Twenty-Two Years of Transcendental Time Machines | 0xSalon

Mistakonic Virtual University Press have brought Anna Greenspan’s hugely influential CCRU infused PHD thesis: Capitalism’s Transcendental Time Machine, to print for the first time for its 22nd anniversary.

The forward was written by buddies Wassim Z. Alsindi, Max Hampshire, and Paul Seidler. Picking Greenspan’s thesis up where it left off back in 2000, they bring technical and philosophical discussion to the world of blockchains in an extended introduction.

We propose that distributed, consensus-based timekeeping technologies—incorporating the mnemotechnics of what are commonly known as blockchains, but more fittingly referred to as timechains—can be apprehended as a realized instantiation of a generative substrate for the spawning of occurrences in virtual time as a by-product of their production of Chronic order. This ‘ultimate abstract power,’ and the concomitant shift in the temporal apparatuses at our disposal, has ramifications regarding the increasingly fragmented era of patchwork modernity that now delimits the preconditions for experience itself. This fragmentation is not merely a point of analytic interest, however. In the past, radical movements with temporal secessionism at the core of their manifestos include the May Fourth movement in China, French Revolutionary Time, and the rearchitecting of time-zones by nation states to distance themselves temporally, economically, and politically from their imperial and colonial oppressors.

In honour of the book’s publication 0xSalon, it;s the first broadcast edition; discussing the thesis and themes in the book. It was strange to on a Salon call knowing that it was being recorded, but it if you haven’t seen or heard of 0xSalon the video / call below is a good introduction to the community its vibe. Something the organisers have spent a lot of time fostering and encouraging.