Ultimately stunning in its revelations, Lutz Dammbeck's THE NET explores the incredibly complex backstory of Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber. This exquisitely crafted inquiry into the rationale of this mythic figure situates him within a late 20th Century web of technology - a system that he grew to oppose. A marvelously subversive approach to the history of the Internet, this insightful documentary combines speculative travelogue and investigative journalism to trace contrasting countercultural responses to the cybernetic revolution.
Will you get lost in the Fourth Industrial Revolution? Most people I asked don't even know what that is, but it's happening all around us right now. This system is about technological evolution... evolving us. Please help support us on Patreon, read our goals here:
We plan to make many more films, and that is a large part of what this Patreon helps create, in addition to our smaller reports on YouTube (for as long as they allow it).
We've got a whole research series in the can as well, it's just a matter of having the ability to get to it all.
Thank you all so much from the bottom of our hearts to everyone who has already offered us support – no matter what kind. Your generosity allows us to pay bills, secure proper equipment, up our content production, and attempt to change the world for the better through truly independent media.
In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto invented bitcoin and the blockchain. For the first time in history, his invention made it possible to send money around the globe without banks, governments or any other intermediaries. The concept of the blockchain isn’t very intuitive. But still, many people believe it is a game changer.
Economist and filmmaker Manuel Stagars portrays this exciting technology in interviews with software developers, cryptologists, researchers, entrepreneurs, consultants, VCs, authors, politicians, and futurists from the United States, Canada, Switzerland, the UK, and Australia.
The Blockchain and Us is no explainer video of the technology. It gives a view on the topic, makes it accessible and starts a conversation about its potential wider implications in a non-technical way. The film deliberately poses more questions than it answers.
Lars Thomsen
Chief Futurist & Founder, Future Matters
Zurich, Switzerland
Eric Van der Kleij
Founder Adeptra, London Tech City, Level39. Adviser UK Govt, Kickstart Accelerator
London, UK
Roger Wattenhofer
Professor, Distributed Computing Group, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH)
Zurich, Switzerland
Rik Willard
Founder & Managing Director, Agentic Group
New York, USA
Steve Wilson
Digital Identity Innovator & Analyst
Sydney, Australia
Additional conversations and special thanks (in alphabetical order): Iris Belle, Ben Bledsoe, Thomas Bromehead, Richard Cheng, Dario Duran, Marie Farrar Knowles, Olga Feldmeier, Sony Fricker, Daniel Gasteiger, Daniel Grassinger, Johs. Hoehener, Richard Kastelein, Leanne Kemp, Thomas Kern, Francine Klopfenstein, Veronica Lange, Claire LaRocca, Adriano B. Lucatelli, Christian Mäder, Ruedi Maeder, Luzius Meisser, Michael Monceaux, Martin Müller, Mia Mutic, Ian Petchenik, Nathaniel Popper, Ramon Quesada, Kamesh Raghavendra, Brian Rogers, Jouko Salonen, Vadim Shamigulov, Raffaela Stelzer, Don Tapscott, Elizabeth Wesson
Many thanks to all conversation partners and all others who made this film possible
Additional thanks (in alphabetical order): Agentic Group, Blockchain News, Blockstream, Bloq, Chamber of Digital Commerce, Constellation Research, Consult Hyperion, Cryptocash, Deloitte Switzerland, Ethereum Foundation, Everledger, Flightradar24, Future Matters, ISO-20022.ch, Lightning, Lockstep Consulting, Municipality of Zug, nexussquared, Northwest Passage Ventures, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Swiss Re, Symbiont, World Economic Forum (WEF), Zurich Airport
Recording of live air traffic courtesy of Flightradar24
Chinese subtitles: Richard Cheng
Dutch subtitles: Rein Jonkman
French translation: Thomas Bromehead
Portuguese subtitles: Caio Rearte
Russian subtitles: Vadim Shamigulov, Sergey Sevantsyan
Spanish subtitles: Jose Felip Daras and Avalbit.org team
Many thanks to all individuals and teams who contributed additional subtitles and translations.
Cinematography, Editing, Music, Narration & Sound Design by Manuel Stagars
The goal of this film is to encourage the conversation about the economic and social impacts of blockchain technology. Participate in the comments and subscribe to the channel to stay in the loop.
Adam Curtis tries to revive the Grand Narrative as a way for understanding history. Using conspiracy as a structure for truth, Curtis pieces together a large number of events in attempt to explain 'the fake world' we live in. However, he avoids many elements that do not fit in with the premise, such as the anti-globalisation movement of the 1990s and 2000s and the power of money. This is despite establishing early in the film that the power of corporations now extends to dominating politics. This idea is abandoned when the film focuses mostly on the deceptions and violence of international politics. The other major failing of this film is the reliance on the images from news and popular media, from the Internet and mobile cameras, in other words the visual regime that creates what Curtis calls 'the fake world'.
The 90s concept of 'cyberspace' is confused by Curtis with Artificial Intelligence, algorithmic capitalism and digital cultures. Surveillance and data mining are largely ignored. There is no 'fake world' - the symbolic visual and spatial system we are creating through technology is the world we live in and also the means by which we understand this world. Whether that is a positive thing is of course very debatable. As recently as last week I read an essay by Hossein Derakhshan on how the visual dependency upon video for news is feeding the extreme ideas of the far right;
"The emerging illiterate class, hooked onto their old television sets or to their Facebook-centred mobile personal televisions (i.e. smart phones), is good news for demagogues. Look at how Donald Trump has mastered the formula of television to turn it into his free-of-charge public relations machine. His capture of the spirit of television has helped him transform all threats into opportunities, garbage into gold, and waste into energy – like a perfect incineration plant."
Curtis is part of this same visual regime and contributes to the creating of non-critical thought. He adds to this lack of critique by always introducing a sense of panic into his narrative by using such phrases as:
We live in a time of great uncertainty and confusion. The endless migrant crisis
those who are supposed to be in power are paralysed - they have no idea what to do. Chaotic events are happening, all of us in the West have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world. Forces that politicians tried to forget are now turning on us with a vengeful fury. Piercing though the wall of our fake world.
That one can simply turn off the computer, not take out credit cards, and instead read books and attend events seems to have alluded Curtis. At one point in the film, (around the 2 hour mark - the film is unnecessarily long), when talking about the Occupy movement, Curtis announces that it was an attempt to 'organise people without the exercise of power' - like 150 years of Anarchist philosophy does not exist. Trying to make sense of chaos is difficult when the argument is that "We live in a time of great uncertainty and confusion". Either the uncertainty and confusion are real, and therefore there is a real world, or the world is fake and therefore so is the uncertainty and confusion. Which is it? Furthermore, Curtis's obsession with the idea that Hafez al-Assad invented suicide bombing as a tactic against a more powerful enemy is not correct. Suicide bombing goes at least back to the kamikaze ('Divine Wind') pilots of Imperial Japan in World War Two, and possibly further back to the 1880s
The idea that 'the Internet had played a key role in organising the groups' is far from established. As one research site states "It is important to understand that new platforms of social media didn’t cause Arab Spring but played a role of communication that aids the revolutions in the long run." The use of the Internet for organising social change is important. But it also seems to contradict the premise that we live in a 'fake world' mediated by technology, if it can in fact bring about real change. It is amazing that the full film of 2 hours and 40 minutes never uses the word 'propaganda'. If there are journalists who seriously believe, as Curtis says, their job is to 'expose lies and assert the truth' they are not working on 90% of the newspapers that have been in circulation since Watergate. Journalism and Public Relations are taught together at universities, they are practiced and produced on a daily basis everywhere.
The film ends on xenophobic fear, and this connects the long, at times rambling, and fear-filled history from Adam Curtis up to the point we are at now, with Trump about to assume office in the White House. What lies at the heart of this drama is not a failure of politics, as it has been the politics of the last 40 years that has been driving a globalized, neo-liberal agenda, and that seems to be perfectly on track. If the values of those neo-liberal globalists are threatened by the socialist and nationalist tendencies of Islam, or the loss of cultural identity through a decline in white middle class Christian values, we can expect to see more hate, more violence and more suffering. The desire to 'change the system' and believe the contradictory and contrived rhetoric of Donald J. Trump supplies the conservative elements of the Republican Party with a new opportunity to keep the global capitalist project on track, no matter what the cost.
The proposed conception of the Anthropocene epoch marks is radical a
shift in species awareness as Darwinian evolution was for the
nineteenth-century. If the notion of the human species' emergence in
time requires new forms of narrative, imaginative and ethical
articulation, then the intensifying sense of the species' end makes a
similar claim for rethinking 'our' processes of self-presentation and
self-preservation.
One of the dominant motifs of the anthropocene
is climate change, which (as Bruno Latour has argued) closes down the
modern conception of the infinite universe, drawing us back once again
to the parochial, limited and exhausted earth. It might be worth
redefining all those hyper-modern proclamations of a post-human and
post-racial future as hypo-modern, as refusals of the species' bounded
temporality. Nowhere is this more evident than in the seemingly modern
fascination with sexual difference. It is the possibility of
transcending sexual difference — of arriving at indifference — that has
always been harbored as the human species' end.
Rammy Elsaadany, a Masters of Architecture student at the Bartlett school of architecture, has just completed a collaborative film with Bruce Damer about the proposed EVOGRID project.
The film connects together a simplified version of the scientific narrative and also a conceptual development of what could possibly happen once the EVOGRID project is established. Rammy used a variety of techniques to achieve this film, including 3d modeling, compositing, and green screen. The software used includes 3D Max, After Effects, Premiere and Sound Booth.
I had the pleasure of hanging out with Bruce for a week recently. One of the most interesting people I have ever met (and I have met a lot of interesting people). More about the EvoGrid project here.
This research proposal rests on the hypothesis that it is possible to create a simulation, the “EvoGrid”, utilizing a large interconnected grid of computers which could plausibly model the pre-biotic chemical environment which was the precursor stage to evolution and life arising on Earth. The key innovation over previous efforts will be the use of a level testing function (Gordon, 2000) that searches for emergent complex self-organization within the discrete element system of the simulation, focusing computing resources and tuning parameters in order to permit the system to drive itself towards ever more complex emergent structures and processes. Research outcomes from the EvoGrid project may shed light on the origins of life on Earth and in the universe, and provide new tools for evolutionary biology, biochemistry, and complexity studies.
The inventor of what he called "implosion technology", Schauberger developed his own highly idiosyncratic theories based on fluidic vortices. Very little of Schauberger's work has received mainstream acceptance, and the bulk of his work would likely be classified as pseudo-science.
Viktor Schauberger could be called the father of implosion technology. The implosion principle is, of course, diametrically opposite to what today's explosion oriented technology utilizes. Implosion has to do with a self sustaining vortex flow of any liquid or gaseous medium, which has a concentrating, ordering effect and which decreases the temperature of the medium, in opposition to the dictates of "modern" thermodynamics.
Viktor Schauberger constructed water sluices, which, with controlled water temperature and vortex flow, were able to transport logs of a higher specific weight than would normally allow their transport on water. He proposed a more effective means of utilizing hydroelectric power by his jet turbine. In the second world war he was forced to develop his concepts of vortex dynamics at the service of Hitler's military goons, and, is said to have produced working prototypes of levitating disks using these principles.
At the end of the war, the remains of his work fell partly into Russian, and American, military hands. After the war, Schauberger worked on a concept of water-based power generation, through vortex action, in a closed cycle engine. In 1958 he was brought to the USA, by promises of a possibility he would get his technology further developed and applied. Afterwards, he was thoroughly debriefed, his writings and prototypes were kept, and, he apparently had to sign a legal document and 'promise' not to promote his technology further - all so that he would simply be able to return home to Austria. Five days after his return to Austria - on 25 September 1958 - he died. A book that details some of the life story of Schauberger was written by Olof Alexandersson.
