How can we design a cryptocurrency for the better of humanity and ecology? In this last chapter of the crypto deep dive series, we will dissect two kinds of blockchain cryptocurrencies that are currently making waves on the internet and beyond. Furthermore, we explore the waves of the ECO Coin framework that intends to bring humans a democratic system – with living trees – into this sustainable, communal cryptocurrency.
Before social networks, there were episodic characters in our lives – people we’ve only met once or twice, and we haven’t heard from since. Nowadays whoever, we once add a person to our social media circle, we’ll stay in our news feed forever – and we’ll be regularly updated on their life events. They may even become dominant people in our online life.
Sports have always had an important place in human societies, providing entertainment, exercise, and a demonstration of the exceptional things the human body can achieve. But in a world of increasingly blurred lines between physical and virtual activities, what new forms of athletics are coming into existence? Let’s look at the games turning sports digital.
Color-blind artist Neil Harbisson designed a brain-implanted antenna that converts colors into sound. This enables him to hear colors he cannot see, and extends his vision to ultraviolets and infrareds. As technology is rapidly advancing, and the boundaries between the body and technology are blurred and ambiguous, it seems plausible that humans will use technologies not only to enhance, but also to extend their physical capabilities.
To some extent, it’s a chicken-and-egg question: Are you unable to think about things you don’t have words for, or do you lack words for them because you don’t think about them? For digital natives, the online realms may become more familiar than aspects of the ‘real’ world – and that’s where the Dictionary of Online Behavior comes in; a growing library for the avid social media user that you need to know to get by.
Under the title Human Nature, designing the equilibrium, eleven designers will answer questions about a future in which Humankind and Nature enter into a new relationship. An initiative of Connecting the Dots and Creative Holland, we are happy to share our vision about this symbiosis in relation to our food, as told by our very own Koert van Mensvoort.
There it is. A hefty hen, with its head up high and its beak out. And a gigantic VR headset over its beady little eyes. What does this battery hen see? ‘An experience of a free life’, according to American designer Austin Stewart. Second Livestock – shown last year at the ‘Robotic Wilderness’ exhibition of the Transnatural collective – is uncomfortable to watch, but it does uncover accurately the relationship we currently have with nature. Because no, this is not an image that we associate with nature. When we think of nature, we think of a hen freely scratching around a bit of bright and unspoiled green. Not of a battery hen, let alone with a VR headset.
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In Ancient Greece the people were part of a direct-democracy, this means that they would directly vote for policies and laws. Nowadays, it seems as though this horizontal approach to governance of a community is desired again: The crypto world has developed a specific platform to enable direct democracies to their users; the Decentralized Autonomous Organisations (DAO’s). What could these DAO’s mean for the ECO Coin? May these revive the ancient buzzing agora, this time in the digital sphere?
