NCMT 500-314 -- Bitcoin and Philosophy (7 of 8)

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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: video original (.mp4).

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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.

• 00:00:00

  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. So the topic laid out for this week was going to be expressed as politics. And there's certainly nothing in that huge, vast balling field that…

• 00:23:55

  If a spammer needed to prove work, if they actually showed that they had put some commitment into their message, then spamming becomes impossible, obviously. It's a natural defense against spam. The whole point of spam is to defend yourself against spam. And that's the key point. The whole point of spam is it's…

• 00:44:09

  I don't know if you can hear me. Well, yes, I can definitely hear you. I mean, this is all very interesting. I mean, maybe we can open up this whole question in all of its dimensions. And if people are gravitating back to this Bischler and Nitzan stuff, then of course that's something we can spiral into further. I…

• 01:04:44

  And it's a strange... And the more I think about it, it is kind of strange. I mean, in the example of the orchid and the wasp, when you think about the orchid hijacking the wasps, certain functions of the wasp, is it doing so because there is a quote-unquote surplus value of code? Is that the way we want to talk about…

• 01:27:24

  I hope it didn't sound as if I was saying I'm that quote dinners is just a his stop her it's a it's a is a nice formulation us I to put it that way I was as well as one that would distance myself from just just a little I'll get it she yeah you said subverting as a yeah yes I'm yeah it's just I mean I'm having…

• 01:52:29

  So I think it's quite interesting that that set of concerns hasn't been something sparking people at all. When you say that, Nick, the allocation of our political power to computing power, when you say that, how far are you going to go with that? Because, of course, we are still the ones circulating Bitcoin. The…

• 02:12:19

  Whereas obviously what, there's just a complete collapse of that in this case. But sovereignty in the sense of being the supreme authority over the fundamental structure of reality, at least in this domain, is not only preserved but reinforced. So, you know, that decoupling is quite dramatic. I don't know. It seems…

• 02:39:36

  Okay. Okay. Yes. So, great. Thanks to everybody, as usual. All right. Cool. Delightful. Thanks to everybody. Thanks, Nick. Thanks, everybody. All right. Have a good week. All the conversations. So talk to you soon. Okay. Great. Have a good week. Bye-bye, Nick. Bye. Bye. Bye.