The Politics of Digital Reality: McLuhan on the Blockchain, Part 3.
Blockchain has unique properties as media — and how it shares power might be the most important.
This is the third part of a chapter excerpted from a book on blockchain that’s currently in progress. The first part reviewed some of the basic tenets of the media theory of Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan argued that changes in media technology could deeply and fundamentally reshape human societies and consciousness.
The second excerpt applied these ideas to blockchain technology, specifically arguing that its technical foundations make blockchain data much more durable than existing forms of digital data. This effectively renders it more ‘real,’ while maintaining some of the speed and other advantages of the digital, a combination I describe as The Invisible Obelisk.
In this final excerpt, we dig into the truly important question — what making digital data ‘real’ means for society, particularly when it’s accomplished without any central arbiter.
I’ve primarily focused on technical description and philosophical parallels to argue that blockchain data is more ‘real’ than digital data as we’ve experienced it up to now. But this difference can also be experienced in an entirely visceral way that doesn’t require any such pontificating. It’s what I experienced at Bitcoin Miami in 2014 when I first received bitcoin into a janky-looking digital wallet on my laptop. Though I now know my ‘wallet’ was essentially a browser pulling data from blockchain nodes, looking at those numbers felt nothing like looking at a website, or even a bank balance. I understood very clearly the forces that gave those numbers not just symbolic meaning, but ontological weight, and my brain felt, deeply, that those bitcoin were actually present on my computer.
That sense that a unique object existed on my computer could be described as a “reality effect” — a subjective experience of the presence or existence of a thing, whether or not it actually exists. The same effect can be felt when highly sophisticated media ‘trick’ our analog senses into deeply believing something that’s not true, as in virtual reality. But the ‘reality effect’ of bitcoin is a bit different, since it derives not from a sensory experience, but from a mental model of the broader system that gives bitcoin its ontological status, or ‘being-ness’. This is why you can’t truly grasp bitcoin unless you understand the broad outlines of its technology — because that knowledge actually instills a subjective ‘belief’ in any particular interaction with bitcoin.
That ‘belief’ often depends on a sense of something being at stake. For example, though bitcoin itself is not directly stored in a wallet, a user’s private key is, and that’s what matters. A private key is a long character string used to control a user’s access to a bitcoin wallet, and potentially to do other things like sign documents that verify identity. Most importantly, a private key is truly private, generated by the bitcoin system in such a way that (with certain precautions in place) nobody but its owner will ever see it.
There’s a serious tradeoff here, though: your private key can also never be recovered if you lose it. When a private bitcoin key is lost, access to a wallet and its contents are lost with it. Particularly around 2014–2016, stories like this were really popular in the press — “guy loses hard drive holding $20 million in bitcoin” and the like 1.
We’ll forgive the mass media for glossing over the distinction between a hard drive holding bitcoin and a hard drive holding the keys to a bunch of bitcoin, because the basic point is valid: bitcoin is cryptographically secure, but very fragile when it comes to interfacing with the real world, even when it comes to its intended users. It’s very easy to lose your keys or (if you’re not careful) have them hacked.
The fragility of the private key system is often cited as a weakness of bitcoin, but I couldn’t disagree more. Our bodies and physical possessions are fragile — we can be hit by a car, struck down by sickness, or see our homes burn to the ground at any moment. That forces us to take a basic level of care with our bodies and physical possessions, but we’ve thus far thrown that level of caution out the window when it comes to our digital lives, quite simply because the stakes seem so low. No need to write down a password if you can just email-recover it later. Nothing is permanent, nothing is real, “might delete later.”
Of course, we’ve found out that, no, you CAN’T delete later, because corporate Big Brother is staring over your shoulder gathering every crumb of data he can find about you. So maybe a move to a more fragile, high-stakes digital world would be genuinely a good thing. The possibility of real-world death is (if you’re doing it right) a pretty major motivation for actually living your life in a conscious, engaged way. Maybe the same is true for the online world.
In one version of the crypto-blockchain future, for instance, your private key becomes essentially synonymous with your digital personhood, so a) you’d better damned well protect it, and b) new services, products, and broad social norms will help you do that. One major example (and we won’t get into the irony here . . . ) involves governments issuing private ID codes to citizens, which provides a mode of recourse for re-establishing a digital ID if it’s lost or compromised. Countries in Africa are working on this right now.
Recoverability of any sort, though, is unlikely to ever exist for bitcoin or other truly decentralized systems — it would simply be too likely to create more opportunities for malicious attacks. And that total responsibility is part of what produces the “reality effect” of true cryptocurrency and digital objects. In turn, that subjective experience has potentially major social effects — the same kinds of social effects that McLuhan saw in the transition from an oral to literate society, then from a literate to an electronic society.
Blockchain Reality
For Innis and McLuhan, media technologies were ultimately political technologies, and moreover, revolutionary technologies. This is not in the sense that they could or should be adopted by revolutionary political movements, but in the sense that a native revolutionary tendency was embedded in their very being. What is seen as merely a way of making a current society more effective inevitably transforms that society by, in a sense, re-wiring it: changing what connects to what, and how.
We’ve temporarily described blockchain as an ‘invisible obelisk,’ acknowledging that it shares at once some of the permanence of an ancient monument, and the speed and omnipresence of digital data. But a blockchain is a revolutionary technology because of the ways it’s different from either of these previous forms. An obelisk feigns eternity, but can only have its impact on those nearby enough to see the towering symbol with their own eyes, or hear about it from those who they trust. This is why even what we think of as the great empires of antiquity — Egypt, Mesopotamia — would be considered geographically miniscule and fragile by today’s standards.
A blockchain, by contrast, can be ‘seen’ by any who choose to see it, and ultimately gains power as more adopt this interface. A blockchain’s strength (expressed in various ‘hard’ metrics such as hashrate, transaction volume, and exchangeability with other symbols) is an outgrowth of the construction of social consensus through a shared interface. That doesn’t just mean a technical interface, such as using the Dapper Labs website as an index of what a CryptoKitty ‘really’ looks like, but also a social interface that agrees, for instance, that bitcoin is ‘money.’
The obelisk, too, gains power to the degree to which it is seen as powerful. But it achieves this convergence in part through force, and invests its symbolic power into the person of the king or (much later) as a manifestation of the abstract nation-state into which one is (still very often) unwillingly born. A blockchain is instead a monument to a consensus of the willing, who have placed actual stakes to enact their consent: bitcoiners will not hesitate to tell you that by trading dollars for BTC, you are in a very real sense pledging allegiance to an alternative collectivity, one on which the sun truly never sets.
This would seem an odd conclusion, given the highly individualistic nature of the libertarian ideas that play a large (though I hope I have shown, not determining) role in the blockchain project. This seeming contradiction — hyper-individualization that leads to a new form of collectivism — is exactly the sort of structural transformation that emerges from new media technology. To illustrate and conclude, we can revisit one of McLuhan’s favorite stories, which also happens to be one of mine: King Lear.
To lightly recap, Lear is the story of a medieval monarch who divides up his kingdom between three daughters. He imagines he will be able to offload only the functions of kingship, while maintaining some form of privilege, but it all goes sideways when the daughters go to war with each other.
In McLuhan’s reading, this plot is Shakespeare’s incredibly adept prediction of the impact of the new media technologies of late Medieval and early Renaissance Europe, specifically the printed word and the map. These, as McLuhan sees expressed in Lear, were individualizing technologies: the map separated the social order from the person of the king, and print, even more fundamentally, separated every person from their role in the ‘natural’ social order 2.
But Lear’s downfall was that the apparently objective, ‘cool’ media of text and maps don’t offer sufficient counterbalance to the appearance of pure individualism. There is a lot to gain from their alienating effects, putting us at a critical distance from questionable institutions like the church and monarchy.
But the individualism they offer is also a trap, one that Lear’s daughters Regan and Goneril fall for entirely. Language and symbols can seem as if they belong to each of us, but in fact they only ever belong to all of us: they are a consensus interface for reality. When they move to vie, first for their father’s favor and later for sheer power, Regan and Goneril mistake the map for the territory, forgetting that power itself is the product of symbolic consensus.
Cordelia, the third daughter, moves radically in the opposite direction. When Lear demands attestations of his daughters’ love for him, Cordelia refuses the symbolic level entirely, declaring, “. . . I am sure my loves/More richer than my tongue.” But in her dedication only to the unalloyed real of experience, stripped of its consensus symbolic interface, she is similarly alienated from the social reality that truly matters, and winds up first exiled by her father, then executed by her sisters.
Blockchain rests lightly on the horns of this eternal dilemma — this split between the subjective and the objective, between the symbolic and the real, between experience and essence. Data on a blockchain is strictly subjective and hard to mistake for the absolute real: no data on a blockchain has any importance without a surrounding symbolic and social ecosystem to instill that importance. It cannot be ‘read’ without a consensus interface.
And yet, in a way distinct even from print but especially from the current digital paradigm, a blockchain and its interfaces can, once firmly established, instill a persuasive reality-effect that may be functionally indistinct from ‘reality’ (whatever that is). Also crucially, this reality effect is not the extension of a single person, lineage, or even geographic territory, but one that can be ‘grown’ with the aid of any would-be constituents who care to stake their claim to a portion of the new reality. This stake can take many forms, including the transfer of wealth from one symbolic system to another, or participation in the discourse that invests the new kingdom with meaning and value. Most importantly, there are no restrictions on participation in this new symbolic polity — no requirements of lineage, location, or even, beyond a belief in the reality-status of the blockchain itself, ideology.
A blockchain is, in the final summation, a symbolic order that elevates consenting collective power over reality. The map becomes the territory, not through the modernist course of empire, but through an almost stereotypically postmodern course of symbolic persuasion to establish a new shared consciousness.
The king is dead — long live the kings.
2 The Essential McLuhan, Basic Books 1995, pp. 105–110
