Update ETHEREUM IS POSTHUMAN.md

content/exeunt/ETHEREUM IS POSTHUMAN.md

@@ -20,7 +20,7 @@ What is more interesting is the question, now that retail seems poised to drop a
 
 Simultaneous to the concerns above is the election of Donald Trump to the United States presidency and the widely declared end of an ideological era. This has at least one edge of convergence with the above, as lax policy signals from kleptocrats who neither understand nor care about the stakes of the challenge crypto represents immediately led to an influx of capital and catalyzed the long anticipated "next bull." But the connection doesn't stop there.
 
-The end of the old regime, I believe, is less the result of any partisan politic or personality cult, and more that of a long brewing threat to the facades of administrative institutional power. Years of high definition empirical science and its implications - systems-theoretic, cybernetic and quantum mechanical models of the real that are richer, more entangled, more dynamic, and more free than the cartoonish abstractions brandished about by the old guard - have made their end all but inevitable. But our current moment is finding a regime of silicon valley capturers, with ideas that are more magical and brutely self-destructive than the old guard itself, ready to take credit for the network revolution.
+The end of the old regime, I believe, is less the result of any partisan politic or personality cult, and more that of a long brewing threat to the facades of administrative institutional [1] power. Years of high definition empirical science and its implications - systems-theoretic, cybernetic and quantum mechanical models of the real that are richer, more entangled, more dynamic, and more free than the cartoonish abstractions brandished about by the old guard - have made their end all but inevitable. But our current moment is finding a regime of silicon valley capturers, with ideas that are more magical and brutely self-destructive than the old guard itself, ready to take credit for the network revolution.
 
 On this world stage, Ethereum might be the sole vessel for an ethical transition - extitutional infrastructure one that reflects the entangled, richly networked and panoramically more-than-human character of our new present. The alternative is more enclosure, more chauvinism, more reality denial and, to be sure, more violence. The stakes are high. *Ethereum needs a posthuman marketing initiative.*
 
@@ -32,7 +32,7 @@ On this world stage, Ethereum might be the sole vessel for an ethical transition
 
 "Complexity," writes N Katherine Hayles, "evolves from highly recursive processes being applied to simple rules. Rather than proceeding along a trajectory toward a known end, such systems evolve toward an *open future* marked by contingency and unpredictability. Meaning is not guaranteed by a coherent origin; rather, it is made possible (but not inevitable) by the blind force of evolution finding workable solutions within given parameters." 
 
-One of the great ironies of our age is the pandora's box of science which, under the well resourced militaristic prerogatives of States have discovered the most psychedelic and subversive insights about reality. As Hayles tells in her book [***How We Became Posthuman***](https://monoskop.org/images/5/50/Hayles_N_Katherine_How_We_Became_Posthuman_Virtual_Bodies_in_Cybernetics_Literature_and_Informatics.pdf), the military dominance of the West - everything from guided anti-aircraft munitions to nuclear weapons and the computational infrastructure required to develop them - was ironically achieved by [three waves of Cybernetics](http://www.cyborganthropology.com/4th_Wave_Cybernetics), each of which further discredited the masculine, self-sovereign Subject and the vision of reality that correlated with him. Uncertainty, feedback, structural coupling, open and extended cognition, productive indeterminacy, emergence and self-organization .. in the twentieth century, the State went looking for John Wayne and found only [a silent and undermining John Cage](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPGxiWssKbI) in the noise.
+One of the great ironies of our age is the pandora's box of science which, under the well resourced militaristic prerogatives of States have discovered the most psychedelic and subversive insights about reality. As Hayles tells in her book [***How We Became Posthuman***](https://monoskop.org/images/5/50/Hayles_N_Katherine_How_We_Became_Posthuman_Virtual_Bodies_in_Cybernetics_Literature_and_Informatics.pdf), the military dominance of the West - everything from guided anti-aircraft munitions to nuclear weapons and the computational infrastructure required to develop them - was ironically achieved by [three waves of Cybernetics](http://www.cyborganthropology.com/4th_Wave_Cybernetics), each of which further discredited the masculine, self-sovereign Subject and the vision of reality that correlated with him. Uncertainty, feedback, structural coupling, open and extended cognition, productive indeterminacy, emergence and self-organization .. in the twentieth century, the State went looking for John Wayne and found only [a silent and undermining John Cage](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPGxiWssKbI) in the noise. [2]
 
 Hayles sees the sum of these inadverdent insights, these second-order effects of military capture and the fruitless search for epistemic "control", as prefiguring the posthuman turn. "In the posthuman view, conscious agency has never been 'in control.' In fact, the very illusion of control bespeaks a fundamental ignorance about the nature of the emergent processes through which consciousness, the organism, and the environment are constituted. Mastery through the exercise of autonomous will is merely the story consciousness tells itself to explain results that actually come about through chaotic dynamics and emergent structures."  
 
@@ -99,4 +99,8 @@ Undergrounds, like Ethereum, demand high agency, just as history demands maturit
 
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-In the hopes of catalyzing some engagement with the ETHEREUM IS POSTHUMAN as a marketing concept, a jokerace will be launched this week. If you'd like to contribute a design or marketing concept, there will be some Eth at stake. If you'd like to raise the stakes, hit me up! 
+**In the hopes of catalyzing some engagement with the ETHEREUM IS POSTHUMAN as a marketing concept, a jokerace will be launched this week. If you'd like to contribute a design or marketing concept, there will be some Eth at stake. If you'd like to raise the stakes, hit me up!** 
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+## Notes
+[1] Given that institutions have been a buzz word in this community (Vitalik addresses that ambiguity well [here](https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2022/12/30/institutions.html)) it's worth clarifying that the institutions in question in this post are the sort referred to in David Graeber's [Dead Zones of the Imagination](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.14318/hau2.2.007): administrative enclosures with a legal sanction to articulate the force-based hegemony of the State. As such, these administrative institutions are also understood here through the lens of James C. Scott's [Seeing Like a State](https://files.libcom.org/files/Seeing%20Like%20a%20State%20-%20James%20C.%20Scott.pdf). Given the obvious need for the first sense of institutions, patterns and behavioral norms formalized to facilitate social coordination, OPRG has put forward the frame of "[*formalization without standardization*](https://mirror.xyz/openprotocolresearch.eth/nrEc6i8pWzo0YxC0-vwfVYlirTD6_FAmBHjoiNwLbQ4)" - shared standards for mutual coherence without the hegemonic claim, logic of centralization or foundation of legitimate violence that equates to "standardization." As Vitalik writes: "there's a strong case that institutions with enshrined elite roles might be an unfortunate historical necessity from when communication was more constrained, but modern information technology (including the internet and also newer spookier stuff like zero-knowledge cryptography, blockchains and DAOs) could rapidly expand our available options."