” [… ] However, the intentionality afforded by smart objects’ allopoietic and homeostatic structure would seem to challenge such distinctions and suggests that many smart objects are capable of some kind of protention. Take for example a context-aware feature of the iOS9 firmware, ‘Hey Siri’. Siri is Apple’s Artificial Intelligence personal assistant that forms part of the core functionality of the iOS mobile operating system shipped with iPhones, iPads and Apple Watches. Users can talk to Siri and ask it to fulfill a range of functions, from dictating messages and emails to asking for directions, to asking for weather forecasts and adding notes to the calendar. Siri’s functionality is based on the integration of three main components: conversational interface, personal context awareness and service delegation […]” (Ash, 2018: p.43)

 

Una riflessione filosofico-ontologica sulla natura degli oggetti digitali (tra cui i crypto-assets) è sempre più urgente -come scrivevo. Non amo l’espressione ‘oggetto immateriale’ (forse meglio dire ‘oggetto programmabile’), ma qui trovate qualche stimolo concettuale da giurisprudenza e diritto.

“Digital tokens—variously intended to function as currency, as securities, or as vouchers for deferred goods and services—have burst into mainstream legal awareness over the past 12 months as a result of high-worth ‘Initial Coin Offerings’ (‘ICOs’). Prior to the important questions of legal characterisation that digital tokens raise could as ‘money’ or ‘securities’ for the purposes of prudential, capital markets, tax, and other regulations, we must establish how the law takes cognisance of a digital token at all. In this article I argue that no legal system deals adequately with immaterial objects, which include digital tokens but also more traditional money and securities. Establishing a satisfactory legal category for immaterial objects as objects of property law is therefore a necessary first step … I explore the ontology of digital immaterial objects and set out the conceptual basis for a new category of property … (Allen 2018)”

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3140499

Nei discorsi correnti, la tecnologia della blockchain viene di norma essenzializzata. Si tende, cioè, a dire cosa “è” la blockchain, impiegando definizioni descrittive. La blockchain -si dice- è un registro pubblico delle transazioni distribuito e decentralizzato. A queste caratteristiche se ne aggiungono, poi, di norma delle altre: è immutabile, sicuro e trasparente. Questo approccio “essenzialistico” ha indubbiamente un pregio: rende qualitativamente e facilmente comprensibile l’oggetto della definizione. Al contempo, però, ha un grande limite: quello di impedire una comprensione effettiva della tecnologia a partire dal suo emergere fattuale e dalla sua operatività concreta. Si suggerisce l’impressione che esista una tecnologia corrispondente alla definizione astratta di blockchain. Una tecnologia che avrebbe, per sua intrinseca costituzione, quei caratteri di decentralizzazione, di immutabilità, di sicurezza e trasparenza richiamati. Questo approccio essenzialistico nasconde, tuttavia, la realtà… (continua qui)

“It’s rather the other way around: the future happens before the present, time arrives from the future” (Armen Avanessian) …  Derivatives are, in Natalia Zuluaga’s phrase, a specific kind of future-mining, an extraction from the future in the present. But this mining of the future in the present changes what the present is. The present isn’t the one that you started with. The very construction of a speculatively constituted present — the “pre-” — actively puts the present into a past that it also is, the “post-.” There’s one version of this configuration that you and others have described through pre-emptive policing, pre-emptive strikes, pre-emptive personality and so on…”