48. Indifference Engine (w/ Wassim Alsindi & Paul Dylan-Ennis)

We're joined by Paul Dylan-Ennis and Wassim Alsindi, two of crypto's sharpest in-house critics, who arrived at the same place from opposite directions.Paul is a lecturer at University College Dublin, author of Absolute Essentials of Ethereum, an early speculative realist (co-founder of Speculations), and a member of the Silviculture Society, the informal cypherpunk body that keeps check on the Ethereum Foundation.Wassim is a chemical physicist turned record-label operator turned MIT Media Lab researcher, founder of 0x Salon in Berlin, and a self-described "deradicalized Bitcoin maximalist." Hell yeah.We start with Wassim's essay 'Open Swords,' which insists that open source has to die. The utopian horizon of the cypherpunks (Tim May's Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, Eric Hughes' clarion call, Barlow's Declaration) has been repurposed into systems of closure, with Palantir, Anduril, Helsing, and the corporate AI monoliths built on the backs (and skulls) of open source development.We go hard on the idea of the cypherbunk in general, into computational counter-politics, Nick Land's Crypto-Current, and Wassim's critical concept of necro-primitivism (Bitcoin as an indifference engine that cannot care about anything outside its thermoeconomic event horizon, now awaiting its quantum-computing civil war.)References:Wassim Alsindi, "Open Swords" (Akisoma)Timothy C. May, "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto" (1988)Eric Hughes, "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto" (1993)John Perry Barlow, "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" (1996)Wassim Alsindi, "The Necroprimitivist Manifesto" (2021) & the Indifference Engine projectNick Land, Crypto-Current: Bitcoin and Philosophy (Šum edition)Anna Greenspan, Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine (2000)Paul Dylan-Ennis, Absolute Essentials of Ethereum (Routledge, 2024)Paul Dylan-Ennis, Continental Realism (Zero Books, 2011)Hannu Rajaniemi, The Quantum Thief (2010)