Identity Imagination and Dreams on the Blockchain

In the famous tears in the rain speech from Blade Runner, Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) recounts all the memories and sensations that inspired his imagination that he feels were somehow the definition of his identity; attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion; C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate and a poetic sense of time lost in the rain. This is what Ray Kurzweil, Google’s Director of Engineering calls singularity, an artificial intelligence with a complete human sensibility combined with advanced machine capabilities. Singularity is immanent and its advent confirms that in the end technology is an imagination machine that makes our dreams real. Blockchain will be an essential component in the realization of singularity and a review of SF in the light of blockchain reveals its brilliance in our scientific evolution.


Blade Runner (dir Ridley Scott 1982) The Matrix (dir Lana and Lilly Wachowski 1999) and Ghost In The Shell (dir Rupert Sanders 2016) all tell the same story, a story of the overwhelming tsunami of technology absconding with our sense of self and even replicants insisting that the age of singularity delivers the unthinkable promise of a cyber soul. What happens to individuality when memories are hacked or an external agency reimagines your identity? Where can you protect your sense of self when the speed and power of information technology makes the very possibility of individuality to be almost impossible?

Can the blockchain, with its magic sticks of blocks and chains, its nodes and distributed ledgers, its miners and crypto currencies really advent a new metaphysics of meaning, identity and certainty? It is naïve to imagine that other people might steal your identity when it is more likely that machines, robots and replicants will steal your imagination in order to pass themselves off as human.
This age of the robots, a promise to some, a menace to others, appears to manifest the visions of SF in remarkable and surreal ways. When the distinction between hardware and software is blurring, SF has much to tell us of the concerns surrounding the human condition in cyberspace. Deckert (Harrison Ford) in Blade Runner, Neo (Keanu Reeves) in The Matrix and Major (Scarlett Johansen) in Ghost In The Shell all struggle to define the nuances between a sense of our humanity and the cybersoul in cyber space.

These iconic journeys in SF were written in the pre blockchain era, a time when technology appeared to be undermining the concept of identity, authenticity and even the imagination itself. The relationships between the principle characters in each film explore different aspects of the dissolving distinction between cyberspace and the human imagination. I will revisit these three films and explore how blockchain might offer a fresh rereading of each text. The blockchain is indeed a revolution in authenticity and identity, promising to bring an as yet unimagined order to the world wide web of simulacra and cryptographic confusion.

Each writer, Philip K Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep), Andy and Lana Wachowski (The Matrix) Masamune Shirow (The Ghost in the Shell) insists that the productivity of your imagination remains the signature of your identity. Yet each sees technology as a threat to the monarchy of the human imagination. Remarkably, it is on the blockchain where the defense of your imaginative sense of self begins. Your ideas, your dreams, your memories can all be hashed and their very uniqueness protected forever. The hash is your own block against the hack.

Each film offers a moment of awakening into a pre designed identity. Blade Runner opens above the skies of Los Angeles as Deckert opens his eyes to his new world, although he has yet to become aware that his imagination has been fabricated by the Tyrell Corporation. The opening of the film marks the first moment of Deckert’s life; he comes to consciousness in the patrol craft above Los Angeles and we the audience follow his journey to emerging self-awareness. Deckert’s awakening eye is a moment of metamorphosis as this sleeping scrap of silicon memories activate into a simulated consciousness. This opening moment is almost the first and last node of certainty in the film until Deckert is serenaded by the remorse of Roy Batty in the iconic tears in the rain sequence at the very end of the film. It is between these two points, the moment of Deckert’s awakening singularity and Roy Batty’s Promethean anguish, that blockchain inserts itself into SF and critiques our assumptions in unexpected ways.

In The Matrix, Morpheus (Lawrence Fishbourne), the god of dreams, insists that identity and imagination are the twin engines of our creative sense of self; each sustaining our uniqueness, our autonomy, our sense of freedom in the world. Identity does not precede imagination, both identity and imagination develop in tandem, one cannot operate without the other. This symbiotic relationship between identity and imagination bewitches the finest algorithm teams at Facebook and Google. Who are you? Where do you go when you dream? When you dream, are you still you, or are you becoming someone else? Can the algorithm anticipate who you will be before you get there? How does the blockchain address and possibly even change the meaning of these questions?
It is no longer enough to secure the fundamental facts of our existence. Forget about trying to hide your date of birth, your mother’s name and passwords to Amazon. All those facts mean nothing without the story of your imagination, the imagination that connects your ‘ghost’, your soul to other people. Today, every time we step onto the world wide web, a collating machine of unimaginable magnitude tracks every moment of our digital heartbeat. Protecting our digital heartbeat will be the battle of the coming millennium. It is the story of our digital heartbeat that every company on the planet is after. And the hunt is only beginning.
Right now the blockchain is in its anarchistic Matrix phase. Neo is morphing through existing data systems checking for weaknesses and vulnerabilities. The blockchain threatens the legacy systems as Neo threatens the architect. Morpheus shows Neo how the legacy systems live off the unique identity of each individual and how that uniqueness powers the entire system. Neo brings the revelation that each of us contains within ourselves a uniqueness that powers its own set of relationships independent of any organizing authority. So the extreme case sees Neo dreaming of a self-governing system without government.

Today Agent Smith style denial of service attacks on websites are a daily occurrence, but it will not be long before denial of identity attacks are launched by billions of machines, it will be interesting to see if the blockchain has the resources to sustain itself against such an onslaught. Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) attempts to harness great power to benefit legacy systems. Like Neo, Smith desires freedom, yet Smith is burdened by his duty to legacy while Neo enjoys the free play of innovation and revolution. It is important to remember that there are thousands of Agent Smiths, reflecting the hall of mirrors of the web today, while there is only one Neo, completely unique on the blockchain. So the blockchain becomes the key to exit the web.
There is an immediate and interesting contradiction in the plot line of the film, where in the restaurant the Merovingian (Lambert Smith) sneers at Neo, telling him that Neo is merely a slave to rational determinism, causality, that he is only in the restaurant because he has been sent, commanded by forces unknown to him. Here the Merovingian represents Hades, lord of the underworld and his wife is Persephone, daughter of Demeter and Zeus. Later the architect tells Neo that Neo is a slave to his passions which are simultaneously his strength and his weakness. So which is it? Is it passion or causality which drives our identity? We might suggest that memories and dreams feed passion and pure code drives reason and causality. Remarkably, blockchain technology resolves both; the code structured by reason, creating brilliant distributed cryptography, allows us to protect our memories and our dreams.

Morpheus: We are here to see the Keymaker.
Merovingian: Oh yes, it is true. The Keymaker, of course. But this is not a reason, this is not a `why.’ The Keymaker himself, his very nature, is means, it is not an end, and so, to look for him is to be looking for a means to do… what?
Neo: You know the answer to that question.
Merovingian: But do you? You think you do but you do not. You are here because you were sent here, you were told to come here and you obeyed. [Laughs] It is, of course, the way of all things. You see, there is only one constant, one universal, it is the only real truth: causality. Action. Reaction. Cause and effect.
Here Morpheus responds by making a case for the imagination when he says
Morpheus: Everything begins with choice.
Merovingian: No. Wrong. Choice is an illusion, created between those with power, and those without. This is the nature of the universe. We struggle against it, we fight to deny it, but it is of course pretense, it is a lie. Beneath our poised appearance, the truth is we are completely out of control. Causality. There is no escape from it, we are forever slaves to it.
Advocates of the blockchain unplug the world from legacy systems and allow the truth to speak. This is the absolute power of the blockchain, it verifies truth through an immutable system, a shared public ledger, shared by all yet owned by no one in particular. It is built around the magic, the uniqueness of identity, encoded in our dreams, our imagination, our very own DNA.
The Matrix battles to ask what is real and learns that a sense of reality is inseparable from a sense of identity. The nature of identity, of who we are will be the great project of the blockchain. The blockchain will teach us how we can filter the way in which we engage with the real world. Permission systems and filtering grant the individual an authority completely lacking in legacy systems.
Morpheus the god of dreams, pulls Neo from the Matrix, just as Major awakens gasping at the beginning of The Ghost in the Shell and Deckert opens his awakening eye at the opening of Blade Runner. Awakening, the dawning of consciousness, the emerging sense of self is a powerful metaphor strangely adaptable to the unique sense of the new that is our dawning age of the blockchain. Open your eyes.

So if you take the red pill, you will step into the blockchain, if you take the blue pill you can bask is bliss forever. Once inside the blockchain the questioning strategies we pursue are very similar the confusion that Neo experiences when Morpheus first explains the Matrix. Anyone who knows anything about the blockchain knows only too well what it is like to try to explain just how completely different the blockchain is from the web.
Neo reflects the initial confusion when people are told that money can be sent by email, that intermediaries are not required to verify anything, that the blockchain is its own self authenticating system shared by everyone and owned by no one. Neo stumbles around trying to understand until finally he realizes enough to appreciate that he will never return to Agent Smith and his legacy systems.
So the big questions, what is justice, what is truth, what is the good, what is beauty are all transformed by encountering the realization that legacy systems are based on a careless disregard for personal information. Neo realizes that his identity is inseparable from his memories and dreams and blockchain has the ability to fuse these dreams to our immutable sense of self on a shared ledger.
In all three films, machines hunt humans for their identities, in order to pass themselves off as human. This will be a reality very quickly as identity becomes an asset more prized than gold itself. So we will use the blockchain to claim ownership of our own imaginations, which will be as subtle as a fingerprint. Strangely, Neo never accepts the Morpheus vision of Neo being the One.
The quest to define ourselves is not an issue as long as everything on the web can be trusted and there is no counterfeit, no fake news, no forgery, no false accounts, no phishing emails. But we are drowning in the hall of endless mirrors, just as the automation of identity replication is beginning.
So Neo must take control of his mind and world of dreams, for this he needs both mercurial Morpheus and the strength of Trinity, each embody the duality of the blockchain. The cryptography is Morpheus like and the distributed system carries the strength of Trinity in its great numbers uniting to affirm the truth. How Neo takes the war to the machines gives us insight into how the battle between the blockchain and legacy systems will play out. The strength of the blockchain is its capacity to accommodate the unique face of imagination, dreams and memories, while legacy systems are one dimensional and forgeable.
Remember both The Matrix and Blade Runner were made before the blockchain was created and the technological contradictions resolved by blockchain were instead expressed as messiah like forces of incredible mystery. With blockchain, authenticity, truth and epistemological certainty are no longer spiritual enigmas but instead technological realities. Unthinkable. Our job now is to think through challenges previously thought unsolvable.

To recover their sense of identity the replicants in Blade Runner turn to photos, memories of piano lessons, Rachel (Sean Young) has memories of spiders, daughters she never had. Deckert struggles with his implanted dreams as they are mocked by the agent tracking his investigation into the off world replicants that have returned to earth. Smith struggles with his identity as there are multiple copies of him, but no sense of origin. In contrast, Neo insists on bearing the light of his own imagination to illuminate the path for him through the Matrix.
Now if we can completely simulate AI in a machine, it will bring us even closer to simulating an AI inside the human mind itself, which brings us to Ghost In The Shell. Ghost In The Shell is the most subtle exploration of the blurring between intelligence, machine and imagination. It is also the second major cyborg movie of the blockchain age, after Ex Machina. In both Ex Machina and Ghost In The Shell, prototype robots struggle to comprehend the complexities of their new found human emotions.

Major has implanted memories laid over her real human memories which she begins to recover when she returns to her mother, the origin of her own code, her own source code if you will. Origin, memory, imagination, dreams are central experiences, until now ephemeral, intangible but on the blockchain they achieve an unprecedented facticity.

What SF seems to be telling us, is that the technological achievement that creates singularity is not quite enough. That the cyborg still has to work through and develop emotional complexity. Imagination is not something the cyborg is born with, but rather the cyborg possesses the capability to develop emotional responses. And this takes time.
In Ex Machina, Ava (Alicia Vikander) the cyborg, learns to deceive her human investigator in the Turing test. It is a skill that evolves as the film develops, tracking her emotional evolution in counterpoint to her superior intelligence. Being an intelligent cyborg is one thing, but learning to negotiate not so much the intelligence of humans as their emotional complexity, is another thing entirely. Her creator Nathan says that the challenge is to show you that she is a robot and then ask if you feel she still has consciousness. Ava eventually learns that our vanity is the key to her final escape. Perhaps we should ask ourselves if we can create singularity and still remain conscious. SF is hinting that we are a little too consumed by our own brilliance, that the human race cannot get over itself.

In the eyes of SF, our intellectual vanity is an Achilles heel, a weakness that singularity robots will quickly exploit to their own advantage. Ava plays to the vanity of Nathan and Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) to secure her freedom and desire to investigate the world beyond the Eden like laboratory where she was created.

Blade Runner as the arch code of cyber punk is one the biggest influences on Ghost In The Shell. In Blade Runner replicants are complete cyborgs with human consciousness simulated through machine code. In Ghost In The Shell, the shell is completely cyborg, but the consciousness is inserted in the form of a human brain and then attached to the cyborg’s circuitry. Then an artificial identity is coded onto the human mind within the cyborg shell. Major then attempts to sift through her simulated consciousness in search of her own true human identity, which is delivered to her rather quaintly on a flash-drive. Today it would be a hash key in the neuro-cloud. Perhaps Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk will be the first humans to fully store their entire memories, imagination and dreams for future awakening in a post apocalyptic cyborg civilization.
Blockchain is a stunning technological achievement greater than fire itself. With blockchain we will conquer the Milky Way. Blockchain I believe will be the most important tool in the development of AI. On the blockchain unique lines of code will be immutably locked, machines will be who they say they are, we will be able to tell the cyborgs from the humans, we will be able to define and protect our own unique memories. Each of these films close out with a quest for identity and certainty, Major reconciling with her biological mother, Deckert making peace with his identity as a replicant and Neo transcending to a higher identity independent of the Matrix. Blockchain cuts to the center of all these SF films and unleashes previously unimagined possibilities. So tonight, take the red pill, pick up your blockchain and step into the future. The blockchain is your key to exit the web.
Further Reading:
· The NSA Report: Liberty and Security in a Changing World.
· The Ascent of Man: Jacob Bronowski
· Finnegan’s Wake: James Joyce
· The Wake of Imagination: Richard Kearney
· Singularity: Ray Kurzweil Google Director of Engineering
· This Perfect Day: Ira Levin
· Player Piano: Kurt Vonnegut
· We: Yevgeny Zamyatin
