The Impact of Endurance: McLuhan on the Blockchain, Part 2
In the first installment of this chapter-length excerpt of my in-progress book on cryptocurrency, we established some basics of media theory, and how it might help us understand blockchain (you should read it first). Specifically, we riffed on some ideas from Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis of the so-called Toronto School, and observed that blockchains are quite novel in their combination of huge geographical reach and, thanks to the social design of blockchain networks, the potential for long-term durability. Based on that idea, we called blockchain the ‘invisible obelisk’ of communication technology — both a monument, and a spectre.
Now comes the tough part: why does any of this actually matter?
If blockchain represents something truly novel in media technology — a new conjunction of digital reach and speed with long-term durability — what impact might that have on a future society in which it plays a major role?
We can start by thinking at the very highest level: that blockchain creates digital objects. Underpinned by the social engineering of public blockchains, these are pieces or collections of information that have some of the existential properties shared by physical objects composed of atoms. We’ve already discussed the long-term durability of public blockchain data, as the system incentivizes maintainers known as miners to continue collating transactions and producing new blocks. This is a stark contrast to the fragility of most digital data, stored only on one or a few servers, but ‘objecthood’ is about more than permanence.
We are getting now into the realm of ontology. It’s one of those twenty-dollar words that usually indicate that someone is a navel-gazing, socially maladjusted weirdo with a barely-repressed Messiah complex, but are also occasionally genuinely useful. “Ontology” is the study of being — of the nature of reality itself, but more specifically of what it means for a thing or person to exist. One of the most important questions tackled by ontology is that of the relationship between the qualities of things in the world — the aspects of them that we can perceive or measure — and their essence: their basic being-ness, separate from human experience.
Some of the earliest efforts to explore this gap remained deeply ingrained in human culture (and, ironically, perception). The pre-Socratic philosophers (arguably the Western world’s first scientists) pioneered explorations of the essence of being. Some argued that all being consisted of transformations of one or a few underlying substances, such as air or fire, which appeared to humans as having a wider array of properties because of our own incapacity to see them directly. The idea that perceived reality was composed of a mixture of more basic elements — usually earth, air, fire and water — was a major part of Western empirical inquiry until the Rennaissance. One group of pre-Socratics — the atomists — even correctly guessed something akin to what we now think of as the ‘deep’ nature of reality: a fabric of various tiny particles knit together by universal forces into physical objects.
This basic theory, that there is a split between reality and our experience of it, also underpinned Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, in which the great philosopher posited that human beings’ relationship to reality is like that of people sitting in a shallow cave, staring backwards at a wall where the sun casts shadows. Humans, Plato argued, mistake the shadows for reality, and are unable to turn to face the real reality represented by the sun, even if they can think about it. This dualism later informed Renee Descartes’ idea that, since only human thought can be directly observed, the contents of one’s own mind are the only defensible starting point for any theory of reality (Some argue that, by pushing the theory of essences to this extreme, Descartes both showed the ultimate failure of the framework, and fueled certain broad anti-human trends in Western thought. But that’s a discussion for another time).
All I want you to take away from this is the most basic underlying truth: that we have no access to a ‘reality’ beyond our perception or ability to measure the world with tools. Even the most speculative and sophisticated contemporary models of reality, such as string theory, are by and large efforts to connect observable data with a complex theory of the essence of being. But in the end, even these scientific efforts seem only to push the boundary of ‘essence,’ rather than eliminating it — every time we directly observe a new fundamental particle, even deeper structures must be posited to explain its properties. The deeper we keep digging for the base layer of reality, the further down that base layer can seem to retreat.
This appearance/essence divide, more than two millenia after the pre-Socratics, has not been solved, and can safely be considered a part of the human condition. The consciousness we hold so precious is inseparable from our split with reality. This fundamental split in the human condition produces an understandable and essentially inescapable anxiety often referred to as ‘existential angst.’
This angst has been recently re-articulated in the particularly relevant terms of so-called ‘simulation theory.’ This is the idea that the reality we know is a mere simulation, running on a hugely powerful computer at a ‘higher level’ of existence. This is such a powerful computer, the theory goes, that it can produce even our subjective experience of consciousness. This is a serious theory often discussed by professional philosophers, which isn’t quite as silly as it sounds — it’s really just a version of Plato’s allegory of the cave, updated for the computer age.
Simulation theory is just a gussied-up restatement of the inevitable dread that sneaks in with consciousness: the possibility that nothing we experience is real, and maybe we aren’t, either. You can measure the way media technology has become a repository for this anxiety by looking at dark films as diverse as Ringu, Videodrome, They Live, Poltergeist, and, of course and most literally, The Matrix. The idea that data can break out of its discrete pipes and interfere with reality is the counterpart of the idea that reality was nothing more than data all along.
But rather than dwell on that delicious, dark anxiety, we’re going to flip the equation: If we regard it as possible that our ‘reality’ is just a program running on a computer somewhere, what can we say about the ‘realness’ of what’s created by our own (possibly simulated) computers?
How a Blockchain Builds (A) Reality
It’s important to specify exactly what our omnipresent obelisk is able to preserve and propagate. The data that can be stored in blockchains is generally very basic, because storing data on a blockchain is, by design, very expensive. Remember that changes to the ledger of a blockchain like bitcoin are broadcast using bandwidth that costs money, and recorded to many thousands — currently maybe even more than a million1 — miners, and a large number of non-mining nodes that still store the full bitcoin blockchain.
The bitcoin blockchain is currently around 160 GB of data, which is pretty tiny for ten years worth of transactions. That’s because bitcoin doesn’t store or transmit much data beyond simple alphanumeric information about the transactions themselves. Anything beyond that is limited to a small memo field, managed using the Op_Return command, that can hold 80 bytes — basically, 80 characters. For comparison, one minute of high-definition video is about 40 megabytes, or 40 million bytes, so you’d have to chop it up across 500,000 bitcoin transactions to write it to the blockchain2. Bitcoin fees can vary a lot (they’re spiking to $4 as I write this) but even at lower levels — they cost about 20 cents for much of 2018 and 2019 — that’s an insanely expensive chunk of video.
This parsimony of data is one of the major tradeoffs for decentralization. Ethereum, by contrast, has smaller block sizes but much faster block times, which ultimately adds up to more space for data on the blockchain. This makes it easier to store more complex data on Ethereum, and it has been used to archive things like news articles. But it’s also why the Ethereum blockchain, at less than half the age of the bitcoin blockchain, is well over 1 terrabyte in size, making it much harder to run a full node and, according to many critics, making Ethereum more centralized.
But even a fat-assed blockchain like Ethereum can’t plausibly store things like images or video at scale, which is very important when we talk about the permanence or reality of a blockchain. The most direct effort to leverage what I’ve described as the permanence of blockchain data is what are joylessly known as “NFTs,” or non-fungible tokens. The better term is “digital objects,” and they’ve taken early form in collectibles such as CryptoPunks or CryptoKitties — unique punks/cats whose features are recorded to the blockchain and can be traded between accounts almost exactly like bitcoin. Similar current efforts include making digital objects that represent items in games like Gods Unchained, or, perhaps most relevant to us, digital objects that represent land and other assets in a virtual world called Decentraland. Most of these ‘digital objects’ are created using a standard known as ERC-721 on the Ethereum blockchain.
Now, to imprecisely throw around some philosophical terms, we know what gives these digital objects their essence: the distributed and self-reinforcing nature of the blockchain makes them more enduring than most digital data, and gives them a claim to being ‘objects’ that are in some sense ‘real.’ But what about their appearance? Not just the fact of their abstract ‘being-ness,’ but the way we perceive them?
Thanks to blockchain’s data limitations, all of the features of digital objects — their color and shape, their properties within a game — are in fact created by the interpretive interfaces that exist outside of the blockchain itself, and transmute the alphanumeric designations in an NFT token into something meaningful to humans. As Ethereum engineer James Duffy put it 3 with regard to CryptoKitties:
“A ‘kitty’ basically comes down to a 256-bit unsigned integer that represents its genetic code. There’s nothing in the [Ethereum] contract code that stores a cat’s image, or its description, or that determines what that 256-bit integer actually means. The interpretation of that genetic code happens on CryptoKitty’s web server . . . If [Dapper Labs’] website was taken offline in the future, unless someone had backed up all the images, you would be left with only owning a meaningless 256-bit integer.”
It’s easy, moreover, for blockchain objects to be ‘read’ through a different interface than the one provided by the creator of a system. For instance, the standard Decentraland browser presents a kind of blocky, Minecraft-esque landscape, but (because data on the Ethereum blockchain can be read for free, by anyone) someone could build a competing browser that used a completely different art style, or even interpreted the alphanumeric tags, tallies, and designations that make up all that ‘land’ as something entirely different.
Maybe, seen through a different interface ‘lens’, your ‘land’ is actually a half-dozen seal pups. Your land’s color could be read as a seal pup’s personality, your land’s location as a pup’s swimming speed. There’s no fixed relationship between a blockchain entry and a familiar object. This is one reason the concept of ‘interoperability’ between blockchain games — that an asset from one game could be imported and used in another — is challenging in practice. Though a blockchain like Ethereum can be interpreted as a base reality layer, there is no single agreed-upon way to make that layer human-readable.
But this isn’t as much of a bait-and-switch as it might seem, because that’s how the rest of reality works too. Remember Plato, the cave, and if you must, The Matrix: all human experience is filtered through an interface. Our eyes and ears are in some sense kinds of technology that allow us to experience the world, but there’s no reason to believe that they give us access to some ‘pure’ version of reality. We know animals see, hear, and smell much differently than us, and they do just fine.
So no, a CryptoKitty doesn’t fundamentally ‘look like’ the cartoon you see when you read it through the Dapper Labs website. But there’s also no way to know that the chair you’re sitting in actually ‘looks like’ the shape you see when you look at it. Seen through a different (biological or electronic) interface, it could quite likely be seen as a pulsing swarm of atomic strings, oozing matter, glutinous tentacles.
In fact, we know that some people really do see these sorts of visions when they look at something as simple as a chair. We think of them as insane, though other cultures may dub them mystics or interpret their strangeness in other ways. Whether regarded as scary or holy, though, such people are absolutely outside of the mainstream of society, which leads us to the strange but vital conclusion that our own perception of reality is ultimately based on social consensus. It’s what guarantees that we4 can effectively work together and communicate.
This is even clearer if we return to one half of our blockchain metaphor — the obelisk. Any imperial or monarchistic monument is intended as a symbol of power, its glory of cut stone attesting to the massive inputs of labor, grain, transportation, and in sum authority required to erect it. But that power is not read the same by all viewers. To subjects of a monumental empire, the obelisk may be perceived through fear or subjugation to the person of the king. But the obelisk can also be a testament to the fragility of all power, as Shelley drove home in “Ozymandias” — the statue of the great king lingers, yet “nothing beside remains.” Even a standing monument to a contemporary king could be seen as a kind of falsehood by the right set of eyes — by the right interface.
The social consensus required to ‘see’ even something as ‘real’ as the obelisk, then, is established at the symbolic level of language. The linguistic interface has to be established socially, because words, just like the images our eyes send to our brain and the image of a cute cat generated from a 256-bit genetic code, words have no fundamental connection to reality. It’s social consensus, for instance, that guarantees I can say ‘tree’ and other English speakers will know that I’m referring to a thing with leaves and branches. Words are given weight and effect by our desire, which may be genetically programmed, to exist in the same world with other humans.
So while perception may not be reality, perception is certainly shared reality. To some extent, we choose to use the same ‘interfaces’ to interpret the physical universe because they give us access, not to reality, but to society, which is much more important. From a social perspective, what’s “real” in the ultimate sense doesn’t even matter 5. And that profoundly strengthens the claim of blockchains and their data to be some form — if perhaps just a toy model — of base-layer reality. Certainly, the fact that it hinges on social and economic consensus, rather than the completely disorganized digital default we live with now, makes it more in line with the way human creatures are wired to organize their perception.
Continue to McLuhan on the Blockchain Part 3: The Politics of Digital Reality
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1 https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/how-many-bitcoins-are-there/
2 Do not do this, you moron.
4 To avoid getting too in the weeds here, I’m not going to address the idea of total solipsism — that in fact no other conscious or percieving beings exist at all — that what we individually see is the only reality, and all the things we perceive as ‘people’ are themselves just highly sophisticated automata. Have fun going to sleep with THAT on your mind.
5 Just ask conspiracy theory adherents, who have formed a very resilient social strata, often bound together by truly absurd, hallucinatory fictions.
