‘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.
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.
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?
The Revolution Will Not Be Tokenised (GANimation via VQ/CLIP)
0xSalon001b ::: Memetics & Mimesis ::: are.na Research Archive
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.
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.
