This article develops Registration Regime Theory (RRT) by treating inscription and registration not as passive containers of memory but as infrastructures for governing social time. It distinguishes inscriptionâthe external fixation of an event, claim, relation, or sign on a material or computational supportâfrom registration, the institutional authorization that allows such a trace to produce rights, identities, debts, obligations, classifications, and decisions. The central thesis is that inscription objectifies time, whereas registration authorizes objectified time. On this basis, the article reconstructs a series of overlapping registrational thresholds: durable inscription and archival accumulation; portable documents and rule at a distance; canonical and typographic replication; standardized, transferable financial claims; bureaucratic classification and synchronized administration; digital capture and interoperability; cryptographic ordering; and predictive registration. These thresholds did not singly cause the state, empire, universal religion, capitalism, or the nation-state. They expanded the durability, scale, reproducibility, and temporal reach through which those formations could be institutionalized. The digital transformation intensifies rather than abolishes this history. Blockchain redistributes technical verification and hardens chronological claims about the past, while predictive artificial intelligence converts probabilistic futures into present grounds for intervention. Their convergence places the registrable person between an increasingly persistent past and an increasingly anticipated future. The article consequently redefines sovereignty as the capacity to orchestrate the layers of a registration architectureâproduction, storage, verification, recognition, interpretation, prediction, enforcement, and contestationârather than as simple ownership of records. It also theorizes the negative space of registration: imposed non-registration, strategic opacity, erasure, and counter-registration. The concluding framework of temporal justice combines a right to recognition with rights to correction, expiry, opacity, reinvention, and an unpredicted future. RRT thereby offers a non-determinist, historically comparative framework for analyzing how power endures by organizing what may count as socially real across time.
Across Bitcoin and the blockchain-art discourse, four recurring claims can be distinguished: trust minimization, authenticity, scarcity, and preservation. A deliberately critical corpus documents each as displaced rather than delivered: trust is relocated, authenticity is located in a registry, scarcity is manufactured, and preservation is asserted rather than achieved. This article reads these displacements against an analogue rule system running since 1 January 1993, in which each calendar day constitutes one work whose Authentic Number and price are fixed by formula, and which remains in suspension until a collector realizes it as a print. The comparison is structural: not protocols versus persons, but a centrally authored, personally warranted rule against a permissionless state maintained through distributed consensus. The formula makes each day's identity and price independently computable; a public realization record publishes which days have been realized; and two named authors â Christopher Temt (concept and text) and Eugen Kment (drawing) â sign the physical work and answer for the remaining claim. Accountable means exactly this: the non-computable claims have identifiable bearers and are publicly contestable. The system does not replace trust with proof. It separates what can be computed from what must be answered for in person.
Digital Glazing⢠is an authorial digital fine art technique created by Inga StawiĹska and held as proprietary intellectual property of Home Made Game. Inspired by Renaissance glazing and sfumato, it translates the gradual construction of colour, luminosity and tonal depth into a manual vector-based process using thousands of individually shaped, overlapping elements with controlled colour and transparency. First systematically applied in PoloLegacy and subsequently developed across White Pants BTC Club, Digital Glazing⢠combines fine-art principles with vector-native SVG construction and Bitcoin-native preservation. This record documents the techniqueâs definition, technical specification, authorship and provenance, accompanied by a reference SVG artwork.
Technological innovations are often perceived as something alien, terrifying, and monstrous. Blockchain technology that creates shared âblocksâ of information, which are interconnected and verified by the network comes as no exception. Two main features of blockchain (1) the absence of a gatekeeper organisation controlling the data, and (2) the fact that the information is rather hard to corrupt and hack, makes the technology very attractive and versatile. It is also what makes it appear frightening, especially for the traditionally centralised and hierarchical disciplines like law. As there is no one to control the data and the access to it, blockchains open a whole world of new possibilities with cryptocurrencies being one of the most popular examples.Approaching blockchain technologies in the context of J. J. Cohenâs monster theory demonstrates that they can be perceived as modern monsters. Our inability to understand the technology and the way it works makes this particular monster both fearful and desired (thesis 6), and law reacts to the fears that circulate in the society. Thus, blockchain technologies are often banned by law in a similar way as in medieval narratives dragons were banished by saints and heroes. Building on Cohenâs thesis 7, which argues that monsters show how we (mis)interpret our surroundings, this article will employ the historical perspective upon the fear of the monstrous to create a better understanding of the legal policies surrounding blockchains. By comparing current legal decisions concerning blockchain technology with the strategies of dealing with monsters, offered by medieval chronicles and collections of wonders (including William of Malmesbury and William of Newburgh), we will analyse the modern way of controlling monsters â or controlling the fear of them.
What is real has always been something we find , not something we make âor so philosophy has assumed. This paper argues otherwise. Characterizing reality through resistance rather than substance (the ways the world refuses a subjectâs mastery), I distinguish three modalities correlative to epistemic, judgmental, and practical mastery: Substrate (matterâs resistance to representation), Contingency (the forceful givenness of experience that resists revision by judgment), and the Inexorable (structuresâ resistance to intervention). Treating virtual environments, AI agents, and blockchain smart contracts not as proofs but as revelatory cases, I show that technology now extends the latter two modalities, Contingency and the Inexorable, artificially. The result is the paperâs central concept, Artificial Externality : human-made structures whose resistance to intervention is deliberately engineered to be practically insurmountable, even for their creators, and that thereby acquire an externality once attributed only to nature. Absoluteness, traditionally found, can now be produced. I close by drawing out the stakes for consciousness: our criteria for what counts as real quietly shape our criteria for what counts as conscious.