‘The Price of Anarchy’ is a concept originally developed in the contexts of economics and game theory. In particular scenarios, The Price of Anarchy compares differences in efficiency in the presence and absence of hierarchical coordination mechanisms. For the Salon, we will invoke The Price of Anarchy in its broadest possible sense to explore challenges in horizontal organising in all contexts: from solidarity-based organisations, to packet routing in digital networks.
Recommended Materials:
Theorymatters: The Price of Anarchy - Tim Roughgarden et al. (short article)
A Prehistory of DAO - Kei Kreutler (article)
The Tyranny of Structurelessness - Jo Freeman (article)
An Introduction to Extitutional Theory - Jessy Kate Schingler & Primavera de Filippi (article)
The Problem of Scale in Anarchism and the Case for Cybernetic Communism - Aurora Apolito (article)
Wikipedia: The Price of Anarchy - Wikipedia (article)
We recently wrapped a series of ‘The Indifference Engine’ discussions on Bitcoin and its externalities.
0xSalon005 ::: The Indifference Engine ::: Topic Information
As Bitcoin surpasses previous price records and re-enters mainstream consciousness following several wilderness years, the twelve year old cryptocurrency appears to have “arrived” in the eyes of the market. The value proposition of an ungoverned, uncensorable digital means of value transfer is clear for all to see…but can our planet afford the thermodynamic price tag? To maintain the integrity of its transaction record, the Bitcoin network creates a hard boundary to the outside through exacting validation requirements. There is no sensitivity to the consequences of the thermoeconomic challenges it issues. This inability of ‘mined’ cryptocurrencies to differentiate the nature of energy sources used to secure them has led to criticism as to their indifference to their ecological externalities.
Illustration of Temperance from Heinrich Suso’s ‘Wisdom of the Clock’, ca. 1450.
A salon on the topic ‘Transcendental Time Machines’ where we discussed history, measurement and synthesis of temporal instruments and regimes.
Recommended Materials:
Xenotemporality: Unnatural Time - Anna Engelhardt & Diann Bauer (video)
Deleuze’s Third Synthesis of Time - Daniela Voss (article)
Pandemic Time: A Distributed Doomsday Clock - Venkatesh Rao (article)
The Immortal - Jose Luis Borges (fiction)
Project Time Capsule - Black Quantum Futurism (article)
The Politics of Time Precis - Peter Osborne (article)
The Poenomenon: Form as Occult Technology - Amy Ireland (article)
Temporal Secessionism - Timezone #1 - nascent.energy (video)
A one-off salon on the topic ‘Memes of the Ages’ where we situated memetic artifacts and technologies in historical, social and political contexts.
Recommended Materials:
Critical Meme Reader: Global Mutations of the Viral Image - edited by Chloë Arkenbout, Jack Wilson, Daniel de Zeeuw (collection)
The Geometric Signs of Ice Age Europe - From The First Signs by Genevive Pettinger (image)
Early Modern Memes: The Reuse and Recycling of Woodcuts in 17th-Century English Popular Print - Katie Sisneros (article)
Reading Strategies for Coping With Information Overload ca. 1550-1700 - Ann Blair (article)
Post-Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production - edited by Alfie Bown, Dan Bristow (collection)
Memes: A Microcosm of Art History (Part 1 - History & Theory of Memetics) - The Philosopher’s Meme (video)
A Military Memetics Compendium - edited by Robert Finkelstein, Amy Kruse (article)
'Viral Realism' ::: are.na Research Archive
Virulence transcends desire. Thirty kilobytes of RNA doesn’t care about what you think it wants.
The past 18 months have - amongst many other things - demonstrated the fragility of both market-mediated capitalist structures and the Westphalian nation-state system in the face of networked contagion as global passive adversary. Our conversation may touch upon: viral nationalism, new signifiers of implicit risk models, the human costs of antiviral measures and the performativity of societal epidemiological theatre.
By analogy with 0x003 topic Algorithmic Realism, must we also leave idealist and formalist orientations behind to navigate our present viral realities?
Recommended Materials:
Before The Cell, There Was Virus - Dahiya
The Mask of Universality: Politics in the Pandemic Response - McGowan
Principles of Coronademonology - Mohaghegh
After the Pandemic, we can’t go Back to Sleep - Graeber
The Biophilosophy of Epidemiological Models - Woodard
Before epidemiologists began modelling disease, it was the job of astrologers - Pfeffer
Non-Fungible $ALON ::: are.na Research Archive
We held a one-off Non-Fungible Salon around unique tokens, collectibles and digital commodification. Audio report now available.
GANimation generated using VQGAN+CLIP using CPRU poem ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Tokenised’ as prompt.
For 0x Salon’s first venture beyond our own memetic practice and into a meta-discussion of internet memes, we aim to bring together meme admins and practitioners, researchers and theorists, and casual viewers alike. Our discussion will move beyond the Dawkinsian notion of memetics often invoked in academic discourse and instead center banal internet memes, which circulate between our screens and spread forcefully into the world outside.
Recommended materials:
Notes Toward the Memes of Production
Post Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production
Post-Digital Cultures of the Far Right: Online Actions and Offline Consequences in Europe and the US
Exploring the emergence of life and collective behaviour, and agency at the level of the individual and the collective.
We’ll connect the drivers towards self-replication from physics and the speculative astrochemistry of primordial life to ecological-evolutionary games, information theoretic approaches to individuality and the emergence of collective behaviour in natural and synthetic contexts.
Recommended materials:
First Support for a Physics Theory of Life
The Environment is not a System
What is an Individual?
Protocols for the Phase Transition