Original in a connected world

A certain deafness

On 22 March 1971 the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss gave a lecture at UNESCO in Paris. It opened the International Year for Action to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination, and the audience expected a celebration of exchange among peoples. He told them something more awkward. The great creative periods of history, he said, were those in which communication had become good enough for distant people to stimulate one another, but not so quick and frequent that differences were worn flat; and a culture that wants to create needs “a certain deafness” to outside values, even to the point of rejecting them. The talk, called “Race and Culture,” was printed that year in the International Social Science Journal and later in his book The View from Afar (French 1983, English 1985). UNESCO’s director-general, René Maheu, was upset, and Lévi-Strauss later called the affair a rather pretty scandal. The surprise was greater because in 1952, in “Race and History,” also written for UNESCO, he had argued that the cultures with the most cumulative histories “have never been isolated cultures”: progress, he argued there, comes from contact and coalition.

The sentences the lecture behind this course quotes are from a few years later, and in a stronger form. In December 1977 Lévi-Strauss gave five talks on Canadian radio for the CBC’s Massey Lectures, published as Myth and Meaning (Toronto, 1978). In them he said that what threatens us now is probably what he called “over-communication”: the tendency to know exactly, in one point of the world, what is going on in all the others. For a culture to be itself and to produce something, he said, its members must be convinced of their originality and “even, to some extent, of their superiority”; only under conditions of under-communication can it produce anything. The danger is to be left as consumers who can take anything from anywhere and have lost all originality. The lecture quotes this and attributes it to a speaker of the 1970s, which is right; the UNESCO speech is the milder version, the radio lectures the sharper.

A caution for the word “superiority”: Lévi-Strauss is describing a condition that he thinks creativity needs, not recommending it. Some critics have heard something less innocent in it. A scholar writing for UNESCO’s own magazine in 2008 called the 1971 position a “very moderate xenophobia,” while others note that UNESCO later made its peace with him (he received a standing ovation at its sixtieth anniversary in 2005). The lecture makes of it a thesis for our time. A person or a company that wants to make something original, it says, has to find the difference and guard it, not watch rivals all day.

What the evidence says

Is it true that a culture needs distance to be original? The thesis is old and attractive, and the evidence is mixed, leaning the other way. Researchers on cumulative culture have asked whether small, isolated groups lose skills and large, connected ones gain them. The best-known case is Tasmania, which was cut off from mainland Australia when the sea rose, more than 10,000 years ago. In 2004 the anthropologist Joseph Henrich published a model in American Antiquity arguing that a small isolated population could lose complex skills such as bone tools and fishing gear. In 2016 Krist Vaesen and colleagues replied in PNAS that his models only work under implausible conditions, that the lost bone points were simpler than things Tasmanians still made, and that the evidence for isolation and shrinking numbers is weak. Henrich’s group replied in turn; the case is contested. A 2010 study by Michelle Kline and Robert Boyd found that among ten Pacific island societies, bigger populations and more contact went with richer toolkits, and others, in 2013, found no such effect among hunter-gatherers in western North America. A 2009 paper in Science by Adam Powell, Stephen Shennan, and Mark Thomas argued that denser, better connected populations in the late Ice Age could sustain more complex cultures. Michael Kremer’s 1993 economic model of population and technology reached a similar conclusion for the long run: more people, more ideas.

The honest summary is that this literature mostly points the opposite way to “isolation breeds originality.” Lévi-Strauss’s version, “just enough distance,” is a thesis, not a result. Nor does the evidence support the claim that the internet has flattened culture. Studies of popular music find a narrowing of pitch transitions and a louder, more uniform sound between 1955 and 2010 (Joan Serrà and colleagues, 2012), and a pattern of continuous change with fast “revolutions” in the American charts in 1964, 1983, and 1991 (Matthias Mauch and colleagues, 2015). Neither tested the internet, so this course does not say that the web caused homogenization.

The lecture links the thesis to a famous entrepreneur. Peter Thiel’s essay “Competition Is for Losers” (Wall Street Journal, 12 September 2014), adapted from his book Zero to One, says that “capitalism and competition are opposites”: monopoly profit funds innovation, whereas under perfect competition all profit is competed away. The argument is about economics. Its connection to over-communication, that you should not obsess over your rivals, is the lecture’s gloss and not Thiel’s point (he later said the headline was the newspaper’s, and that his book’s chapter is titled “All Happy Companies Are Different”).

A ledger with no keeper

The lecture’s last case is Bitcoin. Its argument is a thesis, and we will separate that from the history.

On 31 October 2008 a message went to a cryptography mailing list: “I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party.” It was signed Satoshi Nakamoto, a name whose owner is still unknown, and it linked a nine-page paper, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” The problem it addressed is called double spending. A digital file can be copied, so before this paper only a trusted center, a bank or a mint, could stop someone from spending the same coin twice. The paper’s answer was a public record of payments, in order, that strangers could check without trusting any one of them. It cites eight earlier works, among them Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta’s “How to time-stamp a digital document” (1991), a follow-up of 1993 with Dave Bayer, Adam Back’s Hashcash, and Ralph Merkle’s hash trees. The paper uses neither the word “blockchain” nor “decentralized”; its own phrase is “without the need for a trusted third party.”

The system began on 3 January 2009 with a first block, called the genesis block. Its timestamp is 18:15 UTC. Embedded in it is a line of text: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,” a headline from that day’s Times of London, a proof that the block was no earlier than that date and, many have thought, a comment on the banks. (Whether the comment was intended is not known.) The program itself was announced in a message dated 9 January 2009 (8 January in United States time) as “completely decentralized with no server or central authority.” On 12 January 2009 came the first payment between people, ten bitcoins from Nakamoto to the cryptographer Hal Finney, recorded in block 170. And on 22 May 2010 a programmer in Florida, Laszlo Hanyecz, paid 10,000 bitcoins to a stranger on a forum, who ordered him two pizzas from a Papa John’s; it is the first documented purchase of goods with bitcoin. Sources differ on what the pizzas cost in dollars, so this course gives no figure.

How it works, in outline. Payments are gathered into blocks; each block carries a fingerprint, a hash, of the block before it, so changing anything in an old block changes every fingerprint after it. To add a block, participants called miners compete to find a number that makes the hash of the new block begin with a required number of zeros, which takes many guesses and is cheap to check. This is “proof of work,” a descendant of Back’s Hashcash, and the network treats the longest chain as the true one. The difficulty is adjusted every 2,016 blocks so that a block arrives about every ten minutes. The reward for a block halves every 210,000 blocks, and the total can never exceed just under 21 million coins. The halvings have occurred on 28 November 2012, 9 July 2016, 11 May 2020, and 20 April 2024. Try the linking below on a toy chain: change a word in an early block, and watch the later ones fail.

The thesis: no center leaves history

The lecture does not say whether Bitcoin is valuable, and says plainly that its speaker does not own any. It describes itself as the “midwife” of its listeners’ thinking, an echo of Socrates, and asks them to put the question in a wider frame. What is the dream behind the technology? The dream, it says, is a world in which people deal with one another through code, with no center to supervise or tax. Its answer is a thesis.

The thesis is that this cannot happen, because human beings live under three pulls, each of which keeps a center. As matter, we are held by gravity; leave it, and you are weightless and most unfree. As living things, we cannot escape genes and evolution. As social beings we are held together by a centripetal force called culture, from the household to the nation, and a group needs some center to hold it. From this the lecture concludes that any technology that grew to threaten a state’s central role would be either declared illegal or legalized and placed under supervision, because no center ever retires from history. If the technology works for a company’s particular business, nobody forbids it. It adds a gloss on what this means for the speaker’s own conduct: do not follow a crowd, be critical, and recall Socrates’s saying that the unexamined life is not worth living (in Benjamin Jowett’s English from the Apology, “the life which is unexamined is not worth living”). The lecture mentions that the computer scientist Fei-Fei Li, who then led Stanford’s AI Lab, said that her group should draw on law, philosophy, and literature as well as engineering. Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI, launched in March 2019 by Li and John Etchemendy, says that it draws on “all seven of Stanford’s schools.”

Some of its supporting claims do not survive. It says that “from this January” more than 200 countries will automatically exchange tax information, and that the United States has already done so inside its own borders. The OECD’s Common Reporting Standard, approved in 2014, had 101 jurisdictions committed to begin exchanges in 2017 or 2018, and, by the OECD’s 2024 count, 111 exchanging and 126 expected by 2027. The United States is not part of it. It runs its own law, FATCA (enacted 18 March 2010, withholding from 1 July 2014), which pressed foreign banks to report on American account holders. It says the film Snowden (Oliver Stone, 2016) shows Edward Snowden turning when he saw himself watched in an intimate moment. We could not confirm such a scene, and Snowden’s own stated motive was that he did not want to live in a world where everything he said and did was recorded. His disclosures first appeared in The Guardian on 5 June 2013. And it mentions Julian Assange’s book Cypherpunks (2012), which is a conversation with Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann, not a work he wrote alone.

What happened next

The thesis says: banned, or legalized and regulated. The record, as of October 2026, is as follows. It is a record of dated events, not a forecast.

• China. On 5 December 2013 the People’s Bank of China and other agencies declared bitcoin a “virtual commodity,” not a currency, and barred financial and payment institutions from dealing in it; individuals were not barred. On 4 September 2017 seven agencies halted initial coin offerings, and the large exchanges stopped yuan trading by the end of October. In May 2021 a State Council committee called for an end to mining, and on 15 September 2021 ten agencies issued a notice, posted by the central bank on 24 September, declaring business activities in virtual currencies strictly prohibited. The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance estimated China’s share of the network’s mining at 75.5 percent in September 2019 and 46 percent in April 2021, then at zero in data from mid-2021; a later release showed that miners had in part hidden, and put the United States first, at about 38 percent in January 2022, with China still second, at about 21 percent. The network kept running. Meanwhile the state that banned private bitcoin trading has run a digital yuan of its own: pilots began in April 2020 in Shenzhen, Suzhou, Chengdu, and Xiong’an, and from 1 January 2026 verified wallet balances earn interest.
• United States. The Treasury’s financial crimes unit (FinCEN) said on 18 March 2013 that exchangers and administrators of virtual currency are money transmitters. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission treated bitcoin as a commodity on 17 September 2015. New York finalized its BitLicense in June 2015, and at least ten firms stopped serving the state. On 10 January 2024 the Securities and Exchange Commission approved the listing of spot bitcoin exchange-traded products, with its chair stating that the agency “did not approve or endorse bitcoin.” An executive order of 6 March 2025 created a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve from seized coins, and a law on stablecoins, the GENIUS Act, was signed on 18 July 2025.
• El Salvador. The legislature passed a Bitcoin Law on 9 June 2021, and bitcoin became legal tender on 7 September 2021. On 29 January 2025, as an International Monetary Fund program was being negotiated, it voted 55 to 2 to make acceptance voluntary; the IMF approved the program on 26 February 2025.
• Sanctions and courts. The U.S. Treasury sanctioned the Tornado Cash mixing service on 8 August 2022; on 26 November 2024 a federal appeals court held that its immutable smart contracts were not “property” that could be sanctioned, and Treasury lifted the listing on 21 March 2025. The exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy on 11 November 2022, and its founder was convicted in November 2023 and sentenced in March 2024 to 25 years.

On the lecture’s test, these facts cut both ways. Its second half, that no center leaves history, is well supported: states, courts, and regulators have been present from the start, and exchanges and issuers have been the points where the law reaches. The first half, that a technology must be banned or brought under supervision, is too tidy. A third outcome appears in the record: partial recognition, with the protocol itself untouched. The network ran through China’s bans; El Salvador adopted a coin and then softened its law; and the United States regulated the on-ramps and approved funds that hold the asset.

Looking before judging

What, finally, does the lecture want from the aesthetic gaze on a subject like this? Not a price and not a forecast. It wants the habit this course has followed from the start: to look first, without wanting anything from the thing, and only then to judge. It ends with three voices. Giorgio Agamben’s Taste closes by posing a possible “realization of knowledge” in the “double salvation” of beauty and truth, each rescuing the other. The lecture’s own wording, that beauty must save truth and truth must save beauty, is a paraphrase. Pierre Hadot’s Veil of Isis says that human art is, in a sense, the “prolongation of nature,” and its conclusion adds that nature is art and art is nature, human art being a special case. The lecture gives a third voice, the philosopher Henri Bergson, as saying that to look at the universe with an artist’s eyes is to see grace in beauty and goodness behind grace. We could not find that sentence. His Time and Free Will (1889) does link the feeling of grace to a kind of sympathy, but the line is not in it, and the course does not use it.

The point of all three can be said plainly. A new thing arrives with a crowd around it, and the crowd wants an answer: buy it or ban it, love it or fear it. The aesthetic gaze, in the lecture’s sense, asks to look at the thing before the crowd does, to say what it is, what it has been, and what questions it answers, and only then to decide. That is the first look of Lesson 2, applied to a ledger.