分类：Culture & Public Commentary

Rebuilding the Threshold—Web3 Is Indeed a Kind of Regression into “Enclosure and Self-Exaltation,” but That May Not Necessarily Be a Bad Thing

Culture & Public Commentary2022.01.30
Rebuilding the Threshold—Web3 Is Indeed a Kind of Regression into “Enclosure and Self-Exaltation,” but That May Not Necessarily Be a Bad Thing
Yesterday, the floor price of the Bored Ape NFT broke through 100 Ether (ETH), and now it is 106.9 (one Ether is currently worth more than 2,500 U.S. dollars), which means a single Bored Ape is worth roughly one to two million yuan. “Floor price” refers to the cheapest ape you can buy right now if you rush in and make the purchase immediately. Because every ape looks different, and the rarity of their various attributes also differs, many people choose to buy at a higher price point; for example, Justin Bieber today spent 500 ETH to buy one. The full name of Bored Ape is “Bored Ape Yacht Club”…
culture Web3 blockchain decentralization
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2022年1月30日
From the Altar to the Forum: The Practical Significance of the History of Science (A Review of Modern History of Science)

Culture & Public Commentary2022.01.27
From the Altar to the Forum: The Practical Significance of the History of Science (A Review of Modern History of Science)
This article was published in the April 2021 issue of Book City Magazine. It was a review from last year, but I forgot to repost it then. Since the magazine allows me to republish my own articles on my blog, I might as well put it here too. Making Science—An Over-the-Syllabus Title When Chinese publishers introduce foreign academic works, they often have the habit of changing the title. For example, A Short History of Modern Science: From the Steam Engine to Grebe Courtship, published by the Electronics Industry Press in 2018, had the original title “The Making of Modern Science: The Making of Modern Science: Science, Technology, Medicine and Modernity:…
book reading science history of science philosophy of science
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2022年1月27日
Why Are NFTs Valuable? Rethinking NFTs and Tulips

Culture & Public Commentary2022.01.07
Why Are NFTs Valuable? Rethinking NFTs and Tulips
In the article From BTC to NFT: Wealth to Power I already confessed that my understanding of NFTs has clearly changed. Although in the article NFT and Tulip Mania I agreed with the importance of NFT technology, I still felt that “a pixel image worth tens of millions is, however you look at it, not a price that could possibly last long.” But I have now withdrawn that judgment; now I think that at least some historically significant NFTs are entirely capable of maintaining high prices over the long term. Of course, this judgment of mine does not constitute investment advice. On the one hand, most of the accompanying NFTs…
culture history Web3 Bitcoin
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2022年1月7日
From BTC to NFT: From Wealth to Power

Culture & Public Commentary2022.01.04
From BTC to NFT: From Wealth to Power
In recent years I haven’t really kept up with the new things in the crypto world, because researching them takes a lot of time and energy, and it also affects one’s state of mind quite a bit—because if you’re not careful, you start feeling like you’ve “lost a hundred million yuan.” So it’s better, really, to let what you can’t see be “quiet” to the eyes. But the NFT craze and the so-called “metaverse” are major developments that spilled beyond the crypto bubble; even if I’m no longer paying attention to the crypto world, I can’t help but pay attention to them, so here I am writing again. (A few…
culture Web3 Bitcoin blockchain
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2022年1月4日
Biography of Things (Continued) — Educational Significance, Secondary-School Science and Technology Innovation, and the Bottleneck Problem

AI & the Future of Technology2021.11.04
Biography of Things (Continued) — Educational Significance, Secondary-School Science and Technology Innovation, and the Bottleneck Problem
Yesterday’s comments still weren’t finished. What I wrote yesterday was that research in the history of scientific instruments can be positioned as “artifact biographies,” in which meaning is formed around the artifact itself. But that does not mean that, beyond this intrinsic meaning, research in the history of instruments has no other benefits. We can also make an analogy with biographical research. Unlike general academic research, biographical works as the outcome of research on individuals often lie somewhere between scholarship and popularization. Apart from non-academic biographical literature, research-based biographies also tend to have a popularizing dimension, making them easier for general readers to read. Between intervening in academic issues and…
technology history of science history education
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2021年11月4日
The Biography of Objects: Methods and Significance in the History of Scientific Instruments

AI & the Future of Technology2021.11.03
The Biography of Objects: Methods and Significance in the History of Scientific Instruments
At today’s regular meeting we discussed the question of paradigms in the history of scientific instruments, and I offered some views. Here I’ll spell them out a bit more fully. At present, the history of scientific instruments does not seem to have formed a relatively unified and distinctive research paradigm. On this point, Teacher Wu seems inclined to think that studies of individual instruments belong to the “initial stage” of scholarship in the history of science and technology: instruments, like manuscripts, artifacts, and other primary historical sources, are the foundation of historical research. But through further study, the results we obtain from these basic materials still ultimately have to crystallize…
technology history of science scholarship history
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2021年11月3日
NFTs and Tulip Mania

Culture & Public Commentary2021.09.09
NFTs and Tulip Mania
This article was commissioned by China Business Journal; see http://www.cb.com.cn/index/show/zl/cv/cv13456431853 NFT is the full name of Non-Fungible Token. A literal translation would be “non-fungible token.” The so-called token, also translated as “coin” or “token,” refers to some kind of rights certificate: coupons, prize-redemption slips, game coins, and so on all count as tokens. Of course, in the blockchain context it generally refers to a unit of account in a digital ledger. The various digital currencies that were wildly hyped a few years ago were basically “fungible tokens.” Recently, however, NFT has exploded overnight and rapidly gone mainstream. Speculators these days do not care at all whether the object of speculation…
culture history Web3 history of technology
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2021年9月9日
Games and Its Mission

Culture & Public Commentary2021.08.16
Games and Its Mission
This piece was originally published as the cover article in The Intellectual Weekly, and was slightly revised at the time of publication; here I am posting the original draft. It was written before the “opium theory,” so its appearance now is actually rather apt. But by the time I was writing it, I had already consciously trimmed back many of the directions the discussion might have taken, and it felt like I hadn’t written it with enough freedom. I had originally planned to revise it again and submit it for the phenomenology and philosophy of technology conference, but the conference was postponed because of the pandemic, so I never went…
culture freedom modernity Marx
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2021年8月16日
An Interview Transcript about Zhang Xiaoyu’s Technics and Civilization

Culture & Public Commentary2021.08.09
An Interview Transcript about Zhang Xiaoyu’s Technics and Civilization
Earlier, China Science Daily recommended Zhang Xiaoyu’s book Technology and Civilization, and interviewed me for a few comments. Today I suddenly remembered this, looked it up, and found that the interview had already been used. See China Science Daily (2021-06-17, Section 5, Culture Weekly). The published piece was assembled from excerpts of my written interview responses, integrated with the introduction to Zhang Xiaoyu’s book. Overall it was organized fairly well, but from the standpoint of my own expression, it was chopped up too much. Below I am posting my original answers, which are much richer in content and also more complete. Zhang Xiaoyu’s book is of course a good one,…
philosophy book reading technology China
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2021年8月9日
Freedom of Speech and Social Media

Culture & Public Commentary2021.01.11
Freedom of Speech and Social Media
This article was written spontaneously, as a stream-of-consciousness piece prompted by my own feelings; it is shared only on Suixuan, and please do not reprint it. Trump’s social media accounts being banned set off a discussion about freedom of speech. Aside from the arguments that have never reached consensus, today’s discussions of freedom of speech do in fact involve some new conditions that have only emerged in the past decade or so. This is the rise of large social media websites. They have carved out an autonomous space in the network world, and in many cases have replaced what used to be understood as public space. Whether, and how, the…
culture freedom media commentary
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2021年1月11日