In many ways, crypto enthusiasts are trying to turn the clock back to the era where using computers was itself an exciting and valuable activity. Both a means and a means to an end.
Long before Bitcoin and AI, Dung Kai Cheung’s writings have revolved around the use of tools and how it changes the way people see the world.
天工開物•栩栩如真 (2005) is structured around 19th and 20th century inventions that were introduced to the Chinese from the late Qing dynasty onwards for the first time. These tools, from the radio to the camera, changed the material, economic and social conditions of the fictional Dung family beyond recognition in three generations.
More recent novels, notably 愛妻 and Post-human Comedy, explore the possibility of creating “writing machines” with AI by making an immortal digital copies of literary authors.
Perhaps unusual among most writers, Dung is remarkably open-minded, even positive, about machines doing a lot of writing for human authors.
Part of it is no doubt reflective of a wider materialist philosophical stance: unless we believe there is some (e.g. God-given) secret sauce to humans, human beings are ultimately just animals/machined which science can one day fully understand. If there is no reason in principle why we cannot create humans, there is no reason in principle we cannot create writers either.
Another reason is perhaps of Dung’s persistent doubts about the vitality and contemporary relevance of “serious” or high-brow literature, especially novels.
It is obvious that as a medium of communication and entertainment, novels have lost almost all grounds to films, TV, YouTube etc.
The situation is particularly acute in a place like Hong Kong, which has a (small) literary scene that has no strong connections with the TV or film industry. In the English and Japanese-speaking world, some novels get made into films and gain traction. But this is an exception rather than the norm even there, and just doesn’t happen in any significant way in Hong Kong in the 2010s and the 2020s.
What then is the point of writing (serious and experimental) novels (that is neither designed for nor likely can be easily translated to the screen)?
One answer that occasionally surfaced in Dung’s novels (e.g. 貝貝重生) is political engagement, e.g. by participation in social movements. But Dung is obviously very sceptical of the idea, as demonstrated by the fact that he named the author of his trilogy of novels 獨裁者 (the Dictator). What is left then? It seems to me the only viable answer (which Dung sometimes gestured at) is the enjoyment of writing and reading novels itself. Such enjoyment is self-evident.
Moreover, compared with other popular forms of pastimes, writing and reading literature likely falls on the side of the healthier hobbies: while (likely) less immediately useful than (say) recreational maths, it does improve one’s presentation and grasp of complex and nuanced information, a clear virtue in the modern world.
As a tool, AI / large language models hold a fairly obvious fascination to authors. Are these models conscious? Should cyborgs have rights comparable to humans?
But what about cryptocurrencies and/or technologies for decentralisation? Dung has (to my knowledge) seldom written of this expressly in his novels. To the extent that it might help authors make more money, there is a clear instrumental reason to publish in decentralised ways and/or making use of cryptocurrencies. But are there non-instrumental reasons for engaging with Bitcoin/NFT at all?
I suggest the answer is yes, and that it is stated/implicated from some of Dung’s interviews and blogposts about his NFT books.
In short, these decentralised tools purport to give us a new, deliberately self-conscious, way of relating to digital technologies. To that extent, it bears an eerie similarity to serious literature (as conceived by Dung): “programming for the sake of programming” to “writing for the sake of writing”.
In less than a decade, smart phones have brought platform technologies paid for to every corner of our daily lives. In most communities (including Hong Kong), it is practically impossible to avoid technologies such as WhatsApp and Instagram which are paid for and controlled by large corporations.
The success of these technologies depends in large part of us (as users) not knowing or caring how they work or what economic incentives motivate the production of these “free products”. Every user of a sewing machine or a bike has a degree knowledge of how it works: knowledge of the internals naturally “rubs off” the act of learning to use the tool itself. To a lesser but still significant extent, the same is true even of radios and telephones. We pay once for an object that was made by an expert; afterwards we own it and can repair and modify it if we so which.
But platform services such as Google, Facebook, and Instagram deliberately abstract away the internals. It “just works”: nobody quite understands the internals. In fact, the internals probably change constantly due to A/B testing on different users, and the economic model to pay for the products is often found after some VCs invest millions into a “vision”, gain a massive user base, and then turn around to consider how best to monetise it.
Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and decentralised finance are premised on users leaving the “it just works” mindset and getting them to control the internals of digital technologies themselves.
As compared with other digital products and services, they are either essentially useless (e.g. Bitcoin) or has fewer features plus a more involved and effortful user experience (e.g. Ethereum / Likecoin). The benefit is instead a largely abstract and philosophical one: taking an active part in shaping the community’s collective digital fate.
Will such projects succeed? Bitcoin has proven wildly successful, but other web3 products have failed to gain significant traction thus far. And Bitcoin itself has become something of a purely speculative asset, far away from its original conception as a tool for decentralisation.
But perhaps this is precisely why decentralised technologies is attractive to DKC: a tool that gestures towards an ideal but which hasn’t quite found its place in the world. Not unlike his novels, one might think.