https://interference.io/hacking-state-virtuality-interfering-nature-social-relationships

13:00 Hacking the State: Virtuality Interfering with the Nature of Social Relationships Thomas Meijer

Talk is being recorded in audio

Broad philosophical project : embryology of leviathan

Leviathan is a biblical monster used by Thomas Hobbes as a symbol of the state

How did money emerge and how is it interlinked to political power?

Hypothesis 1: Money is created by kings (“the state”) in the need of providing armies with foods. Taxes are raised, mediating the violence of the raiding for food through the promise to raid burried within the coins and establishing a new way subjects relate to each other.

Hypothesis 2: Money has been introduced before Solons concept for Athens democracy: With the introduction of money, trading and loans, debt-slavery emerges and changes the distribution of power. The innovation of democracy faced the crisis created by oligarchy.

Hypothesis 3: Fibonaccis introduction of arabic numerals revolutioned the debt system be making the risk of loans more easy to calculate. This administrative power helped the Medici and their economical system rise.

All these revolutions can be considered as hacking a system of power by introducing new ways of distributing information, changing social relations and with them the distribution of power.

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Ethymology of “virtuality”: “Virtuality” derives from the latin word “virtus”, meaning power/might. Today, virtuality is also linked to mediation.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/virtue

Virtuality in history:

1. First virtuality in the history of mankind is speech: It mediates our knowledge of the world, at the same time empowering manking over nature.

2. Second virtuality is writing: Writing tatkes the next step in virtuality by conserving the power of speech, overcoming the weaknesses of death and memory. Nevertheless writing introduces a depency on sciptures.

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Money can be considered now as another tool of virtuality (or a cultural grammatic, an informational process) implemented in society, reshaping the whole system of social relations. The best example for the virtuality of money is fiat money, which is basically the promise for the value of the money sometimes in the future, but working as if the value was already present.

Taking the promise for money (or the promise for power) for the actual value (or the actual power) is fetish thinking (or magical pars pro toto) and thus exhibits astonishing similarities to the structure or religious believes (the bread is the body of Jesus Christ)

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The internet seemed first to change the working principles of virtuality since the information in circulation which is able the change social relations could be distributed in an entirely different way: Everyone could distrubte any information.

This promise somehow collapsed with the recent development, where big actors in the internet managed again to institute reigns over vast social dominions. The internet seems to be “read-only” again.

Question:

Virtuality as the functioning mechanism behind different techniques of social hacking, meaning altering the distriibution of social power.

Virtuality is power through mediation, mediation between iinformational processes and social power. But how does this mediation work? What is thei line of transmission? How does it function?