A City of Tokens

On the Greek city, IP, Blockchain and Algorithms

Used bookstores are great places to find something you’re not looking for. Although they are becoming harder and harder to find, I did manage locate one in my area recently. As I was looking through it there was one book that caught my attention, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks by Jean-Pierre Vernant.

Vernant was a French Anthropologist who, like many academics in Postwar France, was influenced by structuralist theory. He was never very popular in the Anglo-American world but he caught my attention years ago because of his theory that the Neolithic revolution was really a revolution in the adoption of new Symbols, not just a socio-economic revolution with the advent of farming which is the predominant theory on the origins of civilization.

Myth and Thought Among the Greeks is a collection of Vernant’s essays on Ancient Greece which was first published in France in 1965. The last part is called FROM MYTH TO REASON and contains one essay entitled, “The Formation of Positivist Thought in Archaic Greece.” The main question he addresses in the article is, what was it about the ancient Greeks that allowed them to develop a specific form of thinking which would develop into rational philosophy and later the sciences? His take is surprising and seems relevant to today.

Contrary to popular belief, Vernant argues the transition to rationality was not due to technological developments in Greece. He states,

It is impossible establish a direct link between rational thought and technological development. In technology Greece invented nothing; introduced no innovations. Greek technology was derived from that of the East which it never truly surpassed.¹

As a side note, it is interesting to mention that ancient Egypt, which was far more advanced in engineering and technology than the Greeks, expressed “thought” with the hieroglyph for “heart” and “speech” with that for “tongue.”² The image of the mind has a very differnt meaning for the ancient Egyptians than for the Greeks.

For Vernant the key to understanding the transition out of myth and into rational philosophy was due in large part to the birth of the Greek city. Specifically a city that has no kings, has an alphabetic writing system, and minted money for the exchange of goods. In other words, it was a new politico-economic system which gave birth to both the philosopher and the citizen.

The transformation from myth to reason resulted in the creation of abstract thoughts that were used to define the invisible in a way that could be shared with others openly through language. This lead to the birth of reason which was a discovery in language that tore apart the mythic world of gods but in the process separated human society from nature. To illustrate this revolution of the Greek city, Verant discusses the birth of the philosopher, the early politico-legal order and the monetary system of Ancient Greece.

The predecessors of the philosophers in Ancient Greece were known as “magi” who were healers and shamanic-like figures that created mystery schools and secret sects of dedicated initiates around themselves. Pythagoras and his school sit on the cusp of this transition from sage to philosopher with his teaching of mathematical harmony in the cosmos. The deciding transition, for Vernant, was that the philosophers brought their teachings out of secrecy and into the marketplace, the agora, for all to hear.

By carrying the ‘mystery’ into the market place, right into the agora, he [the philosopher] made it the subject of public and argumentative debate, in which dialectic discussion finally assumed more importance than supernatural enlightenment.³

The result was that these “ideas” could be shared and evaluated through language itself and the reasoning faculty that would be used to evaluate these teachings which were no longer based on a mythical logic but a logic of identity and non-contradiction.

A similar transition occurs at the same time on the political level where a public calendar is adopted and laws are created that no longer depended on the rituals of the King-Priest but on the judgments of citizens.

With the coming of the city, the political order was separated fom the organization of the cosmos. It was now seen as a human institution which was the subject of concerned inquiry, and impassioned discussion.⁴

Lastly, this period saw an invention in the use of money. While there was money before the Ancient Greeks, they were the first on record to have it minted and guaranteed by the state.⁵ Vernant states that “[t]he general use of minted money helps to give rise to a new, positivist, quantifiable, abstract concept of value”. The result was a new type of wealth and new class of wealth which was disruptive on Greek society.

Again we see the imprint of abstract rational thinking that was disruptive and affected every level of society. The unprecedented transition is one where the magus becomes philosopher, the tribe forms a city, money becomes the object of wealth and the whole cosmological myth is rationalized and becomes an open question of causes for public discourse.

Agree with Vernant’s interpretation of Greece or not, reading his essay I can’t help but think that we may be living through a similar type of disruption, one where the new city is virtual, carried on the back of by the internet, written in a new coding language and where a new monetary system is being built within this new city itself. This is not to say that the virtual city will be anywhere near as transformative and lasting as the Greek city which has impacted humanity for over two millennia, but the seeds of a new city may have similar repercussions on many different levels.

The virtual cities, more commonly known as “technology platforms”, are becoming more and more like a city as a forum for the exchange of not only products but ideas and even citizenship through our digital identities. Will these digital cities have the same transformative effect as the Greek city and what might that be? Could there be something even deeper at play that would have repercussions on our whole way of thinking and speaking?

Let’s follow Vernant’s lead and look at these virtual cities from several different angles.

The Virtual Agora, a Marketplace of Goods and Ideas

The impact of virtual cities on the marketplace has already received a lot of attention. On an economic level, there is a theory that these technology platforms are creating a form of post-capitalism. This idea, that technology platforms are creating a new marketplace that is replacing capitalist markets, was proposed by the Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis. He calls this technofeudalism and we discussed his theory in a previous post.

For Varoufakis, the danger is that the whole marketplace, the new agora, is now completely owned by a technology company, ie. Amazon or Meta, leading to a post-capitalist economy run like a feudal state by these companies. However, from a legal perspective this idea may be better called a technocolonialism.

It is easy to forget the impact that discovering the “new world” had on political and legal theory beginning in the 17th century. It was during this period that the nation state and international law was first conceived in its modern sense and developed into globalization. This period of “colonialism” saw the creation of a legal regime to distribute and regulate this new space among European nation states governed by laws of land and sea. One of the new notions of this era of non-religious international law was the legal creation of the “just war” which allowed for nation states to compete using a bracketed form of war defined by rules. This idea of just war would end by the start of the 20th century.

The new space we are now facing is digital and predomintately owned by tech companies with Influencers and content creators fighting for their fair share. Instead of the just war, Intellectual Property (IP) will likely be the legal regime that governs property rights and ownership in this technocolonial structure. Patents, copyrights and trademarks are the hallmarks of IP but, as we’ll see when we discuss the new forms of money, these could be transformed within this system to be decentralized and recorded more efficiently. We are already seeing that now with the way platforms like Youtube will take down content that infringes on someone else’s copyrights. Soon there could be a tokenization of IP on a blockchain that automatically regulates these assets on the internet. The model would likely look something like NFTs which we’ll discuss below.

The question is how will these new forms of legal rules impact the distribution and use of the digital space and how might they impact rights created by the older regime of laws founded by the nation state.

Money and the “Tokenization of Everything”

One of the interesting points that Vernant raises was that minting of the coin began in Greece in the 7th century BC. This had a similar impact on Greek thought by creating a abstract system of value. The use of money allowed the value of a good (its use value) to be defined by an abstract concept, its exchange value. The exchange value of a good is what turns it into a commercial commodity within an economic system. Things were no longer imprinted with some supernatural power or qualitative virtue within itself. It now became reduced to an abstract quantity measured by its ability to be exchanged for a certain amount of money.

One of the most lasting economic theories of Marx in his critique of Capitalism was that human labor was now becoming a commodity, just like the goods that were traded in Ancient Greece. With the rise of corporations in modern capitalism, the working class were reduced to mere commodities measured by their wage labor without ownership of property which was owned by the capitalists.

However, in the new digital space of the virtual city, it appears that ideas, not labor, are becoming the new commodity that will govern much of the financial activity of this new space. This is becoming possible with the introduction of the blockchain. Think what you want about cryptocurrencies, it does appear that blockchain technology will be adopted by the financial system with even J. P. Morgan incorporating the technology into their financial instruments.

So what is blockchain? In a recent article, Digital Currency and the Evolution of Money, the stablecoin company Circle gives a succinct definition of how blockchain and digital currency will change the way money is used in the internet era. One of the main advantages that blockchain enables is the ability to securely exchange goods and payments across the internet without a “middle man” creating faster, cheaper and more transparent transactions that can be facilitated across the global. With no institution acting as intermediary, the system becomes decentralized and reduces any fees typically charged by these institutions.

The article states,

One of the biggest blockchain breakthroughs is that it enables “real-world” assets like houses, cars, office buildings, factories, concert tickets, customer loyalty points, stock certificates and countless others to be represented online as uniquely identifiable digital tokens. These tokens can make it easy to track, transfer and store ownership proof of the corresponding assets online in a digital wallet. 

Embedding ownership of these assets onto the internet — directly alongside their accompanying financial flows — could open up a potential future where almost anything can be tokenized, financed and traded by anyone, anytime, anywhere, all without the need for traditional financial intermediaries.

The new concept that makes this possible is tokenization which allows “objects” to be tracked and recorded on the blockchain, an invention that was made possible by the creation of Bitcoin.

Tokenization seems to continue this process of the abstraction of goods and products into a system of symbols that capture an exchange of values. One innovation of the blockchain is that the tokens are now digital replacing the metallic coins of the ancient world. The other is that ideas, images, and videos created digitally will now also be considered goods that can be traded in a marketplace. This will become possible as the goods are turned into NFT’s, non-fungible tokens, which act as transferrable assets.⁶

This transition of tokenization illustrates a further advance in abstract thinking but also another degree away from nature and reality. In the marketplace of the older systems, money was still physical as well as the goods purchased, it was only the values exchanged that were abstract. In the new virtual marketplace, the goods and currency themselves are digital and therefore operate on a completely symbolic level. until the goods, if they are physical, are delivered to one’s address. This is becoming known as a cashless system and the rise of mobile devices with mobile payment systems are helping to usher in this new system.

To see how this may impact our experience of the world and ourselves we turn to the new type of thinking that helped build these cities.

Thinking, Algorithms and the separation of Code and Nature

We briefly discussed Vernant’s theory about the rise of reason from mythic thinking that occurred around 7th century BC with the birth of the Greek city. One of the main factors was the transition of the secret teachings from Greek sages that were held private for a select few initiates and into the public sphere, the agora, where these ideas were presented and debated through language. This was not only a shift in the medium of transmission but also the message itself where new concepts and a new logic, a logos, was created to replace the mythic stories that explained the world with concepts that were clearly defined. The key to this new logic was an “internal coherence” in speech itself where the arguments in language had to hold up within reason which is language itself. Underlying this logic in language was the principle of identity and non-contradiction, a logic that is also the bedrock of arithmetic because if there is no principle of identity, meaning A can equal A or B, the whole foundation of reason collapses.

What Vernant points out that is important to remember is that reason works within language not nature. What the birth of reason and the city creates is a separation of society from nature (although “nature” itself is a concept is not something the Greeks would use to describe the world around them.) Addressing this separation of society and nature was one that philosophers sought to address and unify again through new concepts such as being, substance and essence.

While the separation of society and nature does seem to be widening, especially with the creation of the new virtual cities, it does seem that developers, some of whom are our own modern day philosophers, are seeking to mend this rift between abstract symbolic system and the natural world through a virtual world. With the introduction of the metaverse, the creation of digital worlds and immersive experiences through virtual interfaces to create a shared digital space seems possible. But will this really resolve any separation between society and nature or push it wider as people, especially children, become “users” in a new platform with virtual personalities and augmented reality.

Instead of going down the rabbit hole of the metaverse in this aticle⁷, it’s important to take a step back and look at the language that made all this possible. This is the computer coding language that powers the software which powers our devices and machines. Over a decade ago, the entrepreneur Marc Andreessen wrote an iconic article called Why Software is Eating the World which has seemed to predict the exponential rise of software companies taking over every industry for the past 10 years.⁸

Just as the Greek city brought forth a new type of thinking, namely reason, the computer age brought forth a whole new language, code, and the underlying logic is overwhelmingly governed by the use and function of algorithms. Modern users of technology platforms who have learned how to “hack the algorithm” underlying the specific platform have learned how to gain the system to their favor.

It’s important to remember that the coherence of the code and its algorithms is inherent only within its own system. While software codes no doubt have impacted the world, they run on a logic that is completely separate from the world and thus not necessarily in harmony with the inner workings of “nature”, whatever those might be. For example, you can use reason to justify the demolition of an entire forest which would not necessarily be “logical” to the plants, animals, and other beings that live in the forest.

In the efforts to build the metaverse, it does appear that the impetus of describing the world as a pure idealism, that the entire universe exists within the construct of the mind, is present in the hearts of some modern software developers. “It’s all in your mind.” Only now, instead of mind, its is a computer simulation that is the space within our reality exists. This can be clearly seen by a new theory recently put forward by computer scientist, game pioneer, and MIT researcher Rizwan Virk which he calls Simulation Hypothesis.⁹ In a 2022 article in Scientific American he summarizes the theory as such,

In 2019, I wrote a book called The Simulation Hypothesis, in which I laid out the 10 stages of technology development that would take us to the Simulation Point, where we won’t be able to distinguish our virtual worlds from the physical world; or AI characters that live in those virtual worlds, from real humans.

The challenge of reconciling any language with the broader world in which it operates will always remain a near insurmountable hurdle but worth the effort to bridge the gap. Even in the proposed Simulation Theory, where we are all living in a Matrix-like computer simulation, the virtual and physical worlds appear indistinguishable but they are not the same. There still is a physical world wholly outside this virtual creation.

To me, this whole virtual universe of tokens, augmented reality, NFTs, avatars, etc. feels a lot like an arcade such as “Dave and Busters”. When you enter, your money is converted to tokens in order to play the games. Doing well at a game can help you earn more tokens that allow you to play more games and explore new worlds. There is even a shop where you can buy some physical goods with your tokens to take home. But like casinos, arcades have no windows. They create a space away from normal reality. And once you’re done playing you can exit although, like casinos, these places can lead to a form of addiction for those who don’t want to exit this virtual reality.

So where does that leave us now?

One reason to return to the early Greeks, again and again, is to look back at the origins of this separation from nature and, through the writings that have been left behind, see a time when mythic thinking was still mixed with philosophy, when language was still within nature but just starting to form early ideas to explain it. Its an origin that can never be repeated but perhaps point towards another way forward, a new way of thinking about the current situation we find ourselves and perhaps help us with uncovering concepts that can help open up nature and let it appear to us again instead of only trying to create new models to simulate it.

1. J.P. Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, London: Routledeg & Kegan (1983), p. 357.

2. See Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, New York: Princeton Univ Press (1965), p. 20.

3. Vernant, p. 357.

4. Ibid., p 358.

5. Vernant fn 55, citing Herodotus (. 94), Schuhl, Adela, 157-158, and Thomson, ‘Studies’, 194.

6. Although there was a bubble created with the initial offerings of NFTs, this was largely due to marketing and celebrity endorsements that inflated their value.

7. For a good article on the Metaverse from a business perspective visit here.

8. Given the recent downturn for tech companies, this article has been mentioned again by several analysts seeking to understand the current economic environment.

9. The name comes from another theory called the simulation argument proposed by Nick Bostrom which argues that we may all be living within a computer simulation.