The Coordination Keyword

Many features of human experience that feel natural are historically produced. Individuality and consciousness belong to this category. They emerged through specific cultural practices to solve problems of coordination, responsibility, and long-term planning. Computation and capital now solve these problems faster, at larger scales, through external processes. As decision-making, memory, and meaning-production migrate into automated feedback loops, the inner self loses its function. These essays trace the construction of modern subjectivity and examine what happens as the conditions that produced it dissolve.

Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) and other cryptographic and distributed systems primitives will help society create tools that can be used by everyone. ZKPs enable a party to demonstrate a statement to other parties without revealing any information beyond the proof. In more concrete terms, this enables a person to show another person that the computation they did is correct without having to redo it and without even having to grant access to the data that was used.