Pancryptics

Pancryptics

The Politics of Bitcoin

Since its introduction in 2009, Bitcoin has been widely promoted as a digital currency that will revolutionize everything from online commerce to the nation-state. Yet supporters of Bitcoin and its blockchain technology subscribe to a form of cyberlibertarianism that depends to a surprising extent on far-right political thought. The Politics of Bitcoin exposes how much of the economic and political thought on which this cryptocurrency is based emerges from ideas that travel the gamut, from Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises to Federal Reserve conspiracy theorists. Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

Image, Eye and Art in Calvino

Few recent writers have been as interested in the cross-over between texts and visual art as Italo Calvino (1923-85). Involved for most of his life in the publishing industry, he took as much interest in the visual as in the textual aspects of his own and other writers' books. In this volume twenty international Calvino experts, including Barenghi, Battistini, Belpoliti, Hofstadter, Ricci, Scarpa and others, consider the many facets of the interplay between the visual and textual in Calvinos works, from the use of colours in his fiction to the influence of cartoons, from the graphic qualities of the book covers themselves to the significance of photography and landscape in his fiction and non-fiction. The volume is appropriately illustrated with images evoked by Calvino's major texts.