It’s yet another example of the industrial-age ethos that places human needs and values below those of the greater machines and systems in which we live. By contrast, the digital media environment invites us to look at the systems we use as changeable programs, and people as the end users for whom those systems are built. Computer programs like Bitcoin may be the most explicitly digital expression of this drive to hack economics as if it were an operating system. But the Bitcoin protocols are still more concerned with replicating the functions of money than they are with serving the needs of humans. [...]