Re: <nettime> Ethereum: DAO - "The Attacker"

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

I think there are very simple things to be learned from this.
Something that is, in the end, utterly banal but apparently gets
forgotten with every new technology and needs to be relearned.

It is impossible to wish away power and politics.

Even when this wish is shared collectively and expressed as math and
code, it is, in effect, still magical thinking. What changes is the
magic formula and the magicians, but not the impossibility to rescind
gravity and levitate that girl.

The harder this is denied, the less controllable are the forms in
which power and politics reappear, like the repressed that is recycled
through the unconscious.

So, any system that does not accommodate for the expression and
control of power and for self-conscious, accountable decision-making
under circumstances of uncertainty and internal disagreement, cannot
work other than a dictatorship that centralizes power and politics in
closed circles to hide it from view.






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