#minuteminute

Made before the Rolex SubcomandanteandFurlan Marri Passage du Milieu, my first watch photo alteration was to create this Cryptomatic Seasteader from the Cryptomatic Holder, referencing the Omega Seamaster by using the same lettering used for its name.

To be clear: this is a critique and not a promotion of cryptocurrencies and seasteading. As an entry point into that let me point to an interview with Geraldine Juárez:

In important respects, “decentralization” is the new “democratization.” And even more than that often ambivalent concept, it overlaps with values of both left and right. Libertarian ideology is based on the freedom of the individual and private property but occasionally, and temporarily, their principles align with left politics and strategies, for example in rave culture, piracy, privacy, and anonymity. For socialists, communists, and the rest of the left, these principles are means to social ends. For libertarians, these are more ends in themselves – it doesn’t matter if decentralisation benefits human rights activists or owners of capital.

Thus the libertarian Trojan horse pushed the transition to a more liberal version of internet politics that was also in the interests of financial capital. Then with crypto and the rest they intended to financialise –perhaps capitalise is more precise – the idea of decentralization.

Read the rest of that interview and Juárez’s “The Ghostchain. (Or taking things for what they are).” Then maybe watch Dan Olson’s “Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs.”

Here’sanother watch photo alteration that I made, reimagining the Furlan Marri Mare Blu as the Furlan Marri Passage du Milieu.

I made this Rolex Subcomandante (top) photo alteration inspired by this presumably fake Rolex ad featuring Che Guevara (second photo). I’m not sure what the original source is.

Subcomandante Marcos does (or did) wear watches and they appear to be Casio (sometimes the Casio F91W-1 as in the third photo) and maybe Timex watches, often two at a time:

I arrived in that jungle with one watch and the other dates from when the ceasefire began. When the two times coincide it will mean that Zapatismo is finished as an army and that another stage, another watch and another time has started.