# The Invisible Obelisk: Marshall McLuhan and Media Studies on the Blockchain (Devcon5) - Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon) - Date: 2020-10-09 - Duration: 19:50 - Topics: blockchain, smart contracts, distributed ledger, ethereum - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-jp5JF7h1O2c - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jp5JF7h1O2c ## Description Visit the https://archive.devcon.org/ to gain access to the entire library of Devcon talks with the ease of filtering, playlists, personalized suggestions, decentralized access on IPFS and more. https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/5/the-invisible-obelisk-marshall-mcluhan-and-media-studies-on-the-blockchain The so-called Toronto School media theorists, including Harold Innis, Walter Ong, and, most famously, Marshall McLuhan, pioneered a new way of thinking about media and communication technology. For them, innovations like the telegraph and railroad were not merely faster ways of transmitting the same messages that had ridden horseback a century earlier. Instead, they were fundamental re-fashionings of the core of human life, changing the speed, size, and internal dynamics of society itself.Similar transformative potential has been claimed for blockchain technology, specifically for its ability to create unique, non-duplicable data objects. But little thought has been given to exactly whatkind of transformations we're talking about. The Toronto school gives us tools for thinking about the nature of this pending change in detail, such as McLuhan's work on 'warm and cool' media and Innis' work on 'time binding vs. space binding' media. This presentation will be based on this chapter draft: https://medium.com/@dzanemorris/the-invisible-obelisk-mcluhan-on-the-blockchain-part-1-70b668c3778e. It will argue that blockchain tech, because it is both digital and durable, is a truly novel sort of media technology. It will explore how it is different from what came before, and consider some implications for the future. This application was solicited by Maria Paula. Speaker(s): David Morris Skill level: Advanced Track: Society and Systems Keywords: academic Follow us: https://twitter.com/efdevcon, https://twitter.com/ethereum Learn more about devcon: https://www.devcon.org/ Learn more about ethereum: https://ethereum.org/ Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. Devcon 5 was held in Osaka, Japan on Oct 8 - 11, 2019. Devcon is organized and presented by the Ethereum Foundation, with the support of our sponsors. To find out more, please visit https://ethereum.foundation/ ## Transcript [Applause] welcome everybody thanks for coming out to a hopefully fairly smooth talk after a lot of tenant efforts to get the logistics fixed my name Morris first by a show of hands how many people in this room believe that Joaquin and cryptocurrency are fundamentally novel technology of those who raised again to do anyone a moment here maybe one feature one thing that watching that does that has not been possible previously we can see some silence over here soon silence so it makes the point it is very difficult to to identify novelty to analyze it rigorously and to predict what parts of it matter and we know it's sophisticated so luckily though we do have a lot of precedents for thinking about new technology we've gone through a long chain of history where media technology in particular has helped found impacts transforming society is in the way people see and think and interact media technology of getting again has radically transformed the way the human beings with one of the more comprehensive an insightful historians and analysts of this is a guy named Marshall McLuhan did most was worth 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 technology would have before it even existed and he did it by looking at history so this talk is a very brief introduction to employ and to the field of Media Studies / spouse so we're gonna take some very quick stabs at applying just gonna go in we're gonna take some pretty put stabs and applying these concepts to watch it 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 at Fortune magazine prior to that though I was in academic and my training is in media studies and sociology and so this is in in that traditional kind of as a 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 the mechanical print and I'm talking about printing like mass production of books and prints and materials not writing itself it's a whole different topic but print about the mass diffusion of ideas but also it allow people to analyze those ideas and ways that were independent from institutions and kind of gave birth to critical thought so it's not any 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 with the content of their religion rather than just kind of accepting it from on high because we 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 we always this is not something that people think about as a media technology very often but the railway is actually transformed the way people communicate pretty fundamentally we always actually Cuba long before the Telegraph so they increase the speed of communication to a level that had never been seen before because you could send letters by the road so it's Schrank space and made people more connected and it also created new markets for things like commodities wood beef cotton Marshall McLuhan's teacher at Harrow Kenneth spent a lot of time thinking about the railway and talk about that in a bit in more depth now it's likely with a few exceptions that when you've walked into this room you didn't think of railways as a form of media technology but here's one that's really gonna blow your mind the ultimate media technology the electric light the reason that McLuhan in particular spends 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 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 label who were thinking critically about media is that it has no content a light bulb has no message to light bulb isn't telling you anything in particular unless you like use it to spell out something on a sign a light bulb is 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 to so anything that allows a connection especially between humans is formed immediately in this idea that media the structure of a media technology and the ways that it receives connections between people is much more important than the content of that media is summed up in a afraid is 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 part have heard that so from McLuhan what matters about any media technology actually first accentuated this just as a measure of how influential and important buffoon was this is McLuhan on the guess your rights in n Paul 1977 I will go through the joke that he's a part of and let me see woody on how problematic figure these days but he was a 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 from a clue on 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 geographically 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 sorry okay so that's that's kind of what you think of Media Studies the more interesting branch of Media Studies it's 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 shape our society this is a this is a long lineage it involves looking back history in the using those lessons to look forward McLuhan was taught by a guy named Harold Ananas who worked in Canada who in Sweden was a guy named Walter all those three together remembers the Toronto School that's one of about a half dozen of very prominent schools of media criticism contemporary media critics who includes see the white innothing media studies scholars and my teacher jonathan peters so it's a it's a very thriving field Frederick Hitler's gramophone forgetting Frederick Hitler another really good media studies scholar so all of these scholars are basically working on this idea of that technological shifts in communications have fundamental impact on societies and also on human consciousness on the way that we think about it 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 to 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 they're here it's 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 Makluan what it 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 all all talks 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 creator to 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 in this hope this isn't too much distraction but this time versus space categorization is sort of one axis on which you can be analyzed before the media McLuhan also categorized media according to whether they were coal or war and that was based on whether they had an emotional impact or were more rationally oriented so for example from clue and television and radio word well I'm applying I'm forgetting these exact points but um to what I believe to be correct witches television radio are warm media they engage you emotionally they bring you into a world where as Prince 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 but all of us time-binding supposed to last a long time it's designed to convey the idea of endurance and to transmit messages into the future but a novelist can only be within his context obviously we have a photograph here that's transmitted over long distance of attendances for all the contents it can only impact the people who are close enough to see it by contrast the Internet is a space binding technology cellphones 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 Shelley observed even things that are meant to last forever hawking don't and that's actually going to become significant so theaters extend power geographically we thought for a while that it maybe was a decentralized technology that allows different nodes to pop up but as the devolution of the internet goes forward we definitely have found that it tends to centralize pretend 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 has directed research on that story history of the internet can attest to that stuff just disappears not everything that's captured by the Internet Archive entities 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 was fundamentally significant innovation of watching technology is it it eliminates this trade-off between time binding and space binding capacities immediately obviously you can access a blockchain from anywhere just the same way it's the Internet but unlike the Internet the data that's stored on watching is maintained over time by in most cases in built economic incentives that are used to pay maintain errs and theoretically those incentives if they continue interacting with an economy that structured the way ours is right now those incentives can last forever as long as you know humans don't wipe ourselves out the things of the earth and so you have this digital technology that has infinite reach it can be a qualm planet it could be access 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 olives because arguing that instead of bricks you have these economics and incentives that are being used to maintain a structure overall variable long period of time potentially obviously this is all very forward-looking theory that's come with me and I'm talking about public law chains and I'm also talking about proof of work I'm not as familiar as it probably should be from state but fundamentally the the structures are the same so that durability comes with costs economic costs obviously one of the important things is that is where the Ovilus 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 and this is only really one of I'm sure many different ways to look at watching technology and place it in the 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 reason 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 it the reality effect and how many people will hear actually owned some crypto so sit 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 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 and not just ones and zeroes but an object we use this term digital objects right to describe some things that on ethereum blockchain and that speaks I think to a pretty deep psychological reality of what watching two things especially to people who really understand the technology understand the permanence of it costs of writing to it and the durability of the data you have an actual subjective experience that that piece of data is in some way more real than just a file a hard drive because you know that it's part of this collective network that has some sustaining properties I don't know if anybody saw this but there was actually a really interesting tweet about this a couple days ago and I couldn't find it that somebody was saying you know traditionally people would keep their their money in a bank or in a moment-- or something like that I kept 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 later reality language is a layer of reality that some people understand I mean we're here in Japan not everybody speaks Japanese Yorick sort of seeing the fact that you don't have access to every player of reality going on around you but it's still reality and so we can think about media also as layers of reality in blockchain I think has some unique claims to certain reality effects reality status what everyone would call 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 really 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 watching is one way as I mentioned along with language of creating a shared reality through media another and you know you guys can look at this further but another way of creating a shared reality through medium communication has historically been turn magic and this is book that I have that will come out in the next couple of days call it bitcoins 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 out if you're interested and that's my talk [Applause]