Intellectual resistance with the Blockchain, Interview with Creston Davis (Part 2)
Jannice Käll in “Blockchain Control”, argues that Blockchain can be considered as a codification of control into bodies. The spring of Smart Contracts and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) make us believe that code can displace law as means of capitalist control. It reminds us of Deleuze and his notions on “Postscript on the Societies of Control”. Years before the spread of the Internet, Deleuze articulated the way in which societies were/are transforming from disciplinary to what he named “control societies”.
The libertarian rhetoric surrounding bitcoin ignores the fact that Blockchain, despite all its revolutionary characteristics, can consolidate the controlling power of Governments and Intermediaries in such new ways. In most of the crypto communities, entities like Central banks and Governments are not removed but replaced by new entities like Mining pools and core developers. This would be the dark side of Blockchain technology.
In the second part of our interview with Creston Davis, we asked Creston for ideas about the threat of automation and job loss in the coming years. We also went further and asked if the philosopher sees Blockchain as a new weapon in a Deleuzian sense or not. Moreover, we discussed obstacles in front of the globalisation of value. In the end, Davis introduced the economy of GCAS College and his praxis along with the Economic Space Agency to create a new academic paradigm in order to experiment with Cryptoeconomics and collective pedagogy.
Hope you enjoy the second part of the discussion. You can read the first part of the interview here.
Creston Davis is an Irish- American philosopher, psychoanalyst, and writer known for his work on Christian theology and continental philosophy. He is a prolific author whose last published book was Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology. He is the founder and the director of the Global Centre for Advanced Studies and the Chancellor and CEO of GCAS College in Dublin. A research institute and a graduate college were created to experiment with collective pedagogy and crypto-economics. He currently researches future consciousness, sustainability and advanced technologies.
Salman Sadeghi is Coiniran collaborator, and researcher at the GCAS College of Dublin focusing on French post-structural philosophy, political economy and Cryptoeconomics. He currently researches Money, Tokenomics and future consciousness.
Shayan Eskandari holds a PhD from Concordia University. He is the founder of Shir Ya Khat podcast. He is a Coiniran collaborator who is now working as a security engineer with ConsenSys Diligence. He currently researches Security in Bitcoin and Ethereum Blockchain. He is a specialist in decentralized technologies.
Salli:
I know that you’re interested in psychoanalysis professor and you’re a professional philosopher in this field and also for me, this is the most interesting part of this conversation, this would be I think, but excuse me; I should get back to my question.
Imagining the end of both nation states and corporations is even I think harder than the end of capitalism itself. This would be the other side or the dark side of the Blockchain technology: Blockchain could further consolidate centralized power of corporations and governments. Every Wall Street bank is doing Blockchain project. Data shows that only two Chinese giants can control half of the Bitcoin mining operations, also smart contracts, which are among the best use cases of Blockchain technology, would be very beneficial in terms that they would cut off the power of middlemen in intermediaries; there are some other problems with them.
The emergence of a highly automated society makes some changes in the future of the job market. I’m talking about the treat of automation and job loss in the coming years. A new kind of job loss that is totally different from the one that human experience during the 20th century. In the 20th century lots of unemployed farm workers due to automation in agriculture moved to working in industries, so people lost their low skill jobs in farms and transferred to low skill jobs in industries. There were still some opportunities for the masses because the owners of the means of production needed a work power, but today for most of those masses, it is not easy to make the transition. No one knows what a job market would be like in 30 or 40 years, especially it is not the problem of the United States or Western Europe, but in undeveloped countries like countries in Africa or Central Asia, the governments have no idea what to teach children in school. I think a new kind of inequality will emerge here due to contradiction between the owners of data, I mean Facebook, Twitter, etc. and a new sort of class, that I on behalf of Noah Harari would call “useless class”.
So, what is your idea Professor? How would you describe this emerging inequality? And do you see Blockchain a game changer narrative technology here?
Creston:
That’s a really great question and it would take a book to really respond, but I really like your question.
I do have some ideas where we are familiar with AI technologies, automation. I first learned about this when I was an undergraduate in Oxford when I read Jeremy Rifkin’s book called “The End of Work” and it really read like a sci-fi diagnostic of the economy like, are there really going to be machines that take over jobs and this was in the early 90s when I was reading this. But as it turns out that more and more, it’s the case that two things are happened, jobs are shipped over for cheaper labor markets overseas, from say first world to developing world to save money on labor costs. What happens there, you have sweatshops in Bangladesh for example, which is where all the t-shirts and many of the major stores that we wear are made in sweatshops. So that’s the first part that you have shipping overseas or outsourcing jobs and then you can pay less and the conditions are really bad and even worse for human beings to make consumer items. China is a good example of being able to make a lot of products for cheap and the U.S. loves to consume those products, so that’s the first one.
The second one is automation, so it’s a double-edged sword or it’s a double whammy, let’s say. In the first place, that ship jobs overseas to save money on labor and with the money we’re saving on the labor costs, we’re going to invest in AI, automating, machines in the United States and this is precisely what’s happened. And now with Covid-19, with the pandemic, with everybody in isolation, this is a perfect example or laboratory in which to measure who is really essential for an economy and who is not.
This is an answer to a question that you could only theorize about, but now you can actually have data, who’s really essential to an economy and who’s not. And my guess is, you’re going to have basically a massive push for AI technologies happening in the United States, in Canada, in developing worlds in Europe, Western Europe and you’re gonna be able to displace workers altogether and this we called the mannequin proletariat, right? , The ones who have no means of being able to survive on their own anymore. What is this going to be? No wonder you see the ramping up of militarization of police forces, no wonder you have this rather artificial way to separate immigrants from the fortress Europe, from Trump’s wall and this when you put these logics together that double whammy outsourcing AI and you have massive unemployment with walls going up in the militarization of the police and the state apparatus. It doesn’t look very rosy; it looks really ominous. So my answer to this, because we can’t just sit around twiddling our thumbs or entertaining ourselves by talking about how dystopian and everything is which becomes a certain kind of enjoyment pleasure in basking, in our demise as a civilization,
So my answer was let’s develop a college that is also a venture firm that can create jobs for people while they finish their degrees and you create a federation of individuals across the planet who are able to trust each other and can therefore develop new and interesting ways of making things, making society at the level of a virtual and actual axis and axis point our vortex. Rather than just sitting on my ass or retiring as a professor which I certainly could have done, I decided, let’s strategize here knowing what’s really happening. So that’s my contribution along with the others in GCAS including you Salman, that’s what we’re doing, we’re developing those platforms, so yeah. And our cryptocurrency as you know is very different than the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, you can earn cryptocurrency from within the developing community, the college and then be able to start paying for books and classes, but also eventually with our store launching in e-commerce, you’re gonna be able to pay for food, for other supplies, smartphones, computers, whatever. You’re going to be able to pay potentially utilities, so that you can create an internal economy that grows itself through itself, is an imminent structure in a kind of Deleuzian philosophical sense. That’s my contribution as best as I can make it.
Salli:
You mentioned Deleuze, I want to say, can we call universities meta-narratives? that, For example, GCAS or other new kinds of institutions, as a kind of post-modernistic resistance, go against these meta-narratives? That was my last question about your wonderful praxis as I’m previously engaged, but I don’t know if you want to end the conversation with the describing of GCAS. Shayan, what do you think? Would you please come in?
Shayan:
I have a question regarding the globalization of value that you mentioned something there and I have this. So a quick background in next week, there is this conference called Defi discussions, decentralized finance discussions and I’ll be there in a panel with someone from Cuba and someone from Venezuela and talking about how Bitcoin moves values in and out of closed economies. We had some talks with them before and it’s interesting that we realized that the Western view of an authoritarian government is this one cliché top-down hierarchy, but it’s usually not the case and even if it’s different in these three different countries and places. We really wanted to have someone from North Korea too, but there are some technical issues there.
So I really wanna know your opinion about this, where do you see the closed economies fall in the globalization and is there any questions or points that you want to see discussed in that panel?
Creston:
Wow, that’s a great question, thank you and good luck with that conference, it sounds really amazing. Again I’m not an economist, so I have a hard time maybe understanding notions of closed economies, although I can guess with Venezuela and Cuba as a kind of quasi-closed economies of course. Anytime you have closed economies like Cuba, no doubt other economies are parasitical on them. They’re not totally closed, but yeah, I get your point, there’s an embargo like Iran for example and so on. But wouldn’t it be incredible if a cryptocurrency of some kind, Bitcoin maybe, I am very critical Bitcoin for very ecological reasons, but wouldn’t it be incredible if there would be digital assets in a way that could permeate and pop holes in the closure of said economies in ways that can start to open up value structures for individuals, coding, poetry to art, all these various ways that we can possibly open up new forms of value. It’s the Nietzschean, who is a German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, about a 100 or 120 years ago in which he was trying to think through what it would be like to re-evaluate the notion of value itself and I think we stand at a crossroad with decentralized technologies as being able to think through that very question maybe even go further with it. What is it that shapes notions of value? What are notions of desire when you have foreclosure to a consumerist economy?
I think that’s gonna be over the days of consuming and debt are going to dry up and this is gonna be the meta-narrative of the central state, the bailing outs, are all going to be used against the people. We bailed out and therefore our deficit is even greater and because of the deficit being more and more, they’re gonna use that as an excuse to implement ominous forms of control. And why stand by and trust the government? It’s never like if you think about it, the government, with very few exceptions, it never really sides with the people, and it has never done that. The kings and queens before the nation-state developed in Western Europe in the fifteenth 16th century, and it’s interesting when you think through the history of the birth of the nation-state and therefore economies, you have the birth of the corporation, West Indies, East Indies Corporation 1609. West Indies Corporation had founded the city of New York on the fur trade. So, what I think we’re starting to see here is a kind of fragmentation with the drying up of the consumer and of course there’s this attempt to push back with the socialist agenda with Bernie Sanders, Corbyn in Britain, to some although much less degree, your president and the president in Canada, at the end of the day, either you’re gonna have to have a massive uprising. Psychologically speaking, when you just calculate the psychology in the history of psychology from the 70s until today, the psychology in the 60s was right for taking the control of the means of the production, because it was cheaper to live, you could live in a car, you could live on a dollar a week. Nowadays, in terms of the expenses of living, you’re not gonna have that ability to protest for long extended periods of time and at the same time eat. So it’s a humanitarian crisis, furthermore, the psychology protests, what does that mean and how can you persist? Sure, it’s okay to occupy Wall Street for a couple of weeks, but then again, you see the failure of the Occupy movement, it didn’t have a demand, it didn’t have agenda, it couldn’t sustain itself over a long period of time.
So when we developed GCAS as an idea, I was speaking with a former president of ours, Alain Badiou, the famous French philosopher, the question becomes: “How do you maintain the ability to reproduce yourself over a long period of time, over a generation or two?” That’s where you start to build psychology that’s different when you can maintain the conditions of your own autonomy. And so that was how we built GCAS to be able to keep sustaining ourselves over a long period of time and this can become a catalyst for sustained protests because now you have means of production to maintain itself and reproduce itself in order to carry on a sustained form of social solidarity.
Shayan:
Thanks, that was a really interesting answer. One thing I want to add to that, also like a link back to Salman’s question about data silos, one thing that we noticed is like necessarily there is closed economies because of sanctions, they’re not all just monetary values. You could see like information as a source of value and one thing we’ve seen like with slack GitHub just like banning users that have ever logged in in Iran, you’ve seen like companies do over-compliance meaning that they are using let’s say Google servicers for their servers. Google has this engineer that’s for some reason blocked traffic to Iran, Cuba and some other countries and even though this company explicitly is not blocking anyone in Iran, their websites are not accessible because of their stack or technology they’re using and it goes back to your topic that a lot of decentralized technologies help with these, but they need to be scalable. Right now, they’re not there yet, it’s less than ten years old most of them, Bitcoin is the longest one which it’s still not scalable and we are seeing more of this and I really want to know more about where we can read about GCAS and how someone can participate in this?
Creston:
Well, thank you so much, it’s really been a great conversation, I appreciate it again. I venture to speak about topics like economics and ways that an amateur does, so forgive about that in my lack of knowledge. But yeah, GCAS is a project that sees these trends happening in the globe starting with higher education with how labour is being organized, militarization’s happening. And we created a context in which we can continue reproducing ourselves as a mode of production in the knowledge exchange, but also in start-up ideas that have traction and then get behind those start-up ideas and then have an ownership stake and that’s where the venture side of GCAS comes in, in the start-up. So we help them start-up with some funding, they are successful or not. If they’re successful, everybody benefits because everyone who graduates from GCAS College becomes an owner of GCAS College. We give them a diploma and rather than having banks send them payments, we give them a diploma and stock certificates that is equal to the investment that the student has put in for tuition. And so, for us, it’s a collaborative p2p, and by p2p, you know this, but by p2p, you mean peer-to-peer cooperation so it’s horizontal and more horizontal things can be, the stronger they get quicker and you talked about that scaling. Scaling can happen in p2p networks much faster than top-down networks like one person owns and it’s in control of a hundred different sub-people, right? So p2p is a structure that works faster, but p2p doesn’t work perfectly, you still need ethos, you still need a culture, you still need a language, you still need the ability to trust one another and build that trust.
So you can read about us on our website, GCAS.ie, because it’s in Ireland, you can look up gcas.io. We have different nodes, 8 nodes around the world. We’re about to launch another one in Asia, here shortly and sort of being able to decentralize education and grow knowledge platforms and therefore, getting back to the notion of value, the re-evaluation of value. Think about all the time we have on our hands when we like something on Facebook, you’re not getting assets for that and we’re developing new ways to give assets for the time that you would spend doing various things, liking things and sharing information, so let’s see how it goes. So far so good, we have a FinTech, a Finnish investor, who’s on board with us and we’re doing really well and I really appreciate the time and the interest and if anybody is interested in taking classes and doing a degree with us, by all means, check us out. Thanks.
Shayan:
I really appreciate everyone’s time here especially professor Creston Davis. It was a fascinating discussion and I hope that we can have another session in a near future to get more in-depth of these subjects because we touched some of the aspects and we can just dissect the economy together here. Thank you and stay safe and two meters apart.
Creston:
Yeah, no kidding, right? Thank you so much, it was a real pleasure to meet you, good luck in Montreal Shayan and you Salman in Iran: It’s a real pleasure to get to know you and to work with you on an intellectual level, thank you!
This is the end of our interview with Professor Creston Davis from the Global Centre for Advanced Studies. You can read the first part of the interview here or watch the full video version of the interview on YouTube.
