 any things for coming out to a, hopefully, fairly smooth talk after a lot of pant efforts to get the logistics fixed. My name's David Morris. First by a show of hands, how many people in this room believe that blockchain and cryptocurrency are fundamentally novel technology? Of those who raise their hands, anybody want to volunteer maybe one feature, one thing that blockchain tech does that has not been possible previously. Okay, I see some silence, so here's some silence. So makes the point, it is very difficult to to identify novelty, to analyze it rigorously, and to predict what parts of it matter. So luckily though, we do have a lot of precedence for thinking about new technology. We've gone through a long chain of history where media technology in particular has had profound impacts transforming societies and the way people see and think and interact. Media technology again and again has radically transformed the way that human beings live. One of the more comprehensive and insightful historians and analysts of this is a guy named Marshall McLuhan who did most of his work 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 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 McLuhan and to the field of media studies. Thank you, my lovely assistant. So we're going to take some very quick stabs at applying these concepts to blockchain. 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 of Fortune Magazine. Prior to that though, I was an academic and my training is in media studies and sociology, and so this is in that tradition. I'm here kind of 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 is mechanical print. And I'm talking about printing like mass production of books and printed materials, not writing itself, it's a whole different topic. But print allowed the mass diffusion of ideas, but also it allowed people to analyze those ideas in ways that were independent from institutions and kind of gave birth to critical thought. So it's not a 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 the content of their religion rather than just kind of accepting it from on high because when you 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, railways. This is not something that people think about as a media technology very often, but the railways actually transformed the way people communicate pretty fundamentally. Railways actually came along before the telegraph. So they increased the speed of communication to a level that had never been seen before because you can send letters by the railway. So it shrank space and made people more connected. And it also created new markets for things like commodities, wood, beef, cotton. Marshall McLuhan's teacher, Harold Innes, spent a lot of time thinking about the railway and what we'll talk about that in a bit in more depth. Now, it's likely with a few exceptions that when you walked into this room, you didn't think of railways as a form of media technology. But here's one that's really going to blow your mind, the ultimate media technology, the electric light bulb. The reason that McLuhan in particular spent 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 the 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 light bulb when we're thinking critically about media is that it has no content. A light bulb has no message. A light bulb isn't telling you anything in particular unless you like use it to spell out something on a sign. A light bulb has 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 two things. So anything that allows a connection, especially between humans is a form of media. And this idea that media, the structure of a media technology and the ways that it reshapes connections between people is much more important than the content of that media is summed up in a phrase 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 are have heard that. So for McLuhan, what matters about any media technology actually first I should show you this, just as a measure of how influential and important McLuhan was. This is McLuhan on the guess your rights in Paul 1977. I won't go through the joke that he's a part of, but obviously, what he on how problematic figure these days, but he was 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. For McLuhan, 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 geographic range 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 so that's kind of when you think of media studies, the more interesting branch of media studies is 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 change our society? This is a long lineage. It involves looking back at history and then using those lessons to look forward. McLuhan was taught by a guy named Harold Innis who worked in Canada. McLuhan's student was a guy named Walter Aum. Those three together are known as the Toronto School. That's one of about a half dozen of very prominent schools of media criticism. Contemporary media critics include Siva Vaidyanathan, media studies scholars, and my teacher, John Peters. So it's a very thriving field. Frederick Kittler's gramophone for getting Frederick Kittler another really good media studies scholar. So all of these scholars are basically working on this idea that technological shifts in communications have fundamental impacts on societies and also on human consciousness on the way we think about and 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 have 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 you're here is 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 McLuhan but in 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 I'll I'll talk to 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 creators, 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 this I hope this isn't too much of a distraction, but this time versus space categorization is sort of one axis on which you can analyze a form of media. McLuhan also categorized media according to whether they were cool or warm. And that was based on whether they had an emotional impact or were more rationally oriented. So, for example, for McLuhan television and radio were, well, I'm applying, I'm forgetting his exact points, but I'm applying his ideas to what I believe to be correct, which is television and radio are warm media. They engage you emotionally. They bring you into a world, whereas print 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 an obelisk, time binding, it's supposed to last a long time. It's designed to convey the idea of endurance and to transmit messages into the future. But an obelisk can only be, within its context, obviously we have a photograph here that's transmitting it over a long distance, but within its historical context, it can only impact people who are close enough to see it. By contrast, the internet is a space binding technology. Cell phones 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 Shelly observed, even things that are meant to last forever often don't. And that's actually going to become significant if we continue. So the internet extends power geographically. We thought for a while that it maybe was a decentralized technology that allows different nodes to pop up. But as the evolution of the internet goes forward, we definitely have found that it tends to centralize. There tend 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 is trying to research on the story history of the internet can attest to that. Stuff just disappears. Not everything gets captured by the internet archive. 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 it was fundamentally significant innovation of blockchain technology, is that it eliminates this trade-off between time binding and space binding capacities of media. Obviously you can access blockchain from anywhere, just the same way as the internet. But unlike the internet, the data that's stored on a blockchain is maintained over time by, in most cases, inbuilt economic incentives that are used to pay maintainers. And theoretically, those incentives, if they continue interacting with an economy that's structured the way ours is right now, those incentives can last forever, as long as, you know, humans don't wipe ourselves off the face of the earth. And so you have this digital technology that has infinite reach. It can be, well, not infinite, it can be accessed 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 Obelisk, because I'm arguing that instead of bricks, you have these economics incentives that are being used to maintain a structure over a very long period of time. Potentially. Obviously this is all very forward-looking theory that's kind of working on it. And I'm talking about public blockchains, and I'm also talking about proof-and-forth. I'm not as familiar as I probably should be with proof-and-state, but fundamentally the structures are the same. So that durability comes with costs, economic costs. Obviously one of the important things is that is where the obelisk 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 collectively. And this is only really one of, I'm sure, many different ways to look at blockchain technology and place it in 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 or anything 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 the reality effect, and how many people here actually own some crypto? So think 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 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, not just ones and zeros, but an object. We use this term, digital objects, right, to describe some things that are on the Ethereum blockchain. And that speaks, I think, to a pretty deep psychological reality of what blockchain can face, especially to people who really understand the technology, understand the permanence of it, the costs of writing to it, and the durability of the data on it. You have an actual subjective experience that that piece of data is in some way more real than just a file on a hard drive, because you know that it's part of this collective network that has self-sustaining properties. I don't know if anybody saw this, but there was actually a really interesting tweet about this a couple of days ago, and I couldn't find it, but somebody was saying, you know, traditionally people would keep their money in a bank or in a government or something like that. I keep 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 layered reality. Language is a layer of reality that some people understand. I mean, we're here in Japan, not everybody speaks Japanese. You're sort of seeing the fact that you don't have access to every layer of reality going on around you, but it's still reality. And so we can think about media also as layers of reality and blockchain, I think has some unique claims to certain reality effects, reality status, whatever you might recall. 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 sort of, 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, blockchain is one way, as I mentioned, along with language, of creating a shared reality through media. Another, and you guys can look at this further, but another way of creating a shared reality through media and communication has historically been termed magic. And this is a book that I have that will come out in the next couple of days called Bitcoin is 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 it out if you're interested. And that's my talk.