, Daniel Shinbaum.

We held a 0x Salon conversation under Chatham House Rule on our ‘Indifference Engine’ critique of Bitcoin’s proof-of-work. This is an audio report based on that discussion.

Full episode notes on PubPub.

We held a 0x Salon conversation under Chatham House Rule on Non-Fungible Tokens and the speculative artworld mania surrounding them. This is an audio report based on that discussion.