The Invisible Obelisk: McLuhan on the Blockchain (Part 1)
Or: Towards a Toronto School Theory of Blockchain As Media
Note: This series is excerpted from my forthcoming, still-untitled book on bitcoin and blockchain. It includes not just weird theoretical expeditions like this one, but a bunch of personal stories about my time reporting about the industry, and a decent number of hopefully-entertaining insults. These excerpts, meanwhile, should be considered drafts — I welcome feedback.
Part 2 of this essay is now live and can be read here.
It’s fairly easy, in 2019, to talk about the concrete reasons bitcoin grew out of the cypherpunk movement and has long-term promise. Our digital landscape is increasingly locked down by central gatekeepers who monitor our behavior and leverage that data to influence us. Meanwhile, our monetary system is increasingly digital, but the current default administrators are banks who are quick to block even legal behaviors at the behest of governments. Bitcoin — and maybe blockchain tech more generally — can provide a technological counterweight to these trends.
But the chaotic trend towards digital authoritarianism will eventually reach some form of equilibrium. It’s part of a broader upheaval triggered by the growth of the internet and related digital tech, and we are still figuring out how to live in the new world we’ve created. This doesn’t mean these issues will be settled for the better: we can look at GDPR in Europe and Social Credit in China as two diametrically opposed paths towards a ‘solution.’
In the U.S. and other parts of the world where more direct and broad action hasn’t been taken, the future feels much less predictable, but eventually, a new status quo will emerge. Things are currently moving in a troubling direction: with only market forces and (to a much lesser extent) vague ethical pressures guiding them, mainstream platforms like YouTube and Facebook are simply blocking or removing unsavory or controversial content. This points to a future much like the past, with big media platforms controlling what you see (if to a lesser degree), while continuing to harvest data on users to sell ads, in ways much more intrusive than the old model.
But assuming things continue down this path, we will eventually (within the next 20 years, I’d guess) see a broad backlash, in which cryptocurrency and other digital privacy technologies will play a major role. We’ll see upsides and downsides, with things like money laundering and tax evasion balanced against greater individual freedom. Whatever the details, fundamental elements of society — including those that don’t directly connect with technology — will change.
Similar technology-driven 1 social changes have occurred many times in human history. One of the most compelling high-level analyses of such processes comes from a line of 20th century media scholars including Harold Innis, his pupil Marshall McLuhan, and McLuhan’s student and collaborator Walter Ong. Though Ong was American, this intellectual lineage is known as the Toronto School.
At the broadest level, the Toronto School and their successors argue that major shifts in communication technology, such as the transitions first to print and then to broadcast media, have widespread and fundamental impacts not just on societies, but on human consciousness. We’re living through another one of those transitions, driven by digital and network technologies, which among other things radically compress the experience of time, and shorten human attention spans. The broad adoption of cryptocurrency and blockchain tech could trigger a similarly profound shift in society and consciousness, possibly in a much different direction.
But first, digging deeper into a real historical example may make you more comfortable with this kind of prognostication. Let’s take a moment to look at the impact of what some think is the most important technology in human history: mass-produced text, a.k.a. print.
Back in the 15th-16th centuries, the mass production of books was a novelty in Europe (movable type first emerged in China in the 8th century — take that, Western chauvinists). Because religion was the pretty much undisputed dominant ideology of the time, this was most relevant to the Roman Catholic Church. Church authorities opposed the mass dissemination of religious texts, particularly translations of the Bible into vernacular languages, because it risked (basically) making it easier for lay people to think for themselves. The church saw itself as the only valid interpreter of holy texts, and holy texts were nearly the only human knowledge that mattered.
Of course, these were pretty self-centered arguments from the church, which was also highly authoritarian and centralized, and had a lot of secular power thanks to its monopoly on ideology. And it was right to be threatened — the first Gutenberg Bible was printed (in Latin) around 1454, laying the foundation for the printing of various bibles in English and German in the 1530s, which poured gasoline on the Protestant Reformation (kicked off by Martin Luther in 1517) by making scripture, so to speak, ‘open source.’ Protestantism, in turn, was a precursor of individualism, critical thought, Enlightenment, secularization, and, very broadly, what we consider ‘modernity.’
The Catholic Church has undoubtedly lost power because printing technology destroyed its monopoly on ideology. But new power structures came to replace it — most importantly, in the 20th and 21st century, the secular religion of modernist, small-l liberalism in politics, culture, and science. After a period of upheaval, that new system established its own (again) centralized control apparatus, from elite periodicals in the 18th and 19th centuries, on to corporate television, radio, and newspaper networks from roughly the 1920s through the early 2000s. Though allowing more diverse narratives than the religion handed down from Rome to medieval European peasants, the high cost of things like television production and newspaper printing ultimately bound them in a cozy relationship with the very leaders they were supposed to be offering neutral perspectives on 2.
Just as printed vernacular Bibles had essentially made Christianity free to fork, social networks later made it possible for anyone to share their interpretation of world events (or just made-up facts). This technology has again triggered a collapse of the status quo. At the risk of offending just about everyone, both conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and political agitators like the protestors of the Arab Spring have a shot at becoming the Martin Luther of this transformation — a guide for where power can find its new ‘natural’ distribution, given the new state of technological play. The decentralization of knowledge can both give activists more power, and leave the weak-minded more vulnerable to ideas with the complicated truth status of myth.
These conflicting, deep, and profound social changes reflect the best-known of Marshall McLuhan’s observations about communication technology: that “The medium is the message.” What matters about the internet, in short, is not what people use it to say to the world or to each other, but the way the underlying technology structures that communication. In the case of the internet, that includes its geographic reach, its high velocity, and the relative difficulty (compared at least to broadcast television or print newspapers) power elites have of controlling its content.
But McLuhan thought much more broadly and poetically about media 3 and their messages. For one, he thought critically about things we don’t usually consider media, most notably the electric light bulb. McLuhan regarded electric light as the ultimate ‘pure’ medium, which had no content as such, but nonetheless transformed the fundamental structure of human life through its impact on reshaping communication. He inherited this broad approach from Innis, who found his way into thinking about media through a study of railways, which he also considered a ‘medium’ in the sense that they connected people (as well as literally carrying communications like mail).
McLuhan’s subtle approach is clearest in the various abstract criteria he uses to analyze media. For instance, McLuhan argues that print is a ‘cool’ medium, because it requires the reader to abstract their body from the world and consider ‘pure’ ideas. This, he argues, is why the Enlightenment arose from societies with printed alphabets 4. By contrast, he saw radio and television as ‘warm’ media that connected with people on an emotional rather than rational level. McLuhan argued that the speed and ‘warmth’ of electronic media would lead us back to a less rational and more tribal society, a prediction made in the 1950s and 1960s that we are, unfortunately, seeing proven true today 5.
Innis had a similar set of bedrock classifications that are more relevant to our look at blockchain. One of his key works, Empire and Communications, examined the role of media in establishing, growing, and maintaining large empires. Using this rubric, he posited certain media as “time binding” because they carried a message into the future and assured the longevity of an empire. In this category he included things like Egyptian pyramids or Greek temples. Other media, such as parchment or the telegraph, are “space binding,” because they can travel quickly and (in conjunction with other means) extend the contemporaneous reach of a center of power.
Networked digital information is fundamentally this sort of “space binding” technology, with immense reach and speed but inherently limited durability — it exists on one or a few hard drives and is projected across distances, but isn’t necessarily recorded or stored at the endpoint. It’s also not stored with any permanence at its origin: though we’re lucky in the short term to have things like the Internet Archive, we already know that much of the early internet is simply lost. The transitory nature of many digital storage formats means private archives degrade and disappear in a matter of decades, or even years — Zip disks and compact discs are far more fragile than paper 6. Equally important, systems like Twitter are explicitly designed for ephemerality — even if your tweets are dug up later to embarrass you, they’re mainly meant to be seen for a few hours. The sheer volume of content on social networks, moreover, makes them more disposable communication.
The most fundamentally significant feature of blockchain technology is that it upends the tradeoff between time-binding and space-binding capacities of media. It has the speed and ubiquity of any digital media — you can read a public blockchain from anywhere with an internet connection. But unlike making data accessible on the internet, writing to a public blockchain, whether we mean sending a purely financial transaction or literally writing data into a distributed ledger, has much more permanence — maybe the permanence of paper, or maybe the permanence of stone. It’s certainly less like a telegraph than a pyramid, but a digital one, visible from anywhere on the internet.
That durability, like the durability of the pyramids, comes with a cost — literally, the economic cost of writing to the blockchain. Transaction fees, block rewards, and governance systems like difficulty adjustment create incentives to keep a public blockchain going without the direct involvement of any fragile individual. While a pyramid’s durability relies on the natural properties of things like stone, blockchain’s durability relies on social properties, specifically market economics.
Note that I’m emphasizing, here and elsewhere, public blockchains. These are systems, like bitcoin and Ethereum, which can be accessed, used, and maintained (‘mined’) by anyone with the right equipment and knowledge, and which attract maintainers using built-in economic incentives. These are crucially different from various ‘private’ blockchains run by coalitions — so-called “permissioned blockchains.” 7 These do not have the particular features that are most significant for deep, long-term social transformation. Most importantly, because they’re not publicly minable or (in many cases) usable, there’s no reason to think they’re substantially more durable or long-lived than any other private system, lacking either a foundation of social buy-in from a mass of users (what we’ve called the Magic of Bitcoin), or distributed incentives to continually attract maintainers. If a critical mass of the specific actors in a private blockchain disappear, the entire thing collapses.
Even the durability of any particular public blockchain depends on dynamics that we don’t yet fully understand — there’s no guarantee that a chain you launch today will exist three weeks from now, much less in a century. This stage of widespread experimentation has likely produced an array of still-unknown security flaws, for instance, and we have little clue what the long-term social dynamics around smaller blockchains will look like. And, of course, the market is such a key part of any decentralized blockchain that it’s hard to imagine the systems surviving a large-scale transition to another form of economic organization.
But it’s entirely plausible that a widely-adopted and technically sound public blockchain like bitcoin will last centuries 8. It is simultaneously invisible and durable, existing everywhere at once, but strongly resistant to tampering or other damage.
It is an invisible obelisk, both universal and, as much as any feeble human effort, timeless.
Continue to McLuhan on the Blockchain Part 2: The Impact of Endurance
Notes:
1 ‘Technological determinism’ is the general premise that technology is the primary driver of changes in human society. It’s a thesis with various complications and problems, but it’s my basic analytical perspective here (and, frankly, most of the time).
2 See, first, last, and always: Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent.
3 “Media” is the plural of “medium” — a collective term for things like television or the written word. This is not to be confused with “the media,” a blanket term usually applied to the media industry, rather than media technologies.
4 As I pointed out, movable type emerged in Asia long before the West, but McLuhan argues that pictographic languages like Chinese, because each symbol represents a concept instead of a sound, aren’t as conducive to depersonalizing reason as Arabic and European alphabetic languages. It’s a frankly Eurocentric argument that I’m not sure holds up to scrutiny, but there you go.
5 McLuhan didn’t foresee that the internet and digital text would wind up more important than broadcast media, but tweets, memes, and Facebook arguments have much more in common with the emotionality of broadcast media than the rationality of print.
6 And paper, in this new context, is no longer fast, but slow — not space-binding, but time-binding.
7 While this designation is most associated with attempts by companies like banks or shipping companies to benefit from certain parts of blockchain without adopting the whole package, it can also be applied to some systems using the “proof of stake” security architecture. This is a promising, more energy-efficient answer to bitcoin’s security system, but a few such systems hold ‘elections’ or use other social processes to select key maintainers. This loses them some of the benefits of proof-of-work public blockchains.
8 To be very clear: I’m not claiming bitcoin itself will last centuries. I’m sympathetic to the argument that bitcoin could be supplanted by something with all the same fundamental properties, but also some set of improvements that make it more useful or otherwise superior.
