[Applause]
welcome everybody thanks for coming out
to a hopefully fairly smooth talk after
a lot of tenant efforts to get the
logistics fixed my name Morris first by
a show of hands how many people in this
room believe that Joaquin and
cryptocurrency are fundamentally novel
technology of those who raised again to
do anyone a moment here maybe one
feature one thing that watching that
does that has not been possible
previously
we can see some silence over here soon
silence so it makes the point it is very
difficult to to identify novelty to
analyze it rigorously and to predict
what parts of it matter
and we know it's sophisticated so
luckily though we do have a lot of
precedents for thinking about new
technology we've gone through a long
chain of history where media technology
in particular has helped found impacts
transforming society is in the way
people see and think and interact media
technology of getting again has
radically transformed the way the human
beings with one of the more
comprehensive an insightful historians
and analysts of this is a guy named
Marshall McLuhan did most was worth in
the 1950s and 1960s and he managed to
not just predict the Internet as kind of
a technology but to think in really
interesting and prescient ways about the
impact that technology would have before
it even existed and he did it by looking
at history so this talk is a very brief
introduction to employ and to the field
of Media Studies
/ spouse so we're gonna take some very
quick stabs at applying just gonna go in
we're gonna take some pretty put stabs
and applying these concepts to watch it
so very briefly about me a few of you
might recognize my name I'm a journalist
I worked for a magazine called breaker
that existed for a short sweet lifespan
I am now currently on staff at Fortune
magazine prior to that though I was in
academic and my training is in media
studies and sociology and so this is in
in that traditional kind of as a as an
analyst and not so much as a journalist
and I want to start with just a few kind
of precedent setting examples of
transformative media technologies and
how they have had an impact
so the first I want to talk about the
mechanical print and I'm talking about
printing like mass production of books
and prints and materials not writing
itself it's a whole different topic but
print about the mass diffusion of ideas
but also it allow people to analyze
those ideas and ways that were
independent from institutions and kind
of gave birth to critical thought so
it's not any coincidence that the first
printed book was a Bible printed in
Germany about 1450 and a little bit less
than a century later you have the
Protestant Reformation also in Germany a
movement that asked people to engage
critically with with the content of
their
religion rather than just kind of
accepting it from on high because we
have a book in front of you you can
engage more critically with the content
than if you're listening to a sermon
second example we always this is not
something that people think about as a
media technology very often but the
railway is actually transformed the way
people communicate pretty fundamentally
we always actually Cuba long before the
Telegraph so they increase the speed of
communication to a level that had never
been seen before because you could send
letters by the road so it's Schrank
space and made people more connected and
it also created new markets for things
like commodities wood beef cotton
Marshall McLuhan's teacher at Harrow
Kenneth spent a lot of time thinking
about the railway and
talk about that in a bit in more depth
now it's likely with a few exceptions
that when you've walked into this room
you didn't think of railways as a form
of media technology but here's one
that's really gonna blow your mind
the ultimate media technology the
electric light the reason that McLuhan
in particular spends a lot of time
thinking about the light bulb as a form
of media technology is because as you
see here this is a scene of New York
City and 1880s or so it opened up a new
time of day where human beings could
interact with each other and engage in
social life it was transformative
because of what it made possible but
what's most important about the label
who were thinking critically about media
is that it has no content a light bulb
has no message to light bulb isn't
telling you anything in particular
unless you like use it to spell out
something on a sign a light bulb is pure
media pure connection and you have
complete control over the content of
that connection and this is just useful
for thinking about media as such media
for those you don't know literally just
means something that is between two
things as in something that connects to
so anything that allows a connection
especially between humans is formed
immediately
in this idea that media the structure of
a media technology and the ways that it
receives connections between people is
much more important than the content of
that media is summed up in a afraid is
that at least for a time was very well
known the medium is the message this is
Marshall McLuhan's like key phrase I'm
curious by another show of hands how
many people have heard this phrase
before
okay pretty good I've been sort of
noticing in recent years maybe people
are less aware of it but I guess that's
some it's nice to know that there are
people who still part have heard that
so from McLuhan what matters about any
media technology actually first
accentuated this just as a measure of
how influential and important buffoon
was this is McLuhan on the guess your
rights in n Paul 1977 I will go through
the joke that he's a part of and let me
see woody on how problematic figure
these days but he was a he was a very
very prominent figure in his day he was
on TV all the time he was released a
couple of Records I think from a clue on
what matters about any media technology
is not what people use it to say to the
world or to each other but the way the
underlying technology structures their
interaction and perception in the case
of the Internet that includes
geographically so you can connect people
over very long distances and you know
the internet also at least for a time
made it relatively difficult for people
in positions of authority to control its
content so that's kind of a structural
feature of the Internet
if you are sorry okay so that's that's
kind of what you think of Media Studies
the more interesting branch of Media
Studies it's not so much thinking about
what is the newspaper saying today but
what is the fact that we have newspapers
say about our society or how does it
shape our society this is a this is a
long lineage it involves looking back
history in the using those lessons to
look forward McLuhan was taught by a guy
named Harold Ananas who worked in Canada
who in Sweden was a guy named Walter all
those three together remembers the
Toronto School that's one of about a
half dozen of very prominent schools of
media criticism contemporary media
critics who includes see the white
innothing
media studies scholars and my teacher
jonathan peters so it's a it's a very
thriving field
Frederick Hitler's gramophone forgetting
Frederick Hitler another really good
media studies scholar so all of these
scholars are basically working on this
idea of that technological shifts in
communications have fundamental impact
on societies and also on human
consciousness on the way that we think
about it view the world and so it's this
very deep analysis is the main approach
now the reason we're all here today and
the reason most of us to come halfway
around the world is because we on some
level think that the adoption of
cryptocurrency and watching technology
is going to have a similar
transformative effect even if you can't
articulate it in a really clear way
that's why they're here it's because you
believe that on some level but and this
is the key thing that transformation if
you really believe
in the technology that transformation
has nothing to do with the specifics of
how we use it it has to do with the
fundamental features of the technology
itself and how those features reshape
human relationships structures of power
and the way we see the world
so to maybe give an example of how we
can approach this analysis of technology
I want to go through a couple of
categories that not Makluan what it is
used and that then influenced so one way
to evaluate a media form of media is
whether it is time binding or space
binding and all all talks I'll get into
what exactly that means so this is an
Egyptian obelisk built in 1450 BC this
is an example of a time binding
technology it is designed to last a
really long time in the minds of its
creator to mind you to last a really
long time and to attest to the power of
the Empire or the leader who built it so
it draws time together and creates
continuity that's the purpose of this
media now by contrast and in this hope
this isn't too much distraction but this
time versus space categorization is sort
of one axis on which you can be analyzed
before the media McLuhan also
categorized media according to whether
they were coal or war and that was based
on whether they had an emotional impact
or were more rationally oriented so for
example from clue and television and
radio word well I'm applying I'm
forgetting these exact points but um
to what I believe to be correct witches
television radio are warm media they
engage you emotionally they bring you
into a world where as Prince is kind of
the ultimate cool media it detaches you
from the ideas that are being presented
so that's just another example of a
category of analysis but but all of us
time-binding
supposed to last a long time it's
designed to convey the idea of endurance
and to transmit messages into the future
but a novelist can only be within his
context obviously we have a photograph
here that's transmitted over long
distance of attendances for all the
contents it can only impact the people
who are close enough to see it
by contrast the Internet is a space
binding technology cellphones are a
space binding technology they allow us
to connect over long distances and that
has its own implications also worth
noting an obelisk is not always the most
effective time binding technology as
Shelley observed even things that are
meant to last forever hawking don't and
that's actually going to become
significant
so theaters extend power geographically
we thought for a while that it maybe was
a decentralized technology that allows
different nodes to pop up but as the
devolution of the internet goes forward
we definitely have found that it tends
to centralize pretend to be nodes that
have a lot of control so it allows power
among other things to extend over long
distances also worth noting the internet
is ultimately ephemeral
if you think about the kinds of data
that you can access over the Internet
they're kind of isolated right I have
this presentation on this hard drive it
exists maybe on a cloud server somewhere
else but those files can be gone very
quickly and anybody who has directed
research on that story history of the
internet can attest to that stuff just
disappears not everything that's
captured by the Internet Archive
entities and so this trade-off between
time binding and space binding has
previously seemed kind of inevitable
right if you have a piece of paper that
can be sent in a letter over long
distances that piece of paper is fragile
they last a long time sometimes but
basically it's very easy to destroy
so what I want to argue is was
fundamentally significant innovation of
watching technology is it it eliminates
this trade-off between time binding and
space binding capacities immediately
obviously you can access a blockchain
from anywhere just the same way it's the
Internet but unlike the Internet the
data that's stored on watching is
maintained over time by in most cases in
built economic incentives that are used
to pay maintain errs and theoretically
those incentives if they continue
interacting with an economy that
structured the way ours is right now
those incentives can last forever as
long as you know humans don't wipe
ourselves out the things of the earth
and so you have this digital technology
that has infinite reach it can be a
qualm planet
it could be access anywhere on earth but
at the same time the way that it's
structured gives it some of the features
of a time binding Monument a pyramid a
temple which is why this title is called
the invisible olives because arguing
that instead of bricks you have these
economics and incentives that are being
used to maintain a structure overall
variable long period of time potentially
obviously this is all very
forward-looking theory that's come with
me and I'm talking about public law
chains and I'm also talking about proof
of work I'm not as familiar as it
probably should be from state but
fundamentally the the structures are the
same so that durability comes with costs
economic costs obviously one of the
important things is that is where the
Ovilus is built by a king forcing slaves
to do work this is more of a democratic
process where people come together and
contribute to the structure
and this is only really one of I'm sure
many different ways to look at watching
technology and place it in the context
of history in a way that makes it
obvious exactly how it's novel and helps
us think about what the impacts are
going to be and I just want to make some
points about basically one part of the
impact that this structural feature of
the technology might have I'm not going
to go as far as talking about social
changes reason like that but I do want
to talk about kind of a psychological
effect that the blockchain structure can
have it's what I call it the reality
effect and how many people will hear
actually owned some crypto so sit back
you know maybe I had a unique experience
but if you think back to when you first
got that first piece of cryptocurrency
on your on your laptop or whatever I
certainly remember you know five years
ago or whenever somebody sent me some it
felt new it wasn't just a file being
sent to my laptop it was like it was as
if that machine had some sudden new
weight there was a thing there on the
hard drive not just data and not just
ones and zeroes but an object we use
this term digital objects right to
describe some things that on ethereum
blockchain and that speaks I think to a
pretty deep psychological reality
of what watching two things especially
to people who really understand the
technology understand the permanence of
it costs of writing to it
and the durability of the data you have
an actual subjective experience that
that piece of data is in some way more
real than just a file a hard drive
because you know that it's part of this
collective network that has some
sustaining properties
I don't know if anybody saw this but
there was actually a really interesting
tweet about this a couple days ago and I
couldn't find it that somebody was
saying you know traditionally people
would keep their their money in a bank
or in a moment-- or something like that
I kept my money in an
alternate-dimension because he had all
his savings in Bitcoin
now that alternate dimension is still
real and we also always live in a later
reality language is a layer of reality
that some people understand I mean we're
here in Japan not everybody speaks
Japanese Yorick sort of seeing the fact
that you don't have access to every
player of reality going on around you
but it's still reality and so we can
think about media also as layers of
reality in blockchain I think has some
unique claims to certain reality effects
reality status what everyone would call
again like I said I'm not going to go so
far as to speculate in this talk about
what impacts that reality effect might
have socially economically or anything
like that but I have actually spent a
lot of time thinking about this and if
you want to dive deeper there's a medium
post that goes this is really this talk
is part one of a medium post that has
three parts so it goes a lot further and
there are many different ways watching
is one way as I mentioned along with
language of creating a shared reality
through media another and you know you
guys can look at this further but
another way of creating a shared reality
through medium communication has
historically been
turn magic and this is book that I have
that will come out in the next couple of
days call it bitcoins magic you guys are
the first ones to see this spectacular
cover and I'm pretty excited about it
unfortunately I didn't get it up quite
in time I think if you go to Amazon
right now it's probably not quite up yet
but they're working on it
and this is you know lots of different
stuff about journalism Bitcoin media
Theory McLuhan magic all kinds of
weirdness
so check out if you're interested and
that's my talk
[Applause]