#i reference system collapse but this would have taken place before network effect….

[charlie-artlie]

>>SYSTEM COLLAPSE

photos taken moments before disaster, AdaCol1 is not having a good time!

[sylvasthesnowfox]

6. remnant

Rei woke slowly. It's hard when you don't have a clear sense of time. She'd thought her body would get used to it, but, well...

At least she was better off than some. She didn't need an alarm, or a glaring lamp in her face on a timer. She woke up when she woke up. Her apartment was as barren as ever; she didn't spend much time here, except doing exercises - physical or spiritual - and doing her best impression of a girl getting ready for the day, before going out to socialize or study.

Only she and Yomi lived in that particular apartment tower. Most of the other survivors had moved into the twin towers a few blocks down, since there was enough room there for just about everyone, and it was easy for Eliza to reach them all for inspection and such. It was nice having such a large space virtually to herself; Rei wandered where she liked, experimenting with the building's upper floors or watching the motionless sky to clear her mind without being interrupted by anyone else. She was one of the only people she knew that enjoyed watching the stasis barrier.

She made her way upstairs first. The elevator was sluggish, but Rei had learned patience with it by now. Their power generators could only do so much. Once it had carried her as high as it could go, she took a flight of stairs up a couple more floors before reaching the roof access, and stepped out into the open space that had become essentially her open-air living room. She liked the openness there, and the way it faced up into the unyielding sky. She liked the view. Everyone thought she was crazy, but she can't help it. The stasis field was so pretty.

The field itself was some kilometer away from her at its closest point, but that was still uncomfortably close. It looked like a shimmering, undulating wall of water, or maybe gelatin, frozen in place and towering high above her in a domed arch, though it still reached at least a kilometer over her head. Beyond it, she could see the distorted silhouettes of what had once been the city skyline. Massive towers, even taller than the one she was in, stacked in their grid formation, with layers of translucent walkways and streets built up between them. They never moved, never changed, the lights in the distant rooms never blinked. It was stasis, after all. Outside that barrier, the world has ended already.

They'd had some warning when it happened. The end wasn't sudden - it happened from the outside and collapsed inward, so astronomers around the world had a chance to make strange observations and start theorizing about them, resulting in alarmist headlines that Yomi had actually been waiting for. She confirmed with her own observations that the end was coming, and she and Rei began their preparations. Back then Rei was still too young and ignorant to do much to help, but she liked to think she made a decent gofer, if nothing else. The stasis field had hit Earth about a week later, engulfing the planet almost all at once. Almost.

But Yomi's barrier had preserved this little sphere, about five kilometers across, and now that sphere was mostly stable and they - along with everyone that Rei and Eliza had managed to convince to hole up in that sphere with them in advance - had been living in it for about a year. Not a whole lot had outwardly changed in that time, but it was a lot of time to pass when the world is effectively only about 20 square kilometers. They'd had to start growing their own food. Eliza had been talking recently about how they were going to recycle the water they had used. She had a lot of practical troubles on her mind, and Rei wasn't really knowledgable enough about taking care of people to know how to resolve them. She was focused on something else, day to day. Something just as important, if not moreso.

She squinted. The sky overhead didn't change, either. The end had come at night, at least on this part of the planet. The moon was high in a cloudy sky that never changed. Their only light to see by came from their own electricity system, and the moonlight that somehow perpetually shone through the barrier.

Sometimes you could see it shimmer. Like waves of heat off a sidewalk, but far too high.

There it was again.

Rei bolted for the stairs. She didn't have time to wait for the elevator. She had to warn Eliza, now.

"When?"

"Fifteen minutes."

They were walking back towards her building now, using the third-tier walkway - the highest, and thus the one open to the sky - between Rei's tower and Eliza's twins. Eliza's eyes were fixed ont he sky, watching for more signs of boundary decay, while Rei watched their surroundings for any sign of a disturbance. Eliza cursed under her breath as they walked. "Yeah, there it is," she sighed. "Did you see Naomi on your way?"

"Yeah, she's already there." Naomi was perhaps the best fighter of the three, which is to say, she was the only one of them to have taken any kind of formal training not only in how to shoot The Gun, but also how to use a knife. (They liked to dramatically refer to it as The Gun because as far as they knew it was the only one that still existed. No one else owned one or knew where one was.) Not that guns or knives had much of an effect on outsiders when they showed up, but it meant she at least could make herself feel threatening, and sometimes that's what counted most.

Beyond Rei's tower, the road branched to the right and behind the building, but both the forward path and the branch eventually just plunged into the barrier. Yomi and Naomi were waiting at the crossroads, the former with her hands behind her back, and the latter pacing fiercely on the glasswalk, both of their gazes fixed on the sky.

"Good morning," Rei said courteously, as they approached. Yomi glanced back at her with a humorless expression.

"Good morning," she replied, deadpan. "No sign of it yet."

"We just had a weak boundary a few days ago," Eliza groaned. "At least this one isn't at an ungodly hour of morning."

"What time is it?" Rei asked, genuinely curious.

"It's six in the morning," dryly answered Eliza.

"It feels big," Naomi murmured, slowing her pacing. "Can you feel it, Rei?" And Rei nodded - of course she could, she could 'feel' these things better than anyone but Yomi. An immense sense of pressure, as though something is compressing reality itself, pushing down on some unseen boundary and trying to force its way through. Which, as she understood, was not so far off from what was literally happening.

"I wish we had a way to scare them off before they broke through," Rei sighed. "They can cause so much damage if they manage to reach us."

"So, what," Eliza muttered, pulling back the cuffs from her sleeves, "you just want to go out there and talk to them?"

"Well, if I could," Rei murmured back, "wouldn't that be better?"

"Yeah," Eliza huffed, "especially if you couldn't come back." Rei didn't have much a response for that, and Eliza wasn't waiting for one anyway, pulling her lighter from out of her pocket and flicking it twice, ensuring it still produced flame.

"It's coming," Yomi warned. "On both sides."

They hesitated. Nothing seemed to happen.

"Oh, great," Naomi groaned, "it's one of these." Rei turned around slowly, full-circle, watching for any sign of disturbance, something out of place...? She could feel the presence bearing down on her - SOMETHING was here - but... where exactly?

"Tearing in the atmosphere," Yomi observed darkly. "It's definitely here, it's nearby - "

"There!" Rei cried, sprinting out into the street - the walkways were no mere glass, but continuous digital displays, and out of the corner of her eye she noticed some strange artifacting in one even though they ought to have been turned off - as she darted towards it, though, the street lit up all at once a blaze of chaos and white noise, distorted screeching sounding from the speakers built into the handrails, so loud that Rei thought her ears might rupture and she stumbled to the ground to clap her hands over them -

She turned around to see Eliza gesturing in a wide arc with one hand, as though trying to direct the fire from her lighter in a wave - she saw the conceptual flame forming, but it whipped around her and turned suddenly to some kind of strange rope, formed of glittering cube patterns like some kind of crystal; she cried out in pain as it lashed itself tight around her, binding in place.

Naomi emptied the magazine of her pistol into the walkway beneath her feet. Each shot cracked the screens further and further, causing greater distortion, and the lights and sound fled from the damage... towards the city. "Naomi!" Rei shouted in alarm, at the top her lungs - though she couldn't hear herself, her ears were ringing too loud. Eliza flexed against her bindings til they shattered, and they all fled to keep up with it.

(Except for Yomi, who glances into the shadows and watches as a horde of spiders rise up slowly from the walkway's underside; the woman gives a small, smug smile and a tiny beckoning wave, and the spiders slink out of sight once again.)

"A digital outsider?" Eliza hissed, though Rei could only barely hear over the outsider's panicked whines. "That sound is going to shatter the walkways if it gets any higher-pitched, I swear!"

"What happened to you?" Naomi gasped. "Your fire - ?"

"I don't know," Eliza snapped, "but I don't think magic works well on this thing, that's all I can guess right now - "

"Can we just power down the walkway?" Rei panted.

"You idiot, why the hell would we waste power on it?!" Eliza cried. "It's not even wired into the power network!"

"Well, I guess that would make sense," Rei murmured ruefully.

"That makes the opposite of sense!" Naomi shouted. "How is it doing any of this if there's no electricity?!" Eliza shrugged angrily at her, and she sighed and pulled the empty magazine out of her pistol, slowing to focus on it so she could reload. They didn't have bullets - where would they get more bullets? - so she had to create more via magic, and she wasn't especially good at doing that quickly yet.

But all of a sudden the entity changed direction, now suddenly roaring back towards them - they were all at once surrounded by lights and noise again, though now the pitch had raised so that it was slightly easier to hear their voices over it - so Rei could hear Naomi yelp in alarm as she dropped her gun, because it had started to spark and glitter and seemed to be changing shape - "Stop it!" Naomi was yelling, "stop doing that, whatever you're doing!"

Rei turned back towards where they'd started, as Yomi was just now catching up with them - she closed her eyes and imagined the concept of the bullethole, the concept of "piercing", and tried to form that into something in her mind; she'd been trained to do this since she was very small - manifesting material concepts of things that weren't supposed to be tangible - and then, without thinking about what was in her hands or what it looked like, she threw it at the floor; there was an echoing sound like a gunshot and the splintering of glass, and Rei repeated that process again several times rapidly until the concept in her mind changed forcefully -

Yes, sure enough, it was somehow manipulating the conceptualization process -

So she just went with it. Instead of 'pierce' the concept became 'open', which was fundamentally different, but that was fine; she attempted to manifest that between her hands, touching their sides together and then slapping her palms "closed" - ending the spell. She needed something different, something that would force this thing out of its current medium - "Disable"? No, even better, short-circuit, she needed -

"Naomi!" she shouted. "Cut open a panel somewhere! I need to see wires!" She opened her eyes again to see Naomi nodding, jamming her knife into a concealed panel next to her as Rei ran over; Rei was good at materializing things even without seeing them, and water was one of the easiest concepts for her to recall; she cupped her hands, imagining the weight of water filling them, and then splashed it onto the panel - sparks flew out with a burst of light and ozone -

Short-circuit.

She imagined short-circuit in her hands - her hands burned torturously hot but she ignored it - she imagined the concept of short-circuit in her hands and then drew them out wide, increasing its size and reach, and dropped to her knees to slam it into the glass paneling below them -

The walkway burst into blinding light for a brief moment, harsh static overriding the distorted squealing from the speakers around them, and then the walkway was silent and still. Rei looked around wildly, searching for any sign of greater distortion... but...

"I think it's gone?" Naomi said, her voice faint. Eliza let out a long, shaking sigh of relief.

"I don't feel it anymore, either," Yomi agreed, her voice a bit more animated than usual. "Goodness, Rei, that was very creative!"

"I thought it was fairly obvious," Rei murmured, pushing herself up slowly - her own legs were shaking, too, and her ears were still ringing. "If you want to disable electronics, you short-circuit them. Pretty simple."

"I still don't understand how you can materialize such abstract concepts," Eliza grumped, storming over to her. "If I hadn't just watched you do it I'd be certain you were insane. Are your hands okay?"

"A little burned," Rei admitted, holding them up to look at them. All she could see so far were patches of reddened skin along the outside of her index finger and inside of her thumb, but they'd probably swell up nasty later. Eliza grasped her hands from behind the palm and turned them over, inspecting them more thoroughly.

"They look alright," she murmured, "but we should treat the burn if we can..." She turned to Yomi. "Can you take care of that? I should do my rounds now that everyone's almost definitely awake."

"Yes, we'll deal with that," Yomi agreed. "We have our exercises to do, as well. As exciting as this was, we shouldn't make excuses for ourselves, no?"

"Right." Rei nodded gratefully to Eliza. "Thanks for coming on such short notice."

"Of course," Eliza huffed. "What good would I be if I didn't, hmm?" She waved back to Naomi, as well. "Don't get yourselves into trouble. We'll talk later."

(And as Yomi and the purple-eyed girl walk back towards their apartment tower, the spiders follow, little more than a shadow in the glass underneath them.)

[lumanlife-blog]

Humanity Reset

Despite huge potential, humanity appears to be headed in one direction. Down.

For a long time, humanity looked to be improving. Sprinting speeds that once seemed impossible became commonplace. And the record for oldest person in the world was broken over and over.

When we take a partial view of history, many think human development has been one long process of improvement. One that will continue forever. But this idea of exponential progress and growth is fantasy.

All humanity’s greatest civilizations that rose to prominence, eventually crashed and burned. All natural ecosystems follow the same adaptive path — so why would human civilizations be any different?

Latest research shows the humans species is experiencing declines in many of the capacities that ranked it atop the tree of life. More troubling is the fact declines are on a global scale.

This evidence flies in the face of many widely held beliefs across science and business that humans have an endless capacity for growth.

Clearly growth has limits…

In stark contrast to the 20th Century which saw rising gains in many areas, recent stats paint an entirely different picture. In today’s world:

Children are more abused

Teenagers are more suicidal

People are more miserable

Men + women are less fertile

People are more addicted to drugs

Domestic partners are more violent

People experience lower life expectancy

People are fatter + dumber + shorter; and

Businesses are less innovative, particularly in the US

Declines in human potential will accelerate because our kids are being continually exposed to two dysfunctional ecofactors:

toxic ‘junk products’ created by corporations (e.g., fast food, nutrient-poor school meals, cheap drugs, screen media)

toxic nurturing from inept parents (e.g., people that give birth to kids who are mentally and financially unstable)

Possible solution

It’s time we demanded our politicians and key decision makers put policies in place to limit junk products and toxic nurturing. Only then can humanity expect reversal of fortunes and ultimately a brighter future.

Policy A: Introduce Externality Reports — this policy would ensure corporations are fully accountable for negative externalities. In other words any interactions that negatively impact living systems during the production, distribution, consumption and disposal of their products. This could be done by applying regulatory guidelines to increase transparency, with legal action taken when regulatory norms are breached.

The rationale — governments already require education and healthcare to conduct impact reports on outcomes, so why shouldn’t businesses be made more accountable for the damage they cause on ecosystems?

The benefits — dramatic reductions in lifestyle-related diseases, more investment and innovation in sustainable products and environments, and healthier cities for individuals and living systems.

Policy B: Introduce Parental Care Permits — this move would ensure anyone choosing to reproduce are mentally, physically and financially stable. Reproductive fitness and responsible parenting would be state controlled by experts in the field, introducing puberty blocking agents into young children before they become fertile. Parental Care Permits (PCPs) would be offered to young adults who are biologically, psycho-socially and economically fit to reproduce and nurture offspring.

The rationale — government routinely legislates and issues licenses to people wishing to adopt children and care for animals in healthy (and safe) conditions, so why should birth parents be treated any differently?

The process — establish a Ministry for Parental Fitness responsible for innovating (and eventually administering) mandatory puberty suspension in children. Psychologists, obstetricians and gynecologists would be authorized to issue PCPs to those best placed to breed and become parents.

The benefits — reductions in domestic violence against women (and men), increased learning and development opportunities for children, and a more empathic population with increased life expectancy.

It would be delusional to expect such systemic policy changes will be relatively easy to develop and implement. Of course they won’t…

Corporate lobbyists will do everything in their power to keep business opaque (i.e., corrupt).

Pro-life groups will do everything in their power to push back on controlling healthy parenting.

But with decades of failed public health policies behind us, it’s time policy makers took drastic measures to reverse declines.

It’s time to replace human-centered with life-centered policy

Maybe even a paradigm shift to a Life Potential Movement.

We live in hope…

___

References

Degli Esposti, M., Humphreys, D. K., Jenkins, B. M., Gasparrini, A., Pooley, S., Eisner, M., & Bowes, L. (2019). Long-term trends in child maltreatment in England and Wales, 1858–2016: an observational, time-series analysis. The Lancet Public Health, 4(3), e148-e158.

Helliwell, J., Layard, R., & Sachs, J. (2019). World Happiness Report 2019, New York: Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

Joshi, H and Fitzsimons, E. (2016) The Millennium Cohort Study: the making of a multi-purpose resource for social science and policy. Longitudinal and Life Course Studies, 7(4), 409–430.

Levine, H., Jørgensen, N., Martino-Andrade, A., Mendiola, J., Weksler-Derri, D., Mindlis, I., … & Swan, S. H. (2017). Temporal trends in sperm count: a systematic review and meta-regression analysis. Human reproduction update, 23(6), 646–659.

Murray, C. J., Callender, C. S., Kulikoff, X. R., Srinivasan, V., Abate, D., Abate, K. H., … & Abdelalim, A. (2018). Population and fertility by age and sex for 195 countries and territories, 1950–2017: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017. The Lancet, 392(10159), 1995–2051.

Bewley-Taylor, D. R., & Nougier, M. (2018). Measuring the ‘World Drug Problem’: 2019 and Beyond. In Collapse of the Global Order on Drugs: From UNGASS 2016 to Review 2019 (pp. 65–83). Emerald Publishing Limited.

World Health Organization. (2013). Global and regional estimates of violence against women: prevalence and health effects of intimate partner violence and non-partner sexual violence. World Health Organization.

Ho, J. Y., & Hendi, A. S. (2018). Recent trends in life expectancy across high income countries: retrospective observational study. bmj, 362, k2562.

Reilly, J. J., El-Hamdouchi, A., Diouf, A., Monyeki, A., & Somda, S. A. (2018). Determining the worldwide prevalence of obesity. The Lancet, 391(10132), 1773–1774.

Bratsberg, B., & Rogeberg, O. (2018). Flynn effect and its reversal are both environmentally caused. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(26), 6674–6678.

NCD Risk Factor Collaboration. (2016). A century of trends in adult human height. Elife, 5, e13410.

Konczal, M., & Steinbaum, M. (2016). Declining Entrepreneurship, Labor Mobility, and Business Dynamism: A Demand-Side Approach. New York: Roosevelt Institute. http://rooseveltinstitute. org/declining-entrepreneurship-labor-mobility-and-business-dynamism.

Unerman, J., Bebbington, J., & O’dwyer, B. (2018). Corporate reporting and accounting for externalities. Accounting and Business Research, 48(5), 497–522.

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. (2009). Child adoption: trends and policies. New York: United Nations.

[crypto20blog-blog]

How to Get a 3% Discount Genesis Mining Promo Code

The Internet is part of society and is formed by society. And until society is a crime-free zone, the Internet will not be a criminal offense-free zone.

So what's a cryptocurrency? A cryptocurrency is a decentralised payment system, which principally lets people send foreign money to each other over the online with out the need for a trusted third occasion similar to a financial institution or monetary institution. The transactions are low cost, and in lots of instances, they're free. And likewise, the funds are pseudo anonymous as effectively.

In addition to that, the main characteristic is that it's very decentralised, which implies that there isn't any single central point of authority or something like that. The implications of this is performed by everyone having a full copy of all the transactions that have ever occurred with Bitcoin. This creates an extremely resilient community, which means that nobody can change or reverse or police any of the transactions.

The high degree of anonymity in there signifies that it's very hard to hint transactions. It's not totally inconceivable, however it's impractical in most cases. So crime with cryptocurrency-- because you've got fast, borderless transactions, and you have got a excessive stage of anonymity, it in idea creates a system that's ripe for exploitation. So usually when it is a crime online with online fee systems, then they tend to go to the authorities and, say, we will hand over this fee information or we can stop these transactions and reverse them. And none of that may happen with Bitcoin, so it makes it ripe for criminals, in concept.

In light of this, plenty of different businesses are researching into Bitcoin and taking a look at Bitcoin and trying to grasp the way it works and what they can do to police it. It is also been within the media fairly a number of instances, and the media, being the media, like give attention to the dangerous aspect of it. So that they focus very closely on the crime with it. So if there is a theft or a rip-off or something like that, then they have a tendency to blame it on Bitcoin and Bitcoin users.

So probably the most notable is probably Silk Street, which received taken down just lately, and through their $1.2 billion worth of Bitcoins, went to pay for something from drugs to guns to hit males to these sorts of issues. And the media, again, very quickly to blame this on Bitcoins and say that it was the Bitcoin person's fault.

But there's really very little evidence of the scale of the issue of crime with cryptocurrencies. We do not know if there's so much or we do not know if there's a little bit. However despite this, people are very quick to model it as a felony thing, and they overlook the official uses, such as the fast and quick payment.

So a number of analysis questions I am taking a look at in this space is what does crime with Bitcoin appear like? So a lot of people will say that scams and thefts have been occurring for ages. However the means via which they happen changes with the expertise. So a Victorian road swindler would virtually be doing something very completely different to a 419 Nigerian prince scammer.

So the following query that I would prefer to analysis as well is wanting at the scale of the problem of crime with cryptocurrency. So by producing a log of recognized scams and thefts and things like that, we will then cross reference that with the general public transaction log of all transactions and see just how much of the transactions are literally unlawful and legal. So my last query would be, to what extent does the know-how itself actually facilitate crime? By looking again on the crime logs, we are able to see which particular sorts of crime happen, and whether it is really the know-how's fault, or is that this simply the same previous crimes that we've been looking at before. And as soon as we have take into account these items, we will start to consider potential solutions to the problem of crime with Bitcoin.

And we will think about that the one suitable resolution would be one that preserves the underlying values of the know-how itself, which would be privacy and decentralisation. A whole lot of focus from the media is to have a look at the legal points of it. And so they do not give sufficient worth to the reputable uses, because Bitcoin is a expertise that permits quick, fast payments, which is helpful to anybody that is ever paid for anything on the internet.

Crypto-what?

In case you've attempted to dive into this mysterious factor called blockchain, you'd be forgiven for recoiling in horror at the sheer opaqueness of the technical jargon that's often used to frame it. So earlier than we get into what a crytpocurrency is and the way blockchain technology might change the world, let's discuss what blockchain actually is.

In the simplest terms, a blockchain is a digital ledger of transactions, not unlike the ledgers we've got been using for lots of of years to document gross sales and purchases. The perform of this digital ledger is, in ethereum ICO truth, just about identical to a standard ledger in that it data debits and credit between people. That's the core concept behind blockchain; the difference is who holds the ledger and who verifies the transactions.

With traditional transactions, a fee from one particular person to another includes some form of middleman to facilitate the transaction. Let's say Rob wants to transfer ?20 to Melanie. He can both give her cash within the type of a ?20 note, or he can use some kind of banking app to transfer the money directly to her checking account. In both instances, a financial institution is the intermediary verifying the transaction: Rob's funds are verified when he takes the money out of a money machine, or they are verified by the app when he makes the digital switch. The bank decides if the transaction should go forward. The bank also holds the file of all transactions made by Rob, and is solely chargeable for updating it at any time when Rob pays somebody or receives cash into his account. In other words, the bank holds and controls the ledger, and every little thing flows by means of the financial institution.

That's a number of accountability, so it's important that Rob feels he can belief his bank otherwise he wouldn't risk his cash with them. He needs to feel confident that the bank will not defraud him, is not going to lose his cash, is not going to be robbed, and won't disappear in a single day. This want for belief has underpinned pretty much every main behaviour and facet of the monolithic finance industry, to the extent that even when it was discovered that banks had been being irresponsible with our money throughout the financial crisis of 2008, the government (another intermediary) selected to bail them out somewhat than threat destroying the final fragments of belief by letting them collapse.

Blockchains operate in another way in a single key respect: they are totally decentralised. There isn't any central clearing house like a bank, and there's no central ledger held by one entity. As a substitute, the ledger is distributed throughout an enormous network of computers, referred to as nodes, every of which holds a replica of the entire ledger on their respective exhausting drives. These nodes are connected to 1 one other via a chunk of software program referred to as a peer-to-peer (P2P) consumer, which synchronises information across the community of nodes and makes certain that everyone has the same model of the ledger at any given point in time.

When a brand new transaction is entered into a blockchain, it is first encrypted using state-of-the-art cryptographic technology. As soon as encrypted, the transaction is transformed to something known as a block, which is mainly the time period used for an encrypted group of recent transactions. That block is then sent (or broadcast) into the network of pc nodes, the place it's verified by the nodes and, once verified, passed on through the community in order that the block might be added to the top of the ledger on everyone's pc, under the record of all earlier blocks. This is called the chain, therefore the tech is referred to as a blockchain.

As soon as authorised and recorded into the ledger, the transaction may be completed. This is how cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin work.

Accountability and the elimination of belief

What are the benefits of this technique over a banking or central clearing system? Why would Rob use Bitcoin instead of normal forex?

The answer is trust. As talked about earlier than, with the banking system it's crucial that Rob trusts his financial institution to guard his cash and handle it properly. To ensure this happens, monumental regulatory methods exist to verify the actions of the banks and guarantee they are fit for objective. Governments then regulate the regulators, creating a sort of tiered system of checks whose sole goal is to help prevent errors and dangerous behaviour. In other words, organisations just like the Financial Companies Authority exist exactly as a result of banks cannot be trusted on their very own.

And banks frequently make mistakes and misbehave, as we have seen too many occasions. When you might have a single supply of authority, energy tends to get abused or misused. The trust relationship between individuals and banks is awkward and precarious: we do not actually trust them but we do not feel there is much various.

Blockchain methods, then again, do not want you to belief them at all. All transactions (or blocks) in a blockchain are verified by the nodes within the community before being added to the ledger, which suggests there isn't a single level of failure and no single approval channel. If a hacker wished to successfully tamper with the ledger on a blockchain, they must simultaneously hack tens of millions of computers, which is nearly impossible. A hacker would even be just about unable to carry a blockchain network down, as, again, they would wish to have the ability to shut down every single laptop in a network of computer systems distributed around the globe.

The encryption course of itself is also a key issue. Blockchains like the Bitcoin one use intentionally tough processes for his or her verification procedure. In the case of Bitcoin, blocks are verified by nodes performing a deliberately processor- and time-intensive series of calculations, usually in the form of puzzles or advanced mathematical issues, which mean that verification is neither prompt nor accessible. Nodes that do commit the resource to verification of blocks are rewarded with a transaction fee and a bounty of newly-minted Bitcoins.

This has the perform of both incentivising people to grow to be nodes (as a result of processing blocks like this requires fairly highly effective computers and a lot of electrical energy), while additionally handling the process of generating - or minting - models of the forex. This is known as mining, as a result of it includes a considerable quantity of effort (by a pc, in this case) to provide a brand new commodity. It also means that transactions are verified by essentially the most independent means attainable, extra unbiased than a authorities-regulated organisation just like the FSA.

This decentralised, democratic and extremely safe nature of blockchains signifies that they will perform without the necessity for regulation (they are self-regulating), government or other opaque middleman. They work as a result of individuals do not belief one another, reasonably than in spite of.

Let the importance of that sink in for some time and the excitement around blockchain starts to make sense.

Smart contracts

Where issues get really attention-grabbing is the applications of blockchain beyond cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Given that one of the underlying rules of the blockchain system is the safe, impartial verification of a transaction, it's easy to imagine different methods by which any such process may be precious. Unsurprisingly, many such applications are already in use or development. Some of the finest ones are:

? Sensible contracts (Ethereum): most likely the most thrilling blockchain growth after Bitcoin, smart contracts are blocks that comprise code that have to be executed in order for the contract to be fulfilled. The code can be something, so long as a computer can execute it, however in simple terms it implies that you should utilize blockchain know-how (with its independent verification, trustless architecture and safety) to create a sort of escrow system for any kind of transaction. For instance, in the event you're a web designer you may create a contract that verifies if a new consumer's web site is launched or not, and then automatically release the funds to you once it's. No extra chasing or invoicing. Sensible contracts are also being used to show possession of an asset comparable to property or art. The potential for lowering fraud with this approach is gigantic.

? Cloud storage (Storj): cloud computing has revolutionised the online and brought in regards to the advent of Large Data which has, in flip, kick began the new AI revolution. But most cloud-based mostly techniques are run on servers saved in single-location server farms, owned by a single entity (Amazon, Rackspace, Google and so on). This presents all the identical problems because the banking system, in that you simply knowledge is managed by a single, opaque organisation which represents a single point of failure. Distributing information on a blockchain removes the belief issue entirely and in addition guarantees to extend reliability as it's so much harder to take a blockchain network down.

? Digital identification (ShoCard): two of the most important problems with our time are identify theft and information protection. With huge centralised services equivalent to Facebook holding so much information about us, and efforts by varied developed-world governments to store digital information about their residents in a central database, the potential for abuse of our private information is terrifying. Blockchain expertise affords a possible answer to this by wrapping your key knowledge up into an encrypted block that may be verified by the blockchain network whenever it's worthwhile to show your identification. The functions of this range from the obvious alternative of passports and I.D. cards to different areas such as replacing passwords. It might be enormous.

? Digital voting: highly topical in the wake of the investigation into Russia's affect on the latest U.S. election, digital voting has long been suspected of being both unreliable and highly susceptible to tampering. Blockchain expertise affords a method of verifying that a voter's vote was efficiently despatched while retaining their anonymity. It guarantees not solely to reduce fraud in elections but additionally to increase common voter turnout as people will have the ability to vote on their cell phones.

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Documentarian Adam Curtis Dissects the World that Gave Rise to Trump

Still from “Hypernormalisation” (2016) (all images via BBC iPlayer unless noted otherwise)

Towards the end of Adam Curtis’s latest documentary, Hypernormalisation (2016), the BBC filmmaker and journalist spotlights Donald Trump’s constant policy shifts, his utilization of the extreme racist right, and the trivialization of his primary campaign by liberal onlookers and the media. Curtis ends the segment with an examination of social media bubbles, one of the many factors subsequently cited by journalists as instrumental to Trump’s victory. The filmmaker’s narration is accompanied by eerie footage of dimly lit server farms:

The liberals were outraged by Trump, but they expressed their anger in cyberspace — so it had no effect. The algorithms made sure it only spoke to people who already agreed with them. Instead, ironically, their waves of angry messages and tweets benefited the large corporations who ran the social media platforms. As one analyst put it, ‘angry people click more.’ It meant that the radical fury that came like waves across the Internet no longer had the power to change the world. Instead, it was becoming a fuel that was feeding the new systems of power, and making them ever more powerful. None of the liberals could possibly imagine that Donald Trump would ever win the nomination …

Hypernormalisation was released on BBC iPlayer (the broadcaster’s online streaming service) on October 16, just under a month before election day. Curtis had not only anticipated Trump’s victory, but also zeroed in on the abject disbelief and shock that followed in its wake. Following the election, Curtis’s analysis of Trump had shifted from thesis to historic fact. The film, which includes C-Span’s footage of Seth Meyers excoriating the future president at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner, had taken on a new, sobering inflection. The camera centers on Trump’s glowering reaction to the comedian before switching to a shot of President Obama laughing uncontrollably. Five years later, the two men would be sitting in the oval office, solemnly shaking hands before the cameras of the world’s media. Part of Curtis’s extraordinary talent as a filmmaker is his knack for culling fragments of archival footage that crackle with emotional resonance. Watching Hypernormalisation, one can’t help but wonder whether Trump’s resolve to become one of the most powerful men on earth was realized in that very room on May 1st, 2011.

Composite of footage from the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner (via Youtube/C-Span)

Curtis’s American viewership has slowly but gradually grown since the release of his three-part series, The Power of Nightmares, in 2004. The three films traced the rise of Islamic extremism, arguing that the threat of Al Qaeda was not only exaggerated, but that its ideology paralleled many of the central tenets of neo-conservativism. In 2012, e-flux organized The Desperate Edge of Now, an exhibition dedicated to Curtis’s films. A year later, the Park Avenue Armory staged Massive Attack V Adam Curtis, a rock-driven “video spectacle” during which Curtis — using one of his signature narrative devices — weaved together seemingly unconnected figures and events, including Donald and Ivanka Trump, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, Jane Fonda, “everyone in Goldman Sachs who made a killing in 2008,” and the Chernobyl disaster.

Curtis’s films are fundamentally about power, how it’s obfuscated and where it really resides. His stories, built up through the use of rich archival material and music, are constructed as overarching grand narratives. He typically centers on a particular idea, tracing its interpretation and implementation by different persons and movements. For instance, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011) focuses on the notion of the ecosystem, namely the belief that nature can stabilize itself. The filmmaker follows the concept’s influence on economic discourse, computer networks, communal living, and genetics. You’ll know you’re watching a Curtis film when you hear the phrase “this is a story about how….”

During a talk at his 2012 e-flux exhibition, Curtis critiqued the rise of individualism and implored the audience to “surrender themselves” to movements with ideals and ideas that they admired. This, Curtis argued, was “difficult in our age” because the culture of individualism has resulted in people not wanting to “give themselves to other things.” It was a striking departure from his prior focus on how ideas and mass movements have often been implemented with disastrous consequences. I asked Curtis about the shift in his thinking (you can hear the exchange at the 131-minute mark here):

There are two answers to that. One, I’m a creature of my time. I have made a series of films that have analyzed why the optimistic visions of the past 100 years didn’t quite work out as they were supposed to […] The other is, yeah, it is really dangerous [to surrender to mass movements] … and that’s why we distrust it. The generation who came out of [World War II] were frightened of mass movements. They had seen what it had done. They promoted the idea of the free individual as an alternative. My argument now is that we’re sort of trapped by that […] You’re not really going to be able to challenge something unless you unite people. That’s what makes people powerful. It’s what the trade unions were about. You’re much more powerful when you are in a group than if you’re on your own. And I think since 2008 people have increasingly — or certainly in my country — come to realize that alone they are much less powerful. But no one’s offering them a way of uniting. But I mean you’re right. I’m being a hypocrite. It’s true.

Curtis was — in a stereotypically British manner — being hard on himself. The shift in his thinking wasn’t a contradiction but a development. The entrenchment of individualism has left people divided and without agency. This is why, Curtis argues, that efforts such as Occupy and the Arab Spring have had limited success. Although both movements successfully utilized the internet to bring people together, they failed to proffer any alternative visions of the future. Meanwhile, the failure of Western governments to deal with disasters, such as the refugee crisis and rampant inequality, has allowed reactionary actors to enter the world stage, manipulating the truth in order to keep their atomized citizens powerless, disunited, and confused. Our fear of any alternative future, combined with our pining for an impossible political stasis, has finally come home to roost. This is the premise with which Hypernormalisation opens. “This film will tell the story of how we got to this strange place,” Curtis states. “It is about how over the past 40 years, politicians, financiers, and technological utopians — rather than face up to the complexities of the world — retreated. Instead, they constructed a simple vision of the world in order to hang onto power. And as this false world grew, all of us went along with it, because the simplicity was reassuring.”

Anthropologist Alexei Yurchak coined the term ‘hypernormalisation’ to describe the Soviet Union during its latter years. The country’s citizens knew that the reality presented by its leaders was a lie. Food was scarce, industry was failing, and yet everyone was expected to maintain the USSR’s façade as a formidable world power. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, everyone was surprised. Even its own citizens had bought into the fakeness. “You were so much a part of the system, that it was impossible to see beyond it,” Curtis explains. “The fakeness was hypernormal.” Curtis’s use of the term suggests that we’re now laboring under a similar delusion. The film’s title also happens to chime with the post-election calls to fight the “normalization” of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Hypernormalisation is divided into nine chapters. The film opens with footage of New York City during the 1975 fiscal crisis. The event marked a “radical shift in power” Curtis argues, because “the financial institutions took power away from the politicians.” The committee set up to deal with the city’s finances — the majority of whom were bankers — implemented a severe program of austerity. “The old politicians believed that crises were solved through negotiations and deals, Curtis states. ” The bankers had a completely different view. They were just the representatives of something that couldn’t be negotiated with. The logic of the market. To them, there was no alternative to this system. It should run society.” Curtis then cuts to Damascus during the same year. Enraged by Henry Kissinger’s manipulation of leaders in the Middle East (a policy that the then Secretary of State referred to as “constructive ambiguity”), Hafez al-Assad — Syria’s President and the father of current President Bashar al-Assad — retreated from his belief that the region could be united. Following the United States’ involvement in the Lebanon War (1982), al-Assad allied himself with Ruhollah Khomeini. This, Curtis argues, marked the escalation of suicide bombing throughout the region.

Still from “Hypernormalisation” (2016)

Curtis then sets up multiple narrative threads — the development of cyberspace, the rise of the banks and computer networks, the use of perception management techniques, and the rapid fracturing of the Middle East — weaving in and out each story whilst binding them together. He regularly returns to a few key figures, among them Hafez al-Assad, Ronald Reagan, Muammar Gaddafi, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump.

The overarching narrative is both compelling and convincing. That said, some of Curtis’s chosen subjects are unabashedly idiosyncratic. One section of the film is dedicated to US counter-intelligence efforts to manipulate ufologists. Military officials allegedly forged classified memos regarding alien activity in order to divert public attention away from secret aerial weapons programs. The result, however, was that more Americans began to believe in UFOs as an alien phenomenon. Curtis cites the affair as an example of perception management. It also sowed an ever-growing distrust of the government. Of course, there are many other documented examples that Curtis could choose from. For instance, a segment on the Iraq war — namely the absence of WMD’s and the so-called “45- minute” claim — feels rushed by comparison. The problem is that Curtis can’t fit everything in, an expectation that is bolstered by some of his more creative sequences. Some sections of the film, particularly those that depart from the narrative, might feel like an indulgence to some viewers. One such sequence is comprised of footage from Hollywood disaster movies (all of which were produced before 9/11) cut to Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream” (1979). The result is eerie, disturbing, and utterly compelling. Curtis’s detractors typically zero in on his style, arguing that it’s incompatible with his role as a documentarian. But Curtis has always been unafraid of spectacle and humor. It’s what makes his films so engrossing. His visual style and flair are essential to the articulation of his thesis.

Still from “Hypernormalisation” (2016)

Hypernormalisation breathlessly weaves together many of the filmmaker’s chosen themes over the years. Long-time fans will also recognize the incorporation of subjects from Curtis’s shorts as well as his blog. It is, without question, Curtis’s most all-encompassing project to date. Clocking in at two hours and 45 minutes, the film constantly threatens to collapse under the weight of its narrative breadth. It just about manages to avoid this, in part because the film is less about one specific idea and more about tracing the mood of our time. In this regard, it conceptually resembles It Felt Like a Kiss (2009), Curtis’s audio-visual history of post-World War II America. Similarly, Hypernormalisation functions as a multi-faceted meditation on the present. Curtis’s critique of individualism has also become more pointed. Have our politicians failed us? Yes. The bankers, kleptocrats, and technologists? Of course. But it’s our apathy that allowed these forces to consolidate their power. If recent events have demonstrated anything, it’s that we need to unify and develop a new vocabulary of protest. It’s time for a new vision of the future.

Hypernormalisation was released on BBC iPlayer on October 16, 2016.

The post Documentarian Adam Curtis Dissects the World that Gave Rise to Trump appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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