Coining Reason
Coining Reason is a discussion series exploring ideas connected to Web3 through a deliberately wide range of subject areas — economics, philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis, law, ecology, business, art, and religion.
This breadth isn’t undisciplined wandering: as financialization comes to touch nearly every part of life, no single field is equipped to catch everything at stake, and a single technology’s arrival tends to reshape the whole frame people think within, not just the picture inside it.
Below is a Roadmap of these subject areas (“Units”), each with its own reading list. Because the depth and scope of each Unit varies, Coining Reason’s participants ultimately help shape the pace and direction of the investigation.
- Held
- April 2023 – July 2024
- Units
- Ten planned · two held
- Discussions
- X Spaces, recorded
- Archive
- GitHub ↗
Unit II is on hiatus while Sex, and/or Love continues. Explore the completed sessions and the larger roadmap below.
Economics
Before all the talk of “Web3,” there was Bitcoin, and Bitcoin is as much an intervention in digital technology as it is in monetary theory. In this Unit, we will present histories and theories of the “money” concept, as well as strive to ascertain a relation between money and surplus value. The economic problem of surplus value will be brought into connection with human nature’s surplus of virtuality as explored in Unit I.
Archive readings are available to enrolled participants. How to enroll →
2.0Re-Orientation
Past
Readings — 26 Jul 2023
- Optional: Rhea Myers, "Computers and Capital: The Rise of Digital Currency" ↗
2.1Economy
Past
2.2Byzantine: Icon and Economy
Past
2.3The Song of Money
Past
2.4WTF Happened in 1579?
Past
2.5Phenomenology of Money
Past
Readings — 27 Sep 2023
- Massimo Amato and Luca Fantacci, "Part I: Phenomenology," from The End of Finance — Read ↗
2.6The Ontology of Money
Past
2.7Money: Paper and Virtual
Past
Readings — 11 Oct 2023
- John Kenneth Galbraith, "Of Paper" and "An Instrument of Revolution," from Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went — Read ↗
- Joan Robinson, "The Keynesian Revolution," from Economic Philosophy — Read ↗
- Edward Castranova, "Weirdly Normal: Virtual Economies and Virtual Money," from Wildcat Currency — Read ↗
2.8The Birth of Banking
Past
2.9Surplus
Past
Readings — 1 Nov 2023
- Karl Marx, "Reflections on Money," from MECW Vol. 10 — Read ↗
- Stefan Eich, "Money as Capital: Karl Marx and the Limits of Monetary Politics," from The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes — Read ↗
- Rhea Myers, "Why Bitcoin is Money According to Marx," from Proof of Work: Blockchain Provocations, 2011–2021 — Read ↗
- Optional: Karl Marx, "Theories of Surplus Value," from Grundrisse — Read ↗
2.XNegation
Past
2.X pt.2The Money of Language
Past
Readings — 16 Nov 2023
- Sigmund Freud, "Negation," from SE Vol. XIX — Read ↗
- Jacques Lacan, "Introduction to Jean Hyppolite's Commentary on Freud's 'Verneinung,'" from Écrits — Read ↗
- Jean Hyppolite, "A Spoken Commentary on Freud's 'Verneinung,'" from Écrits — Read ↗
- Jacques Lacan, "Response to Jean Hyppolite's Commentary on Freud's 'Verneinung,'" from Écrits — Read ↗
- Alenka Zupancic, "Hegel and Freud: Between Aufhebung and Verneinung," from Crisis and Critique — Read ↗
- Paolo Virno, "The Money of Language," from An Essay on Negation: For A Linguistic Anthropology — Read ↗
- Optional: Raymond Ruyer, "There Is No Subconscious: Embryogenesis and Memory," from Diogenes — Read ↗
2.10Psychoanalysis of Money
Past
Readings — 11 Jan 2024
- Jodi Dean, "Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics," from Cultural Politics — Read ↗
2.11Exchange: Self/Other
Past
Readings — 24 Jul 2024
- Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function ↗," from Écrits (trans. Bruce Fink)
- Giorgio Agamben, "The Friend ↗," from What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays (trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella)
- Screening: Where Is the Friend's House, dir. Abbas Kiarostami (Neta DAO meeting)
On hiatus · scheduled, and paused while Sex, and/or Love runs
2.12Money is Sad Shit
On hiatus
2.13The Technology of Trust
On hiatus
Readings
- Christine Desan, "Money's Design Elements: Debt, Liquidity, and the Pledge of Value from Medieval Coin to Modern 'Repo'," from Banking and Finance Law Review — Read ↗
- Jens Beckert, "Trust and the Performative Construction of Markets," from Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies Discussion Papers — Read ↗
- Jacques Lacan, Sessions 1 and 2, from Seminar XVI: From an Other to the other — Read ↗
- Edouard Pignot, "Bringing Down the House (of Goldman Sachs): Analyzing Corrupt Forms of Trading with Lacan," from Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization — Read ↗
2.14Bitcoin
On hiatus
Readings
- Ole Bjerg, "How Is Bitcoin Money?" from Theory, Culture, and Society — Read ↗
- Saifedean Ammous, "Digital Money" and "What Is Bitcoin Good For?" from The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking — Read ↗
- George Gilder, "Money in Information Theory" and "What Bitcoin Can Teach," from The Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers but the Economy Never Does — Read ↗
- Lyn Alden, "The Creation of Stateless Money" and "A World of Openness or a World of Control," from Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make It Better — Read ↗ and here ↗
- Optional: Frances Ferguson, "Bitcoin: A Reader's Guide (The Beauty of the Very Idea)," from Critical Inquiry — Read ↗
2.15Money in Crisis
On hiatus
Readings
- Kojin Karatani, "On Modes of Exchange" and "Toward a World Republic," from The Structure of World History — Read ↗ and here ↗
- Werner Bonefeld, "Monetarism and Crisis," from Global Capitalism, National State and the Politics of Money (eds. Werner Bonefeld and John Holloway) — Read ↗
- Werner Bonefeld, "Notes on Fetishism, History, and Uncertainty: Beyond the Critique of Austerity," from Notes From Tomorrow: On Reason, Negation, and Certainty — Read ↗
- Optional: Tomaz Fleischman, Paolo Dini, and Giuseppe Littera, "Liquidity-Saving through Obligation-Clearing and Mutual Credit: An Effective Monetary Innovation for SMEs in Times of Crisis," from Journal of Risk and Financial Management — Read ↗
2.16Money: The Negative
On hiatus
Readings
- Giorgio Agamben, "The Economy of the Moderns," from The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government — Read ↗
- Samo Tomsic, "The Vicious Circle of Labor and Resistance," from The Labor of Enjoyment: Toward a Critique of Libidinal Economy — Read ↗
- Slavoj Žižek, "Three Fragments on Suicide as a Political Factor," from Crisis and Critique — Read ↗
The Internet
Before thinking about Web3, it may be helpful to come to terms with the histories of Web 2 and Web 1 and the broader impact of telecommunications technologies, centering the question: What is human nature such that it develops these technologies of distance and propinquity?
Archive readings are available to enrolled participants. How to enroll →
1.0Cypherpunk
Past
Readings — 5 Apr 2023
- Eric Hughes, "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto" ↗
- Timothy May, "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto" ↗
- Nick Srnicek, "Trusting the Trustless" ↗
1.1Tele-History
Past
Readings — 12 Apr 2023
- Tom Standage, "The Mother of All Networks" and "Love Over the Wires," from The Victorian Internet — Read ↗
1.2Web 1.0
Past
Readings — 19 Apr 2023
- Jessa Lingel, "Becoming Craig's List" and "Craigslist, the Secondary Marketplace," from An Internet for the People — Read ↗
1.3Freedom and Control Between Web 1 and Web 2
Past
Readings — 26 Apr 2023
- Wendy Chun, "Why Cyberspace?" from Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics — Read ↗
Unrecorded
1.4The World Brain
Past
1.5Psychoanalyzing Cyberspace
Past
Readings — 10 May 2023
- André Nusselder, "The Question Concerning Technology and Desire" and "The Technologization of Human Virtuality," from Interface Fantasy: A Lacanian Cybertheory — Read ↗
1.6Digital Bodies
Past
Readings — 24 May 2023
- Slavoj Žižek, "How Real Is Reality?" from Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (see Discord)
- Clint Burnham, "Is the Internet a Thing?" from Does the Internet Have an Unconscious? Slavoj Žižek and Digital Culture — Read ↗
1.7Web 3.0
Past
Readings
- Joel Monegro, "The Blockchain Application Stack" ↗
- Joel Monegro, "The Shared Data Layer of the Blockchain Application Stack" ↗
- Joel Monegro, "Fat Protocols" ↗
- Joel Monegro, "Thin Applications" ↗
1.8Digital Commons
Past
Readings
- Nick Szabo, "Money, Blockchains, and Social Scalability" ↗
- Jameson Lopp, "Who Controls Bitcoin Core?" ↗
- Jae Kwon and Ethan Buchman, "Cosmos Whitepaper" ↗
Roadmap
Archive access
Seminar policies →Coining Reason is on hiatus. Requesting access opens a unit’s existing materials; it doesn’t enroll you in a live seminar.
01
Request a unit
Create your account, choose Unit I or Unit II, and tell us your name, X handle and why you’d like access.
Request archive access
You’re already signed in. Use your profile to request or manage Coining Reason archive access →
03
Read and listen
Once access is confirmed, sign in with your email and password for the readings and the recorded discussions.