Bitcoin and Philosophy (Session 7)

Provenance

Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: stage-1 acceptance ruling — lane open-web-talk approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). Series: Landian Bitcoin. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:01

  Hello, everyone. Welcome to the seventh session of Nick Land's Bitcoin and Philosophy Seminar. Nick, you can start anytime. Okay. Great. I'm just going to access one text. Yep. So the topic laid out for this week was going to be expressed as politics. And there's certainly nothing in that huge, vast, sprawling field…

• 00:24:27

  It's a kind of exterminator of the spam phenomenon. I think he, Adam Back, had expected that this would just catch on. Everyone would be using this system because it was the natural way, he thought, to stop spam happening. Instead, people have found these other slightly messier ways of just dealing with spam. And it's…

• 00:45:57

  Right. And so forth. That's sort of the projected shadow of this relative capital accumulation which grants a primary power over pricing regimes. Is that kind of the structure that they're building? Yes. Okay. But they only concern themselves with numbers. And in their model really what's important is ability…

• 01:07:17

  Now, there's a certain kind of quantitative continuum that, by the basis of these certain relatively straightforward arithmetical functions, you carve off a surplus that is profit from that. The pool of labor, if you take your whole labor force as a particular kind of collective body, with a certain productive…

• 01:32:09

  That's not the case we're talking about. Well, I think... Let me see whether if we just go through... Because the example that D&G will use, so let's stick with this one, is the wasp and the orchid example. Now, I'm understanding it that the surplus value in that case is the potential of the wasp to be a sexual organ…

• 01:55:23

  And there's no other or transcendent authority that can change that game without mobilizing more computing power on its behalf. And that, but that which, so capital is that which organizes the distribution of the ability to buy computing power and to deploy it, you know, for the purposes of this game. Then capital…

• 02:16:30

  And actually, my cousin gave up his US citizenship in favor of one of these things. That was like literally the stupidest thing any person related to me has ever done. Because now we can't come back to the US. But anyway, that aside, this, that's just a complete, it's a complete fantasy. You know, declaring yourself…

• 02:39:45

  Thanks, everybody. Have a good week. All the conversations. So talk to you soon. OK, great. Have a good week. Bye.