Epistemology — The Allure of the Latest Shiny Thing

About that same time Steven Johnson published a long piece about blockchain possibilities in the NYT Magazine and as I read it I wondered what Geoff Bilder thought. Bilder (Director of Strategic Initiatives at Crossref) is the most insightful person I know when it comes to the intersection of people and technology. He’s done a lot of work on trust and identity, concepts which are central to the blockchain hype. A quick search to see what he was up to lately took me to the PIDapalooza 2018 website and I wasn’t surprised to see that he was doing a session (with Martin Fenner of DataCite) titled, “The Bollockschain and other PID hallucinations.” I sent him an email.He replied with a number of useful comments but I think the most important is his observation that technophiles “keep trying to address social issues by attempting to hack around them.