Blockchain

Das Editorial zur vorliegenden Ausgabe 10/2 (2019).

What kind of world emerges as a common world for the spectator in the staging of the events of war? And how can the film-analytical reconstruction of a sense of commonality open up historical consciousness in the first place? Focusing on the combat report With the Marines at Tarawa (USA 1944) this text shows how the ramifications of genre poetics can be explored as a network of experiential modalities that make history graspable as a continuous process of delineating the limits of community.

This article examines the connections between the camera shot and the gun sight in the age of classic Hollywood cinema. Comparing THE LOST PATROL (USA 1934, John Ford) with TRINADTSAT (THIRTEEN, UdSSR 1936, Mikhail Romm), it asks what kind of relationship films from this era strove to establish between the viewer and the gun shot on screen. The ideological and stylistic differences between the films make visible divergent fantasies of agency, community and technology.

In 1971, the WDR broadcasts the show ORAKEL as a social experiment to test participatory democracy using the new media – telephone, fax, television and computer. Developed by Helmut Krauch, who has been conducting futures studies on behalf of the German government with the Heidelberg Study Group for Systems Research since the early 1960s, ORAKEL is based on the Delphi method developed by RAND researchers in the United States. According to Krauch, the format represents a first step on the way towards a computer democracy, the short history of which is traced in this article.

In education policy debates, there has been a call not only since today to introduce something like ›digital education‹ as a new school subject and many ministries of education are already in the process of forging corresponding curricula. Klaus Zierer and Christina Schatz caution against following this demand immediately and in its entirety. The evaluation of a large number of empirical studies and meta-studies on the subject revealed that the effectiveness of digital media on learning outcomes had only moderate effects on average. The elementary cultural techniques of reading and writing can be learned much more effectively with paper and pencil or a book in hand than on a laptop or tablet. Media, whether digital or analogue, are teaching aids. The professionality of teachers is and remains decisive for learning success. If teachers use technology for the sake of technology, which is currently not uncommon, empirical studies show that digital media can even lead to negative effects. As a result, when it comes to questions of learning, it becomes clear that a revolution at this level will not succeed through digital technology. Heiko Christians, on the other hand, is convinced that the term ›digital education‹ cannot exist in the first place. Today, repeated reading of canonical texts – as a cultural precondition for education – is a counterintuitive, old usage of the latest technical infrastructures. This use is still not excluded per se, but it is more improbable than ever before. And it is only possible at all as long as this use, which obviously originates from other infrastructures and epochs that have been ›overcome‹ today, is maintained in the user’s memory and in their trained reflexes and constantly made plausible. This, however, is precisely what educational institutions would have to do if they still wanted to carry out their old educational mission. The same institutions that once devoted themselves primar ily to the maintenance of various canonical text corpora are today no longer supposed to educate their inmates, but to make them ›fit‹ for the ›digital future‹. In short, this means that there should no longer be any noticeable differences between the technical conditions inside and outside the institutions. The question remains whether one wants to preserve techniques and works from this old book culture or whether education should be defined quite differently today?

Im September 2015 fegte ein gewaltiger Staubsturm über den Nahen Osten. In Syrien, Libanon, Israel/Palästina, sogar in Zypern war die Sicht auf wenige Meter beschränkt. Eine der wissenschaftlichen Erklärungen dieses Staubsturms bestand darin, dass syrische Bauern unter den Auswirkungen von Krieg und Dürre ihre zerstörten Dörfer, Häuser und Felder verlassen hatten, die allmählich zu Staub zerfielen, wie alles, das verlassen wird. Dann kam der Ostwind und trug diesen Staub in die Luft, wo er sich in einem orangenen Wolkensystem von kontinentalem Ausmaß sammelte,…

John McAfee has drafted a Declaration of Currency Independence in which he proclaims that the time has come to question the state monopoly on the production and control of foreign exchange and its flows and to break the link between geography and currency. In her article, philosopher Catherine Malabou explains the economic and philosophical background leading to her decision to sign this declaration.

In times in which stable relationships of trust have been increasingly shaken around the globe for decades, people are looking for new approaches to the ability to trust. The libertarian philosophy behind Bitcoin uses simple and understandable mathematical techniques to create a monetary system without banks and states. The speed and worldwide availability of communication networks thus make for a completely new social experiment.

The decentralized technology of blockchains promises its users more freedom and autonomy as well as more security and transparency through its specific network architecture. In recent years, blockchains have thus become a projection screen for democratic and egalitarian utopias. The contribution is a mediaphilosophical analysis of the Blockchain idea and its practical implementation and aims at a critical examination of the promises and expectations associated with Blockchains.

Blockchain has found its way out of technical obscurity via a largely faded phase of utopian-mystifying enthusiasm to established industry solutions. Blockchain-based crypto currencies have long been accepted as a means of payment and are tentatively being used institutionally as well. Nevertheless, Blockchain solutions still seem to sell a promise that seeks to satisfy a social need—that of trust within systems. A glance at the technicalities of Blockchain, however, allows insights into the possibility of such techno-social promises and their (non-)redeemability.

This article summarizes the current status of the legal challenges of blockchain technology. Similar to the World Wide Web, Blockchain represents a kind of basic technology on the basis of which new platforms and business models can be created. However, the question arises as to whether the German legal system is fundamentally capable of mastering the challenges posed by such a decentralized technology. In particular with regard to criminal offences or the new Basic Data Protection Ordinance. The question is how the current negative headlines (e. g. Silk Road) will affect crypto currencies in the long term and, as a result, blockchain technology, not only with regard to illegal content such as child pornography.

Decentralized, open blockchain technologies manage transactions of data on a protocological level. Cryptographic methods can be used to identify data transactions. This happens—if no software update takes place—without external intervention. Blockchains are therefore presented as sovereign media technologies. They govern themselves. This puts them on a collision course with traditional sovereignties that are allowed to decide what is the case. The emergence of a generic digital form of sovereignty can therefore be observed. Their consensus on the state of their government will be analyzed.