The Cabrini Green Blockchain 🐝
“There are new metaphors. There are new sounds. There are new relations. Men and Women will be different. Children will be different. They will have to make money obsolete. Make a man’s life worth more than that.” — James Baldwin
Learning Objectives
At the end of this essay, you will be able to:
- Understand what the blockchain is by using the movie Candyman as a learning tool
- Concept map new language and metaphors for race
New Metaphors
Summary: How we describe the world’s state of affairs constantly changes. Progress in the United States is connected to the ability of its citizens to understand the categories we use in our dialogue. Therefore a metaphor for race in America is the Ethereum Blockchain.
In a conversation between two writers: James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni, Giovanni asked about Baldwin’s essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” Her question was: “How do you stand in relation to that novel; what do you think about the younger writers of which I am one… Are we, in your opinion, moving out of those basic set of assumptions.”
She was basically asking if anything had changed for her generation. Baldwin wrote a bunch of words decades before their conversation, and she wanted to know if they were still true.
Baldwin answered by saying that the assumptions changed in an almost inexpressible way. If he decided to rewrite that essay, he would be writing it about something different.
Among other things, the novel discusses the ability to move past the boxes we are forced into. Baldwin talks about this ideology and its effects on him. After all, if you get shoved into a box, you’ll come out square.
He agreed something had changed in the relationship between Giovanni’s generation and the premises of his argument in the novel, but articulating it was difficult.
Listening to old interviews like this one from the 70s, what might strike you immediately is the language. Some of the words they use are not used anymore. For example, the term “Negro” is no longer used; their sentence structure is strange; and if we recognize that, we can get a glimpse of what he meant. Words fall out of our vocabulary, problems take new forms, explanations and relationships become outdated in unique ways.
In other words, like milk, problems have an expiration date.
States
Baldwin addresses this point again later in the discussion by saying the danger of Giovanni’s generation is to substitute one form of romanticism for another. Closing the thread on this, he states the crisis of the age is summarized in Malcolm X’s quote that “white is a state of mind.”
It’s worth understanding two points:
- Romanticism
- The comment about State of Mind
We can understand what Baldwin means by romanticism if we hear something Ta-Nehisi Coates said about the founders of America who left old-world Europe. Coates is a MacArthur Fellow and National Book Award, finalist. He says:
“America is a profound experiment. The people who came to this country and killed the native inhabitants; and brought a bunch of enslaved people with them did so under the idea that they were escaping the sins of old-world Europe.
That a new world, a new man, a new kind of humanity would be reborn here. You can see this kind of romanticism in a lot of Jefferson’s early writings. [Belief] that there would be this great distance between corrupt monarchical Europe and this new world. . .”
In other words, romanticism in this context describes a framing of the effects of old decisions. A belief that they would not be carrying the impact of their past choices with them. This mindset brings us to the crisis of the age that Baldwin talked about.
The use of white in the context of mindset is not a radical idea in the way Brian Chesky defines radical. Brian Chesky is CEO of Airbnb, and he established the definition in his interview with Reid Hoffman.
Chesky used “radical” in the following context. He said that the Business Roundtable — which included 200 CEOs — believed “that a corporation’s charter cannot merely serve the shareholders.”
When he said this, he was doing two things:
- Defining radical as a contrast of popular opinion. Meaning, an idea held and expressed by 200 people in positions of influence is by definition a popular idea, and therefore not radical at all.
- He defined the state of mind that Malcolm X spoke about as the enforcement of imaginary boundaries. Chesky clarified that in the future, our definitions must expand to accommodate adjacent topics.
With this being said, the Malcolm X quote is not radical. However, I recognize it is an uncomfortable one. But I realize I’d be leaving an important part out of this discussion if I did not bring it up. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb said in his book The Black Swan:
“To be genuinely empirical is to reflect reality as faithfully as possible; to be honorable implies not fearing the appearances and consequences of being outlandish.”
So that phrase about state of mind isn’t meant to create shock value or make those who have those physical characteristics uncomfortable. Its purpose is to make the following sentences both empirical and honorable. These words would not reflect reality if I did not fully explore the statements made by black leaders in the context that they were made.
Ta-Nehisi Coates said the following in another setting about his writing. He wants to:
“attack the basic notion that whiteness is about phenotype — that race is a real thing, biologically inherited thing — instead of as the great historian Nel Painter says, actually an idea, not a real thing. And so, whiteness has to come from a certain place, and throughout American history, what it has come from is the negation of blackness, the idea of not being a n****r”
Put a different way, object-oriented computer programmers will understand the following:
Whiteness is not an entity or an object but a class.
“There was not, no matter where one turned, any acceptable image of oneself, no proof of one’s existence. One had the choice, either of “acting just like a n****r” or of not acting just like a n****r — and only those who have tried it know how impossible it is to tell the difference” — James Baldwin, 1961
With this connection established, we can get a better sense of what Baldwin meant in this interview when he said that the problem of those who believe themselves to be white is a kind of incomprehension. Where the apprehension of the experience of another is not allowed to “enter into [their] guts.” To quote Baldwin exactly:
“He doesn’t know what will happen if he allows his apprehension of someone else’s experience to enter into him…this is the crisis of the age. This is what Malcolm meant when he said that white is a state of mind.”
Put another way, the person does not attempt to understand the other person’s point of view. This means that to comprehend how the conversation about race has changed, focusing on skin color can be more distracting than it is helpful. As Trevor Noah said in an interview with The Breakfast Club:
“When you look at the world, you realize these things can exist beyond race. . . I can tell you stories like that about my friends who grew up in African countries where there are no white people and its a tribal thing. . . It is almost like you want to evolve to the next step where maybe you’re dealing with the next ‘ism.’ ”
We could say that Peter Thiel’s interview question in his book Zero to One is another version of this incomprehension:
“What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
Transactions
With this, it becomes evident that the movie Candyman should take on an entirely different meaning. A description of the Ethereum blockchain is needed to drive the point home and understand what black writers have been saying.
Summary: A mirror is a metaphor for something called an Ethereum client (node). Through the mirror, residents of Cabrini Green “summon him.” The act of “summoning him” is a metaphor for an instruction (transaction) on the Ethereum blockchain. Those instructions are gathered by Candyman, which is similar to something called “mining” transactions. Summoning him changes the urban legend of Cabrini Green because one more person participated in it. Another sentence gets added to the story. This addition to the urban legend is comparable to the change in the “world state” of Ethereum.
The above summary brings us closer to the state of mind that Malcolm and Baldwin talked about. This is because the movie is centered around the injustice of wrongfully killed black men. To say their names is to let their experience “into their guts,” as Baldwin said. Saying his name in the mirror, the resident of Cabrini Green does not know what will happen. Is this just some urban legend, or is it real? Will they explode? Are they brave enough to interact with this irreversible smart contract? When they do interact with it, the “state” of Cabrini Green is changed.
But what is a state? What is a smart contract?
Enough with the tongue twisters; let’s get to the heart of the issue.
Let’s consider what you are doing at this moment. You are reading these words. But if these words get boring at any point, as I’m sure they have, you may open your phone and scroll through social media. When you do, you’re no longer reading this article. Until you reach the final sentence of the entire article, you will not be done reading it. We could say there are two situations you can be in:
- Reading the article
- Not reading the article
If you get a call from a friend while reading this article, you’ll pick it up. That phone call is an instruction to pick up the phone. It can be called a transaction.
Once you pick up the phone, your “state” changes. You’re not reading the article. Talking on the phone is way more fun than reading about some confusing technology that nobody understands.
When you finish the conversation on the phone, you’ll hopefully go back to reading. Then your “state” will change again. That’s what it means when we say a transaction is a bridge between states.
In the context of this legend, there are a ton of “states.”
If, in the context of Ethereum, a transaction (a.k.a. an instruction) is a valid bridge between two states, the transformation between two “states” in the urban legend of Cabrini Green can be thought of as a transaction. What changes is the mind state of each resident.
Thus as Baldwin described it, the categories are commercial.
View of the legend from the States
Summary: The legend can be understood as an instruction-based story. A summons is a potential change to the story, and witnesses of a body represent validation that someone “summoned him.”
“The EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) behaves as a mathematical function would: Given an input, it produces a deterministic output. It, therefore, is quite helpful to more formally describe Ethereum as having a state transition function: Y(S, T) = S”
This means that we could write a mathematical formula that describes whether you are reading this article or not. More specifically, one that represents the changes on the blockchain.
Thus, the legend of Cabrini Green has a state transition function as well:
Given an old valid legend (L) and a new set of valid summons ©, the Cabrini Green state transition function Y(L, C) produces a new correct legend L’
Y(L, C) = L’
To begin, let’s start with the first way you could talk about the blockchain, using the states.
Literature about the Ethereum blockchain describes it as a transaction-based state machine. But what does this mean? We can reiterate the discussion about your friend who called you in the following way: Instructions have effects. The recipe to make a peanut butter sandwich decreases the amount of peanut butter in a jar. So:
A summons resulting in a killing in the movie is made valid when someone finds a body. One more piece of the story is added to the urban legend.
Therefore
σ = the current legend
σ + 1 = the legend, plus another person who summoned him and was killed
View of the legend From the Mirrors (Implementation)
Summary: Multiple summonses make up a block which is only added to the legend when validated by others in the town (news outlets and witnesses who find the bodies). All of those “transactions” create a block, and we would refer to the chain of blocks as a *drum roll* blockchain.
One mention of his name is likened to a transaction request (we’ll call it a summons request). These requests are written by what Ethereum calls an external user — in this case, it is the person standing in the mirror.
This request is submitted to the entire legend from a node (mirror). It goes into a summon pool — synonymous with something called a transaction pool in Ethereum. Candyman aggregates the summons and submits the completed block, which is the next part of the story. That new part of the story is added when someone finds a body.
Smart contracts, by default, cannot be deleted. Interactions with them are irreversible, just like it is for the person standing in the mirror.
View of the legend from the Ledger
Summary: From the viewpoint of a ledger, these summonses are stacks of instructions beginning with the genesis block, which could be seen as comprising the first pieces of the legend. Suppose there is another movie that follows the summer of 2021. In that case, I think any new summons can be conceptualized as a fork on the blockchain (but we will discuss this another time 😃).
The Dilemma Begins With Entities
Summary: In object-oriented programming languages, entities contain fields or attributes.
With this understanding, we come closer to realizing why Baldwin used the example of an enslaved woman — the baby of whom could become a slave or not — to describe the beginning of “the dilemma” of commercial categories.
This means that when Baldwin described the body of a slave, he could have used a metaphor for object-oriented programming languages instead and been just as effective.
An entity is a thing that exists.
I know. . . it’s a broad definition
In these languages, entities contain fields or attributes, and you establish the relationship between them. Once the relationship between those entities is changed, the model changes. What does all of that mean?
Let’s take a book. A book is something that exists. You could develop a model that has a book as an entity. It has pages, words, an author, and a title. Those are attributes of a book.
So when Nikki Giovanni described the dislike of a master and a slave, she expressed a distaste for the basis of determining these relationships.
These relationships tend to break down when “dealing with the world,” as Giovanni puts it.
Thus in the context of an object-oriented programming language, she is expressing discontent for the logic that defines the attributes of the created entities.
A Baby
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;” — T.S. Eliot
The conversation with Nikki Giovanni and Baldwin continues adding context to the understanding of the film. Throughout the discussion, they use a metaphor to describe the evolution of each topic discussed. Consider this point as it relates to Anthony (the main character):
“We have to give the children something which in a way was given to us, although we had to learn how to translate it…your kid will be moving in a very different world than the one in which I grew up, or the one in which you grew up which will be remote for him. And yet he comes out of it and has got to carry it much further than you or I will be able to carry it.”
In reply, Giovanni summarizes saying:
“He’s got to have respect for it but not be trapped by it.”
Baldwin confirms:
“Precisely. You have to both give it to him and liberate him from it.”
From this viewpoint, we can step back from the description of the entity we discussed earlier in the metaphor of a born child and take a more expansive view. A view that is not commercial in nature. Perhaps we could envision it as striving to accomplish some shared goal, which in its lack of specific definition allows for the growth of the human spirit.
The problems we face as a species take new forms. Poets continuously help us redefine it and add context. In the process, they translate it for the current generation to contribute to its progress.
To understand this point, look no further than examples of people like Brian Chesky. He interpreted the biography of Walt Disney to inform his next steps at Airbnb. In this sense, Anthony’s lack of knowledge of who the “baby” was in the legend of Cabrini Green is the act of giving and liberation that Baldwin was talking about. His mother’s decision to withhold his identity, strangely enough, contributed to his release from the mirror at the end of the movie (the fork in the blockchain). Contributed to his freedom of expression in producing the work of art that resonated with the entire town.
His mother both gave him the legend and liberated him from it.
