The Second Use: Money, Machines, and What They Become (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798171983260)

What survives when the original purpose disappears?

A graphics card built to draw images begins earning cryptocurrency on a pool table. The organization that grows around it will eventually sell computation for artificial intelligence. But following that transformation means looking beyond the chip.

In The Second Use, machines, records, and institutions find work their makers did not anticipate. Researchers borrow the equipment of the gaming industry. A missing engine helps identify a shipwreck. Sailors rebuild a calculation after their compass fails. A trading program keeps buying and selling after the orders it was meant to fill are complete.

These are stories of people finding possibilities-and discovering limits-in what they inherit. A processor may retain an unexpected capability. A record may preserve an answer to a question nobody has asked. Or it may lack the very detail its next user needs.

Moving from mining facilities and archives to laboratories and the disputed boundary between a mind and its tools, the book follows an increasingly consequential question: what happens when a useful representation becomes a reason to act?

The next use can make a discovery possible. It can also carry an old assumption farther than anyone meant it to go.