Sometimes I have to drop apparent non-sequiturs to prime readers for a topic, and the post about Tenet is one such topic. This is technically part of the series on money but it’s more a kind of primer to a totally non magical subject which doubtless came to some peoples mind’s at the moment I mentioned the yawning abyss of a cashless society. This subject is dangerous to mention online however, and I wanted to explain why that is, in a way that magicians might find helpful.
Tenet is a nice squishy example of what I call a Confounding Sociological Infohazard. Lets break that term down.
An infohazard is a science fiction concept similar to that of harmful sensation, where a sight or sound can somehow permanently harm you; not in the sense that a really bright light can blind you, more like the idea of a work of art so bizarre that can make you go insane, a song so sad it makes you walk into the ocean and drown, or a joke so funny that you instantly laugh yourself to death. An infohazard is like this except that it is a mere idea, knowledge you can’t unlearn, often framed as a fact which upends your entire worldview into a bleak existential dread from which you can never return.
A confounding infohazard is my term for what XKCD calls nerd sniping, the art of posing a question with no obvious answer but which feels like there should be a simple and elegant solution. Upon learning of the question a certain type of person will immediately spiral into a obsessive compulsion to answer it.
A confounding sociological infohazard then is a question which doesn’t affect individuals in this way, but will cause an argument when discussed, descending into visceral hatred and even eugenic ideation for those involved. As you might imagine, the internet is allowing confounding sociological infohazards to spread and mutate at a rate never previously known, as what would have once caused mild cursing across a dinner table for a single evening gets spun out into a global 24/7 screaming match, replete with slurs, factionalism, and maybe even profiteering.
But how does this work? To explain it, I need to give a few examples.
Content warning: This post contain 4 such info hazards, with increasing danger levels, which I am going to hopefully explain in enough detail that you will feel satisfied and not have to discuss them any further… but I cannot guarantee this.
Proceed with caution.
Problem 1: Can a plane on a conveyor belt take off?
The setup is simple, you take a regular passenger aircraft and put it on a giant conveyor belt. This conveyor belt is somehow setup to run against the plane, so that if the plane moves forward at 1mph, the belt will pull it back at 1mph, to stop the plane from moving. Can this plane take off?
You probably think you know the answer, maybe you didn’t have to think at all, but this surface simplicity hides an underlying misunderstanding.
Knee jerk response: Planes go up, even if it can’t move forward the engines will still lift it, so yes it will take off.
Thoughtful response: Planes are lifted by the air passing over their wings, if it can’t move forward it can’t get this lift. It will stay on the ground.
Intelligent response: It doesn’t matter how fast the conveyor goes planes are moved forward by jet engines forcing air through, not wheels turning on the ground like a car. As such the conveyor is irrelevant, the plane will go forward and hence, take off.
Intellectual response: Presumably the original question posed was badly phrased, the conveyor itself is conceptual, what if you moved the AIR to stop the plane moving foward? No forward, no up, it stays on the ground.
Scientific response: Planes don’t need to actually move forward, they only need air passing over the wings. A plane in high wind will take off straight up, which often causes problems if a hurricane hits an airport. Regardless of the nature of the conveyor: it will take off.
There don’t have to be five layers to a Confounding Sociological Infohazard, they could have as few as three or more than twenty. I picked five as an homage to the worlds most contentious confectionary: Liquorice Allsorts
Of these five possible arguments three are correct, and you’ll note that I’ve listed these as best I can from the one with the least understanding of aviation, to the one with the best understanding of aviation. Or, as this would be framed online the stupidest argument to the smartest argument. I’d say none of these are stupid, per se, it’s just a matter of how much you know about the science of aeroplanes. But framed this way, and with the argument demanding a yes/no answer. Boiled down to this one word binary response, the ‘smartest’ and ‘stupidest’ person will both give the right answer. In between these two you might also give the right answer, but you also might give the wrong answer. Importantly, you might give the wrong answer for different reasons, and the person correcting you may actually know less about the subject than you, so two people can have opposing viewpoints on a binary subject and both be wrong in how they try to explain it to each other.
And this is just a single subject with a simple question.
Problem 2: Can a wind powered vehicle move faster than the wind in the direction the wind is blowing?
Originally this post would have had 3 CSIs but this one makes a great addendum to the previous. It’s fully explained in a series of YouTube videos which give a full rundown of all the arguments, but I’ll summarise here.
Normally something moving in the wind cannot go any faster than the wind pushing it. But someone claims to have built a vehicle which when the wind blows it at 10mph, it moves at 15mph (this is a number I pulled from thin air, what’s important is that it’s faster). The question posed is how does this vehicle work, and are they somehow faking it?
Empty head answer: If the wind turns the propeller and the gearing to the wheels is high enough, they will be able to turn faster than the wind speed. So it’s fine.
Regular brain answer: When the vehicle gets up to wind speed, you have a problem because now the air isn’t moving over the propeller at all, so it can’t actually move the vehicle faster than the wind.
Big brain answer: But the wind isn’t turning the propeller. If you look at the explanation, the wind pushes the vehicle, which makes the wheels turn, and they make the propeller blow back at the wind, giving it a greater force to push back against the wind and move forward faster.
Genius brain answer: Did you forget a little thing called conservation of energy? If the vehicle getting faster makes the vehicle get faster you’ve built a perpetual motion machine, which everyone knows is impossible [citation needed] because of entropy.
Galaxy brain answer: But it doesn’t get faster and faster, it eventually reaches an equilibrium, and if the wind stops, so does the vehicle. Fake perpetual motion machines always have a hidden power source and this isn’t hiding its power source – its the wind. You can even prove it works by putting it on a conveyor belt, proving the power source is the relative motion between the ground and the air.
Transcendant answer: Oh, like that airplane problem. You know the ground speed has nothing to do with-
Oh yeah, that’s the other thing I didn’t tell you. A lot of CSIs have a similar flavour, in that they rely upon an easily misunderstood scientific principle, so if you encounter one, you’ll very quickly get dragged into another. Put a pin in that.
Problem 3: Does Tenet make scientific sense?
I already went into this at length so let me instead say that to be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Rick and Morty. The humour is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics most of the jokes will go over a typical viewer’s head.
See this is how CSIs get you. People start to stratify into what they see as intelligence levels and so anyone who disagrees with you is not smart enough to ‘get it’. So if you didn’t like Tenet because you call bullshit on the consistency of the time travel stuff¹, people who did like Tenet will just tell you that you didn’t get it, and its only a movie for smart people even if they like it because they were able to not think about the inconsistencies or notice the awful sound mixing.
Whilst occasionally opinions like this can lead to all kinds of harassment online, that’s normally where they end, if you’re a nobody and someone disagrees with you, they might quote tweet you and you get a few notifications of people calling you a dum dum, but it’s very rare that the outcome of these arguments will take over a sizeable chunk of the world economy at the cost of a small country’s carbon footprint to fuel an unscrupulous pyramid scheme capable of maybe destroying the entire world.
Problem 4: So what is Bitcoin?
Is it a currency? An investment? A commodity? A pyramid scheme? A scam? Money laundering? The future of currency? The end of civilisation?
Is it all of those things?
The fact is, money is only real by consensus in the first place. Anyone who has tried to spend a Scottish banknote in a high class London restaurant can attest to that. The very fact that there’s wide contention in the legitimacy of Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies²) immediately disqualifies it as currency. Of course that may change and in order to reach that point, consensus must be reached. It is for this reason that bitcoin investors evangelise so loudly. They are (in a digital sense) holding a lot of monopoly money and the second it becomes real money they become the capitalist class of the new economy.
Until then, the only way to turn crypto in to real world spending is through an exchange, where people will exchange your digital fun bucks into something you can use to buy pornography and biscuits. Some businesses have, at various points in time, accepted bitcoin for purchases, but they have to inflate their prices for such transactions against the risk of it being worth half as much by the time they can exchange it for something the shareholders believe in. Its allegedly untraceable pseudonymity has maintained the utility of bitcoin as an exchange currency for illegal transactions, such as ransomware viruses, blackmail, and deeply immoral and illegal products on the dark web. If you want to learn more about what exactly that includes, exercise caution before you go googling.Here be dragons.
So as the value fluctuates, bitcoin becomes a volatile commodity, but with one key difference. Real world commodities, things like crude oil, gold bullion, and frozen concentrated orange juice, have their trading prices linked to the real world utility of the products and the abundance of the supply. Cryptocurrencies have no utility outside of their use as a medium of exchange, and the supply of bitcoin is mathematically tethered to an algorithmic decline in production, which should in theory make them more and more expensive as time rolls on… except that the growth is asymptotic, so even that will eventually dry up. What that means is the first people who set about ‘mining’ bitcoins in the background on their home computers obtained what would later be millions of dollars worth in the space of a few weeks, whereas now there are huge warehouses full of custom built processing units consuming megawatts of energy and barely breaking even.
This is why a lot of people see bitcoin as a pyramid scheme where the early adopters are the only ones making any money. Indeed this primacy bonus is why so many new cryptocurrencies have been started, because the people behind them wanted to get in early on their own scam. Unlike a standard pyramid scheme, money isn’t directly passed up a chain to a single figure. Rather, like all commodities, bitcoin’s value is directly tied to how much people are willing to pay for it, and the more people are willing to pay for it, the greater the fortunes of those who are still holding their early adopter money. So late adopters pay in and through the mathematical wizardly of commodities trading, other people get richer. Newer cryptocurrencies often play this process out in fast forward, as the early adopters sell up as soon as the value spikes from wider adoption. This is called a ‘pump and dump’ scam, and it could be argued that bitcoin’s founders are holding off on this tactic only because they honestly think one day they won’t have to, and their algorithmically generated, economically enriched distributed spreadsheet will become real spendable money and never crash in value again.
But wait, didn’t I just say something about megawatts of power? Well I may have been understating it. A cursory google shows the current bitcoin network uses approximately 80 terrawatt hours of power annually. Dividing down that means it has an average constant power consumption of just over 9 gigawatts. You might think that’s just the power used to mine it, and when it gets too costly people will just stop right? Well… no.
Cryptocurrencies rely on a technology called blockchain, which is incredibly complicated but can be summed up as, rather than keeping a big spreadsheet with everyone’s balance, you instead just store a long chain of individual transactions. This keeps the system honest, because everyone keeps a copy of the chain and they can be checked against each other to make sure no one is trying to fool the system. Keeping this chain of data cryptographically secure is what uses all the energy and the cryptographic keys which are newly generated in this process are essentially the bitcoins ‘mined’ as payment to the people who are using their electricity bills to keep the system running. When I say “keep the system running” what I mean is that in order to keep all these digital copies of the ledger up to date, at the time of writing a single bitcoin transaction (regardless of its magnitude) requires an estimated total energy consumption of 1.5 gigawatt hours, which is about the same as the average American household uses in 53 days.
And they have air conditioners.
Some countries have already either put in rules to regulate cryptocurrency trade or declared it completely illegal. What is yet to be seen is whether this will destroy crypto or force it underground, where it will finally achieve its original dream of becoming a useable currency to a global network of criminals. Personally I think the gold coins John Wick uses are cooler, and don’t contribute to man made climate change with the carbon footprint the size of New Zealand’s.
So, what is bitcoin? A currency? An investment? A commodity? A pyramid scheme? A scam? Money laundering? The future of currency? The end of civilisation?
Not yet, kind of, sort of, technically no, arguably yes, frequently, only on a small scale, and I really fucking hope not but… probably.
The problem is that, in the face of these concerns, the evangelists trying to enrich their own bitcoins’ market value will tell you that you just don’t get it. That you’re one of those clueless people who doesn’t understand the blockchain, the math involved, the modern banking system, cryptography, or any number of other things they will bring up. Not with the intention of clarifying their position, but simply to convince you that you don’t know enough to have an opinion.
Or to make you forget that until 2014 the main trading website for bitcoin was Mt.Gox, which was named for its original purpose: Magic The Gathering Online eXchange.
In Conclusion: What this all means
Wow… this took a while didn’t it? Did I really just go on a huge tangent including a separate post about the movie Tenet to explain a concept I made up to distance myself from discussions of cryptocurrency?
What does any of this have to do with magic?
Well, it was all to provide magicians with two pieces of advice. The first is to avoid arguing with people online about a certain class of problem³.
The second was that if anyone mentions bitcoin during a performance, don’t miss a beat, just whip out one of these bad boys.
Problem solved.
¹ Like why do inverted bullet holes in glass work differently to inverted bullet wounds in people later in the same movie? How long had those bullet holes been there before the protagonist turned up anyway? Were they still in the window when it was installed in the building? Did it come out of the factory like that? Most of the scenes in Tenet don’t make any sense if you extend the timeline beyond the scene itself in either direction.
² There are a ridiculous amount of these, many of them having the ‘coin’ suffix, despite not having any physical coinage to speak of. Indeed, most of them use their imaginary coin design as their logo. You can actually buy physical simulacra of these coins as a novelty and some people actually buy these trinkets thinking they’re investing in crypto. Crypto enthusiasts and critics alike mock these people, but I posit that when the cryptocurrency market collapses, the physical remnants of its era will have value as antique curios of a bygone age.
³ Just so I don’t have to ever do another post about it, what’s currently going on in the magic circle is also this class of problem. Rather than the ignorance of scientific or mathematical principles, the confounding factor is that everyone talking about it only has partial information and if only you knew what they know, then you’d know they were right. It’ll tear us apart if we try to get to the bottom of it. It’s fucking irritating and my advice is to pretend nothing happened, and express any distaste you may have through the coming council election.