1,576 days, 2,409 entries ...

Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
● 19/02/2024

Gala Hernández López’s sci-fi documentary for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world (2024) premieres at Berlinale. In the double-screen collage of YouTube videos, archival images, and 3D animations, the French artist-researcher and filmmaker explores the links between crypto culture and cryogenics as two speculative technologies that exploit the future. A key narrative figure: American extropian and cypherpunk Hal Finney, who, in a fictional future, implements societal biostasis for economic gain.

Berlinale
● 06/02/2024
“If the tale of hard work and upward mobility kept us yoked to our employers and our 9-to-5 jobs, the fantasy of the YOLO investment ‘Lambos or food stamps!’ keeps its subjects attached to the market. To risking it all.”
– Irish digital culture scholar and Tokens (2023) author Rachel O’Dwyer, on how disillusionment and precarity fuel the “cruel optimism” of crypto hype cycles. “Crypto did not level the playing field,” O’Dwyer summarizes. “It exposed the vulnerable to fraud and scams. It offset risk on to the poorest in society, all while paying lip service to a dream.”
Aeon
● 28/12/2023
“The growing awareness that unchecked centralization and over-financialization cannot be what ‘crypto is about,’ and new technologies like second-generation privacy solutions and rollups are finally coming to fruition, present us with an opportunity to take things in a different direction.”
– Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, calling for developers to “make Ethereum cypherpunk again” by focusing on privacy-enhancing tools and public goods—not casinofication [quote edited]
Vitalik.ca
● 14/11/2023
“They serve no positive function for society. They’re like mustard gas, polystyrene, lead in gasoline—all these crappy ideas we had to get rid of.”
– British conservationist and development researcher Peter Howson, on the corrosiveness of cryptocurrencies. In his new book, Let Them Eat Crypto (2023), Howson rescinds his initial blockchain advocacy, declaring the technology “industrial scale scumbaggery” that ought to be banned.
Truthdig
● 08/10/2023

At the New York trial of disgraced FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, co-founder Gary Wang testifies the crypto exchange used a random number generator to create fake daily deposit values for an ‘insurance fund’ to reassure investors. Calculated by taking an arbitrary number around 7,500 multiplied by the platform’s daily volume and divided by a billion, the greatly embellished fund “was intended to protect FTX and its customers from losses due to unprofitable liquidations,” says Web3 critic Molly White.

The Block
● 22/08/2023
“Today’s sentence should serve as a warning to other corporate insiders that insider trading—in any marketplace—will not be tolerated.”
– Southern District of New York Attorney Damian Williams, on former OpenSea executive Nathanial Chastain’s sentencing of three years probation, the forfeiture of his ill-gotten gains, and a hefty fine as the first person convicted for digital asset insider trading. During the 2021 crypto boom, Chastain bought NFTs scheduled to be featured on OpenSea—and sold them for 200-500% profit when they were.
U.S. Department of Justice
G
● 08/08/2023
“Scanning the irises of individuals in the Global South, who genuinely need the money and are unaware of potential risks, is a contemporary form of colonialism.”
– New York-based artist Burak Arikan, on the recent launch of Worldcoin. Sam Altman’s biometric cryptocurrency project that aspires to be “the world’s largest identity and financial public network” rolled out with an aggressive recruitment campaign including in the Global South. Luring people with a sign-up bonus of 25 WLD—about $50 USD—Worldcoin booths in Nairobi, Bengaluru, and Hong Kong, for example, drew massive crowds.
Twitter
● 06/08/2023
“It’s the future of finance! Except when the SEC comes knocking, then it’s just a harmless little toy, Your Honor.”
– Crypto pundit Molly White, on Coinbase’s argument that crypto trading is a form of speculation. In a motion to dismiss the recent U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charge of operating an unregistered securities exchange, the American crypto vendor notes that there’s “no investment of money with a promise of future delivery of anything.” Rather than offering security, a crypto asset is no different than “an American Girl Doll, or a Beanie Baby, or a baseball card.”
Twitter
● 01/08/2023
“I think markets are fundamentally a better source of truth than media or narratives.”
– 1confirmation founder Nick Tomaino, anticipating prediction markets (e.g.) will become a go-to source of ‘truth’ as faith in legacy media and government erodes. “People with skin in the game that are speculating on outcomes—I think that can bring a lot more truth to the world,” says the Peter Thiel-backed venture capitalist unironically of his wretched casino-like future.
Empire
● 01/08/2023
“By 2025, unless a radical rethink takes place in how we develop AI systems to better account for their environmental impact, the energy consumption of AI tools will be greater than that of the entire human workforce.”
– British journalist Chris Stokel-Walker, citing a 2022 Garner study in his tally of AI’s exploding ecological costs. To mitigate, he suggests to treat AI more like a cryptocurrency: “with an increased awareness of its harmful environmental impacts, alongside awe at its seemingly magical powers of deduction.”
The Guardian
● 24/07/2023
“On the whole, despite the ‘dystopian vibez’ of staring into an orb and letting it scan deeply into your eyeballs, it does seem like specialized hardware systems can do quite a decent job of protecting privacy.”
– Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, assessing Tools for Humanity’s plan to confirm proof-of-personhood for the global populace by scanning their irises for the Worldcoin project. While he concedes it will probably be necessary to distinguish humans from AI soon, Buterin warns of the triple threat of security vulnerabilities, identity black markets, and overly-centralized hardware.
Vitalik.ca
● 24/07/2023

Worldcoin, a proof-of-personhood digital identity system for a future full of AI agents, launches. A Tools for Humanity (OpenAI’s Sam Altman and engineer Alex Blania) initiative, it proposes iris scanning everyone on earth to assign them an anonymized biometric identity—and a related cryptocurrency. Anticipating AI-induced cultural shifts, Altman & Blania claim Worldcoin will let users “prove you are a real and unique person online” and assist in universal basic income (UBI) disbursement.

Worldcoin
● 14/07/2023

Diving full-on into data aesthetics, Dutch artist (and half of JODI) Joan Heemskerk’s “REc+ >>>” opens at Brussels’ Rectangle (BE). Broadly engaging networks, data, and cryptography, Heemskerk foregrounds the abstraction implicit in computation, in one piece visualizing a mournful requiem for a (crypto) wallet and in another taking the elegant mathematics of base number system conversion (2 to 8 to 16) and expressing it as a sculptural colour study (image: Untitled, 2023).

Rectangle
● 23/06/2023

“Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop,” a send-up of disgraced crypto CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s (SBF) Future Fund by Michael Stevenson, opens at Michael Lett in Auckland (NZ). The show takes aim at SBF’s defunct effective altruism charity by reproducing the text from the fund’s website on beanbag chairs—just like those beloved by the former billionaire. The New Zealand artist describes each chair (filled with shredded paper) as “a placeholder” for “good intentions and a compromised crypto ecosystem.”

Michael Lett
● 15/06/2023

Ringers #879 (The Goose), from Canadian artist Dmitri Cherniak’s 2021 Art Blocks NFT series, is sold at a Sotheby’s London auction for $6.2M. The sale to collector 6529 completes an ‘only in crypto’ journey, as the NFT was amongst the liquidated assets of collapsed crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital. ‘The Goose’ is perhaps Ringers most beloved output, for the avian neck, beak, and eye that serendipitously peeks out from an algorithmic exploration of the myriad ways to wrap pegs with string.

Sotheby’s
● 09/06/2023
“I’m so grateful that the AI revolution came along if for no other reason than that it showed us what it looks like when consumers actually get excited about something. It truly revealed that the crypto story was about 98% hype.”
– Tech columnist Casey Newton, chiding crypto boosters who keep saying that ‘it’s time to build!’ “There is not one crypto product to my knowledge that has, say, 100 million users,” Newton vents. “Meanwhile, ChatGPT comes along and gets 100 million users, allegedly, within the first couple of months or so.”
Hard Fork
● 09/06/2023
“I think the Bitcoiners that are celebrating these enforcement actions tend to be later on the adoption curve and lower on the IQ spectrum than folks that actually know what’s going on. They’re cultists.”
– Crypto analyst Ryan Selkis, on the Bitcoin purists vocally celebrating recent SEC lawsuits that claim (at least as far as America is concerned) other leading cryptocurrencies are securities
YouTube
● 01/05/2023
OUT NOW:
Danny Franzreb
Proof of Work
German photographer Danny Franzreb captures crypto’s material reality—GPU farms, miners, energy infrastructure—in stunning images he shot around the world during the bull run of 2021 and 2022. Franzreb’s photos are accompanied by essays of UCCA curator Holly Roussell and NFT booster Anika Meier.
Hartmann Books
● 25/04/2023
OUT NOW:
Cory Doctorow
Red Team Blues
Prolific Canadian sci-fi writer and tech pundit Doctorow kicks off a new series, about a legendary scam-busting forensic accountant that gets caught up in an elaborate cryptocurrency caper.
Tor Books
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